All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?
Well, I'm a Mac zealot, and I've convinced 4 or 5 people who were fed up with there shit-riddled Windows boxes to switch to Macs. They've never been happier, and tell their friends about it. So...it helps.
The only people Mac zealots piss off are PC guys who know, in their heart of hearts, that OS X is waaaay better than anything that will ever ooze its way out of Redmond.
When I was in Cyber-Corp at U of Tulsa (Center for Information Security) getting an MS, a group of undergrads developed an AIM logger for the cyber-crime unit of the Tulsa PD. They get a tap on teh suspects internet connection, and all IM going in and out gets sniffed, then timestamped, hashed, and encrypted for storage and later use in court.
Nifty little system, and they designed it to be plug-in friendly, so they could add chat protocols other than AIM later on.
If this is true, it looks like we won't be in for a 18-month wait for 10.5.
Although it will be interesting to have an OS that will be able to run on PowerPC (PowerMac) and some type of Intel chip (Mac Mini). Or do we get "Classic2" to emulate PowerPC OS X on Intel hardware, since the machines that will have to do double-duty will probably be dual 3.2GHz (a guess) PowerMacs by then?
Apple didn't invent Bluetooth 2.0. Also, how come Apple got their shit together and Microsoft didn't? Last time I check my Mac, it wasn't vulnerable to either any current virii or MIME-contained executables.
And don't forget, Apple is also responsible for both 400Mb/s and 800Mb/s firewire, along with the best ZefoConf protocol there is, Rendezous/Bonjour. And made the 3.5" floppy disk standard....in fucking 1984. Original mac also shipped with a real sound processor and speaker, instead of that boop/beep stuff that was standard on PCs well into the 90s.
iPods also have no MMU, which is why running Linux on them has been somewhat of a challenge (that and puzzling out the bootloader code, but that's been figured out)
The ONLY game I've ever run across for the PS2 with real multi-channel digital surround is "SSX Tricky", which you could play in DTS. Why is that? How come so many games have Dolby Pro Logic II, but not Dolby 5.1 or 7.1 or DTS or whatever?
On the flip side of the capability coin, the pressure sensitive buttons are capable of reporting 256 levels of pressure (8 bits), and are actually analog pressure buttons. They work like this:
"Each button has a tiny curved disk attached to its bottom. This disk is very conductive. When the button is depressed, the disk is pushed against a thin conductive strip mounted on the controller's circuit board. If the button is pressed lightly, the bottom part of the curved disk is all that touches the strip, increasing the level of conductivity slightly. As the button is pressed harder, more of the disk comes into contact with the strip, gradually increasing the level of conductivity. This varying degree of conductivity makes the buttons pressure-sensitive!"
(rant)
First, did you know that you can actually die from alcohol withdrawl? And that it is as bad or worse than heroin withdrawl in terms of pain and suffering? Really, look it up, but I digress...
I agree that opiates are pretty damn addictive, but LSD? LSD has got to be the most non-addictive substance ever. It almost has an anti-addiction property built in, where people almost always say "wow, let's wait a few weeks before we try that again". Sure, there are some wackos who trip for days and days on end, but there are wackos for every substancem legal or illegal.
As far as I can tell, there has NEVER been a death attributed directly to LSD overdose, although I'm sure many people have somehow killed themselves while high on LSD becuase of lack of sober supervisors. That's a problem caused by law enforcement, which forces people to go underground and into uncomfortable/unsafe situations to use drugs, where unsafe things can happen. If you could just hang out in the park while tripping witha sober buddy, and didn't disturb anyone, who would you be harming?
On the other hand, in 2001 there were 75,000 alcohol-related deaths in the United States, which took an average of 30 years off the lives of each person that died. That's a staggering figure. For the same year, there were only 21,683 drug-related deaths, and that ANY drug, legal or illegal, meaning botched prescriptions and overdoses on aspirin and tylenol and everything else included (opiates too).
I know, alcohol is much more readily available than drugs, so there are more deaths, but think about all the expense, pain, and misery people are put through just because they want to get high.
Is that such a crime? Since when is being sober 24/7 a necessary requirement to be a good person? Illegal drugs can lead to amazing emotional/personal breakthroughs, or just plain enjoyment. If people want to get fucked up and (eventually) damage their health, there are MUCH better ways to do it that by using alcohol. The gov gives you the least fun and most damaging of intoxicants and says "have at it!" Brilliant....=( (/rant)
Just becase it's a dynamic site doesn't mean it won't benefit from Coral caching!
