Oh Windows' plug-n-play is fun sometimes. My mum recently upgraded the motherboard and CPU in her Win2K machine. This new mobo has on-board ethernet so the old nic is no longer in the machine. A day or two after the upgrade she's having some sort of trouble on the network. I check the settings and find that the IP address is wrong. I correct it in the network settings but when I hit "OK" a dialog box pops up with a rather long piece of text. It turns out that instead of removing the record of the old nic, it has instead made it "hidden". It was still there so it conflicted if I gave the new on-board nic the same IP address, but I couldn't find any way to un-hide it and/or delete it. This is presumebly a feature useful for laptops with easily-removable nics. But there was no easy way to remove the old "hidden" card. I can't remember how I/we fixed it, but in the end we did.
But who says we have to go after all the AOL users? Linux isn't a company and isn't out to gain marketshare just to make shareholders happy. Are you just using the mythically stupid AOLusers as an example of the lowest-common-denominator? I say we shouldn't aim that low. Perhaps these are people that don't really need a PC in the first place, or should have a Mac instead. IMNSHO the Linux desktops should aim for the average to slightly-above-average user. That's a far more reasonable target to aim for (for now at least), and the sort of person that's more likely to use Linux.
I was going to correct you by saying that it's really a "back door" lock rather than an escrow lock. But I just looked at the CryptoGram story myself and found that Bruce even used the term "key escrow lock". I thought key escrow (escrowing?) is where you give a copy of your (otherwise private) key to an authority for safe keeping. The purpose being that your data can still be decrypted by the authorities with a suitable court order or somesuch. Do I have this wrong?
... as soon as it is as "easy" and "intuitive" to use as Windows.
It's appropriate that you put quote marks around "easy" and "intuitive" because Windows really isn't as easy or intuitive as most people think. It's just that most people haven't used (or even know of) anything else. If anyone has problems, they can usually find someone else that can help them with Windows or can at least sympathize with them (most computer-illiterates will blame themselves rather than MS or Windows). Then you have the business types that reason Microsoft must make better software than everyone else simply because they make the most money.
The nipple is intuitive, everything else is learned
Yes, Linux distros come "bundled" with tonnes of software whereas Windows is very bare out of the box. I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but let me rant for a moment about what really annoys me. It's when some MS shill "analyst" writes a "report" puporting to compare the relative security of each system by counting bug reports. What they will do every f**king time is 1. Count all the bundled software as being part of "Linux" and 2. Aggregrate all the Linux's together thus counting most of the bugs multiple times. Surprise surprise, MS wins with a lower number of supposed bugs. Laura Didio[t] recently did one of these hack jobs (which resulted in the joint press-release from Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSe) but it wasn't the first. This is about the third or fourth of these reports that has come out in as many years.
I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like he's doing forward ray-tracing on the whole scene. Conventional ray-tracing traces the light rays backwards, i.e from the camera/eye out into the scene and finally back to the light(s). The only problem is that it doesn't really do caustics or diffuse lighting well. POVray faked caustics in version 3 (IIRC), and Radiance has done excellent diffuse lighting using a monte-carlo simulation for about a decade. In recent years photon maps have also developed. These apply forward ray-tracing to selected areas, usually selected refractive and reflective surfaces. The impact points for the photons are recorded and then used in a regular renderer (either scan-line or ray-tracer) as an additional source of light.
Again, it sounds like this guy wants to do this to the whole scene, and to a very high degree of precision. I'm not sure why. Any decent ray-tracer would get a 99% solution in a fraction of the time. Hell, in good hands even scan-line renderers can get a 90% solution even quicker, just look at all the motion-picture visual effects (and whole movies) rendered with Pixar PRman. Most effects don't even need a good ray-tracer to look realistic to most people. Unless he's rendering something more interesting than shiny balls and a mirror, or going to do something interesting with the trillions of photons (near-real-time camera-independent renders?), I really don't see the point. It's still kinda interesting though, if only because of the scale of the work. It might lead somewhere, you just never know.
