"why do 'greens' throw so much effort into things like wind, solar, and hydro, when the only real solution to replacing fossil fuels is nuclear power?"
Locate your office within 5 miles of where people live, and you could use any power-source you want for essential stuff. Ditto for insulating houses. Nuclear power isn't going to suddenly get a 3000kg car from the suburbs to a city each day.
"My bank website also has a sane system that allows me to use my usual password-derivation method (pick interesting phrase or sentence, take first letter of every word, and punctuation marks, and combine with a number.
You might want to check those passwords against a cracking dictionary (e.g. elcomsoft.com) before continuing to use them -- lots of common phrases are listed by their initials, and all the "is3scsi" or "tbgwnmhgb"-type passwords should be just as vulnerable as standard english words.
Re:The ABCs of Google Complete
on
Google Suggest
·
· Score: 1
"So even though 's' has more hits than 'spybot', Google thinks you're more likely to search for 'spybot'."
Interestingly (or not), I use "s, down-arrow, enter" as a quick way to get to slashdot using browser autocomplete. But if something happens in the wrong order, you get to the "I'm feeling lucky search for s", which is Hoover (the vacuum-cleaner manufacturers), a site that I always think is slightly freaky that they've taken the letter s as a website. Although on checking it now, the top result seems to be McDonalds, the grease-sellers, which is every bit as odd. (not a parity joke, honest)
"I wouldn't categorize wind power as being entirely green. There is much evidence to suggest the impact windmills have upon migratory bird populations can be devastating."
Ah, but the question I want to know is: "do birds which avoid windmills evolve quicker than forests which survive acid rain?"
Amazon Best buy CNN Dictionary Ebay Firefox Games Hotmai l Ikea Jokes Kazaa Lyrics Mapquest News Onl ine dictionary Paris Hilton Quotes Recipes Spybot Tara reid UPS Verizon Weather XBox Yahoo Zip codes
"This means that they reckon that weaknesses will be exploited in a matter of hours of being announced, rather thant the weeks and months that we're seeing now." -- Kinda makes you think twice about publicly announcing vulnerabilities in your software before you have time to fix them, does it not?"
There's also the theory that exploits are already available and in moderate use, for (months|years) before the company involved knew about the vulnerability, and are part of peoples' own cracking toolkits.
Once the vulnerability is announced on a mailing list or by releasing patches, the exploit becomes much less valuable (or declines in value over the course of a week), so people may as well release their code and get bragging-rights for it (especially as the less-capable crackers will be starting to put together their own exploits from information in the announcement)
I guess it depends who you hope to secure against. Most people are happy to defend against automated virus-style attacks, but are wide-open to targeted attacks by someone who does their own security-testing on other peoples' products.
I've found exploitable security-related bugs in commercial products, just while trying to use them normally (not even looking for the bugs) so imagine how much more is going to be found by someone who goes looking for loopholes...
OK, I've used speech-recognition system for a "proper" project, and it's barely adequate for replacing push-buttons (for pilots with both hands on the controls, etc.) so trying to program in it would be a frustrating experience, right until you got a sore throat after the first 20 minutes...
"Yeah, but they never, ever seem to get done properly. Even if the splash screen isn't one of those obnoxious ones that insists on always being on top, it's still blocking a good portion of my desktop."
Maybe some of that "Firefox download manager" code could help, which displays messages in a 50x30 box at the corner of your screen, and doesn't attract any sort of window focus...
Perhaps display a "$APPNAME is starting" message, which reduces in size to an even smaller progress-bar after a few seconds.
"How about modifying your mailserver, such that when an email message is marked as spam it sends a message to the sender saying it bounced. That way you don't drop any valid emails"
Yeah, how about modifying your computer to relay email to arbitrary addresses?
People keep coming up with these ideas... can't we have some sort of "reverse patent office" where you check to see if an idea has already been analysed and found lacking in clue?
If you want a GPS receiver to believe it's in a certain position, you need something like this, which is in the 'telephone our salesman to negotiate' price range (or it might be 'US government only', I can't quite tell..)
If you want a computer to believe its attached GPS receiver is in a different location, you simply send formatted text from a serial port.
"You're a very brave man to admit on Slashdot that you have the urge to torment penguins."
