I keep wondering about the slate of games offered as part of the Humble Bundles. Both of the previous bundles have included a really good "headline" game (World of Goo and Braid), and a bunch of games which to my eyes vary between clever but very light (Osmos), of limited appeal (Machinarium), just plain unimpressive (Gish, Lugaru), and simply unfinished (the still-incomplete Cortex Command, the beta Revenge of the Titans, and this "prototype" Jack Claw). Plus a few I'm simply uninterested in. I'm sure the other games have their fans, and I'm not saying they're bad -- just not especially high-caliber, and generally not something I'd pay more than a couple bucks even if they weren't part of the bundle. Can Wolfire not find more developers to take part, or is this the best available slate of indie-cross-platform games?
(I've bought both of the previous bundles and will buy the third. I'm just disappointed that a) I don't have much money to contribute and b) what's on offer isn't really worth much more to me).
As I'm sure you already know, the main dialect of classical Athens was Attic. Later Koine became standardized Greek under Macedonian hegemony. During the middles ages there is also what is known as "Byzantine" today (which is actually a slew of Greek dialects)
I'm not sure if you've looked at any modern Greek but I was shocked by just how much it has in common with ancient dialects (far more than say Italian does Latin). I can't understand most modern (demotic) Greek spoken but the alphabet is the same one Aristotle knew and many words are spelled identically (or so close they are easily identifiable).Of course what represents a dialect versus a distinct language is hotly debated subject even among linguists.. (and politicized if you ask me)
All true, to be sure. I've had a look at Modern Greek, yes; I can sometimes make out the gist of the old Katharevousa dialect but not Demotic, which yields no more than a few familiar roots to my inspection. While there are a fair few common roots, the grammar has undergone massive changes since Aristotle, to the extent that the Attic and Demotic dialects are probably less mutually intelligible than, say, Italian and Spanish.
(Unsure how to decline 'Gyges' but we'll go with that for accusative. I guess it's a Greek paradigm.)
I think that's correct. It's a Greek paradigm although the original name is presumably Lydian. Woodhouse has it as Guges, -ou, ho, which ought to make the accusative Gugen. The TLG agrees. (Slashdot's dropping the Greek characters for some reason, but the 'e's are both etas).
I'm two weeks away from a master's degree in Ancient Greek. I'm not sure I'd pass the Greek portion of the exam. Why? Because it focuses on extremely rigorous memorization of obscure details (and I'm talking obscure details of an arcane dead language, mind you). I can read even difficult Greek pretty well, but that doesn't mean I can decline 'trirs' (a noun in a highly unusual declension), or form the correctly-accented participles of 'histmi', or decline much of anything in the unusual dual number, off the top of my head and without consulting a grammar. Nor, I think, could most of my colleagues. The translation *into* Greek, however, is quite easy. It's a hard test for college freshmen, to be sure, but it's also testing based on a very different sort of educational objective. Passing the Greek section requires more memorization than actual competence in the language.
I am a Mac developer (on Mac, for Mac), so I'll try to address your questions - bear in mind though I have little experience with non-Mac systems.
1: Terminal.app is bare-bones but fairly usable. If you need more bells and whistles by all means go for iTerm. Also, I recall reading somewhere that Leopard will have an upgraded Terminal with more features.
2: My familiarity with Linux/UNIX is not high, but I'm pretty sure what you're looking for is launchd. You can manage launchd's daemons via the command-line launchctl, which I assume can be done through ssh though I've never tried it. (There's also a very nice FOSS Cocoa app called Lingon that interfaces with launchd locally).
3: X isn't bad; it starts automatically when you attempt to open an X app, which can be packaged and opened from the Finder just like a native one or from the command line. In my experience it's a bit slow, especially on first startup, but usable. There are a few quirks of integration with the OS X window manager and controls, but nothing too serious. Oh, and Fink is very very valuable, though it can be somewhat out of date (you absolutely must use the unstable package tree).
4: Of a sort, yes; there is a hierarchical list view and a column-based browser. I find both very clumsy myself and tend to stick with the old-style Mac icon view. Fair warning, the Finder is widely -- and correctly -- considered a piece of junk needing a total rewrite. It's not well (or at all?) multithreaded and tends to balk on things Konqueror wouldn't even bat an eyelash at.
