Have you forgotten the International Date Line? April Fools is already here! Stories emerging from the other side of the planet: A NEW Google program powered by artificial intelligence allows internet users to search web pages 24 hours before they're created, the company said today.
My favourite part of this was when they posted comments about new this feature, and someone said, "This is old news. I already found out about this yesterday."
I read a web site somewhere about some German researchers trying to figure out what was "beautiful" by taking eight of the top Miss Germany contestants (including the winner) and algorithmically averaged their eight faces into a ninth composite face. To be fair, the beauty queen contestants had to wear no makeup and have a neutral expression on their face. They let people rank the nine faces in terms of beauty, and it turned out that the non-existent ninth "averaged" face was ranked the most beautiful.
They then expounded on how people found an average prototypical face the most beautiful.
When I checked back later with the web site, they had added an addendum to the web site, saying something to the effect of, "Oh, yeah, we also found that, by averaging the photos together, we smoothed out any skin blemishes on the face, and maybe it could be possible that there's a chance that somehow people were just finding that the ninth average face had the smoothest skin and was thus the most beautiful."
In other words, "We completely forgot to account for the superhumanly flawless skin in the algorithmically generated face, which invalidates all this work we've done, but we've put so much work into this project that we don't want to throw it all into the trash just yet." Kinda like how a PhD candidate researching a breakthrough in space-dwelling aliens might add, at the very end of his thesis, "Oh, or it might have been just ants crawling on the lens of the telescope. Woops."
Agree with parent. The whole point of being anonymous is that people don't know who you are. Now, one or more persons might specifically take on the pseudonym "Anonymous" (capitalized), but then that would only be applicable within a very specific context, and certainly it would be silly to say, "But *I'm* the *real* Anonymous!" Imagine a conversation like this:
A: "Someone suggested that taxes be raised. I didn't know who it was." B: "Really? Someone whom I didn't know had suggested that taxes be lowered. Boy, this person that we don't know sure has trouble making up his mind!"
(Yes, I know that "anonymi" is not the correct plural. Yes, I know that "anonymous" is not spelled "anonymus". If the plural of "mouse" is "mice", perhaps the plural of "anonymous" is "anonymic"?)
If you really enjoy (or are obsessed with) having that flight map tracking your location, you might want to consider bringing a GPS on board. I bring my clunky Garmin on board, and you can see the ground speed, the vertical ascent rate, etc. I'm training myself to estimate, based on what I see out the window, the altitude of the airplane, distances on the ground (how far is that tall building from the edge of the lake there?), etc. Also, it hadn't fully hit me before using the GPS that the airplane makes a *huge* loop around the destination before coming in for landing.
Since the GPS only receives signals and transmits none, no one can accuse you of generating signals that interfere with the aircraft function. Of course, the flight attendants still have to announce the rules that "anything with an on-off switch must be turned off, or the airplane will crash" (yes, yes, I'll turn off my wind-up alarm clock), but then I just bundle up my still-powered-on GPS in my jacket and put it against the window, leaning my head against it pretending to use it as a pillow. I can check out the breadcrumb trail later.
Now if only GPSBabel were compatible with my laptop USB port...
First you say "I don't think it means a thing for honesty", then you say "it might mean there is less corporate corruption going on". [...] You start each sentence one way, then contradict yourself later in the same sentence. Sorry, but you can't have it both ways.
He's not contradicting himself., you know. He's merely making two opposing statements, of which only one can be true.
The Catholic church has no objection with the theory of evolution. Sure, it was a fundamental change of belief during Darwin's time that people needed time to digest, just as the probabilistic nature of quantum physics came as a shock to our Newtonian physics-based thought, but after a thorough hashing of the data, theories and philosophies involved, the Catholic church concluded that the Bible was not to be interpreted literally. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, one of the scientists involved in the research on Peking Man, was a Catholic priest (a Jesuit, I think).
You might be thinking of various fundamentalist Christian denominations that attack evolution as being contrary to a literal (ie. fundamentalist) interpretation of the Bible.