Sure, the dynamic bits still have to get through, but what about all the graphics that get served out? I know that's just bandwidth, and requires almost 0 processing on the sender's part, but it would still help when 250,000 slashdotters descend on a site at once. At least his bandwidth won't max out anywhere near as quickly.
I was able to use the site via the Coral Caching system (before it got totally zonked) and it appeared to serve data to me correctly. Am I an idiot? I mean, if you submit a novel (as in uncommon) query to the site via the cache and it responds, that proves it's at least working correctly, right? Might help, but it won't hurt.
Awesome, I saw Steppenwolf at Ribfest a few years ago, and I saw David Crosby like 3 years ago at Last Fling, it was great. Yeah, in retrospect I think the Carillon was paid for, at least in part, by private donations.
Eh, Longwood isn't bad, at least as of 2001 or so. I lived across Route 59 in the Brookdale subdivision (I know, N Naperville, for shame! S Naperville sucks; Those people can take their giant, empty houses and shove them), and there was never any ghetto people that bothered us. Shit, much MUCH nicer neighboorhood than the ghetto I live in in Northern Virginia, in my $1200/month rented apartment.
I used to have baseball practice at the field at Longwood elementary school when I was little, seemed OK. The houses were smaller, but they were still houses. Nothings worse that the blight that are condo and apartment complexes, which always have more ghetto people.
While Neuqua Valley is not the most expensive high school built on a per student basis (about $20K per student, 3100 students at full capacity), I challenge you to find a American public high school with a contstruction greater than Neuqua's $62 million.
PS - According to the Wikipedia article you linked to, "In addition, it is considered poor form to invoke the law explicitly." You also failed to take into account "Quirk's Exception" to Godwin's Law, which is "Intentional invocation of this so-called 'Nazi Clause' is ineffectual." =)
And if there's one thing they like doing, it's spending tons of $ on flashy, useless stuff.
Like that amazing Carillon tower (giant bell tower) that they decided was a good use of millions of $ of taxpayer cash. It never gets played. Totally useless, but IT'S THE BIGGEST ONE FOR HUNDRED OF MILES AROUND, LOOK AT US!
PS - I spent like half my life up to age 18 checking out books from the fantastic Naperville Library System, it's a shame they're doing this, but I'm not at all suprised. They want to look like technological leaders.
Seriously, why would selling a pound of a totally benign and legal substance and saying it's drugs carry the same penalty as if you were selling drugs? I mean, WHY? It's not drugs. That's like firing a gun loaded with blanks at someone and being charged with murder or assault with a deadly weapon or something.
Hell, cops should run around selling huge quantities of fake drugs just to take the drugdealers' $ and use it to buy squadcars or something. It would sow tons of distrust amoungst dealers.
Don't get me wrong, it was a really, really interesting class, but the projects were just KILLER. If I could have taken it just for learning value without the projects, it would have been much better.
Hell, I took Compiler Design and it was almost easier than OS Design. And we had to build the Lexical, Syntactic, and Symantic analyzers without YACC or LEX, not even an LL1 grammar to start with. We had to remove recursion and ambiguity by hand, and build a recursive descent compiler in Java (crazy and useless, but interesting none the less)
It's more like 90 sheep and 10 wolves deciding what to have for dinner, after the wolves have done one of the following:
1) Convinced the stupider and more easily distracted sheep (51%) that getting eaten will help fight the war on terror.
2) Said "what's that sheep? You want us to eat you? OK...." while the sheep are screaming that they everyone should have a salad.
Those 10 wolves have much, much more power thatn the 90 sheep, and not because of numbers. They have the ability to dictate what most of the sheep think, by careful manipulation they learned in advertising/marketing school.
Here is the message template that eff.org (Electronic Freedom Foundation) provides to write your representatives to speak out against the REAL ID Act. Use this if you're having trouble thinking of what to say. I know I'm encouraging thoughtless messages to congress, but hey, too bad for the idiots that support this bill: ------------------ I am a constituent who cares about privacy and national security, and I urge you to oppose the REAL ID Act provisions of the House emergency supplemental spending bill. The REAL ID Act creates a de facto "national ID," threatening our privacy, security, and the principles of federalism that safeguard both.
National identification systems are prone to abuse at every step of their creation and use. The REAL ID Act would establish an enormous national database of ID holders, where even a small percentage of errors would cause major social disruption. Also, the ID would function as an internal passport that would be shown before accessing planes, trains, national parks, and court houses - an irresistible target for forgers and identity thieves. The Act also requires IDs to include "common machine-readable technology," which would likely include controversial radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies that can broadcast personal data to passersby. Worst of all, the REAL ID Act would divert resources from security measures that could actually work.
