TheFNORD! last time I wrote anyFNORD!thing in a stack-based languaFNORD!ge it was silly little progrFNORD!ams in Reverse Polish LiFNORD!sp on an HP-48.
Well-said. I can think of a great example. Alt-Tab switching I think first appeared on Windows. So Apple implemented it as Command-Tab switching, BUT they improved it. Once the (much better-looking) bay of icons respresenting open programs comes up, if you continue to hold down Command, you can use Command-backquote to iterate backwards through the open windows. Or, if you start by hitting Command-Backquote, the task switcher automatically goes into iteration through the foreground application's open windows. So a combination of keystrokes easily can bring a background application's background window to the fore, with a caveat: in the Apple task-switching world, hidden windows don't come up for iteration, but on the whole, I think it's much cleaner than MS's implementation. I find that I rarely need Expose do to its efficiency.
Geez, should have previewed that. The universe was not only expanding into nothingness for the first 400,000 years, it still is expanding into nothingness. What I meant to say was that the inflation during which radical expansion well beyond c took place only occurred for 400,000 years, and now we are expanding at much less, though I think still increasing, speed.
Re:That math makes no sense to me. Help me out.
on
An Older, Larger Universe
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The initial expansion was MUCH faster than the speed of light. c is the limit that governs speed in a vacuum. But by definition the early (first 400,000 years) expansion (or inflation) of the universe was expanding into NOTHINGNESS, not vacuum. For a period of time the universe expanded at many times the speed of light.
Journey into the mind of a madman: At first I was thinking he pirated "Meet the Feebles" and wondering how the hell you could get sued for pirating low-budget, hobbit-issued Muppet porn. Then it registered that it was "Meet the Fockers" and figured the studio needed the money, cos it looked like an abominable movie from the preview. Then I found out the damn thing grossed $279.167 million and thought "that can't be it." Then I remembered Barbara Streisand was in it and figured they probably were in the hole still from paying her royalties.
So this guy went from being cool, to being lame, to partial redemption for suing the MPAA
IMO, Science differs from religion only in that religion admits there's a higher power in play upon which we are accountable. Science assumes there's a cosmic, random power upon which we are not accountable.
We shouldn't be offended by any but the most egregious opinions. So perhaps I feel that this is an egregious opinion among an otherwise acceptable (though IMO wrong) post.
If you really think that what you've stated is the only difference between science and religion than you understand neither. Religion doesn't "admit" there's a higher power in play, it refuses to admit there might not be. Science does not say that there is not a higher power in play, it says that it has simply found no evidence of such. Science makes no assumptions, period. That's why it's science. It doesn't assume there is a "cosmic, random power." It doesn't assume there is not a "cosmic, random power."
The mistake you're making is that you're conflating people who use science's lack of proof (thus far) of the divine to justify immorality with science itself. That's an important distinction. You seem to think science has a hedonistic ulterior motive other than seeking truth. But it is in fact religion that has demonstrable ulterior motives. It is religion that seeks to impose pseudoscience in an effort to obscure the truth. It is religion that has forged holy artifacts for milennia, and kept scriptures encrypted in Latin while extorting people with heretical promises of purchased salvation. The rigor of peer review is enough to keep science honest: religion can make no such claim.
Even retinal scans are permutable. So I think you have to consider biometrics as a single factor in multi-factor authentication. If looked at as another layer in your defenses and not a defense in and of iteslf, then it becomes useful.
If an ad is hosted on a known ad-serving commercial, mapping ad servers to 127.0.0.1 can help defeat attacks like this. On my Linux and OS X machines I have a cron script automatically curl http://everythingisnt.com/hosts to my/etc/hosts file (after first archiving it) every so often, appending past entries I want to preserve and overwriting the previous list entries. The site has a Windows installer too, so I manually install on my Windows machines whenever an update comes out. I use this list on all my machines and it is pretty effective. My motivation isn't defense so much as it is not wanting to see advertisements at all or waste time loading them.
