The first thing I did, after Google Chrome came out, was go through the source code to see how it encrypts saved passwords.
Before using Firefox password saving feature, with a master password, I researched what techniques there are to brute force it open, and which password combinations are the most secure. I even bruted my own key file (with no important saved passwords btw) as a test.
I then chose a password with a complexity to match my own educated guess.
Would you be willing to share some details? In particular, what would be the needed complexity of the Master Password to make it just as worthwhile to brute-force the Firefox password vault as to guess the Master Password? How many bits? (Or, alternatively, how long would a lower-case-letters-only password have to be to have the correct complexity?)
If you say 8 letters lower-case, I'm going to delete all my passwords from Firefox...
"cf.." which deletes from the cursor to the next period, and keeps the period.
I notice that you are deleting the period itself (with "cf.") and then entering another period to replace it. You could also use "ct.", since "t" will move the cursor till just before the next period, as opposed to "f" which moves the cursor until it finds the next period and stops on top of it.
This is not to show that you're wrong or that I'm a more proficient Vim user, but to illustrate one quirk about Vim: there can be many commands to learn, not all of which can be learned right away, but sometimes using vim can be quite inconvenient if you don't know it. You struggle mightily with the editor and say "I wish it would... (whatever)" and then a few months later you find that there was already exactly the command you wanted built-in but you didn't know. For me, I wanted to be able to find something with the "/" command, and then jump back to the place where I was before. Finally I did a
:nnoremap / mq/
, and then much later I found out that the
`'
command would already do what I wanted.
I'm still learning. Half of what keeps me going in my struggle to learn vim is my faith that there should be some command or other, buried deep in the help files, that does what I want. (The other half is the ability to program vim, which is desperately needed in my smartphone where all other editors seem dumb by comparison.)
Thanks for sharing your experience, and thanks also to all the auntie posts (parent's sister posts).
People say that Android is open, but it isn't nearly as open as WebOS in what you can do. There is no jail breaking or anything like it. You enter dev mode and you have root. Period.
So, I guess a summary is:
iPhone: jailbreak and be willing to be excommunicated from Apple, and you have root Droid: jailbreak, and you have root Pre: enter dev mode, and you have root N900: you have root
I better jump on this chance to ask my question. No, I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but this might be a unique chance to some more insight.
Okay, you use emacs. What was your choice based on? What were the factors that ended up getting you on emacs?
For me, I decided to learn vim, because I had heard that there was a lot of chording (ie. Esc-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift type simultaneous keys) in emacs. It worked out well when I started using vim on my smartphone. But I haven't actually used emacs before, so I don't know what emacs is like, and I freely admit that I don't know what I'm missing.
It sounds like there are a lot of historical for preferring either, which are not necessarily relevant today (e.g. Emacs took up more memory, before massive cheap memory was available on the market; there were no colour screens when vi was created, etc.).
So, my specific questions to all you emacs/vim users out there are: 1. Which do you use? 2. Have you used the other one before? 3. If you have had experience with both, what were the deciding factors for your choice?
Note: Please don't say which one is better overall --I think we've all heard that before. Please don't tell us how Pico or Gedit or MS DOS Editor is better than either vi or emacs (unless you want to share how your decision came about after actually having used vi/emacs). The purpose of this question is (among others) to help a user naive to both vim and emacs to decide which to learn.
Isn't the fact that you can "unbrick" it mean it's not really bricked?
Hear hear! Let's recall that "brick" basically means "turning your equipment into something completely worthless, equivalent to a brick".
I propose the following "USB cable" test:
Has your device been rendered so unusable that you'd be willing to give it to me if I gave you a USB cable?
If the answer is "yes", then you have bricked your device. Congratulations.
If the answer is "no, let me work on this for a bit --I think I can restore partial functionality by pressing this reset button for 30 seconds, and then at least it will function as a glorified wall clock", then this is not "bricked".
If you say, "This is the third time I've bricked my device --I had to SSH into it and do 'sudo reboot'" --then the brick is in your brain.
Now, having said this, it's possible that the owner of the computer didn't know it was possible to undo the damage, in which case, yes, the device is bricked because he might as well have traded it in for a USB cable, prior to knowing how to salvage his device.
You can substitute any marginally useful but cheap piece of equipment for "USB cable".
Someone else at Sony saw the "you sunk my battleship" tweet, and after a mild heart attack and stroke, ran to the aforementioned shlub and told him to remove the tweet. What does this mean?
It means that someone pointy-haired at Sony is going to yell, "Take that number off my Internet!" followed by a conglomerate of 1,000,000 lawyers who comtransbineform into MegaLawyer and SMASH! all websites that try to post that number. Kevin Rose can try another round of censorship before whining, "Ummm... I never meant to suppress your 4000 posts of the number! It was the bad guys that made me do it!"
Of course, MegaLawyer wouldn't know that it's actually a number, and for those who don't want to display four hundred and four quadrillion quintillion quintillion red dots on their web site in solidarity, a simple line would suffice:
echo "obase=16; 404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 " | bc
As for myself, I'm gonna go get a new sig right now.
Unfortunately you don't really own a smartphone, even one that isn't tied down to a contract and paid big bucks to carry around. The phone doesn't obey to you instead obeys to the manufacturer, to google, to the app developers, etc. It keeps sipping information and reporting it back to headquarters, and it's blocked in such a way that bypassing that is not practical.
Is this true, especially with unlocked phones? Do any others among you fellow Slashdotters agree with this? I don't feel that way with my N900, but I realize that it is probably an exception among smartphones.
The reason I ask is because I hope to replace my N900 with something similar, not from Nokia, when I can. Unfortunately right now the N900 is unique in its openness and power, which means there's no alternative if I want a phone that can run Bash (as root), Python (running portable PyQT desktop apps), and Vim (and make phone calls from within Vim via DBUS). The N900 actually is quite bad in a number of ways, mostly in terms of its operating system software, but nothing else comes close.