With Galileo, heliocentrism was similarly a shocking, fundamental change of belief compared to the prevailing world view at the time, Christian or not. The Catholic church sent this theologian, Bellarmine (think he was a Cardinal, ie. above an archbishop but below the Pope) to adjudicate the dispute. Bellarmine said that there was nothing wrong with Galileo teaching his theory of heliocentrism, but until he had conclusive proof, he should say that it was a theory and not proven.
It's easy to look back 400 years and point out the now well-known flaws in knowledge, but you have to realize that any fundamental shift in human knowledge is going to warrant controversy and demand for more proof before it is accepted. I mean, imagine if someone came up with this ridiculous-sounding theory that... oh, I dunno, electrons are sentient, or something. Well, there had better be some damn good proof of this before they start teaching this to my kids in the classroom!
[...]in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010. This quickly-approaching release date would[...]
A release date between one and a half, and two years off is "quickly-approaching" the same way a glacier is "swiftly-flowing".
I was thinking the same thing. Before this "quickly-approaching" date arrives, Ubuntu will have come out with its new Long-Term Support version, Hardy Heron (8.04), and then have two more version, 8.10 and 9.04 (Irritable Iguana and Jumping Jackal?) and maybe even come out with one more, the 9.10 version. Even assuming that MS manages to stay on schedule for once, by the time MS gets its act together and comes out with MS Windows 7 SP1, they'll be competing with the next Long-Term Support version for 10.04 (Long-term-support Lion?).
On the other hand, compared to the rate at which MS puts out improvements in their product, the date is indeed "quickly-approaching" --the way a "swiftly-flowing" glacier will outrun continental drift.
Hey, Microsoft, the only reason you're still relevant is because of your massive inertia. Enjoy it while you can, before the rest of us make a quick right-turn at the intersection up ahead.
No, this isn't a technological problem, and technology won't solve it.
Technology can be used to solve social problems as well.
What!? That is not an acceptable proposal in our modern and socially refined world, and if you insist on promoting your disruptive agenda in this community, I'm activating the Automatic Foe-Downmodding Distributed AI system on you!
Microsoft providing free Microsoft software for lock-in reminds me of infant formula companies providing free formula to developing countries so that people won't realize that there is a free, superior and natural alternative: breast milk. It took a great deal of initiative to overcome the powerful propaganda machine of the wealthy companies.
Nowadays people recognize issues behind a company trying to give "aid in the form of free infant formula" to poor countries, and no longer say, "Wow, what an altruistic and heroic company!" People aren't savvy enough yet to do this with software, but I hope that the FOSS movement can continue to promote this awareness.
Please keep up the momentum, my fellow Slashdotters.
Plan for next decades bandwidth usage. to figure it out raise it to the 20th power.
You are so right! Right now, I only use 1 Mb/s, but in the next decade, my usage is going to increase to... (hang on, let me think here...)
1 ^ 20 =... 1
Hmm, lemme just check that with my calculator...
1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 = 1
Yup, confirmed! My bandwidth usage is going to rise all the way to 1 Mb/s!!! That infrastructure had better be ready to handle that sort of load ten years from now!
I wish that there would be a piece of software that could function as a gateway to a SOHO setup, and route packets over multiple links to the Internet. For example, the gateway computer could be on a DSL line provided by SBC/AT&T, get cable internet from Comcast, phone in to a dial-up service by Earthlink, and be connected via bluetooth to the cell phone internet service by T-mobile. The gateway computer would accept connections from the other computers on the home network, and distribute the packets over these various DSL/cable/dial-up/GPRS connections so that we could form an aggregated faster Internet connection. More importantly, the Internet connections would not all fail at the same time. (E.g. if Comcast decided not to play ball, we would still have other options.)
I brought this up before, and was told that it wasn't feasible, but I figure if I mention it from time to time, maybe someone will be inspired or hear about something related, or otherwise somehow or other make this move toward reality.
I just started learning about the Linux "route" command the other day when we had some wonkiness in the SOHO network; maybe something can be done there...