Not necessarily true. It doesn't have to be something wrong, it can be something that is in violation of a standard that itself is not perfect, or it could be a problem with the documentation OSSI has provided. Remediation might involve "fixing" something that wasn't really broken to start with, or with modifying documents to suit algorithms or vice-versa.
So you're expecting an application framework that adapts itself to any forseeable trend? Good luck with that. For the time being, any framework that is easy to adapt will have to do, at least for those of us living in the real world.
Any Turing complete language is adaptable in some sense. And programming languages do indeed have to be adapted, and that adaptation requires work. That's why you write libraries, and why features are added over time.
There's no reason to assume that Rails will fail in the near term. Rails is based on a method of decomposing software functionality that does back to the 1970s (Model-View-Controller). Rails might not be here forever, but it has a very solid architectural foundation and it is easy to adapt it to the latest trends (for instance, you can create AJAX-based Web applications very easily with RoR). In other words, the extensibility and architecure of Rails make it adaptable, just as you mention Ruby being adaptable.
Ubuntu is supposedly "Linux for human beings", not "Linux for open source zealots who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of proprietary software."
*sigh* Perhaps if you had taken the time to gloss over the FRONT PAGE of the Ubuntu Web site:
The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.
These freedoms make Ubuntu fundamentally different from traditional proprietary software: not only are the tools you need available free of charge, you have the right to modify your software until it works the way you want it to.
So, yes, it IS in fact software for people who place freedom as a high priority. The platform in fact places freedom so high as to allow users (like myself) who want to use proprietary software that freedom as well. It simply doesn't ship with it enabled and they don't support it. That's their right. They are providing a distribution of supreme quality for free, after all.
GNU should focus on making better software, not pursuing an ideology.
Are the two mutually exclusive? If so, then how come GNU software has consistently bested equivalent UNIX utilities in quality? And what exactly do you think GNU is anyway? It isn't a software shop in the traditional sense, it's collaborative and paticipatory--anyone who wants to can write software under a GNU license can. Quality is maintained by peer review. It appears to be an effective approach. You seem to be saying "they" should surrender the ideals that have gotten them this far and focus on making better software. How exactly would that be done? Do you imagine some whip-cracking wookie is going to bear down on participants? Should they attempt to keep their distributed contributers underfoot with a CMMi level 5 lockdown, keyboard monitors, meetings and document generation? It's ludicrous statement.
Keeping proprietary software out demonstrates adherence to a higher ideal, and ideal foundational to the GNU movement, that I admire. If you want nonfree software, and want to manage it within apt, all you have to do is add a few repositories and you can get it. For example, as much as I would like to use gcj as my primary Java, I found that Sun's Java was better for what I was doing. So adding restricted and multiverse to/etc/apt/sources.list allowed me to install Sun's JRE using apt-get, and dpkg-reconfigure allowed me to choose the Sun Java as my default. Just one example of many, I have tons of nonfree software on my box and most of it is managed through apt. Even if there isn't a respository, you can create a package and still manage the installation through automated tools.
You can also add other respositories as needed, but I suggest being very careful there and perhaps disabling the respositories after you've installed what you want.
It's not a 1337 1iNuX, it's Linux for Idiots. Ease of use is NOT A BAD THING unless it encourages novice or lazy users to engage in bad practices. Otherwise, it's valuable not just for n00bs but for people who are lazy (like me) or have better things to do than spend time on trivial tasks (like me). I think it's a great distro.
I may not agree with everything they stand for and do, but I'm still grateful for their existence, because we need organizations to fight against government abuses, and there simply aren't many well-funded and organized organizations protecting our Constitutional rights.
Affirmative action isn't in the Constitution because the slave-owning founders who didn't allow women to vote would never have even considered allowing minorities to work for money, much less get protection from unfair hiring practices. Citing the intent of the Founders isn't always a good thing, but calling fair treatment an intrinsic right doesn't speak to the Constitution so much as it does the Declaration of Independence--we have simply learned that this rule should encompass more genders and races.