I have my hopes on the Rumoured Samsung Linux Phone (RSLP) when it comes out, hopefully later this year, but the parent comment has me wondering whether there will be some sort of lockdown just because it's a smartphone (with the N900 being an exception) or whether any geekphone with root shell (assuming the RSLP has one) will give me the same freedom as Nokia's creation.
Come to think of it, my previous phone, an unlocked Treo 650 (the newest available that could come unlocked from Palm, which is why I didn't get the Treo 700 or newer), did have a rather frustrating lack of apps, especially FOSS. The backup application, BackupMon, was proprietary and made me very nervous about potential failure blocking my access to critical backups.
How is the Palm Pre in this respect? Any scripting languages, or do I need to get a SDK just to program my phone to read from a text file and dial the phone number within? What about Android --is the fact that it's "obeys just the app developers" a philosophical abstraction, or would it create an obstacle for someone who wants to script the phone? E.g. I'm pretty sure Vim runs on Android, but can it dial a phone number via a shell command (DBUS, for example)? Is the Nexus One open in this regard --should I buy one from eBay?
Thanks for any insight any of you can give. This is the smartphone equivalent of asking, "I want to buy a computer and then install Linux --which computer system should I get?"
They don't exist on Sprint and Verizon, yet. In the United States, that makes them commercially irrelevant because T-Mobile is tiny, and NOBODY voluntarily uses AT&T unless they're shackled to a pre-Verizon iPhone.
Why, may I ask, are Sprint and Verizon so big? (This is not trolling; I really don't know.)
I will never ever use Sprint or Verizon. This is not a matter of revenge or personal principle, but simply because I need to use a phone that takes SIM cards (I travel internationally, and need to be able to swap SIM cards). So my choices in the USA are AT&T or Tmobile.
So why are Sprint or Verizon so big? Is it just that they were big historically? Are there few enough global travellers in the USA that they don't mind using a phone with no SIM card? Do Sprint or Verizon have any particular advantage (for example, better customer service)? I wonder.
Of course, once Sprint or Verizon (are they the same company now?) allow me to use SIM cards, they would become a viable choice.
One of the reasons that the trial was based on is that legalizing PSJailbreak SONY remove the GNU / Linux where you claim Sony which sells a console with a number of features that were later removed, also talks about the user can do whatever you want with your console purchased allowing you to enter including the "guts" of the console with full right and one's Playstation 3 is not only used exclusively to play original games from Sony.
From what I can tell, the reason it's okay to jailbreak is because, by (previously) allowing GNU/Linux, Sony said it was "okay to jailbreak" (or at least okay to modify and hack), and then they took away that capability.
It seems to me that would discourage Sony and other big companies from supporting Linux, because some jurisdiction somewhere might interpret that as "But you said it was okay for your customers to wrest control away from you!".
Hopefully not. Maybe someone with a better knowledge of Spanish than I can check the original article and confirm/refute this?
Replying to myself may be a sign of mental breakdown, but I did want to point out the following web page, listed under Google as having only appeared an hour ago (2300h UTC) stating everything that the main article says, with the addition of:
"Microsoft is not amused by the open source software community's effort to build its own Kinect drivers. The company says that it doesn't condone reverse engineering and has vowed to use technical and legal measures to prevent unauthorized third parties from repurposing the Kinect camera."
There is no attribution and I don't know where they got the statement. I guess as time goes on we'll find out.
Fellow Slashdotters, your opinion on this please: now that the Kinect is actually useful, for how long do you think they will be available before Microsoft changes something so that the open-source drivers don't work?
I want to know whether to go buy one now before Microsoft retires the current model and starts putting other models out with new firmware that won't work with the drivers.
Currently I don't have any use for one, but I do have a bit of disposable income, and wonder whether it would be useful to sink US$150 (if that's what it costs as mentioned in another post) into one so that when software comes out for it, I won't be stuck reading "This does not work the newer models of Kinect" or something.
good... That's what you get for resting on your laurels.
I'll end up un-moderating a few posts that I modded, in order to reply to this comment.
It may seem like Microsoft was resting on its laurels, this is not actually what happened. Microsoft did not come out in a blaze of brilliance, and then say, "There, I did it. Now we don't need to do anything else, because we've made it."
If you look closely, you'll find that Microsoft attempted the opposite: based on their uncontestably dominant position, their stranglehold, they went on to try to branch out into all sorts of other ventures: palmtop computers, gaming consoles, portable media players, search engines, social portals, web servers, you name it. They even valiantly tried to trailblaze out their very own futuristic computers in the form of the tablets (no, not iPad, those laptop thingies with the swivel screens that fold back onto themselves the way your spine folds backwards against the back of your knees).
And each time, they fell flat on their face.
Microsoft has been incapable of becoming a technical leader. They just plain don't know how to innovate! Imagine it --they even had the clout to go tell the various hardware vendors like Acer, "This is what the future of computer hardware is, which YOU will create" --and they obediently came out with those tablets-- and they STILL failed to make any significant headway into the market.
It becomes clear that Microsoft has been a big name in computing because of their business strategy, and not at all because of any advantage they have in technology or expertise.
The final effect is that they have been resting on their laurels, but only because they have been incapable of doing anything else. Goodness knows what potential advances in computing they have ended up suppressing because they were technologically incompetent.
Actually, it is YOU who should go invent your own phrase, and YOU who is [sic] wrong. Open has a clearly defined meaning in English, and the OSI and FSF have no mandate to redefine the language.
You seem to be implying that, even prior to the invention of the term "open source", it already had a meaning, but this is not the case: the term was created at a meeting of the minds http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html specifically so that we could avoid this sort of mixup and not be accused of "redefining the language".