HTK is free of charge and open source (in the strict sense of you-can-look-at-the-code). It is, however, not "free".
Hold on just a frakking minute.
What the hell is "open source (in the strict sense of you-can-look-at-the-code)"? Since when did anyone start to mean "open source" as code that was merely available but not modifiable? As this sibling comment points out (please mod him up, by the way), the term "Open Source" has a very specific meaning. This meaning was determined at the time this term was invented, so you can't even use the same excuse as "free software" and hide behind the excuse of "but for the past 600 centuries, Shakespeare has been using the term 'open source' for this other meaning!"
Microsoft has been muddying the water enough with terms like "Shared Source" and "Open" as in "OOXML". This thing about the "strict sense" of the term "open source" has got to be nipped in the bud.
At my office, we use a computer dictation system for medical notes. It is amazingly accurate for those who speak with accents within the norm. It works well for me, and I will typically dictate something like this:
"The patient presents today with three complaints comma as follows colon new paragraph For the past week comma he has had right shoulder pain period new paragraph He has noticed that when he sneezes comma there are streaks of blood in his mucus period new paragraph He has been experiencing diaphoresis and is concerned that it may be related to his systemic lupus erythematosus for which he has been taking prednisone twenty milligrams q h s."
I think the software is called "Enterprise Dictation System"; requires Internet Explorer, although there must be some component that's pushed out locally to the client since I can't imagine the sound data being sent over intranet to be interpreted. I dictate in chunks, and apparently the longer the chunk the more easily it can interpret what I say. For example, if I just dictate "to", then it may transcribe "to", "2", "two", or "too". If I say "to prevent this comma", then it knows that the first word should be spelled "to".
It's surprisingly accurate, and is more accurate for esoteric medical terms than for comment short words since for medical terms there is a relatively limited number of possibilities relative to the number of syllables.
For some colleagues who speak with foreign accents --and even for certain colleagues who seem to speak with standard local accents-- recognition was quite poor, and they fall back on human transcription.
Anyway, just wanted to share this experience. I was quite amazed at how well the dictation worked.
Here's hoping we can build up a good Open Source/Free database of voice recognition data. Or at least, perhaps an Open Source engine, and then different companies can market their voice data.
My memory is shot, I can't remember the term for this, or the process as a whole...)
Clean room reverse engineering? Or something along those lines right?
I'm guessing he's thinking about "Chinese wall".
You're right, "clean room" technique is probably the more correct term. But the term "Chinese wall" sounds more exotic, so I'm going to bet that that's the one he was trying to think of.
In a nutshell, a "man-in-the-middle" attack is no more to be feared than a "dictionary" attack on a password: the attack only works if the security is implemented poorly. In the same way that you wouldn't say, "They use a password? How useless --simply do a dictionary attack!", you would not say, "Encryption? Just do a man-in-the-middle attack!"
I know that ssh takes steps to store the public keys and warn you if they've changed. Why would it bother doing that if man-in-the-middle attacks aren't possible?
For the same reason that they warn you when you change your password: "Your password is too short!" or "Your password is dictionary-guessable!" etc. Why would it bother doing that if dictionary attacks aren't possible?
You said:
My understanding is as follows:
Party A contacts Party B and sends it's public key. Party E (evil guy) intercepts this public key and replaces it with his own. Party B replies with his public key, which is also intercepted and replaced. Party A and B are now "encrypting" the traffic with the public key provided by Party E, whom decrypts it, and re-encrypts it with the original public keys provided by A and B prior to forwarding that traffic on to them. Party E now has access to the complete conversation between A and B whom are none the wiser, unless they have an outside method of verifying the keys they received.
I fail to see how an exchange of a random number stops this, when Party A never actually received Party B's key to begin with, because said key was replaced by Party E.