The most commonly used packages were cracked by the NSA years ago.
Really. Can you provide any documentation at all for this claim?
If they really want to brute force it they can.
The NSA can brute-force 2048-bit RSA? How 'bout 448-bit symmetric Blowfish? Have they found a way to stop time, perhaps?
The only secure ways are one time pads or coming up with your own secret method that they haven't encountered before.
That's hilarious. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to design a cipher that will take NSA cryptologists more than five minutes to rip apart? One-time pads (excepting quantum encryption, expensive, unusual, and limited) are totally impractical for regular use.
Double encription, using two schemes is also about as useful as rot-13.
What?? Unless some drastic changes have taken place since Schneier's Applied Cryptology came in (in which case, please enlighten me), this is both hyperbolic and wrong.
Sadly for Linux, Adium is written in Cocoa, which means it's GNUstep or nothing off of OS X - and even then porting is not necessarily a walk in the park.
Monopolistic practices aren't a crime unless committed by a monopoly. While Apple does have a dominant market share in the MP3 player market, they're far from a monopoly; hence, by definition, they cannot be prosecuted for monopolistic practices.
This is probably not suitable for your purposes, but it may be interesting anyway: on Mac OS 9, it was possible to use a voiceprint to login. You'd repeat the same phrase four times, and then at login you would be asked to repeat it. The computer did show your voiceprint as you spoke.
I remember it being fairly good for a while, but having to re-record my passphrase as my pronunciation changed over a couple months or so. Nonetheless, it was popular with myself and my family simple because it was so freakin' cool to login via your voice.
Presentation counts. No, I'm not saying books should be judged by how flashy their illustrations are, or how highbrow the font choice is. But a well designed, well-laid-out book can be a pleasure for the eyes as much as the words are for the mind. A good design complements the text, in some cases even subtly contributes to the "feel" or tone of the book.
I have not read the reviewed book, so I can't say "the reviewer is right to criticize this" or "the reviewer is splitting hairs", but I think he is quite justified in bringing the book's design/layout into his review. You may not care, but I certainly would want to know if the book I'm considering buying is drab or ugly or if it is a beautiful object as well as a good read.
I've often driven past a house where (apparently) a fellow geek lives. They own a Mini, which sports a large (British-style) front license plate bearing the legend: GZIP -9 SUV.
The fact that the Internet is global and many countries don't share the United States' puritanical views on sexuality? The fact that the "more social conservative" people you speak of are in power right now and would *love* an excuse to prevent kids/teens from accessing honest sex education? The fact that the "obscenity rules that apply to broadcasters" you advocate would result in many non-pornographic sites being placed under.XXX (like, perhaps, The Onion)? There are a million reasons why attempting to segregate out porn sites is pre-doomed to failure; this is just a few off the top of my head.
Personally, I am dismayed by this ICANN action; it looks to me like censorship coming in the guise of "protecting the children". Let's all just face it: no filter, domain-name segregation, or other silly external method is going to protect kids as well as the most important one: honest parental discussion and oversight.
I enjoyed (and still do enjoy) Ender's Game. For me, the interest lies mainly in the portrayal of the characters and how they respond to the moral and mental difficulties of the situation they're placed in. I also think the book is much richer if you read Speaker for the Dead, which concerns an adult Ender Wiggin still dealing with the aftermath and guilt for the "xenocide" he committed.
I don't think that the main interest comes from the fact that Ender is a child. It *is* important to the plot that this is so, but I don't see it as being the whole point of the story. Battle School and its associated zero-G tactics isn't the focus of the story - it's fun to read about (for me, at least), but Battle School, the age of the characters, and the Bugger War itself serve to create a background for the development of the character of Ender.
Well, that's my two cents, for whatever it's worth. As you can tell from my sig, I'm an Orson Scott Card fan, so I can't really claim to be an unbiased reader.