I already addressed this in the post to which you are responding; when you reply to me with an answer I already anticipated, you're supposed to address that, too. I had given an example of someone defining "open source" as meaning that the room door is open as you look at the source code --are you going to turn around and say that that use of the word "open" is invalid where yours is valid? Please see http://web.archive.org/web/20060423094434/www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.html Prior to that, the technical term was just used by spies to denote publicly available info, and was not even used in the software world.
But most telling of all is your apparent indifference to the way the software community is using the term "open source". When you say "nothing else matters", what you are saying is not just "the word 'open' already has a meaning" (ignoring its juxtaposition with the word "source") but also "I don't care how the rest of you use the English language as a mutually agreed-upon way of communication".
Don't agree? You'd need to cite a use of the term "open source" prior to February 1998 to mean what you say it means. Or else I'd ask you to get stuffed and take a hike. Well, of course I meant "obtain some stuffing and grab a fee increase"! What, are you saying that words have different meanings when used in certain specific combinations?
Well, the source is open to you, therefore it is open source. Nothing else matters.
Perhaps nothing else matters to you in your world, but I live in a world that includes my fellow English speakers who have a say in what English words and phrases mean.
With any other phrase other than "open source", you might convince me that the commonly held meaning of a phrase is actually wrong, and it originally meant something else, or in certain circles it means something else, or the Trobriand Islanders use it to mean something else.
But the phrase "open source" was invented to have a very specific meaning --go check the OSI website if you need to (and turn in your geek card)-- so you're not going to be able to say, "Well, but for me it means something else so I don't care if you end up misunderstanding because it's your fault!" So, what, someone else can come in and say "By 'open source' I mean that the room door is open as I look at the source code"?
If the source is open to you, but not open to anyone else, then you cripple the ability to locate and identify bugs. If the source is visible to people but not modifiable, you lose the ability improve the software as a community. If the source code is mostly but not completely visible to you, but you are not able to compile a binary that matches exactly the one that you are deploying, then you lose the ability to verify that the source code represents the software you are running. There is a reason for very specific requirements given to meet the criteria of "Open Source".
If you mean something else, go invent your own phrase.
An IT professional will do more free work than a doctor or lawyer would ever dream of.
I think the difference is in the responsibility and accountability for giving the answer. As as licensed physician, I am happy to help out when I am not working professionally, but at the same time, I am not to be held accountable for my answer (because otherwise I would need to do a lot more work before answering, and I would expect to be compensated for that). As a licensed engineer, the same applies: I'll answer questions, but if you expect to get an answer commensurate with a P.Eng, you better provide compensation commensurate with a P.Eng.
So, you might envision this conversation at a party: Software Engineer: "Hi. How's it going?" Medical Doctor: "Crummy. My Windows system went down." SE: "Why are you using Microsoft, man? Seriously, you should switch to Linux." MD: "Okay. How are things with you?" SE: "I'm not getting any. I'm microsofter than Microsoft." MD: "You should get Viagra."
So far so good. But how accountable are these answers?
One year later... SE: "Hey, you said I should get Viagra, and you didn't even check if I was taking isosorbide mononitrate! I went to the Emergency and almost died! I should sue you!" MD: "Oh, yeah? Well, I switched to Linux like you said, it couldn't handle my mission-critical Windows software like Excel VBscript and Minesweeper, and I almost had to shut down my clinic! I'm the one who should sue you!"
You don't seriously expect this conversation to take place, but it's a lot more common for a doctor to be held accountable to his/her words than an IT person.
Note: This is not legal advice, nor medical advice, nor IT advice. There is no express or implied warranty to this text. This text has been transmitted to you with particles moving at close to the speed of light; the poster is not responsible for any injury caused by coming in contact with these particles.
I installed Firefox Sync twice recently. The first time it asked for a password and also a "secret passsphrase". A week later, the second time I created a new account for a different set of computers, it generated a twenty-letter key (like "xaedr-gterw-sfdfs-hryns" or something). I guess there was a change in between. If they did not generate a key for you, then the sync key is your passphrase. Apparently it's used to actually encrypt your data (as opposed to the password, which seems to be just for authentication).
Long story short... the voice recorder cannot be activated while you're having a call. Does this article means an update on the iPhone to allow this and properly support complaints on such companies?
I am not familiar with the iPhone. You refer to "the" voice recorder; is there only one, then? It comes with a voice recorder? Presumably you can install (or program) your own voice recorder which can be activated while having a call, no?
I ask this because my N900 can record a call with a voice recorder app.
There is very little evidence correlating these behaviors with any particular neurological state.
You seem to be saying that, because you don't know that the medication is shown to produce any particular neurological state which is correlated to this behaviour, the medication should not be given.
Your stance seems to be based on more theory than I think is necessary. My views on this are a bit more pragmatic. This is how I would make the decision: does the patient end up better with medicine, or better without?
That's really the bottom line, and physicians tend to be more willing to accept medications that are shown to work even if the mechanism is not completely known. So, you'll find that the ADHD medications are given to schoolchildren on school days but not on weekends or holidays, because they need the meds on school days but not holidays. And I tell parents that I don't focus so much on the diagnosis (whether their kid "really" has ADHD) as what difference they find the medication makes. When I had more time, I actually did double-blinded placebos (1 week with placebo, 1 week with half dose, 1 week with full dose, in random order, with parent and teacher each completing a questionnaire each week).
While I agree that we need to resist handing out prescriptions to every patient/kid who says they have ADHD, I think stopping it entirely it would unnecessarily harm many many patients who would otherwise benefit from the medication. You weigh the pros and cons (risk of addiction, other side effects) and make a decision, just like any other medical decision from "should I take Tylenol for my fever" to "should I get surgery for such-and-such a condition".
I'm a little disgusted at the thought of giving speed to a 5 year old.