This is a common question about public key encryption. I'm going to quote my own post:
People worried about man-in-the-middle note that the phone company owns the channel, and thus can intercept everything! But that's not enough for a man-in-the-middle attack (MitM attack, where attacker K intervenes in the conversation between A and B; K tells A that K is really B, and K tells B that K is really A, and relays the conversation). The key to breaking MitM is to recognize the additional condition for such an attack: the attacker must completely replace the messages from the sender with his own messages. Otherwise, either:
* the attacker is only eavesdropping, but won't be able to get any info once sender and receiver start using encryption, or
* sender and receiver realize that there is someone intercepting, and switch encryption or move to a different channel
Thus, sender and receiver must prevent a MitM attacker from completely replacing all the messages. The way to do this is to exchange messages through more than one channel, at least in the beginning.
With the usual PKE such as GPG over email, for example, the sender doesn't just send public keys to you and say, "Here's my public key; now let's talk." [...] And, no, the way to make it more secure is NOT to send more data, like "Here's my public key and my photo. Now do you believe that it's my real key?" That would just be sending more data over the same channel. You need another channel.
Hope that clarifies things for anyone who's still confused about WHY public key encryption works. The GP poster is correct.
There's also the missing component of having the corresponding data in the airline's computer network/system that matches the barcode for that flight, at that time, on that date, at that gate...
You won't be so sure after you hear what happened to me.
Once, I got on a flight to Hawaii. The plane was about to push off and, like most of the other passengers, I had settled into my seat. Then some other passenger came and said I was sitting in her seat! We compared boarding passes, and lo and behold, both of our passes were for the same seat! We couldn't figure it out, so we asked the flight attendant for assistance. She couldn't figure it out either, so she had to go back to the boarding gate with our passes to ask the ground crew to figure it out.
After a while, someone finally realized what happened. I was on the wrong flight! I was on board a direct flight to Hawaii, but I had actually bought a ticket to fly to San Francisco and from there transfer to a flight to Hawaii. I had always thought of it as "my flight to Hawaii" and had completely forgotten that I would have to transfer. The boarding gate was off by one, but the airport always changes boarding gates at the last minute and I figured this was one of the times. And the flight was scheduled 5 minutes before my actual flight, so I figured that the flight was early. I lined up like everyone else with my Internet-printed boarding pass, the computer scanned it, and I got on board just like everyone else. There was no alarm that I was on the wrong flight or anything like that.
That was with me accidentally getting on the wrong flight. What do you suppose could happen if someone was intentionally trying to pull off a deception? The only redeeming feature is that this happened in 2002, and I hope that airline security has improved somewhat since then. (I can dream, can't I?)
Even the Ubuntu community doesn't seem to be concerned about a MD5 discrepancy. The CD-ROM image for the newest Kubuntu, found at http://torrent.ubuntu.com6969/ shows that the MD5 hash is: 6709ff39ea47d3563b537b67153f60ee0c932a93
When I downloaded the ISO through BitTorrent, though, I found this instead:
I mean, this is coming through BitTorrent, so other than myself, there must be thousands of other people downloading this identical supposedly error-corrected ISO. Why is there a discrepancy? Either someone has poisoned the entire Kubuntu ISO distribution and nobody cares, or someone has compromised the Ubuntu server to display the wrong MD5 sum, and nobody cares. When I Googled for the variant MD5 hash that I calculated, nothing came up. (Later, I checked, and the main result was some inane forum about "Let's all paste in the contents of whatever's in our clipboard right at this exact moment!") WTF???
That is the reason I haven't installed Gutsy on my Dellbuntu laptop. No, I don't really think there is an evil Ubuntu conspiracy. No, I don't really think all the Kubuntu ISO's have been compromised. But I don't know what to think. Probably I can just ignore the problem, and it will go away. But I don't want to develop the habit of ignoring discrepancies, or one day the security hashes will be as useful as the User Access Controls of MS Vista.
Your comment is insightful, but doesn't apply to Adobe's current situation.
Yahoo and Google provide a service to the public, but their true customers (the ones paying for the services) are the advertisers...
Indeed, many people fail to realize that, when it comes to services supported by advertising, the public is the product, not the customer. This explains why companies may sometimes piss off the public despite the adage that "the customer is king."
