You may remember the "clipper chip". The idea, proposed during the first Bush administration, was that encryption technologies would have to include a back door for U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement. I forget whether this was just for export, or whether it included domestic products as well. The argument "pro" was that we could trust the U.S. government not to misuse the key; the argument "con" was that it would inhibit exports of U.S. products, because while Americans might trust their government with keys to their back door, why would anyone else? And there was also the issue that foreigners might be smart enough to come up with something that the NSA couldn't crack. I was disappointed to see the Clinton administration follow through on the idea. Ultimately, export controls were relaxed somewhat, but I'd be surprised if there weren't back doors and/or key cracking algorithms available in Fort Meade. (sp?)
It'll be interesting to watch this play out. I'm sure any resolution will disappear deep within the inner pages of the paper, if it is discussed at all.
In my second year off-campus, I shared an apartment with two others, and we split the electric bill evenly. December came and was uncommonly cold. The electric bill was a budget-buster -- more than the first 4 months combined! So we turned the heat off to save money.
January was colder. We had ice forming on the inside of the windows. As the end of the month approached, I went out and read the meter, so I could get an idea of how much money we were going to have to cough up when the next bill came. You can imagine my surprise and irritation when I discovered that the meter hadn't yet caught up to the previous month's final reading.
I think we finally caught up with the December reading in early March, and I learned to always check the meter if a bill seems out of sorts.
Nice article, indeed. It didn't tell me what I'd hoped it would, though, that there is a tool to give me memory stats the way Data General's AOS/VS II tools did. In the DG world, one component of process memory organization mapped a process' space into four areas: shared code, unshared code, shared data, and unshared data. The DG equivalent of "ps" reported shared memory and unshared memory, and it made short work of determining which processes were pigs and which weren't. I haven't found that in either Unix or Windows. It would be really useful in troubleshooting my wife's accursed W2K system.
... booting XP on a Mac is completely perverse! Why buy an expensive piece of hardware and replace its closed, proprietary operating system with another?
When I was using dial-up, someone hacked into my Red Hat box and partially installed a root kit. I didn't discover it until the following morning when I attempted to login to bring up the dial-up again, and I couldn't login. They'd have had complete control of the system except that the Linux was so far out of date that some of the tools they were relying on weren't there. After that, I took the time to learn a little bit about the firewalling that I'd thought I didn't need.
After my wife's Windows 2000 system caught a virus of some kind, I was able to make the case to her for DSL as a security measure. With dial-up, she hadn't updated her machine with security updates (nor had I), because the download times were too onerous. Now they're updated regularly, and the router's firewalling helps keep the barbarians at bay.
With this new attribute and the ability to disable it you get a plain non-tracked destination URL.
I haven't found the part about how to disable it. It's not in the UI, and it doesn't seem to be in the files I grepped, nor does it turn up in the first couple of pages of Google hits.
I feel betrayed. There are certainly good uses for this new "feature", but I'd like to have more say as an end user. That's why I switched to Mozilla/Firefox in the first place.
I'm glad you got your answer. Sheldon Brown is a great fountain of cycling knowledge. In all my years of cycling with handbrakes (around 30), I've gone over the handlebar twice. The first time was when I was around 17 and decided to try locking the front wheel in the grass of my parents' back yard. The other time was when I was riding a brand-new mountain bicycle on a dirt trail and locked up the front wheel while using both brakes. I subsequently adjusted the brakes on that bike so they took about the same amount of force as my other bikes.
I only skimmed Mr. Brown's article, but I noticed he advised against using both front and rear brakes. I use both and agree with the hypothesis that this is safer than using only one because the rear wheel will lock sooner and tip you off in advance of a front wheel skid. The exception is when I ride my track bike, which has no rear brake, on the road. On that bike, I brake by resisting the pedals, and the front brake is an assist for emergencies. I can count on one hand the number of times I used the brake last year.
Brake adjustment is, of course, a problem on many bicycles. This is frequently due to improper maintenance, or poor set-up and cheaply made components on bikes bought through other outlets than bike stores. Good quality brakes require very little adjustment, just a turn of a threaded "barrel", until the pads wear out or the cable breaks. Keeping the wheels trued is important, too.
Anyway, as I was trying to point out in my original post, good controls will allow the operator to easily modulate the output and will be like other vehicles the operator uses. The thing that threw me on my bike that day was that the brakes were tighter and stronger than the other bikes I was accustomed to riding. I didn't have time to think about the fact that I was riding a new bicycle, and my "training" kicked in, to ill effect.