You're just choosing your wording to be provocative. Are you also disgusted at feeding willow bark to elderly invalids? Well, it turns out that aspirin, which is not quite the same as willow bark, has a proven benefit to mortality for people over 65, just as the combination dexamphetamine derivatives, which is not quite the same as the illicit speed traded in dark alleys, can make the difference between a kid going to college or not.
By the way, I wouldn't give ADHD meds to a 5-year-old; it's more that the diagnosis of ADHD is only made if the patient started showing symptoms around 5 years of age. (E.g. it's not ADHD if the problem only started at age 12 or so.)
As for whether ADHD is overdiagnosed: well, yes, you will get cases of kids diagnosed with ADHD who don't actually have it. But it doesn't happen as often as people seem to think, and it certainly isn't a case of "everyone in the top 2.5%ile is automatically diagnosed" type case as suggested by the summary. That was just to get page clicks for Slashdot --but, hey, please enjoy the ads.
disclosure: Family physician here, and I see several ADHD patients a month.
KDE 4.4 doesn't suck? Which version are you using?
on
KDE 4.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but have they made it not suck yet? (KDE 3.x user here...) Yes. It quit sucking at about 4.4.
Well, it sort of quit sucking enough for me (a KDE 3.x user) to use, but that's only because it was in Kubuntu 10.04 which is a LTS, promising support for the next three years. Hopefuly it means Canonical will put some more work into it.
However, I continue to encounter ways in which it sucks, and in fact I am building up quite a collection of screenshots showing errors and such. For example:
- kmail doesn't work. Took me a while to figure out a workaround. If I suspend or hibernate my laptop and then resume, then it stops getting mail from my IMAP account. The solution is to exit kmail and then restart, but it's not as simple as it sounds: exiting the kmail program leaves behind about a dozen sleeper processes which all have to be killed, to the point that I had to write a script to identify all the child processes of kmail and kill them one by one. Can you imagine a non-technical user doing this!? - the eye candy is too flashy. The pretty little icons on the "system tray" change their position and appearance under certain circumstances. For example, the "device notifier" is this shape with the USB symbol. When you plug in an external hard drive (for example), it changes to a checkmark and shifts downward a few icons (my system tray area is a vertical one against the right edge of the screen). It always takes me a few moments to look for the icon, and then remember that it is now a checkmark (or an exclamation mark). I mean, why can't it be a checkmark overlapping on the original device notifier symbol? It took me FOREVER to figure out what was happening. - when widgets like the weather applet put up little dialogues saying "Error --we can't connect", you can't get rid of the dialogues. Yes, it's probably a bug with the widget, but a good DE should be able to get rid of the dialogues. I mean, what's the point of eye candy if you can't even manage your own widgets? - the power management system is SOOO WONDERFUL that it even manages your screen brightness for you! For example, if your laptop is not plugged in and has only 4 hours left on battery, it goes into Powersave mode and automatically dims the screen for you. When you raise the brightness again, it has this COOL feature where it automatically detects that you raised the brightness (you bad boy!) and dims it for you again a few minutes later. Thank you, KDE, for knowing better than even myself what it is that I want. - Krunner is a system where you can type in the name of a command, and KDE tells you what you really want to run. For example, simply type in "kru", and KDE knows that you want to run "Krusader in Root Mode". (Geez, does ANYONE run Krusader in root mode?). If you continue typing 4 more letters "krusade", it still offers to run "Krusader in Root Mode". But if you type the final letter "krusader", then it says, "Oh, you want to run 'Krusader'!" (not in root mode, which is what I actually want). Ummmm..... why??? - They have this COOL NEW notification system where messages pop up in little dialogues to tell you "Hey, I finished copying those files you told me to copy 2 seconds ago, okay?". Unfortunately, they fail to expand to make enough room for long messages, so good luck trying to read long error messages. - the taskbar has its own ideas about when and how to show which programs are running. Sometimes the taskbar entries overlap, so there will be a two separate areas which correctly show Program A and Program C are running, and then overlapping them to make them unreadable is an area showing that Program B is running. - KPackageKit fails to find packages that obviously exist; e.g. it tells me there is no such package as OpenOffice Calc in Ubuntu!?
There are too many others to list in detail, but I'll give a list of what screenshots I've collected. These are images of the screen, entitled: - Does Not Highlight GIMP Though Focused.png - Fi
A US ounce is 1/16th of a US pound, which is an SI unit equal to 0.45359237 kg.
Wait, what!? A US pound is a SI unit? Have you been smoking something, or have I? And since when did we get an SI unit that is equal to 0.45359237 kg?
I would agree that 0.45359237 kg weighs approximately one pound, on the surface of the earth. But otherwise your post smacks of "-1 Wrong". (Which is an SI unit equal to -1.333 Please Downmod Me.)
Skype voice-only has been available on the N900 since it was released.
I have not been able to call ordinary phones (POST) using Skype, on my N900.
Yes, I am paying for the Skype-Out service (monthly subscription). I can dial ordinary phones from the Skype client on my Kubuntu 10.04 laptop, but not my N900. The fact that my N900 Skype client says that my destination number "is invalid" (because it should be the name of a Skype account) is disappointing, to say the least. (Although it's only one in a long list of disappointing things about the N900.)
I use T-Mobile in the US and when ever I needed a phone unlocked I simply asked them, and they did it for me. No fuss, no bother. Generally they would ask me why and I would say because I am traveling overseas and want to get a local SIM card.
Same experience. When we bought our T-mobile phones (with contract), they said that we could have the phones unlocked after 3 months. So we asked them after 3 months (said we were travelling oerseas, needed a local SIM card), and they provided the codes to unlock. After a year or two, we got new phones at subsidized cost from T-mobile, and could have it unlocked right away (since we had already been T-mobile customers for more than 3 months).
Once, we were overseas and found out that one of the phones was still locked. (We thought the guy said that it came unlocked, but I guess he really meant we could have it unlocked right away.) We phoned long-distance to Tmobile, and they gave instructions on how to unlock the phone. We got it unlocked and were able to use a local SIM card.