However, Adobe has not been supported by ad revenue, at least not in a major way. They are now breaking into a new business model where they do have ad revenue, but that doesn't necessarily excuse any antagonization of the public just because "hey, now the public is the product, not the customer."
They "may" cut funding? Let me know when they *DO* cut funding.
Exactly! This reminds me of a joke, apparently about a maintenance repair request form filled out by an Air Force pilot. These forms have a spaces under the headings "Request" (filled out by the pilot) and "Action Taken" (filled out by the mechanic). This particular one reads:
REQUEST: Left tire on landing gear almost needs replacement.
ACTION TAKEN: Left tire on landing gear almost replaced.
I put my MS approved camera on the surface, up pops a enormous windows telling me I got to agree to a eula (exactly what happens when you access MS media player for the first time)
Actually, what would happen is that a small window pops up with a EULA (End User License Agreement). You can scroll through it, but you can't copy&paste it. Three years later, after someone finally transcribes the EULA by hand, the EULA is discovered to be the length of a small novel.
Chinese fonts are especially bad, especially with the need for both Traditional (Fantizi) and Simplified (Jiantizi) characters. (These are independent characters, much like upper case and lower case in English, except for some reason Chinese fonts tend to contain only one or the other.)
Does anyone know of any Chinese fonts that:
look nice
include both Simplified and Traditional, and
have English letters that also look nice?
Okay, I already know that the answer is "no". How about two out of three?
I'm trying to find a font that works well for reading either Chinese or English, so that I don't have to mess with font settings in Firefox and other software, but for some reason the above features seem to be mutually exclusive. I'm trying to mix my own fonts with FontForge, but this is proving to be more complex than I expected.
The funny mod makes it look like I actually knew the answer, but actually I didn't know. It wasn't until after a while that I noticed the "network-attached storage" heading under Wikipedia, but even then I wasn't sure. Thanks for confirming it.
You know, even in the most advanced scientific journals, the readership of which is surely limited to only subspecialists in that field, all acronyms are preceded by an explanatory note on their first appearance. For example, before using the term "MI", a medical journal would mention "myocardial infarction (MI)" the first time, so everyone would know "MI" meant "heart attack".
Could we not do the same for acronyms in Slashdot, the readership of which is global and encompasses readers with all range of technical proficiency? Otherwise it could lead to unnecessary frustration and misunderstanding, such as the time I referred my patient to a psychiatrist who said that the patient "had no history of MI", when in fact he had had not only MI's but bypass surgery. Only later did the PsychMD explain that "MI" meant "mental illness". Stupid shrink.
Slashdot Mirror
I read a web site somewhere about some German researchers trying to figure out what was "beautiful" by taking eight of the top Miss Germany contestants (including the winner) and algorithmically averaged their eight faces into a ninth composite face. To be fair, the beauty queen contestants had to wear no makeup and have a neutral expression on their face. They let people rank the nine faces in terms of beauty, and it turned out that the non-existent ninth "averaged" face was ranked the most beautiful.
They then expounded on how people found an average prototypical face the most beautiful.
When I checked back later with the web site, they had added an addendum to the web site, saying something to the effect of, "Oh, yeah, we also found that, by averaging the photos together, we smoothed out any skin blemishes on the face, and maybe it could be possible that there's a chance that somehow people were just finding that the ninth average face had the smoothest skin and was thus the most beautiful."
In other words, "We completely forgot to account for the superhumanly flawless skin in the algorithmically generated face, which invalidates all this work we've done, but we've put so much work into this project that we don't want to throw it all into the trash just yet." Kinda like how a PhD candidate researching a breakthrough in space-dwelling aliens might add, at the very end of his thesis, "Oh, or it might have been just ants crawling on the lens of the telescope. Woops."