I've been playing with a honeypot email account for the last couple of months. Those "remove me from your list" links sure are a good way to get more spam (Spammers are lying scum). I hope this SURBL suggestion doesn't get implemented at the ISP level. Then I wouldn't be able to go the spammers site (carefully editing the URL as needed, and with Mozilla) and sign up my honeypot account for more penis enlargement spam!
Not really. They'd probably use a reputation-based system like Razors'Truth Evaluation System. All that would happen is this:
Spammers sign up a new account and subscribe to mailing lists.
Spammers mark these ligitimate emails as "spam" in an attempt to poison the spam detection system.
Regular users notice this and mark it as non-spam.
The spammers' already-low (since they're new) trust level goes down so far that their future markings are ignored.
Spammers could abuse this by automatically signing up lots of new accounts. Perhaps new accounts could start out with zero trust, or maybe even a negative number. Then people would have to earn trust (by correctly marking any spam that gets through) before their marks are even used by the system. It would be tricky to manage and find a balance. Spammers are a determined bunch, but so are users. There's always a certain subset of users who are willing to be a little more vigilant in order to keep the spammers in line and help everyone else. Gmail is bound to have a huge number of users, so it should work out fairly well. Vigilant users + bayesian filter (with huge database) = almost perfect spam filter.
Yikes. It's stories like this that are making me want to get out of IT. So how did the job go? Let me guess, they didn't like the result. It's a good reason for specifications. "We did what you asked for, now pay up!":P
They cared not at all about actual usability, they wanted this horrific system that they had all cooked up in their heads.
Thankfully I've never had to deal with customers. I've heard this sentiment several times over the years. You must remember that users are not experts on usability, security, scalability, reliability, etc, etc. At some point someone has to act as a mediator and say "look, that's just not going to work well". Explain why, and try to work out other solutions or a compromise. I guess this'd be where people skills are useful:P
Yeah, alright. You caught me out. I looked in my German dictionary just before I posted that message and saw karten (cardboard box) and kiste (wooden box). But I thought what the heck and decided just to post that quick little quip. It sounds like you know at least a little more German than I do, which isn't hard to be honest. I still need to get to grips with the whole masc/fem/nuet words and choosing die/der/das/dem correctly.
I'm not sure where you got the explaination of boxen being "an attempt to glorify the ubiquity of *NIX computers". I'd never seen or heard to before. I just always thought is was a pseudo-German plural (although I see now that the German word boxen refers to the so-called sport of boxing). Anyway, with the elitist spin you give it, it sounds like either you or the person doing the explaining have/had a chip on their shoulder.
If someone questions the security of Open Source Software, point out that the design for the barrel locks on their doors is openly documented and has been common knowledge for quite a long time (100 years?). Open almost any encyclopedia and you can see how they work.
Ok, maybe a poor example to draw comparisons from. But people usually assume that security can only be obtained through secrecy (or obscurity). Just point out how much of their "security" is in fact not secret.
Re:From sSomeone who pitches those PHB's...
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 1
The Windows variety, OTOH, are overwhelmingly suited drones who fit in perfectly with the corporate culture. But they're no less zealots.
Sad but true, I'm afraid. Windows has the advantage of being mainstream. Anyone extolling the virtues of windows and other MS products is seen as being "smart" and "knowledgable" by the general populace. But us Linux/BSD (and even Mac) geeks are seen as being strange and subversive. It's funny. People will bitch and whine about viruses and unreliable "computers", but if you suggest a real solution (as opposed to a band-aid solution) then you're dismissed with little real thought. Oh no, a mess of virus scanners and other "security software" piled onto an insecure OS is seen as much better than starting with a much more secure OS in the first place.
Re:From sSomeone who pitches those PHB's...