Btw, Tmobile has several different call centres in the USA, and at least one of them is staffed with totally clueless people. If you find yourself wasting time with the person, just say you have to end your call because of some emergency, and then call back to get a different call centre.
For example, I asked how to contact Tmobile from overseas if I have trouble with roaming, and the staff said, "1-800-937-8997". I asked, "Does that 1-800 number work overseas?" and she said (after a long pause) "I don't know. Let me check." (pause of 1-2 minutes) "No, it doesn't." I asked, "So how do I contact you from overseas?" (long pause) "You can't."
But I was asking just to verify a number I had already written down from before (you see, I had *already* contacted them from overseas a few years before). I asked, "If I call +1(505)998-3793, would that work?"
(long pause)
"Yes, that would work."
Someone should really look into the training program for these Tmobile phone receptionists. Anyway, there's the phone number if you need to contact T-mobile overseas.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you be willing to share some details? In particular, what would be the needed complexity of the Master Password to make it just as worthwhile to brute-force the Firefox password vault as to guess the Master Password? How many bits? (Or, alternatively, how long would a lower-case-letters-only password have to be to have the correct complexity?)
If you say 8 letters lower-case, I'm going to delete all my passwords from Firefox...
I notice that you are deleting the period itself (with "cf.") and then entering another period to replace it. You could also use "ct.", since "t" will move the cursor t ill just before the next period, as opposed to "f" which moves the cursor until it f inds the next period and stops on top of it.
This is not to show that you're wrong or that I'm a more proficient Vim user, but to illustrate one quirk about Vim: there can be many commands to learn, not all of which can be learned right away, but sometimes using vim can be quite inconvenient if you don't know it. You struggle mightily with the editor and say "I wish it would ... (whatever)" and then a few months later you find that there was already exactly the command you wanted built-in but you didn't know. For me, I wanted to be able to find something with the "/" command, and then jump back to the place where I was before. Finally I did a
, and then much later I found out that the
command would already do what I wanted.
I'm still learning. Half of what keeps me going in my struggle to learn vim is my faith that there should be some command or other, buried deep in the help files, that does what I want. (The other half is the ability to program vim, which is desperately needed in my smartphone where all other editors seem dumb by comparison.)
Thanks for sharing your experience, and thanks also to all the auntie posts (parent's sister posts).
So, I guess a summary is:
iPhone: jailbreak and be willing to be excommunicated from Apple, and you have root
Droid: jailbreak, and you have root
Pre: enter dev mode, and you have root
N900: you have root
I better jump on this chance to ask my question. No, I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but this might be a unique chance to some more insight.
Okay, you use emacs. What was your choice based on? What were the factors that ended up getting you on emacs?
For me, I decided to learn vim, because I had heard that there was a lot of chording (ie. Esc-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift type simultaneous keys) in emacs. It worked out well when I started using vim on my smartphone. But I haven't actually used emacs before, so I don't know what emacs is like, and I freely admit that I don't know what I'm missing.
It sounds like there are a lot of historical for preferring either, which are not necessarily relevant today (e.g. Emacs took up more memory, before massive cheap memory was available on the market; there were no colour screens when vi was created, etc.).
So, my specific questions to all you emacs/vim users out there are:
1. Which do you use?
2. Have you used the other one before?
3. If you have had experience with both, what were the deciding factors for your choice?
Note: Please don't say which one is better overall --I think we've all heard that before. Please don't tell us how Pico or Gedit or MS DOS Editor is better than either vi or emacs (unless you want to share how your decision came about after actually having used vi/emacs). The purpose of this question is (among others) to help a user naive to both vim and emacs to decide which to learn.
Thanks for any insight you can give.
Hear hear! Let's recall that "brick" basically means "turning your equipment into something completely worthless, equivalent to a brick".
I propose the following "USB cable" test:
Has your device been rendered so unusable that you'd be willing to give it to me if I gave you a USB cable?
If the answer is "yes", then you have bricked your device. Congratulations.
If the answer is "no, let me work on this for a bit --I think I can restore partial functionality by pressing this reset button for 30 seconds, and then at least it will function as a glorified wall clock", then this is not "bricked".
If you say, "This is the third time I've bricked my device --I had to SSH into it and do 'sudo reboot'" --then the brick is in your brain.
Now, having said this, it's possible that the owner of the computer didn't know it was possible to undo the damage, in which case, yes, the device is bricked because he might as well have traded it in for a USB cable, prior to knowing how to salvage his device.
You can substitute any marginally useful but cheap piece of equipment for "USB cable".
Disclaimer: no, I haven't RTFA.
It means that someone pointy-haired at Sony is going to yell, "Take that number off my Internet!" followed by a conglomerate of 1,000,000 lawyers who comtransbineform into MegaLawyer and SMASH! all websites that try to post that number. Kevin Rose can try another round of censorship before whining, "Ummm... I never meant to suppress your 4000 posts of the number! It was the bad guys that made me do it!"
Of course, MegaLawyer wouldn't know that it's actually a number, and for those who don't want to display four hundred and four quadrillion quintillion quintillion red dots on their web site in solidarity, a simple line would suffice:
echo "obase=16; 404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 " | bc
As for myself, I'm gonna go get a new sig right now.
Is this true, especially with unlocked phones? Do any others among you fellow Slashdotters agree with this? I don't feel that way with my N900, but I realize that it is probably an exception among smartphones.
The reason I ask is because I hope to replace my N900 with something similar, not from Nokia, when I can. Unfortunately right now the N900 is unique in its openness and power, which means there's no alternative if I want a phone that can run Bash (as root), Python (running portable PyQT desktop apps), and Vim (and make phone calls from within Vim via DBUS). The N900 actually is quite bad in a number of ways, mostly in terms of its operating system software, but nothing else comes close.