Wrong. Since Morse code does not represent all letters with the same number of dashes and dots (as, for example, ASCII does), it in fact needs three possible values -- dash, dot, and separator (a space). Hence, it is not really binary.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep wondering about the slate of games offered as part of the Humble Bundles. Both of the previous bundles have included a really good "headline" game (World of Goo and Braid), and a bunch of games which to my eyes vary between clever but very light (Osmos), of limited appeal (Machinarium), just plain unimpressive (Gish, Lugaru), and simply unfinished (the still-incomplete Cortex Command, the beta Revenge of the Titans, and this "prototype" Jack Claw). Plus a few I'm simply uninterested in. I'm sure the other games have their fans, and I'm not saying they're bad -- just not especially high-caliber, and generally not something I'd pay more than a couple bucks even if they weren't part of the bundle. Can Wolfire not find more developers to take part, or is this the best available slate of indie-cross-platform games?
(I've bought both of the previous bundles and will buy the third. I'm just disappointed that a) I don't have much money to contribute and b) what's on offer isn't really worth much more to me).
As I'm sure you already know, the main dialect of classical Athens was Attic. Later Koine became standardized Greek under Macedonian hegemony. During the middles ages there is also what is known as "Byzantine" today (which is actually a slew of Greek dialects)
I'm not sure if you've looked at any modern Greek but I was shocked by just how much it has in common with ancient dialects (far more than say Italian does Latin). I can't understand most modern (demotic) Greek spoken but the alphabet is the same one Aristotle knew and many words are spelled identically (or so close they are easily identifiable).Of course what represents a dialect versus a distinct language is hotly debated subject even among linguists.. (and politicized if you ask me)
All true, to be sure. I've had a look at Modern Greek, yes; I can sometimes make out the gist of the old Katharevousa dialect but not Demotic, which yields no more than a few familiar roots to my inspection. While there are a fair few common roots, the grammar has undergone massive changes since Aristotle, to the extent that the Attic and Demotic dialects are probably less mutually intelligible than, say, Italian and Spanish.
(Unsure how to decline 'Gyges' but we'll go with that for accusative. I guess it's a Greek paradigm.)
I think that's correct. It's a Greek paradigm although the original name is presumably Lydian. Woodhouse has it as Guges, -ou, ho, which ought to make the accusative Gugen. The TLG agrees. (Slashdot's dropping the Greek characters for some reason, but the 'e's are both etas).
I'm two weeks away from a master's degree in Ancient Greek. I'm not sure I'd pass the Greek portion of the exam. Why? Because it focuses on extremely rigorous memorization of obscure details (and I'm talking obscure details of an arcane dead language, mind you). I can read even difficult Greek pretty well, but that doesn't mean I can decline 'trirs' (a noun in a highly unusual declension), or form the correctly-accented participles of 'histmi', or decline much of anything in the unusual dual number, off the top of my head and without consulting a grammar. Nor, I think, could most of my colleagues. The translation *into* Greek, however, is quite easy. It's a hard test for college freshmen, to be sure, but it's also testing based on a very different sort of educational objective. Passing the Greek section requires more memorization than actual competence in the language.
I am a Mac developer (on Mac, for Mac), so I'll try to address your questions - bear in mind though I have little experience with non-Mac systems.
1: Terminal.app is bare-bones but fairly usable. If you need more bells and whistles by all means go for iTerm. Also, I recall reading somewhere that Leopard will have an upgraded Terminal with more features.
2: My familiarity with Linux/UNIX is not high, but I'm pretty sure what you're looking for is launchd. You can manage launchd's daemons via the command-line launchctl, which I assume can be done through ssh though I've never tried it. (There's also a very nice FOSS Cocoa app called Lingon that interfaces with launchd locally).
3: X isn't bad; it starts automatically when you attempt to open an X app, which can be packaged and opened from the Finder just like a native one or from the command line. In my experience it's a bit slow, especially on first startup, but usable. There are a few quirks of integration with the OS X window manager and controls, but nothing too serious. Oh, and Fink is very very valuable, though it can be somewhat out of date (you absolutely must use the unstable package tree).
4: Of a sort, yes; there is a hierarchical list view and a column-based browser. I find both very clumsy myself and tend to stick with the old-style Mac icon view. Fair warning, the Finder is widely -- and correctly -- considered a piece of junk needing a total rewrite. It's not well (or at all?) multithreaded and tends to balk on things Konqueror wouldn't even bat an eyelash at.
Hope this helps.
Who are you who are so wise in the ways of logic?
The most commonly used packages were cracked by the NSA years ago.
Really. Can you provide any documentation at all for this claim?
If they really want to brute force it they can.