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 1
My experience has been that these consultants are, by and large, pretty slanted in the first place. They don't have solid TCO and ROI numbers, they just make stuff up to make Linux look good.
Ok, your first bit I would agree with. It's not just the Linux guys. Any consultant is going to be biased towards what they know and can do. They're hardly going to say "Oh, there's this other thing that's cheaper and better suited to this situation, but I don't know anything about it and couldn't deliver it". They're going to push what they know and understand. They're going to spin its advantages to make it sound like a good choice whether it's windows, linux, solaris, aix, or an IBM mainframe.
Ok, in not buying CD's you're hurting the RIAA financially, but you are helping any statistics they produce (look at the downturn since 2000...). Ironic isn't it?
I don't know if you're talking about a different base station, but there was a story here on slashdot last year about a guy who pulled his apart. It had an AMD Au1500 CPU, a MIPS-compatible processor. Not x86 compatible by any stretch of the imagination:)
I don't know exactly either. Perhaps because IC's are actually SOLID (mostly), instead of a delicate glass tube with a heater and all manner of stuff hanging inside.
Ah yes, that's the number. So it's either 5 or 10 FP components per pixel, depending on whether it's using single or double precision. You prove my point though, just because it uses that precision internally it still outputs fairly regular images at a lower precision.
Usually it's just some slight blending problems, this is especially evident when you take what once was a real character, like say, Neo during the Burly Brawl, and CG him. The differences are slowly becoming more subtle, however I can still see them.
The main problem is that we, as humans, spend almost our entire life looking at other real human beings. Either eye-to-eye or on TV or in photos, we have a life-time of experience of looking at other humans. Plus we have millions of years of evolution in our brains focusing that skill. And it's so many aspects: the shape, the size, the lighting of the skin and hair, as well as the movement. We read so much emotion and intent into the motion. So it's realtively easy for us to look at a figure and/or face on screen and say "nah, it's not real".
You're right, the differences between real and generated images are becoming smaller. But it probably follows the law of diminishing returns. The best CGI is now perhaps 99% perfect, but it will take just as much work to get to 99.99% or better. And audiences are becoming more sofisticated as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh Windows' plug-n-play is fun sometimes. My mum recently upgraded the motherboard and CPU in her Win2K machine. This new mobo has on-board ethernet so the old nic is no longer in the machine. A day or two after the upgrade she's having some sort of trouble on the network. I check the settings and find that the IP address is wrong. I correct it in the network settings but when I hit "OK" a dialog box pops up with a rather long piece of text. It turns out that instead of removing the record of the old nic, it has instead made it "hidden". It was still there so it conflicted if I gave the new on-board nic the same IP address, but I couldn't find any way to un-hide it and/or delete it. This is presumebly a feature useful for laptops with easily-removable nics. But there was no easy way to remove the old "hidden" card. I can't remember how I/we fixed it, but in the end we did.
But who says we have to go after all the AOL users? Linux isn't a company and isn't out to gain marketshare just to make shareholders happy. Are you just using the mythically stupid AOLusers as an example of the lowest-common-denominator? I say we shouldn't aim that low. Perhaps these are people that don't really need a PC in the first place, or should have a Mac instead. IMNSHO the Linux desktops should aim for the average to slightly-above-average user. That's a far more reasonable target to aim for (for now at least), and the sort of person that's more likely to use Linux.
I was going to correct you by saying that it's really a "back door" lock rather than an escrow lock. But I just looked at the CryptoGram story myself and found that Bruce even used the term "key escrow lock". I thought key escrow (escrowing?) is where you give a copy of your (otherwise private) key to an authority for safe keeping. The purpose being that your data can still be decrypted by the authorities with a suitable court order or somesuch. Do I have this wrong?
It's appropriate that you put quote marks around "easy" and "intuitive" because Windows really isn't as easy or intuitive as most people think. It's just that most people haven't used (or even know of) anything else. If anyone has problems, they can usually find someone else that can help them with Windows or can at least sympathize with them (most computer-illiterates will blame themselves rather than MS or Windows). Then you have the business types that reason Microsoft must make better software than everyone else simply because they make the most money.