I have my hopes on the Rumoured Samsung Linux Phone (RSLP) when it comes out, hopefully later this year, but the parent comment has me wondering whether there will be some sort of lockdown just because it's a smartphone (with the N900 being an exception) or whether any geekphone with root shell (assuming the RSLP has one) will give me the same freedom as Nokia's creation.
Come to think of it, my previous phone, an unlocked Treo 650 (the newest available that could come unlocked from Palm, which is why I didn't get the Treo 700 or newer), did have a rather frustrating lack of apps, especially FOSS. The backup application, BackupMon, was proprietary and made me very nervous about potential failure blocking my access to critical backups.
How is the Palm Pre in this respect? Any scripting languages, or do I need to get a SDK just to program my phone to read from a text file and dial the phone number within? What about Android --is the fact that it's "obeys just the app developers" a philosophical abstraction, or would it create an obstacle for someone who wants to script the phone? E.g. I'm pretty sure Vim runs on Android, but can it dial a phone number via a shell command (DBUS, for example)? Is the Nexus One open in this regard --should I buy one from eBay?
Thanks for any insight any of you can give. This is the smartphone equivalent of asking, "I want to buy a computer and then install Linux --which computer system should I get?"
Why, may I ask, are Sprint and Verizon so big? (This is not trolling; I really don't know.)
I will never ever use Sprint or Verizon. This is not a matter of revenge or personal principle, but simply because I need to use a phone that takes SIM cards (I travel internationally, and need to be able to swap SIM cards). So my choices in the USA are AT&T or Tmobile.
So why are Sprint or Verizon so big? Is it just that they were big historically? Are there few enough global travellers in the USA that they don't mind using a phone with no SIM card? Do Sprint or Verizon have any particular advantage (for example, better customer service)? I wonder.
Of course, once Sprint or Verizon (are they the same company now?) allow me to use SIM cards, they would become a viable choice.
My oblig. reference to point out the Big4 companies, which thankfully are named in TFA instead of just RIAA/CRIA:
Warner Music Canada
EMI Music Canada
Sony Music Canada
Universal Music Canada
As I had said, together they form the acronym WESU, as in "We sue! Yes, we do!"
To which Roesti cleverly replied: "That's for the US, though. This is the Canadian affiliate, WESUC."
FTFA:
From what I can tell, the reason it's okay to jailbreak is because, by (previously) allowing GNU/Linux, Sony said it was "okay to jailbreak" (or at least okay to modify and hack), and then they took away that capability.
It seems to me that would discourage Sony and other big companies from supporting Linux, because some jurisdiction somewhere might interpret that as "But you said it was okay for your customers to wrest control away from you!".
Hopefully not. Maybe someone with a better knowledge of Spanish than I can check the original article and confirm/refute this?
Replying to myself may be a sign of mental breakdown, but I did want to point out the following web page, listed under Google as having only appeared an hour ago (2300h UTC) stating everything that the main article says, with the addition of:
"Microsoft is not amused by the open source software community's effort to build its own Kinect drivers. The company says that it doesn't condone reverse engineering and has vowed to use technical and legal measures to prevent unauthorized third parties from repurposing the Kinect camera."
There is no attribution and I don't know where they got the statement. I guess as time goes on we'll find out.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/11/microsoft-not-amused-by-open-source-kinect-drivers.ars
So, I guess I should go buy one.
Fellow Slashdotters, your opinion on this please: now that the Kinect is actually useful, for how long do you think they will be available before Microsoft changes something so that the open-source drivers don't work?
I want to know whether to go buy one now before Microsoft retires the current model and starts putting other models out with new firmware that won't work with the drivers.
Currently I don't have any use for one, but I do have a bit of disposable income, and wonder whether it would be useful to sink US$150 (if that's what it costs as mentioned in another post) into one so that when software comes out for it, I won't be stuck reading "This does not work the newer models of Kinect" or something.
Your opinions would be appreciated. Thanks.
I'll end up un-moderating a few posts that I modded, in order to reply to this comment.
It may seem like Microsoft was resting on its laurels, this is not actually what happened. Microsoft did not come out in a blaze of brilliance, and then say, "There, I did it. Now we don't need to do anything else, because we've made it."
If you look closely, you'll find that Microsoft attempted the opposite: based on their uncontestably dominant position, their stranglehold, they went on to try to branch out into all sorts of other ventures: palmtop computers, gaming consoles, portable media players, search engines, social portals, web servers, you name it. They even valiantly tried to trailblaze out their very own futuristic computers in the form of the tablets (no, not iPad, those laptop thingies with the swivel screens that fold back onto themselves the way your spine folds backwards against the back of your knees).
And each time, they fell flat on their face.
Microsoft has been incapable of becoming a technical leader. They just plain don't know how to innovate! Imagine it --they even had the clout to go tell the various hardware vendors like Acer, "This is what the future of computer hardware is, which YOU will create" --and they obediently came out with those tablets-- and they STILL failed to make any significant headway into the market.
It becomes clear that Microsoft has been a big name in computing because of their business strategy, and not at all because of any advantage they have in technology or expertise.
The final effect is that they have been resting on their laurels, but only because they have been incapable of doing anything else. Goodness knows what potential advances in computing they have ended up suppressing because they were technologically incompetent.
It's very sad.
You seem to be implying that, even prior to the invention of the term "open source", it already had a meaning, but this is not the case: the term was created at a meeting of the minds http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html specifically so that we could avoid this sort of mixup and not be accused of "redefining the language".
I already addressed this in the post to which you are responding; when you reply to me with an answer I already anticipated, you're supposed to address that, too. I had given an example of someone defining "open source" as meaning that the room door is open as you look at the source code --are you going to turn around and say that that use of the word "open" is invalid where yours is valid? Please see http://web.archive.org/web/20060423094434/www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.html Prior to that, the technical term was just used by spies to denote publicly available info, and was not even used in the software world.