The government is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act by spending $1m of our (meaning "public") funds in order to figure out how to better keep us in the dark. The claim is that it is to keep terrorists from getting details on our infrastructure, but based on the government's recent record on matters of secrecy, should we trust them?
It's things like this that make me thank the gods for institutions like the ACLU and the EFF.
I agree with your point about an evolutionary perspective things, at least as far as psychology goes. Religion among tribal peoples, however, is quite different than the revealed religions of civilization. I think that for them religion is part of who they are, and that it binds them. Religion and mythology satisfy human needs of understanding (mythological tales of origin of natural phenomena) and they imbue life with a greater purpose.
However, the Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Hindi, and Buddhist faiths in many ways were developed as a way to cope with the inequities, privation, brutality and sufferings of our civilization. They weren't so much for explaining natural phenomena (though some of that exists in each of them) they were to try to keep people sane and give them hope. Unfortunately, coping with a system that doesn't work is not a good thing. Religion has soothed us and forestalled our dealing with foundational cultural problems that are now threatening to destroy our species.
In other words, I view the revealed religions not as a necessary development for our species to survive, but a necessary development for our species to endure the system it set up for itself in our anthro-centric agrarian society. And a system this flawed should not be endured, it should be scrapped in favor of another attempt. But it appears we will endure it long enough to destroy ourselves. If we somehow came to realize as a species that this is the only world that matters, perhaps we would belatedly at least try to start over and treat this world with the respect it deserves.
The problem as I see it is that we still live according to a civilizational system that is hopeless. There simply is no way for our species to survive in this system. It has to be thrown out entirely and we have to build a new system which reevaluates our place in relation to our habitat. I don't claim to know what system might work, but I'm fairly certain it would involve removing mankind from the center of the universe and placing us instead as mere participants in, instead of rulers of, the world.
Anyone who uses a computer for business has missed the point entirely.
Is there a reason why you feel qualified to tell others what "the point" is?
From the profile:
-If you're not doing something original and creative with a computer, you're wasting your time.
So it's impossible to "do something original and creative with a computer" if what you're doing relates to business? I'm glad the folks at the engineering firms that brought this technology to us in the first place didn't feel that way.
And FWIW, that computers are being used primarily for business isn't an assumption, it's a fact. Second behind that is viewing porn (the distribution of porn largely falling under the business side of things):P. I wish they were used primarily for spreading world peace and ending hunger, but that just isn't so.
And what about security? (yeah, you know, the topic?:P)I'm not worried. A hardware firewall, coupled with basic precautions like not using IE, not opening random email attachments, and not browsing Russian porn/warez sites, keeps me perfectly secure. I haven't been hit by a single virus, worm, or piece of spyware in my entire life, and I see no reason to suppose that's about to change.
That's a logical fallacy, and a 0-day exploit could get anyone on any platform. Statistically, the fact that there appear to be many more 0-day exploits for Windows means there is a higher likelihood of compromise on that platform, but you can of course use Windows fairly safely--a conscious Windows user is better than an inept OpenBSD user. Anyway, it appears that OS X is a safer platform than Windows, but security is always a trade-off with usability. If you prefer Windows, then you are making that trade-off, but it seems at least you're savvy enough to mitigate the trade-off fairly well.
But consider a worm like SASSER. It's plausible that such a worm could get even a competent user of any OS, provided it exploited an open service. Imagine if you were one of the first victims of such a worm, or if you couldn't remediate your system because the update servers were hammered. Assuming you're secure just due to past luck is dangerous.
OS X is more secure, but that doesn't make it or any OS secure. OS X allegedly has some serious vulnerabilities waiting in the wings. I say get an old x86 or SPARC box, throw OpenBSD on it, configure pf (perhaps this is the hardware firewall to which you refer), and it doesn't matter what you're running behind it, you'll at least have a spohisticated extra layer of security.