*Ahem*
saavik:~# cattesting/unstable
saavik:~# uname -a
Linux saavik 2.6.5 #3 Sun Apr 11 14:17:30 EST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
taliesin:~# cat
testing/unstable
taliesin:~# uname -a
Linux taliesin 2.6.5 #2 Sun Apr 11 22:54:33 EST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
Yes, Linux distros come "bundled" with tonnes of software whereas Windows is very bare out of the box. I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but let me rant for a moment about what really annoys me. It's when some MS shill "analyst" writes a "report" puporting to compare the relative security of each system by counting bug reports. What they will do every f**king time is 1. Count all the bundled software as being part of "Linux" and 2. Aggregrate all the Linux's together thus counting most of the bugs multiple times. Surprise surprise, MS wins with a lower number of supposed bugs. Laura Didio[t] recently did one of these hack jobs (which resulted in the joint press-release from Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSe) but it wasn't the first. This is about the third or fourth of these reports that has come out in as many years.
I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like he's doing forward ray-tracing on the whole scene. Conventional ray-tracing traces the light rays backwards, i.e from the camera/eye out into the scene and finally back to the light(s). The only problem is that it doesn't really do caustics or diffuse lighting well. POVray faked caustics in version 3 (IIRC), and Radiance has done excellent diffuse lighting using a monte-carlo simulation for about a decade. In recent years photon maps have also developed. These apply forward ray-tracing to selected areas, usually selected refractive and reflective surfaces. The impact points for the photons are recorded and then used in a regular renderer (either scan-line or ray-tracer) as an additional source of light.
Again, it sounds like this guy wants to do this to the whole scene, and to a very high degree of precision. I'm not sure why. Any decent ray-tracer would get a 99% solution in a fraction of the time. Hell, in good hands even scan-line renderers can get a 90% solution even quicker, just look at all the motion-picture visual effects (and whole movies) rendered with Pixar PRman. Most effects don't even need a good ray-tracer to look realistic to most people. Unless he's rendering something more interesting than shiny balls and a mirror, or going to do something interesting with the trillions of photons (near-real-time camera-independent renders?), I really don't see the point. It's still kinda interesting though, if only because of the scale of the work. It might lead somewhere, you just never know.
I've been playing with a honeypot email account for the last couple of months. Those "remove me from your list" links sure are a good way to get more spam (Spammers are lying scum). I hope this SURBL suggestion doesn't get implemented at the ISP level. Then I wouldn't be able to go the spammers site (carefully editing the URL as needed, and with Mozilla) and sign up my honeypot account for more penis enlargement spam!
ObSimpsons: That's where I saw the Leprchaun. He tells me to burn things!
Don't forget Nessus, a vulnerability scanner similar to SATAN and SAINT.
Not really. They'd probably use a reputation-based system like Razors' Truth Evaluation System. All that would happen is this:
Spammers could abuse this by automatically signing up lots of new accounts. Perhaps new accounts could start out with zero trust, or maybe even a negative number. Then people would have to earn trust (by correctly marking any spam that gets through) before their marks are even used by the system. It would be tricky to manage and find a balance. Spammers are a determined bunch, but so are users. There's always a certain subset of users who are willing to be a little more vigilant in order to keep the spammers in line and help everyone else. Gmail is bound to have a huge number of users, so it should work out fairly well. Vigilant users + bayesian filter (with huge database) = almost perfect spam filter.