Agree with parent. The whole point of being anonymous is that people don't know who you are. Now, one or more persons might specifically take on the pseudonym "Anonymous" (capitalized), but then that would only be applicable within a very specific context, and certainly it would be silly to say, "But *I'm* the *real* Anonymous!" Imagine a conversation like this:
A: "Someone suggested that taxes be raised. I didn't know who it was."
B: "Really? Someone whom I didn't know had suggested that taxes be lowered. Boy, this person that we don't know sure has trouble making up his mind!"
(Yes, I know that "anonymi" is not the correct plural. Yes, I know that "anonymous" is not spelled "anonymus". If the plural of "mouse" is "mice", perhaps the plural of "anonymous" is "anonymic"?)
If you really enjoy (or are obsessed with) having that flight map tracking your location, you might want to consider bringing a GPS on board. I bring my clunky Garmin on board, and you can see the ground speed, the vertical ascent rate, etc. I'm training myself to estimate, based on what I see out the window, the altitude of the airplane, distances on the ground (how far is that tall building from the edge of the lake there?), etc. Also, it hadn't fully hit me before using the GPS that the airplane makes a *huge* loop around the destination before coming in for landing.
...
Since the GPS only receives signals and transmits none, no one can accuse you of generating signals that interfere with the aircraft function. Of course, the flight attendants still have to announce the rules that "anything with an on-off switch must be turned off, or the airplane will crash" (yes, yes, I'll turn off my wind-up alarm clock), but then I just bundle up my still-powered-on GPS in my jacket and put it against the window, leaning my head against it pretending to use it as a pillow. I can check out the breadcrumb trail later.
Now if only GPSBabel were compatible with my laptop USB port
The Catholic church has no objection with the theory of evolution. Sure, it was a fundamental change of belief during Darwin's time that people needed time to digest, just as the probabilistic nature of quantum physics came as a shock to our Newtonian physics-based thought, but after a thorough hashing of the data, theories and philosophies involved, the Catholic church concluded that the Bible was not to be interpreted literally. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, one of the scientists involved in the research on Peking Man, was a Catholic priest (a Jesuit, I think).
... oh, I dunno, electrons are sentient, or something. Well, there had better be some damn good proof of this before they start teaching this to my kids in the classroom!
You might be thinking of various fundamentalist Christian denominations that attack evolution as being contrary to a literal (ie. fundamentalist) interpretation of the Bible.
With Galileo, heliocentrism was similarly a shocking, fundamental change of belief compared to the prevailing world view at the time, Christian or not. The Catholic church sent this theologian, Bellarmine (think he was a Cardinal, ie. above an archbishop but below the Pope) to adjudicate the dispute. Bellarmine said that there was nothing wrong with Galileo teaching his theory of heliocentrism, but until he had conclusive proof, he should say that it was a theory and not proven.
It's easy to look back 400 years and point out the now well-known flaws in knowledge, but you have to realize that any fundamental shift in human knowledge is going to warrant controversy and demand for more proof before it is accepted. I mean, imagine if someone came up with this ridiculous-sounding theory that
Shad Valley does this already, doesn't it? They still have it at the U of Waterloo, I think.
On the other hand, compared to the rate at which MS puts out improvements in their product, the date is indeed "quickly-approaching" --the way a "swiftly-flowing" glacier will outrun continental drift.
Hey, Microsoft, the only reason you're still relevant is because of your massive inertia. Enjoy it while you can, before the rest of us make a quick right-turn at the intersection up ahead.
Microsoft providing free Microsoft software for lock-in reminds me of infant formula companies providing free formula to developing countries so that people won't realize that there is a free, superior and natural alternative: breast milk. It took a great deal of initiative to overcome the powerful propaganda machine of the wealthy companies.
Nowadays people recognize issues behind a company trying to give "aid in the form of free infant formula" to poor countries, and no longer say, "Wow, what an altruistic and heroic company!" People aren't savvy enough yet to do this with software, but I hope that the FOSS movement can continue to promote this awareness.
Please keep up the momentum, my fellow Slashdotters.