Slashdot Mirror
TheFNORD! last time I wrote anyFNORD!thing in a stack-based languaFNORD!ge it was silly little progrFNORD!ams in Reverse Polish LiFNORD!sp on an HP-48.
Well-said. I can think of a great example. Alt-Tab switching I think first appeared on Windows. So Apple implemented it as Command-Tab switching, BUT they improved it. Once the (much better-looking) bay of icons respresenting open programs comes up, if you continue to hold down Command, you can use Command-backquote to iterate backwards through the open windows. Or, if you start by hitting Command-Backquote, the task switcher automatically goes into iteration through the foreground application's open windows. So a combination of keystrokes easily can bring a background application's background window to the fore, with a caveat: in the Apple task-switching world, hidden windows don't come up for iteration, but on the whole, I think it's much cleaner than MS's implementation. I find that I rarely need Expose do to its efficiency.
Geez, should have previewed that. The universe was not only expanding into nothingness for the first 400,000 years, it still is expanding into nothingness. What I meant to say was that the inflation during which radical expansion well beyond c took place only occurred for 400,000 years, and now we are expanding at much less, though I think still increasing, speed.
The initial expansion was MUCH faster than the speed of light. c is the limit that governs speed in a vacuum. But by definition the early (first 400,000 years) expansion (or inflation) of the universe was expanding into NOTHINGNESS, not vacuum. For a period of time the universe expanded at many times the speed of light.
Journey into the mind of a madman:
At first I was thinking he pirated "Meet the Feebles" and wondering how the hell you could get sued for pirating low-budget, hobbit-issued Muppet porn. Then it registered that it was "Meet the Fockers" and figured the studio needed the money, cos it looked like an abominable movie from the preview. Then I found out the damn thing grossed $279.167 million and thought "that can't be it." Then I remembered Barbara Streisand was in it and figured they probably were in the hole still from paying her royalties.
So this guy went from being cool, to being lame, to partial redemption for suing the MPAA
We shouldn't be offended by any but the most egregious opinions. So perhaps I feel that this is an egregious opinion among an otherwise acceptable (though IMO wrong) post.
If you really think that what you've stated is the only difference between science and religion than you understand neither. Religion doesn't "admit" there's a higher power in play, it refuses to admit there might not be. Science does not say that there is not a higher power in play, it says that it has simply found no evidence of such. Science makes no assumptions, period. That's why it's science. It doesn't assume there is a "cosmic, random power." It doesn't assume there is not a "cosmic, random power."
The mistake you're making is that you're conflating people who use science's lack of proof (thus far) of the divine to justify immorality with science itself. That's an important distinction. You seem to think science has a hedonistic ulterior motive other than seeking truth. But it is in fact religion that has demonstrable ulterior motives. It is religion that seeks to impose pseudoscience in an effort to obscure the truth. It is religion that has forged holy artifacts for milennia, and kept scriptures encrypted in Latin while extorting people with heretical promises of purchased salvation. The rigor of peer review is enough to keep science honest: religion can make no such claim.
Even retinal scans are permutable. So I think you have to consider biometrics as a single factor in multi-factor authentication. If looked at as another layer in your defenses and not a defense in and of iteslf, then it becomes useful.
If an ad is hosted on a known ad-serving commercial, mapping ad servers to 127.0.0.1 can help defeat attacks like this. On my Linux and OS X machines I have a cron script automatically curl http://everythingisnt.com/hosts to my /etc/hosts file (after first archiving it) every so often, appending past entries I want to preserve and overwriting the previous list entries. The site has a Windows installer too, so I manually install on my Windows machines whenever an update comes out. I use this list on all my machines and it is pretty effective. My motivation isn't defense so much as it is not wanting to see advertisements at all or waste time loading them.
Not necessarily true. It doesn't have to be something wrong, it can be something that is in violation of a standard that itself is not perfect, or it could be a problem with the documentation OSSI has provided. Remediation might involve "fixing" something that wasn't really broken to start with, or with modifying documents to suit algorithms or vice-versa.