Moreover, states do not want this kind of system. A similar program called "MATRIX" recently failed because states abandoned it due to privacy concerns. This is an example of federalism at work. We should respect a state's decision to protect its citizens' privacy, not conscript it into an ill-conceived national system.
I hope that you will work to strip the REAL ID Act provisions from the emergency supplemental spending bill. Thank you for your time. -------------
They forgot NP Complete, unless in the future they figured out how to knock that class of problems down to NP. Now that I think about it, they probably did.
I work as an IT guy at a US federal agency. Not one of the scary DoD ones, but a nice one that funds lots of science research. As webmaster for our department, it's frequently my job to redact (black out the secret stuff) in MS Word documents before they're converted to PDF and put up on the web.
Here's my procedure: I wrote a VBA marco that takes the text you're highlighted in a word doc, counts the characters selected, and replaces it with half that number of capital "X"es. I've found on average that half the number of characters selected in "X"es is about the original length of the selection. I then select these areas of XXXXX in black highlighting for that "freshly redacted" taste. Then I make sure change tracking is turned off, save the document, and Print (not auto-convert) to PDF.
Ta-da! Redacted! If it's a scanned document that shows up in PDF on my desk, I render all the pages to JPG, black out the secret stuff in GIMP, and then resave and stuff back into PDF format.
Even if your bosses are too cheap to by PDF redacting software, it can still be done fairly cheaply. And don't give me any shit about meta-data, I've checked the resulting PDFs with a hex editor and I don't see anything substantive.
Slashdot Mirror
I have this great button that just says "Windows '95 = Macintosh '89".
I think my Dad picked it up a local Mac shop in 95. I wore it on my backpack for the remainder of highschool (yes, I was lame).
I suppose now we'll have to mint one that says "Windows Vista = OS X 10.0.0"
Did you think people would pay $2 or $3 for a 20 second, polyphonic ringtone? Never underestimate the public's need to consume media.
All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?
Well, I'm a Mac zealot, and I've convinced 4 or 5 people who were fed up with there shit-riddled Windows boxes to switch to Macs. They've never been happier, and tell their friends about it. So...it helps.
The only people Mac zealots piss off are PC guys who know, in their heart of hearts, that OS X is waaaay better than anything that will ever ooze its way out of Redmond.
Wow, you're right, I underestimate the amount of stuff Windows puts in that damn right-click menu.
I've been hitting control-v by reflex and getting "^V" for years. That's what I get for using a Mac my whole life: key combos vs. right-click
But, I am unable to highlight text in the CLI window. Clicking on the window has no effect, and copy is greyed out in the right-click menu. Oh well.
You mean a CLI that you can cut, copy, and paste to/from? Innovation!
About time MS got on the fucking ball in terms of CLI.
When I was in Cyber-Corp at U of Tulsa (Center for Information Security) getting an MS, a group of undergrads developed an AIM logger for the cyber-crime unit of the Tulsa PD. They get a tap on teh suspects internet connection, and all IM going in and out gets sniffed, then timestamped, hashed, and encrypted for storage and later use in court.
Nifty little system, and they designed it to be plug-in friendly, so they could add chat protocols other than AIM later on.
So, USE ENCRYPTION to avoid getting sniffed.
If this is true, it looks like we won't be in for a 18-month wait for 10.5.
Although it will be interesting to have an OS that will be able to run on PowerPC (PowerMac) and some type of Intel chip (Mac Mini). Or do we get "Classic2" to emulate PowerPC OS X on Intel hardware, since the machines that will have to do double-duty will probably be dual 3.2GHz (a guess) PowerMacs by then?
Apple didn't invent Bluetooth 2.0. Also, how come Apple got their shit together and Microsoft didn't? Last time I check my Mac, it wasn't vulnerable to either any current virii or MIME-contained executables.
And don't forget, Apple is also responsible for both 400Mb/s and 800Mb/s firewire, along with the best ZefoConf protocol there is, Rendezous/Bonjour. And made the 3.5" floppy disk standard....in fucking 1984. Original mac also shipped with a real sound processor and speaker, instead of that boop/beep stuff that was standard on PCs well into the 90s.
iPods also have no MMU, which is why running Linux on them has been somewhat of a challenge (that and puzzling out the bootloader code, but that's been figured out)
The ONLY game I've ever run across for the PS2 with real multi-channel digital surround is "SSX Tricky", which you could play in DTS. Why is that? How come so many games have Dolby Pro Logic II, but not Dolby 5.1 or 7.1 or DTS or whatever?