1 ^ 20 =
Hmm, lemme just check that with my calculator
1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1
= 1
Yup, confirmed! My bandwidth usage is going to rise all the way to 1 Mb/s!!! That infrastructure had better be ready to handle that sort of load ten years from now!
I wish that there would be a piece of software that could function as a gateway to a SOHO setup, and route packets over multiple links to the Internet. For example, the gateway computer could be on a DSL line provided by SBC/AT&T, get cable internet from Comcast, phone in to a dial-up service by Earthlink, and be connected via bluetooth to the cell phone internet service by T-mobile. The gateway computer would accept connections from the other computers on the home network, and distribute the packets over these various DSL/cable/dial-up/GPRS connections so that we could form an aggregated faster Internet connection. More importantly, the Internet connections would not all fail at the same time. (E.g. if Comcast decided not to play ball, we would still have other options.)
...
I brought this up before, and was told that it wasn't feasible, but I figure if I mention it from time to time, maybe someone will be inspired or hear about something related, or otherwise somehow or other make this move toward reality.
I just started learning about the Linux "route" command the other day when we had some wonkiness in the SOHO network; maybe something can be done there
What the hell is "open source (in the strict sense of you-can-look-at-the-code)"? Since when did anyone start to mean "open source" as code that was merely available but not modifiable? As this sibling comment points out (please mod him up, by the way), the term "Open Source" has a very specific meaning. This meaning was determined at the time this term was invented, so you can't even use the same excuse as "free software" and hide behind the excuse of "but for the past 600 centuries, Shakespeare has been using the term 'open source' for this other meaning!"
Microsoft has been muddying the water enough with terms like "Shared Source" and "Open" as in "OOXML". This thing about the "strict sense" of the term "open source" has got to be nipped in the bud.
I think the software is called "Enterprise Dictation System"; requires Internet Explorer, although there must be some component that's pushed out locally to the client since I can't imagine the sound data being sent over intranet to be interpreted. I dictate in chunks, and apparently the longer the chunk the more easily it can interpret what I say. For example, if I just dictate "to", then it may transcribe "to", "2", "two", or "too". If I say "to prevent this comma", then it knows that the first word should be spelled "to".
It's surprisingly accurate, and is more accurate for esoteric medical terms than for comment short words since for medical terms there is a relatively limited number of possibilities relative to the number of syllables.
For some colleagues who speak with foreign accents --and even for certain colleagues who seem to speak with standard local accents-- recognition was quite poor, and they fall back on human transcription.
Anyway, just wanted to share this experience. I was quite amazed at how well the dictation worked.
Here's hoping we can build up a good Open Source/Free database of voice recognition data. Or at least, perhaps an Open Source engine, and then different companies can market their voice data.
You're right, "clean room" technique is probably the more correct term. But the term "Chinese wall" sounds more exotic, so I'm going to bet that that's the one he was trying to think of.
In a nutshell, a "man-in-the-middle" attack is no more to be feared than a "dictionary" attack on a password: the attack only works if the security is implemented poorly. In the same way that you wouldn't say, "They use a password? How useless --simply do a dictionary attack!", you would not say, "Encryption? Just do a man-in-the-middle attack!"For the same reason that they warn you when you change your password: "Your password is too short!" or "Your password is dictionary-guessable!" etc. Why would it bother doing that if dictionary attacks aren't possible?
You said:This is a common question about public key encryption. I'm going to quote my own post:
Hope that clarifies things for anyone who's still confused about WHY public key encryption works. The GP poster is correct.
Once, I got on a flight to Hawaii. The plane was about to push off and, like most of the other passengers, I had settled into my seat. Then some other passenger came and said I was sitting in her seat! We compared boarding passes, and lo and behold, both of our passes were for the same seat! We couldn't figure it out, so we asked the flight attendant for assistance. She couldn't figure it out either, so she had to go back to the boarding gate with our passes to ask the ground crew to figure it out.