Walks up to a penguin: "Excuse me, are you Gentoo? I'm looking for some KDE programs" Penguin stares blankly back at the scientist. "Ok, nevermind". Scientist tries the next penguin
"Now, the REAL accomplishment would be to produce the movie in second person.:)"
Interactive fiction is arguably the literary form of second-person storytelling.
So the film equivalent might use the "DVD scene" features to write an interactive story, if the DVD is advanced enough to do that. Press 'red' to follow the voice, or 'blue' to open the door.
(Of course, if you take that concept to the limit, you'd end-up with a computer game. For the sake of argument, we could call it Doom3)
I quite like the idea of an interactive movie though, I haven't seen one since they were experimenting with laserdiscs in the late 1980's.
"The appeal of Office suites is that you can create a document of some kind in one, and import data from another component."
Is this a corollary of "Every program attempts to expand until it can send and receive email"?
i.e. "every word processor attempts to expand until it takes longer to load the program that it does to create the document", in the style of the office-suites you mention?
And with people asking about.DOC support - we don't care any more! Word files might have been a popular discussion 4 years ago, but OOo solved that problem, and if you haven't already switched to an Open format, you're never going to muster the corporate enthusiasm to do so before you all get ensnared by the "patented Word format" trap being set for 3 years' hence.
"What would concern me is how frequent and up to date it could keep it's stories?"
Wikipedia has had a Current events page for a while -- have a look through the archives of that if you want an idea of what to expect.
Presumably the problem won't be so much getting the current news, as moderating it in time. Imagine a list of the most controversial articles, with most people seeing the article less than a day after it was created, and with not much opportunity to 'lock' articles -- the task of preventing vandalism here will be substantial.
<cynic>Especially when the US government has announced that it will be intentionally placing untrue news stories into international media channels...</cynic>
Hmmm, decisions, decisions... Option 1: Install sourceforge, host the respositary, job done. Option 2: Private non-profit U.S. academic institutions can also become members by signing the GOCC Operating Agreement through an authorized representative. The signatory or their designee can then appoint additional members within their institutions. People belonging to a government entity or private non-profit academic institution that has not signed the Operating Agreement can participate with an Observer status. Representatives of non-profit associations of public entities can also participate as Observers. Observers have to be sponsored by a Member. Observers are able to join the GOCC list server to receive announcements and participate in discussions and are encouraged to participate in the GOCC bi-weekly conference calls.
If you heard that Website A had managed to get 5 programs hosted, and Website B had 91,783 programs, could you guess which one was run by the government, and which one was run by hackers?
"Can anyone see a business model here? Read the GOCC.gov charter and you discover that it has built one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy."
"Look, all I said was that Apple is contributing back to the community."
And my response was that that "contribution" of theirs involved Apple getting $5M-worth of code for free. Which they're welcome to. But spinning that as some great gift by Apple is a bit misleading.
"In fairness, apple contributes quite a bit back into the open source community. khtml is a good example"
Hang on, I seem to remember using HTML before "open source apple" was even invented (or at least, before they were ever involved in BSD)
"KHTML is the HTML layout engine developed by the KDE project." - Wikipedia
According to Apple, they received 140,000 lines of code, which COCOMO says is worth $5 million. In return for that, Wikipedia reports that their patches have been very difficult to integrate with the main project.
"Apple worked secretly on their version of KHTML for a year before making their fork public. Apple also tends to submit their changes in large patches that incorporate a great number of changes, in some cases leaving code to do with future feature additions barely documented, making it difficult for the KDE developers to sort through and incorporate the changes"
"My code is meant to be secret. If anyone ever saw it, I'd be ridiculed for my terrible coding style and lack of programming prowess. I don't think I could survive the shame. -- Is that you, Mister Gates?"
Slashdot Mirror
"why do 'greens' throw so much effort into things like wind, solar, and hydro, when the only real solution to replacing fossil fuels is nuclear power?"
Locate your office within 5 miles of where people live, and you could use any power-source you want for essential stuff. Ditto for insulating houses. Nuclear power isn't going to suddenly get a 3000kg car from the suburbs to a city each day.
"My bank website also has a sane system that allows me to use my usual password-derivation method (pick interesting phrase or sentence, take first letter of every word, and punctuation marks, and combine with a number.