On the flip side of the capability coin, the pressure sensitive buttons are capable of reporting 256 levels of pressure (8 bits), and are actually analog pressure buttons. They work like this:
"Each button has a tiny curved disk attached to its bottom. This disk is very conductive. When the button is depressed, the disk is pushed against a thin conductive strip mounted on the controller's circuit board. If the button is pressed lightly, the bottom part of the curved disk is all that touches the strip, increasing the level of conductivity slightly. As the button is pressed harder, more of the disk comes into contact with the strip, gradually increasing the level of conductivity. This varying degree of conductivity makes the buttons pressure-sensitive!"
(rant)
First, did you know that you can actually die from alcohol withdrawl? And that it is as bad or worse than heroin withdrawl in terms of pain and suffering? Really, look it up, but I digress...
I agree that opiates are pretty damn addictive, but LSD? LSD has got to be the most non-addictive substance ever. It almost has an anti-addiction property built in, where people almost always say "wow, let's wait a few weeks before we try that again". Sure, there are some wackos who trip for days and days on end, but there are wackos for every substancem legal or illegal.
As far as I can tell, there has NEVER been a death attributed directly to LSD overdose, although I'm sure many people have somehow killed themselves while high on LSD becuase of lack of sober supervisors. That's a problem caused by law enforcement, which forces people to go underground and into uncomfortable/unsafe situations to use drugs, where unsafe things can happen. If you could just hang out in the park while tripping witha sober buddy, and didn't disturb anyone, who would you be harming?
On the other hand, in 2001 there were 75,000 alcohol-related deaths in the United States, which took an average of 30 years off the lives of each person that died. That's a staggering figure. For the same year, there were only 21,683 drug-related deaths, and that ANY drug, legal or illegal, meaning botched prescriptions and overdoses on aspirin and tylenol and everything else included (opiates too).
I know, alcohol is much more readily available than drugs, so there are more deaths, but think about all the expense, pain, and misery people are put through just because they want to get high.
Is that such a crime? Since when is being sober 24/7 a necessary requirement to be a good person? Illegal drugs can lead to amazing emotional/personal breakthroughs, or just plain enjoyment. If people want to get fucked up and (eventually) damage their health, there are MUCH better ways to do it that by using alcohol. The gov gives you the least fun and most damaging of intoxicants and says "have at it!" Brilliant....=(
(/rant)
Just becase it's a dynamic site doesn't mean it won't benefit from Coral caching!
Sure, the dynamic bits still have to get through, but what about all the graphics that get served out? I know that's just bandwidth, and requires almost 0 processing on the sender's part, but it would still help when 250,000 slashdotters descend on a site at once. At least his bandwidth won't max out anywhere near as quickly.
I was able to use the site via the Coral Caching system (before it got totally zonked) and it appeared to serve data to me correctly. Am I an idiot? I mean, if you submit a novel (as in uncommon) query to the site via the cache and it responds, that proves it's at least working correctly, right? Might help, but it won't hurt.
How hard is it for the editor who posts these stories to the front page of Slashdot to replace them with Coral Cache links?
Seriously, just make it an automated process or something. ALWAYS make it a Coral link.
Awesome, I saw Steppenwolf at Ribfest a few years ago, and I saw David Crosby like 3 years ago at Last Fling, it was great. Yeah, in retrospect I think the Carillon was paid for, at least in part, by private donations.
Eh, Longwood isn't bad, at least as of 2001 or so. I lived across Route 59 in the Brookdale subdivision (I know, N Naperville, for shame! S Naperville sucks; Those people can take their giant, empty houses and shove them), and there was never any ghetto people that bothered us. Shit, much MUCH nicer neighboorhood than the ghetto I live in in Northern Virginia, in my $1200/month rented apartment.
I used to have baseball practice at the field at Longwood elementary school when I was little, seemed OK. The houses were smaller, but they were still houses. Nothings worse that the blight that are condo and apartment complexes, which always have more ghetto people.
While Neuqua Valley is not the most expensive high school built on a per student basis (about $20K per student, 3100 students at full capacity), I challenge you to find a American public high school with a contstruction greater than Neuqua's $62 million.
PS - According to the Wikipedia article you linked to, "In addition, it is considered poor form to invoke the law explicitly."
You also failed to take into account "Quirk's Exception" to Godwin's Law, which is "Intentional invocation of this so-called 'Nazi Clause' is ineffectual." =)
And if there's one thing they like doing, it's spending tons of $ on flashy, useless stuff.