You're off by an order of magnitude, it was the 68000 that Apple used. You have to go back 30 years for the Mot 6800.
Yeah, "stagnation in market growth..."
My serial didn't work. So I provided a bunch of information to them for nothing. Great.
Any Turing complete language is adaptable in some sense. And programming languages do indeed have to be adapted, and that adaptation requires work. That's why you write libraries, and why features are added over time.
There's no reason to assume that Rails will fail in the near term. Rails is based on a method of decomposing software functionality that does back to the 1970s (Model-View-Controller). Rails might not be here forever, but it has a very solid architectural foundation and it is easy to adapt it to the latest trends (for instance, you can create AJAX-based Web applications very easily with RoR). In other words, the extensibility and architecure of Rails make it adaptable, just as you mention Ruby being adaptable.
A blue dragon? What the hell are you smokin'?
FNORD!
--Hagbard
...and consider all the time you save not having to reboot every time you install something!
You can also add other respositories as needed, but I suggest being very careful there and perhaps disabling the respositories after you've installed what you want.
It's not a 1337 1iNuX, it's Linux for Idiots. Ease of use is NOT A BAD THING unless it encourages novice or lazy users to engage in bad practices. Otherwise, it's valuable not just for n00bs but for people who are lazy (like me) or have better things to do than spend time on trivial tasks (like me). I think it's a great distro.
Affirmative action isn't in the Constitution because the slave-owning founders who didn't allow women to vote would never have even considered allowing minorities to work for money, much less get protection from unfair hiring practices. Citing the intent of the Founders isn't always a good thing, but calling fair treatment an intrinsic right doesn't speak to the Constitution so much as it does the Declaration of Independence--we have simply learned that this rule should encompass more genders and races.
It's things like this that make me thank the gods for institutions like the ACLU and the EFF.
However, the Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Hindi, and Buddhist faiths in many ways were developed as a way to cope with the inequities, privation, brutality and sufferings of our civilization. They weren't so much for explaining natural phenomena (though some of that exists in each of them) they were to try to keep people sane and give them hope. Unfortunately, coping with a system that doesn't work is not a good thing. Religion has soothed us and forestalled our dealing with foundational cultural problems that are now threatening to destroy our species.
In other words, I view the revealed religions not as a necessary development for our species to survive, but a necessary development for our species to endure the system it set up for itself in our anthro-centric agrarian society. And a system this flawed should not be endured, it should be scrapped in favor of another attempt. But it appears we will endure it long enough to destroy ourselves. If we somehow came to realize as a species that this is the only world that matters, perhaps we would belatedly at least try to start over and treat this world with the respect it deserves.
The problem as I see it is that we still live according to a civilizational system that is hopeless. There simply is no way for our species to survive in this system. It has to be thrown out entirely and we have to build a new system which reevaluates our place in relation to our habitat. I don't claim to know what system might work, but I'm fairly certain it would involve removing mankind from the center of the universe and placing us instead as mere participants in, instead of rulers of, the world.
I've never heard of a literate carnie, much less one capable of getting on the Internet. I call bull$hit!!
And FWIW, that computers are being used primarily for business isn't an assumption, it's a fact. Second behind that is viewing porn (the distribution of porn largely falling under the business side of things) :P. I wish they were used primarily for spreading world peace and ending hunger, but that just isn't so.
But consider a worm like SASSER. It's plausible that such a worm could get even a competent user of any OS, provided it exploited an open service. Imagine if you were one of the first victims of such a worm, or if you couldn't remediate your system because the update servers were hammered. Assuming you're secure just due to past luck is dangerous.
OS X is more secure, but that doesn't make it or any OS secure. OS X allegedly has some serious vulnerabilities waiting in the wings. I say get an old x86 or SPARC box, throw OpenBSD on it, configure pf (perhaps this is the hardware firewall to which you refer), and it doesn't matter what you're running behind it, you'll at least have a spohisticated extra layer of security.