But most telling of all is your apparent indifference to the way the software community is using the term "open source". When you say "nothing else matters", what you are saying is not just "the word 'open' already has a meaning" (ignoring its juxtaposition with the word "source") but also "I don't care how the rest of you use the English language as a mutually agreed-upon way of communication".
Don't agree? You'd need to cite a use of the term "open source" prior to February 1998 to mean what you say it means. Or else I'd ask you to get stuffed and take a hike. Well, of course I meant "obtain some stuffing and grab a fee increase"! What, are you saying that words have different meanings when used in certain specific combinations?
Perhaps nothing else matters to you in your world, but I live in a world that includes my fellow English speakers who have a say in what English words and phrases mean.
With any other phrase other than "open source", you might convince me that the commonly held meaning of a phrase is actually wrong, and it originally meant something else, or in certain circles it means something else, or the Trobriand Islanders use it to mean something else.
But the phrase "open source" was invented to have a very specific meaning --go check the OSI website if you need to (and turn in your geek card)-- so you're not going to be able to say, "Well, but for me it means something else so I don't care if you end up misunderstanding because it's your fault!" So, what, someone else can come in and say "By 'open source' I mean that the room door is open as I look at the source code"?
If the source is open to you, but not open to anyone else, then you cripple the ability to locate and identify bugs. If the source is visible to people but not modifiable, you lose the ability improve the software as a community. If the source code is mostly but not completely visible to you, but you are not able to compile a binary that matches exactly the one that you are deploying, then you lose the ability to verify that the source code represents the software you are running. There is a reason for very specific requirements given to meet the criteria of "Open Source".
If you mean something else, go invent your own phrase.
I think the difference is in the responsibility and accountability for giving the answer. As as licensed physician, I am happy to help out when I am not working professionally, but at the same time, I am not to be held accountable for my answer (because otherwise I would need to do a lot more work before answering, and I would expect to be compensated for that). As a licensed engineer, the same applies: I'll answer questions, but if you expect to get an answer commensurate with a P.Eng, you better provide compensation commensurate with a P.Eng.
So, you might envision this conversation at a party:
Software Engineer: "Hi. How's it going?"
Medical Doctor: "Crummy. My Windows system went down."
SE: "Why are you using Microsoft, man? Seriously, you should switch to Linux."
MD: "Okay. How are things with you?"
SE: "I'm not getting any. I'm microsofter than Microsoft."
MD: "You should get Viagra."
So far so good. But how accountable are these answers?
One year later ...
SE: "Hey, you said I should get Viagra, and you didn't even check if I was taking isosorbide mononitrate! I went to the Emergency and almost died! I should sue you!"
MD: "Oh, yeah? Well, I switched to Linux like you said, it couldn't handle my mission-critical Windows software like Excel VBscript and Minesweeper, and I almost had to shut down my clinic! I'm the one who should sue you!"
You don't seriously expect this conversation to take place, but it's a lot more common for a doctor to be held accountable to his/her words than an IT person.
Note: This is not legal advice, nor medical advice, nor IT advice. There is no express or implied warranty to this text. This text has been transmitted to you with particles moving at close to the speed of light; the poster is not responsible for any injury caused by coming in contact with these particles.
I installed Firefox Sync twice recently. The first time it asked for a password and also a "secret passsphrase". A week later, the second time I created a new account for a different set of computers, it generated a twenty-letter key (like "xaedr-gterw-sfdfs-hryns" or something). I guess there was a change in between. If they did not generate a key for you, then the sync key is your passphrase. Apparently it's used to actually encrypt your data (as opposed to the password, which seems to be just for authentication).
I am not familiar with the iPhone. You refer to "the" voice recorder; is there only one, then? It comes with a voice recorder? Presumably you can install (or program) your own voice recorder which can be activated while having a call, no?
I ask this because my N900 can record a call with a voice recorder app.
Please correct me if I have any misconceptions.
You seem to be saying that, because you don't know that the medication is shown to produce any particular neurological state which is correlated to this behaviour, the medication should not be given.
Your stance seems to be based on more theory than I think is necessary. My views on this are a bit more pragmatic. This is how I would make the decision: does the patient end up better with medicine, or better without?
That's really the bottom line, and physicians tend to be more willing to accept medications that are shown to work even if the mechanism is not completely known. So, you'll find that the ADHD medications are given to schoolchildren on school days but not on weekends or holidays, because they need the meds on school days but not holidays. And I tell parents that I don't focus so much on the diagnosis (whether their kid "really" has ADHD) as what difference they find the medication makes. When I had more time, I actually did double-blinded placebos (1 week with placebo, 1 week with half dose, 1 week with full dose, in random order, with parent and teacher each completing a questionnaire each week).
While I agree that we need to resist handing out prescriptions to every patient/kid who says they have ADHD, I think stopping it entirely it would unnecessarily harm many many patients who would otherwise benefit from the medication. You weigh the pros and cons (risk of addiction, other side effects) and make a decision, just like any other medical decision from "should I take Tylenol for my fever" to "should I get surgery for such-and-such a condition".
You're just choosing your wording to be provocative. Are you also disgusted at feeding willow bark to elderly invalids? Well, it turns out that aspirin, which is not quite the same as willow bark, has a proven benefit to mortality for people over 65, just as the combination dexamphetamine derivatives, which is not quite the same as the illicit speed traded in dark alleys, can make the difference between a kid going to college or not.
By the way, I wouldn't give ADHD meds to a 5-year-old; it's more that the diagnosis of ADHD is only made if the patient started showing symptoms around 5 years of age. (E.g. it's not ADHD if the problem only started at age 12 or so.)
As for whether ADHD is overdiagnosed: well, yes, you will get cases of kids diagnosed with ADHD who don't actually have it. But it doesn't happen as often as people seem to think, and it certainly isn't a case of "everyone in the top 2.5%ile is automatically diagnosed" type case as suggested by the summary. That was just to get page clicks for Slashdot --but, hey, please enjoy the ads.
disclosure: Family physician here, and I see several ADHD patients a month.