Like that amazing Carillon tower (giant bell tower) that they decided was a good use of millions of $ of taxpayer cash. It never gets played. Totally useless, but IT'S THE BIGGEST ONE FOR HUNDRED OF MILES AROUND, LOOK AT US!
PS - I spent like half my life up to age 18 checking out books from the fantastic Naperville Library System, it's a shame they're doing this, but I'm not at all suprised. They want to look like technological leaders.
Tell me how that makes any fucking sense at all.
Seriously, why would selling a pound of a totally benign and legal substance and saying it's drugs carry the same penalty as if you were selling drugs? I mean, WHY? It's not drugs. That's like firing a gun loaded with blanks at someone and being charged with murder or assault with a deadly weapon or something.
Hell, cops should run around selling huge quantities of fake drugs just to take the drugdealers' $ and use it to buy squadcars or something. It would sow tons of distrust amoungst dealers.
Don't get me wrong, it was a really, really interesting class, but the projects were just KILLER. If I could have taken it just for learning value without the projects, it would have been much better.
Hell, I took Compiler Design and it was almost easier than OS Design. And we had to build the Lexical, Syntactic, and Symantic analyzers without YACC or LEX, not even an LL1 grammar to start with. We had to remove recursion and ambiguity by hand, and build a recursive descent compiler in Java (crazy and useless, but interesting none the less)
Ah, just war stories, good times though.
*Commence horrible flashback to "OS Design" class as an undergrad*...
It's more like 90 sheep and 10 wolves deciding what to have for dinner, after the wolves have done one of the following:
1) Convinced the stupider and more easily distracted sheep (51%) that getting eaten will help fight the war on terror.
2) Said "what's that sheep? You want us to eat you? OK...." while the sheep are screaming that they everyone should have a salad.
Those 10 wolves have much, much more power thatn the 90 sheep, and not because of numbers. They have the ability to dictate what most of the sheep think, by careful manipulation they learned in advertising/marketing school.
Here is the message template that eff.org (Electronic Freedom Foundation) provides to write your representatives to speak out against the REAL ID Act. Use this if you're having trouble thinking of what to say. I know I'm encouraging thoughtless messages to congress, but hey, too bad for the idiots that support this bill:
------------------
I am a constituent who cares about privacy and national security, and I urge you to oppose the REAL ID Act provisions of the House emergency supplemental spending bill. The REAL ID Act creates a de facto "national ID," threatening our privacy, security, and the principles of federalism that safeguard both.
National identification systems are prone to abuse at every step of their creation and use. The REAL ID Act would establish an enormous national database of ID holders, where even a small percentage of errors would cause major social disruption. Also, the ID would function as an internal passport that would be shown before accessing planes, trains, national parks, and court houses - an irresistible target for forgers and identity thieves. The Act also requires IDs to include "common machine-readable technology," which would likely include controversial radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies that can broadcast personal data to passersby. Worst of all, the REAL ID Act would divert resources from security measures that could actually work.
Moreover, states do not want this kind of system. A similar program called "MATRIX" recently failed because states abandoned it due to privacy concerns. This is an example of federalism at work. We should respect a state's decision to protect its citizens' privacy, not conscript it into an ill-conceived national system.
I hope that you will work to strip the REAL ID Act provisions from the emergency supplemental spending bill. Thank you for your time.
-------------
They forgot NP Complete, unless in the future they figured out how to knock that class of problems down to NP. Now that I think about it, they probably did.
01010111011010000110000101110100011001010111011001 10010101110010001000000110010001110101011001000110 01010010110000100000011001100010000001110101001000 00011101000110111101101111001011100010000000100000 011010100010111101101011
I work as an IT guy at a US federal agency. Not one of the scary DoD ones, but a nice one that funds lots of science research. As webmaster for our department, it's frequently my job to redact (black out the secret stuff) in MS Word documents before they're converted to PDF and put up on the web.
Here's my procedure: I wrote a VBA marco that takes the text you're highlighted in a word doc, counts the characters selected, and replaces it with half that number of capital "X"es. I've found on average that half the number of characters selected in "X"es is about the original length of the selection.
I then select these areas of XXXXX in black highlighting for that "freshly redacted" taste. Then I make sure change tracking is turned off, save the document, and Print (not auto-convert) to PDF.
Ta-da! Redacted! If it's a scanned document that shows up in PDF on my desk, I render all the pages to JPG, black out the secret stuff in GIMP, and then resave and stuff back into PDF format.
Even if your bosses are too cheap to by PDF redacting software, it can still be done fairly cheaply. And don't give me any shit about meta-data, I've checked the resulting PDFs with a hex editor and I don't see anything substantive.