There's also a reason your acceleration and braking are controlled by your feet - because your leg muscles are stronger than your thumb muscles. You can't have your acceleration/braking controlled by a non-resistive joystick, because it'd just be too easy to sneeze/drop your coffee/knock it with your elbow and have sudden acceleration or braking. You need pretty stiff resistence to prevent accidental input. Now can you imagine driving for an extend period of time using your thumb muscles instead of your leg muscles?
Actually, I do a lot of my braking with my hands -- when I am on my bicycle. But I think the thing that makes the steering wheel, accelerator pedal, etc., good inputs for driving is that they are almost universally used, so there is less of a learning curve when switching vehicles. Right now, whether you get into a Ford or a Toyota, the accelerator, brake, and (possibly) clutch pedals are in the same place. On bicycles, the left hand-brake lever controls the front brake, and the right one controls the rear brake. It could be argued that switching front and rear would make more sense, because the front wheel is far more effective for braking and most people are right-hand dominant, but doing it would be very dangerous for anyone switching from one braking scheme to the other.
Modulation is another problem, but you can learn quickly enough. The '67 Mustang I learned to drive in had plain old hydraulic brakes with no vacuum assist. When I first drove my grandmother's car that had power brakes, it took some getting used to the reduced pressure needed to stop the car. Now, of course, there is the problem of having anti-lock brakes (ABS) vs. standard brakes. I worry that now that I am accustomed to braking in a vehicle with ABS, I might forget how to brake without it -- particularly since panic stops when ABS might kick in are so rare.
I am not keen on the idea of trusting automatic blind spot detection. I wonder whether it might detect something as small as a cyclist or a pedestrian. For my part, I will prefer to rely on turning my head.
I've been wearing glasses since I was in 4th grade, and I've been working with computer monitors for the last 20 years, so here's my experience.
Within the last couple of years, it's been harder to see small objects close up, and I have even resorted to removing my glasses, even though I cannot focus beyond a foot without them, for things like examining DIP switches. My distance vision, however, has been rock-solid since my eyes stabilized in my 20's. A visit to my optometrist confirmed my worst fears: I'm turning into an old fart.
I've now got progressive lenses in my eyeglasses, and I can even read my laptop's 1280xsomething resolution without eyestrain. I also got the anti-reflective coating on my lenses. Don't do what I did and try to get away cheaply with bifocals. The line between the two lens areas was like someone smeared Vaseline on my lenses, and it fell exactly where I want to view the computer screen. The anti-reflective coating hasn't really seemed to make a positive difference, but it is certainly much more susceptible to smearing and scratching. I'm going to skip the coating on the next pair of lenses.
besides, do i really want AIDS cured? i mean, it's natures way of weeding out the idiots. aww... dammit, there goes my karma.
You might, if you contracted it from a blood transfusion, a lover/spouse who isn't as true as you believed, or any of a number of other ways that are completely out of your control.
Maybe you're joking, and not like that fellow in Jerry Falwell's association who called AIDS "God's punishment" 20+ years ago, but it's a sore subject to a lot of people.
Video internet? Gimme a break! I don't do streaming video now, and not because of shortcomings in my OS's. It's kind of like HDTV. Why, exactly, would I want to see The Apprentice and Fear Factor in high definition OR on my computer?
I worked with Data General systems for a number of years in an office run by a government manager named Milo. When the DG went in, one of the secretaries to a director in Milo's division heard there was a thing called "superuser". She buttonholed Milo in the hall and demanded that she be made a superuser.
Milo thought for a second. Superuser in AOS/VS was equivalent to root access on a Unix system, and a superuser account can delete anything and everything.
"Okay, Helen," he replied, "you're a super user!"
Placated, Helen went on about her business. Milo didn't have us change anything about her account, and she never raised the issue again.
"[S]cience is not about truths. What science is about is making our beliefs less false." -- S. James Gates, Jr.
Dr. Gates is a U. of Md. physics professor, and I heard him say this in an interview on Speaking of Faith the other day. The full transcript is available in one of their programs on Einstein.
I hope someday the people who object to evolution on religious grounds will understand that theories is all anybody's got. (And, for that matter, also the people who object to religion on scientific grounds.)
Does this mean that when I wipe my new laptop's disk tonight and install Linux, without having booted the XP that it shipped with, that the money that went to Redmond for XP is charity?
That's my experience, too. I've worked for years with keyboards, and last year I did one lousy project with Powerpoint in which I did lots of mousing around. Boom! Aching hands and numbness!
Am I the only one wondering why it's p0rn sites that are using the hole to install spyware? I mean, why not other businesses and/or government agencies? Surely Sony isn't the only company to believe they have the right to do whatever they want to a customer's computer.
As far as I know, it's not illegal to telemarket to cell phones in the U.S., but telemarketers realize it's a lightning rod not to trifle with. I could be very wrong on this.