The NSA can brute-force 2048-bit RSA? How 'bout 448-bit symmetric Blowfish? Have they found a way to stop time, perhaps?
The only secure ways are one time pads or coming up with your own secret method that they haven't encountered before.
That's hilarious. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to design a cipher that will take NSA cryptologists more than five minutes to rip apart? One-time pads (excepting quantum encryption, expensive, unusual, and limited) are totally impractical for regular use.
Double encription, using two schemes is also about as useful as rot-13.
What?? Unless some drastic changes have taken place since Schneier's Applied Cryptology came in (in which case, please enlighten me), this is both hyperbolic and wrong.
Sadly for Linux, Adium is written in Cocoa, which means it's GNUstep or nothing off of OS X - and even then porting is not necessarily a walk in the park.
Monopolistic practices aren't a crime unless committed by a monopoly. While Apple does have a dominant market share in the MP3 player market, they're far from a monopoly; hence, by definition, they cannot be prosecuted for monopolistic practices.
Since when is Apple a monopoly?
This is probably not suitable for your purposes, but it may be interesting anyway: on Mac OS 9, it was possible to use a voiceprint to login. You'd repeat the same phrase four times, and then at login you would be asked to repeat it. The computer did show your voiceprint as you spoke.
I remember it being fairly good for a while, but having to re-record my passphrase as my pronunciation changed over a couple months or so. Nonetheless, it was popular with myself and my family simple because it was so freakin' cool to login via your voice.
Presentation counts. No, I'm not saying books should be judged by how flashy their illustrations are, or how highbrow the font choice is. But a well designed, well-laid-out book can be a pleasure for the eyes as much as the words are for the mind. A good design complements the text, in some cases even subtly contributes to the "feel" or tone of the book.
I have not read the reviewed book, so I can't say "the reviewer is right to criticize this" or "the reviewer is splitting hairs", but I think he is quite justified in bringing the book's design/layout into his review. You may not care, but I certainly would want to know if the book I'm considering buying is drab or ugly or if it is a beautiful object as well as a good read.
I've often driven past a house where (apparently) a fellow geek lives. They own a Mini, which sports a large (British-style) front license plate bearing the legend: GZIP -9 SUV.
what am i not getting?
.XXX (like, perhaps, The Onion)? There are a million reasons why attempting to segregate out porn sites is pre-doomed to failure; this is just a few off the top of my head.
The fact that the Internet is global and many countries don't share the United States' puritanical views on sexuality? The fact that the "more social conservative" people you speak of are in power right now and would *love* an excuse to prevent kids/teens from accessing honest sex education? The fact that the "obscenity rules that apply to broadcasters" you advocate would result in many non-pornographic sites being placed under
Personally, I am dismayed by this ICANN action; it looks to me like censorship coming in the guise of "protecting the children". Let's all just face it: no filter, domain-name segregation, or other silly external method is going to protect kids as well as the most important one: honest parental discussion and oversight.
I enjoyed (and still do enjoy) Ender's Game. For me, the interest lies mainly in the portrayal of the characters and how they respond to the moral and mental difficulties of the situation they're placed in. I also think the book is much richer if you read Speaker for the Dead, which concerns an adult Ender Wiggin still dealing with the aftermath and guilt for the "xenocide" he committed.
I don't think that the main interest comes from the fact that Ender is a child. It *is* important to the plot that this is so, but I don't see it as being the whole point of the story. Battle School and its associated zero-G tactics isn't the focus of the story - it's fun to read about (for me, at least), but Battle School, the age of the characters, and the Bugger War itself serve to create a background for the development of the character of Ender.
Well, that's my two cents, for whatever it's worth. As you can tell from my sig, I'm an Orson Scott Card fan, so I can't really claim to be an unbiased reader.
Morse code is considered binary right?
Wrong. Since Morse code does not represent all letters with the same number of dashes and dots (as, for example, ASCII does), it in fact needs three possible values -- dash, dot, and separator (a space). Hence, it is not really binary.
* It works on KHTML-based Safari, so it the crash must be a Konq-specific problem.
* It ignores, um, non-work-safe input.
* It works fine on moderately esoteric topics -- I started typing n-s-a-r and it found NSArray, NSArrayController, NSArchiver, etc.