You might want to check those passwords against a cracking dictionary (e.g. elcomsoft.com) before continuing to use them -- lots of common phrases are listed by their initials, and all the "is3scsi" or "tbgwnmhgb"-type passwords should be just as vulnerable as standard english words.
"So even though 's' has more hits than 'spybot', Google thinks you're more likely to search for 'spybot'."
Interestingly (or not), I use "s, down-arrow, enter" as a quick way to get to slashdot using browser autocomplete. But if something happens in the wrong order, you get to the "I'm feeling lucky search for s", which is Hoover (the vacuum-cleaner manufacturers), a site that I always think is slightly freaky that they've taken the letter s as a website. Although on checking it now, the top result seems to be McDonalds, the grease-sellers, which is every bit as odd. (not a parity joke, honest)
s
There also seems to be a strong "alphabetical order first" preference, so for example LI will match:
Limewire: 762,000
Lindsay lohan: 595,000
Linksys: 8,990,000
Lingerie: 23,400,000
Linux: 204,000,000
Linkin park: 1,940,000
Linen and things: 800,000
Note to the squeamish: yes that means Linux is nine times as interesting as lingerie. "Go catch those fish, dear..."
"I wouldn't categorize wind power as being entirely green. There is much evidence to suggest the impact windmills have upon migratory bird populations can be devastating."
Ah, but the question I want to know is: "do birds which avoid windmills evolve quicker than forests which survive acid rain?"
Amazoni ll ine dictionary
Best buy
CNN
Dictionary
Ebay
Firefox
Games
Hotma
Ikea
Jokes
Kazaa
Lyrics
Mapquest
News
On
Paris Hilton
Quotes
Recipes
Spybot
Tara reid
UPS
Verizon
Weather
XBox
Yahoo
Zip codes
"h suggests "hotmail", and x suggests "x-box""
Anyone have the full "A-Z as searched by google"?
"Direct link to the fullscreen CatCF trailer"
Fullscreen for who, 1280x1024-boy?
"This means that they reckon that weaknesses will be exploited in a matter of hours of being announced, rather thant the weeks and months that we're seeing now." -- Kinda makes you think twice about publicly announcing vulnerabilities in your software before you have time to fix them, does it not?"
There's also the theory that exploits are already available and in moderate use, for (months|years) before the company involved knew about the vulnerability, and are part of peoples' own cracking toolkits.
Once the vulnerability is announced on a mailing list or by releasing patches, the exploit becomes much less valuable (or declines in value over the course of a week), so people may as well release their code and get bragging-rights for it (especially as the less-capable crackers will be starting to put together their own exploits from information in the announcement)
I guess it depends who you hope to secure against. Most people are happy to defend against automated virus-style attacks, but are wide-open to targeted attacks by someone who does their own security-testing on other peoples' products.
I've found exploitable security-related bugs in commercial products, just while trying to use them normally (not even looking for the bugs) so imagine how much more is going to be found by someone who goes looking for loopholes...
"code that %&#@% interface by tomorrow you @#$%@ piece of *&^$&!!!"
The Perl compiler says you missed out a quote...
OK, I've used speech-recognition system for a "proper" project, and it's barely adequate for replacing push-buttons (for pilots with both hands on the controls, etc.) so trying to program in it would be a frustrating experience, right until you got a sore throat after the first 20 minutes...
"The problem I always found with uuhhhhh voice writing was mmmmm filtering out unwanted noises and shhhhh distractions"
Yeah, that TRAIN can be ARRIVING annoying AT when PLATFORM you're ONE trying IS to THE use 14:45 speech-recognition in TO SALISBURY public, can't it?
"Yeah, but they never, ever seem to get done properly. Even if the splash screen isn't one of those obnoxious ones that insists on always being on top, it's still blocking a good portion of my desktop."
Maybe some of that "Firefox download manager" code could help, which displays messages in a 50x30 box at the corner of your screen, and doesn't attract any sort of window focus...
Perhaps display a "$APPNAME is starting" message, which reduces in size to an even smaller progress-bar after a few seconds.
"How about modifying your mailserver, such that when an email message is marked as spam it sends a message to the sender saying it bounced. That way you don't drop any valid emails"
Yeah, how about modifying your computer to relay email to arbitrary addresses?