As for text messaging, my cell carrier (Verizon) sells text messages in buckets of a hundred or so, or individually at a dime a pop incoming, and another dime for outgoing. Their web-based account control allows one to block specific email addresses but does not allow the inverse, specifying which addresses are allowed to send. Amazingly, I haven't gotten any unwanted text messages yet. (This is doubly amazing because I get spam on my Verizon DSL email account, which has never been used for anything but communications with Verizon and isn't something that could be effectively guessed by software.) IMHO, text message spam is a completely unexploited venue for marketers, and I'm expecting the party to end any day now.
If you get taken, report 'em to the Better Business Bureau, regardless of whatever feedback you give somewhere else. BBB may or may not be able to convince a vendor to give you your money back, but it will help someone else along the line.
As always, skepticism is healthy. If a deal seems impossibly good, that's when the alarms should go off in your head.
I'm not surprised, either. IMHO, the move to HDTV was one of those things that wasn't necessary. I wonder how many of the congressmen who voted to eliminate the old analog television system in favor of HDTV did so because they thought it was necessary to have big television screens.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be interesting to watch this play out. I'm sure any resolution will disappear deep within the inner pages of the paper, if it is discussed at all.
My daughter doesn't need any further education in this skill.
In my second year off-campus, I shared an apartment with two others, and we split the electric bill evenly. December came and was uncommonly cold. The electric bill was a budget-buster -- more than the first 4 months combined! So we turned the heat off to save money.
January was colder. We had ice forming on the inside of the windows. As the end of the month approached, I went out and read the meter, so I could get an idea of how much money we were going to have to cough up when the next bill came. You can imagine my surprise and irritation when I discovered that the meter hadn't yet caught up to the previous month's final reading.
I think we finally caught up with the December reading in early March, and I learned to always check the meter if a bill seems out of sorts.
This whole chain of discussion has got me to the point that I may actually try it. If I do, I'll report the results -- perhaps with egg on my face.
Thanks! The awks on my system don't have the strtonum function, but I see what you've done, and you've prompted me to read the fine man page on proc.
Nice article, indeed. It didn't tell me what I'd hoped it would, though, that there is a tool to give me memory stats the way Data General's AOS/VS II tools did. In the DG world, one component of process memory organization mapped a process' space into four areas: shared code, unshared code, shared data, and unshared data. The DG equivalent of "ps" reported shared memory and unshared memory, and it made short work of determining which processes were pigs and which weren't. I haven't found that in either Unix or Windows. It would be really useful in troubleshooting my wife's accursed W2K system.
... booting XP on a Mac is completely perverse! Why buy an expensive piece of hardware and replace its closed, proprietary operating system with another?
After my wife's Windows 2000 system caught a virus of some kind, I was able to make the case to her for DSL as a security measure. With dial-up, she hadn't updated her machine with security updates (nor had I), because the download times were too onerous. Now they're updated regularly, and the router's firewalling helps keep the barbarians at bay.
I haven't found the part about how to disable it. It's not in the UI, and it doesn't seem to be in the files I grepped, nor does it turn up in the first couple of pages of Google hits.
I feel betrayed. There are certainly good uses for this new "feature", but I'd like to have more say as an end user. That's why I switched to Mozilla/Firefox in the first place.
8. What is your name?
9. What is your quest?
10. What is the wing speed of a swallow?
I only skimmed Mr. Brown's article, but I noticed he advised against using both front and rear brakes. I use both and agree with the hypothesis that this is safer than using only one because the rear wheel will lock sooner and tip you off in advance of a front wheel skid. The exception is when I ride my track bike, which has no rear brake, on the road. On that bike, I brake by resisting the pedals, and the front brake is an assist for emergencies. I can count on one hand the number of times I used the brake last year.
Brake adjustment is, of course, a problem on many bicycles. This is frequently due to improper maintenance, or poor set-up and cheaply made components on bikes bought through other outlets than bike stores. Good quality brakes require very little adjustment, just a turn of a threaded "barrel", until the pads wear out or the cable breaks. Keeping the wheels trued is important, too.
Anyway, as I was trying to point out in my original post, good controls will allow the operator to easily modulate the output and will be like other vehicles the operator uses. The thing that threw me on my bike that day was that the brakes were tighter and stronger than the other bikes I was accustomed to riding. I didn't have time to think about the fact that I was riding a new bicycle, and my "training" kicked in, to ill effect.