Well, it sort of quit sucking enough for me (a KDE 3.x user) to use, but that's only because it was in Kubuntu 10.04 which is a LTS, promising support for the next three years. Hopefuly it means Canonical will put some more work into it.
However, I continue to encounter ways in which it sucks, and in fact I am building up quite a collection of screenshots showing errors and such. For example:
- kmail doesn't work. Took me a while to figure out a workaround. If I suspend or hibernate my laptop and then resume, then it stops getting mail from my IMAP account. The solution is to exit kmail and then restart, but it's not as simple as it sounds: exiting the kmail program leaves behind about a dozen sleeper processes which all have to be killed, to the point that I had to write a script to identify all the child processes of kmail and kill them one by one. Can you imagine a non-technical user doing this!?
- the eye candy is too flashy. The pretty little icons on the "system tray" change their position and appearance under certain circumstances. For example, the "device notifier" is this shape with the USB symbol. When you plug in an external hard drive (for example), it changes to a checkmark and shifts downward a few icons (my system tray area is a vertical one against the right edge of the screen). It always takes me a few moments to look for the icon, and then remember that it is now a checkmark (or an exclamation mark). I mean, why can't it be a checkmark overlapping on the original device notifier symbol? It took me FOREVER to figure out what was happening.
- when widgets like the weather applet put up little dialogues saying "Error --we can't connect", you can't get rid of the dialogues. Yes, it's probably a bug with the widget, but a good DE should be able to get rid of the dialogues. I mean, what's the point of eye candy if you can't even manage your own widgets?
- the power management system is SOOO WONDERFUL that it even manages your screen brightness for you! For example, if your laptop is not plugged in and has only 4 hours left on battery, it goes into Powersave mode and automatically dims the screen for you. When you raise the brightness again, it has this COOL feature where it automatically detects that you raised the brightness (you bad boy!) and dims it for you again a few minutes later. Thank you, KDE, for knowing better than even myself what it is that I want.
- Krunner is a system where you can type in the name of a command, and KDE tells you what you really want to run. For example, simply type in "kru", and KDE knows that you want to run "Krusader in Root Mode". (Geez, does ANYONE run Krusader in root mode?). If you continue typing 4 more letters "krusade", it still offers to run "Krusader in Root Mode". But if you type the final letter "krusader", then it says, "Oh, you want to run 'Krusader'!" (not in root mode, which is what I actually want). Ummmm..... why???
- They have this COOL NEW notification system where messages pop up in little dialogues to tell you "Hey, I finished copying those files you told me to copy 2 seconds ago, okay?". Unfortunately, they fail to expand to make enough room for long messages, so good luck trying to read long error messages.
- the taskbar has its own ideas about when and how to show which programs are running. Sometimes the taskbar entries overlap, so there will be a two separate areas which correctly show Program A and Program C are running, and then overlapping them to make them unreadable is an area showing that Program B is running.
- KPackageKit fails to find packages that obviously exist; e.g. it tells me there is no such package as OpenOffice Calc in Ubuntu!?
There are too many others to list in detail, but I'll give a list of what screenshots I've collected. These are images of the screen, entitled:
- Does Not Highlight GIMP Though Focused.png
- Fi
Wait, what!? A US pound is a SI unit? Have you been smoking something, or have I? And since when did we get an SI unit that is equal to 0.45359237 kg?
I would agree that 0.45359237 kg weighs approximately one pound, on the surface of the earth. But otherwise your post smacks of "-1 Wrong". (Which is an SI unit equal to -1.333 Please Downmod Me.)
I guess, until Slashdot enables the UTF character set like everyone else has for the past decade or so,
1. There will be some domain names that we can't link to on Slashdot
2. No one will get my First Post joke.
! ("shou3" = number one; "biao1" = to announce/post)
I have not been able to call ordinary phones (POST) using Skype, on my N900.
Yes, I am paying for the Skype-Out service (monthly subscription). I can dial ordinary phones from the Skype client on my Kubuntu 10.04 laptop, but not my N900. The fact that my N900 Skype client says that my destination number "is invalid" (because it should be the name of a Skype account) is disappointing, to say the least. (Although it's only one in a long list of disappointing things about the N900.)
Same experience. When we bought our T-mobile phones (with contract), they said that we could have the phones unlocked after 3 months. So we asked them after 3 months (said we were travelling oerseas, needed a local SIM card), and they provided the codes to unlock. After a year or two, we got new phones at subsidized cost from T-mobile, and could have it unlocked right away (since we had already been T-mobile customers for more than 3 months).
Once, we were overseas and found out that one of the phones was still locked. (We thought the guy said that it came unlocked, but I guess he really meant we could have it unlocked right away.) We phoned long-distance to Tmobile, and they gave instructions on how to unlock the phone. We got it unlocked and were able to use a local SIM card.
Btw, Tmobile has several different call centres in the USA, and at least one of them is staffed with totally clueless people. If you find yourself wasting time with the person, just say you have to end your call because of some emergency, and then call back to get a different call centre.
For example, I asked how to contact Tmobile from overseas if I have trouble with roaming, and the staff said, "1-800-937-8997". I asked, "Does that 1-800 number work overseas?" and she said (after a long pause) "I don't know. Let me check." (pause of 1-2 minutes) "No, it doesn't." I asked, "So how do I contact you from overseas?" (long pause) "You can't."
But I was asking just to verify a number I had already written down from before (you see, I had *already* contacted them from overseas a few years before). I asked, "If I call +1(505)998-3793, would that work?"
(long pause)
"Yes, that would work."
Someone should really look into the training program for these Tmobile phone receptionists. Anyway, there's the phone number if you need to contact T-mobile overseas.