After a while, someone finally realized what happened. I was on the wrong flight! I was on board a direct flight to Hawaii, but I had actually bought a ticket to fly to San Francisco and from there transfer to a flight to Hawaii. I had always thought of it as "my flight to Hawaii" and had completely forgotten that I would have to transfer. The boarding gate was off by one, but the airport always changes boarding gates at the last minute and I figured this was one of the times. And the flight was scheduled 5 minutes before my actual flight, so I figured that the flight was early. I lined up like everyone else with my Internet-printed boarding pass, the computer scanned it, and I got on board just like everyone else. There was no alarm that I was on the wrong flight or anything like that.
That was with me accidentally getting on the wrong flight. What do you suppose could happen if someone was intentionally trying to pull off a deception? The only redeeming feature is that this happened in 2002, and I hope that airline security has improved somewhat since then. (I can dream, can't I?)
Even the Ubuntu community doesn't seem to be concerned about a MD5 discrepancy. The CD-ROM image for the newest Kubuntu, found at http://torrent.ubuntu.com6969/ shows that the MD5 hash is:
6709ff39ea47d3563b537b67153f60ee0c932a93
When I downloaded the ISO through BitTorrent, though, I found this instead:
kwtm@host ~/isocd$ md5sum kubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso
ae9b209fe4b9caf545fa2011631de797 kubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso
I mean, this is coming through BitTorrent, so other than myself, there must be thousands of other people downloading this identical supposedly error-corrected ISO. Why is there a discrepancy? Either someone has poisoned the entire Kubuntu ISO distribution and nobody cares, or someone has compromised the Ubuntu server to display the wrong MD5 sum, and nobody cares. When I Googled for the variant MD5 hash that I calculated, nothing came up. (Later, I checked, and the main result was some inane forum about "Let's all paste in the contents of whatever's in our clipboard right at this exact moment!") WTF???
That is the reason I haven't installed Gutsy on my Dellbuntu laptop. No, I don't really think there is an evil Ubuntu conspiracy. No, I don't really think all the Kubuntu ISO's have been compromised. But I don't know what to think. Probably I can just ignore the problem, and it will go away. But I don't want to develop the habit of ignoring discrepancies, or one day the security hashes will be as useful as the User Access Controls of MS Vista.
However, Adobe has not been supported by ad revenue, at least not in a major way. They are now breaking into a new business model where they do have ad revenue, but that doesn't necessarily excuse any antagonization of the public just because "hey, now the public is the product, not the customer."
REQUEST: Left tire on landing gear almost needs replacement.
ACTION TAKEN: Left tire on landing gear almost replaced.
Wake me up when EMI actually does something.
Does anyone know of any Chinese fonts that:
- look nice
- include both Simplified and Traditional, and
- have English letters that also look nice?
Okay, I already know that the answer is "no". How about two out of three?I'm trying to find a font that works well for reading either Chinese or English, so that I don't have to mess with font settings in Firefox and other software, but for some reason the above features seem to be mutually exclusive. I'm trying to mix my own fonts with FontForge, but this is proving to be more complex than I expected.
The funny mod makes it look like I actually knew the answer, but actually I didn't know. It wasn't until after a while that I noticed the "network-attached storage" heading under Wikipedia, but even then I wasn't sure. Thanks for confirming it.
You know, even in the most advanced scientific journals, the readership of which is surely limited to only subspecialists in that field, all acronyms are preceded by an explanatory note on their first appearance. For example, before using the term "MI", a medical journal would mention "myocardial infarction (MI)" the first time, so everyone would know "MI" meant "heart attack".
Could we not do the same for acronyms in Slashdot, the readership of which is global and encompasses readers with all range of technical proficiency? Otherwise it could lead to unnecessary frustration and misunderstanding, such as the time I referred my patient to a psychiatrist who said that the patient "had no history of MI", when in fact he had had not only MI's but bypass surgery. Only later did the PsychMD explain that "MI" meant "mental illness". Stupid shrink.
Thanks again.
That's what I love about Slashdot --you learn something new every day!
:)
Thanks for the tip. A few more corrections like this, and I'll have enough experience points to advance to the next level of Grammar Nazi!