Yikes. It's stories like this that are making me want to get out of IT. So how did the job go? Let me guess, they didn't like the result. It's a good reason for specifications. "We did what you asked for, now pay up!" :P
Thankfully I've never had to deal with customers. I've heard this sentiment several times over the years. You must remember that users are not experts on usability, security, scalability, reliability, etc, etc. At some point someone has to act as a mediator and say "look, that's just not going to work well". Explain why, and try to work out other solutions or a compromise. I guess this'd be where people skills are useful :P
Yeah, alright. You caught me out. I looked in my German dictionary just before I posted that message and saw karten (cardboard box) and kiste (wooden box). But I thought what the heck and decided just to post that quick little quip. It sounds like you know at least a little more German than I do, which isn't hard to be honest. I still need to get to grips with the whole masc/fem/nuet words and choosing die/der/das/dem correctly.
I'm not sure where you got the explaination of boxen being "an attempt to glorify the ubiquity of *NIX computers". I'd never seen or heard to before. I just always thought is was a pseudo-German plural (although I see now that the German word boxen refers to the so-called sport of boxing). Anyway, with the elitist spin you give it, it sounds like either you or the person doing the explaining have/had a chip on their shoulder.
I find it funny that someone with the nick of dasmegabyte has a problem with the German-style plural of "box". Boxes, boxen. Who cares.
If someone questions the security of Open Source Software, point out that the design for the barrel locks on their doors is openly documented and has been common knowledge for quite a long time (100 years?). Open almost any encyclopedia and you can see how they work.
Ok, maybe a poor example to draw comparisons from. But people usually assume that security can only be obtained through secrecy (or obscurity). Just point out how much of their "security" is in fact not secret.
Sad but true, I'm afraid. Windows has the advantage of being mainstream. Anyone extolling the virtues of windows and other MS products is seen as being "smart" and "knowledgable" by the general populace. But us Linux/BSD (and even Mac) geeks are seen as being strange and subversive. It's funny. People will bitch and whine about viruses and unreliable "computers", but if you suggest a real solution (as opposed to a band-aid solution) then you're dismissed with little real thought. Oh no, a mess of virus scanners and other "security software" piled onto an insecure OS is seen as much better than starting with a much more secure OS in the first place.
Ok, your first bit I would agree with. It's not just the Linux guys. Any consultant is going to be biased towards what they know and can do. They're hardly going to say "Oh, there's this other thing that's cheaper and better suited to this situation, but I don't know anything about it and couldn't deliver it". They're going to push what they know and understand. They're going to spin its advantages to make it sound like a good choice whether it's windows, linux, solaris, aix, or an IBM mainframe.
Ok, in not buying CD's you're hurting the RIAA financially, but you are helping any statistics they produce (look at the downturn since 2000...). Ironic isn't it?
Jesus died on the cross? Well thanks for ruining the ending for me, Mr Spoiler :P
I don't know if you're talking about a different base station, but there was a story here on slashdot last year about a guy who pulled his apart. It had an AMD Au1500 CPU, a MIPS-compatible processor. Not x86 compatible by any stretch of the imagination :)
I don't know exactly either. Perhaps because IC's are actually SOLID (mostly), instead of a delicate glass tube with a heater and all manner of stuff hanging inside.
$40B? I thought that was about how much he's currently worth. I'd be surprised if the total amount he's given away is more that $1B.
Ah yes, that's the number. So it's either 5 or 10 FP components per pixel, depending on whether it's using single or double precision. You prove my point though, just because it uses that precision internally it still outputs fairly regular images at a lower precision.
The main problem is that we, as humans, spend almost our entire life looking at other real human beings. Either eye-to-eye or on TV or in photos, we have a life-time of experience of looking at other humans. Plus we have millions of years of evolution in our brains focusing that skill. And it's so many aspects: the shape, the size, the lighting of the skin and hair, as well as the movement. We read so much emotion and intent into the motion. So it's realtively easy for us to look at a figure and/or face on screen and say "nah, it's not real".
You're right, the differences between real and generated images are becoming smaller. But it probably follows the law of diminishing returns. The best CGI is now perhaps 99% perfect, but it will take just as much work to get to 99.99% or better. And audiences are becoming more sofisticated as well.