Actually, I do a lot of my braking with my hands -- when I am on my bicycle. But I think the thing that makes the steering wheel, accelerator pedal, etc., good inputs for driving is that they are almost universally used, so there is less of a learning curve when switching vehicles. Right now, whether you get into a Ford or a Toyota, the accelerator, brake, and (possibly) clutch pedals are in the same place. On bicycles, the left hand-brake lever controls the front brake, and the right one controls the rear brake. It could be argued that switching front and rear would make more sense, because the front wheel is far more effective for braking and most people are right-hand dominant, but doing it would be very dangerous for anyone switching from one braking scheme to the other.
Modulation is another problem, but you can learn quickly enough. The '67 Mustang I learned to drive in had plain old hydraulic brakes with no vacuum assist. When I first drove my grandmother's car that had power brakes, it took some getting used to the reduced pressure needed to stop the car. Now, of course, there is the problem of having anti-lock brakes (ABS) vs. standard brakes. I worry that now that I am accustomed to braking in a vehicle with ABS, I might forget how to brake without it -- particularly since panic stops when ABS might kick in are so rare.
I am not keen on the idea of trusting automatic blind spot detection. I wonder whether it might detect something as small as a cyclist or a pedestrian. For my part, I will prefer to rely on turning my head.
You forgot my favorite: Punch cards. Or, for that matter, paper tape.
Within the last couple of years, it's been harder to see small objects close up, and I have even resorted to removing my glasses, even though I cannot focus beyond a foot without them, for things like examining DIP switches. My distance vision, however, has been rock-solid since my eyes stabilized in my 20's. A visit to my optometrist confirmed my worst fears: I'm turning into an old fart.
I've now got progressive lenses in my eyeglasses, and I can even read my laptop's 1280xsomething resolution without eyestrain. I also got the anti-reflective coating on my lenses. Don't do what I did and try to get away cheaply with bifocals. The line between the two lens areas was like someone smeared Vaseline on my lenses, and it fell exactly where I want to view the computer screen. The anti-reflective coating hasn't really seemed to make a positive difference, but it is certainly much more susceptible to smearing and scratching. I'm going to skip the coating on the next pair of lenses.
You might, if you contracted it from a blood transfusion, a lover/spouse who isn't as true as you believed, or any of a number of other ways that are completely out of your control.
Maybe you're joking, and not like that fellow in Jerry Falwell's association who called AIDS "God's punishment" 20+ years ago, but it's a sore subject to a lot of people.
Video internet? Gimme a break! I don't do streaming video now, and not because of shortcomings in my OS's. It's kind of like HDTV. Why, exactly, would I want to see The Apprentice and Fear Factor in high definition OR on my computer?
Milo thought for a second. Superuser in AOS/VS was equivalent to root access on a Unix system, and a superuser account can delete anything and everything.
"Okay, Helen," he replied, "you're a super user!"
Placated, Helen went on about her business. Milo didn't have us change anything about her account, and she never raised the issue again.
"[S]cience is not about truths. What science is about is making our beliefs less false." -- S. James Gates, Jr.
Dr. Gates is a U. of Md. physics professor, and I heard him say this in an interview on Speaking of Faith the other day. The full transcript is available in one of their programs on Einstein.
I hope someday the people who object to evolution on religious grounds will understand that theories is all anybody's got. (And, for that matter, also the people who object to religion on scientific grounds.)
Okay, so I made that up. But how are they going to prove it's a prime? And, more importantly, does it taste good?
Does this mean that when I wipe my new laptop's disk tonight and install Linux, without having booted the XP that it shipped with, that the money that went to Redmond for XP is charity?
That's my experience, too. I've worked for years with keyboards, and last year I did one lousy project with Powerpoint in which I did lots of mousing around. Boom! Aching hands and numbness!
Am I the only one wondering why it's p0rn sites that are using the hole to install spyware? I mean, why not other businesses and/or government agencies? Surely Sony isn't the only company to believe they have the right to do whatever they want to a customer's computer.
As for text messaging, my cell carrier (Verizon) sells text messages in buckets of a hundred or so, or individually at a dime a pop incoming, and another dime for outgoing. Their web-based account control allows one to block specific email addresses but does not allow the inverse, specifying which addresses are allowed to send. Amazingly, I haven't gotten any unwanted text messages yet. (This is doubly amazing because I get spam on my Verizon DSL email account, which has never been used for anything but communications with Verizon and isn't something that could be effectively guessed by software.) IMHO, text message spam is a completely unexploited venue for marketers, and I'm expecting the party to end any day now.
As always, skepticism is healthy. If a deal seems impossibly good, that's when the alarms should go off in your head.
I'm not surprised, either. IMHO, the move to HDTV was one of those things that wasn't necessary. I wonder how many of the congressmen who voted to eliminate the old analog television system in favor of HDTV did so because they thought it was necessary to have big television screens.