People keep coming up with these ideas... can't we have some sort of "reverse patent office" where you check to see if an idea has already been analysed and found lacking in clue?
"So... how easy is it to spoof a GPS signal?"
Depends what system you want to fool.
If you want a GPS receiver to believe it's in a certain position, you need something like this, which is in the 'telephone our salesman to negotiate' price range (or it might be 'US government only', I can't quite tell..)
If you want a computer to believe its attached GPS receiver is in a different location, you simply send formatted text from a serial port.
All GPS devices I've come across simply stream out NMEA data from a serial port, someone would just send their own NMEA stream
The difference is, you're approaching this from the view of a technology expert. Try to think of it through the eyes of a marketer.
"It's perfectly secure, the laptop can never be used outside of designated locations"
"You're a very brave man to admit on Slashdot that you have the urge to torment penguins."
Walks up to a penguin: "Excuse me, are you Gentoo? I'm looking for some KDE programs" Penguin stares blankly back at the scientist. "Ok, nevermind". Scientist tries the next penguin
"Now, the REAL accomplishment would be to produce the movie in second person. :)"
Interactive fiction is arguably the literary form of second-person storytelling.
So the film equivalent might use the "DVD scene" features to write an interactive story, if the DVD is advanced enough to do that. Press 'red' to follow the voice, or 'blue' to open the door.
(Of course, if you take that concept to the limit, you'd end-up with a computer game. For the sake of argument, we could call it Doom3)
I quite like the idea of an interactive movie though, I haven't seen one since they were experimenting with laserdiscs in the late 1980's.
"The appeal of Office suites is that you can create a document of some kind in one, and import data from another component."
.DOC support - we don't care any more! Word files might have been a popular discussion 4 years ago, but OOo solved that problem, and if you haven't already switched to an Open format, you're never going to muster the corporate enthusiasm to do so before you all get ensnared by the "patented Word format" trap being set for 3 years' hence.
Is this a corollary of "Every program attempts to expand until it can send and receive email"?
i.e. "every word processor attempts to expand until it takes longer to load the program that it does to create the document", in the style of the office-suites you mention?
And with people asking about
"What would concern me is how frequent and up to date it could keep it's stories?"
Wikipedia has had a Current events page for a while -- have a look through the archives of that if you want an idea of what to expect.
Presumably the problem won't be so much getting the current news, as moderating it in time. Imagine a list of the most controversial articles, with most people seeing the article less than a day after it was created, and with not much opportunity to 'lock' articles -- the task of preventing vandalism here will be substantial.
<cynic>Especially when the US government has announced that it will be intentionally placing untrue news stories into international media channels...</cynic>
"What they need is a GForge site instead"
Hmmm, decisions, decisions...
Option 1: Install sourceforge, host the respositary, job done.
Option 2: Private non-profit U.S. academic institutions can also become members by signing the GOCC Operating Agreement through an authorized representative. The signatory or their designee can then appoint additional members within their institutions. People belonging to a government entity or private non-profit academic institution that has not signed the Operating Agreement can participate with an Observer status. Representatives of non-profit associations of public entities can also participate as Observers. Observers have to be sponsored by a Member. Observers are able to join the GOCC list server to receive announcements and participate in discussions and are encouraged to participate in the GOCC bi-weekly conference calls.
If you heard that Website A had managed to get 5 programs hosted, and Website B had 91,783 programs, could you guess which one was run by the government, and which one was run by hackers?
"Can anyone see a business model here? Read the GOCC.gov charter and you discover that it has built one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy."
"Look, all I said was that Apple is contributing back to the community."
And my response was that that "contribution" of theirs involved Apple getting $5M-worth of code for free. Which they're welcome to. But spinning that as some great gift by Apple is a bit misleading.
Hang on, I seem to remember using HTML before "open source apple" was even invented (or at least, before they were ever involved in BSD)
"KHTML is the HTML layout engine developed by the KDE project." - Wikipedia
According to Apple, they received 140,000 lines of code, which COCOMO says is worth $5 million. In return for that, Wikipedia reports that their patches have been very difficult to integrate with the main project.
"My code is meant to be secret. If anyone ever saw it, I'd be ridiculed for my terrible coding style and lack of programming prowess. I don't think I could survive the shame.
-- Is that you, Mister Gates?"
No, he said that he created some software...