4) Canada benefits more than other countries from global warming
Canada doesn't benefit at all from global warming. I don't particularly want Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria underwater (from icecap melting due to heat increases), which doesn't matter, because the temperature isn't likely to increase much anyway.
If it does: we lose our most beautiful cities, and Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta get warmer. Like anyone cares. Hell, I lived there and I wouldn't care, it's a dry cold, it's entirely livable.
If it doesn't: well, then what's the point? Damage the environment, for what? A little extra profit margin the easy way?
If you're going to be/talk stupid or Albertan or whatever you are - and that's fine - please don't give away the fact that you're Canadian, you'll give us all a bad name. Most (halfway educated) Canadians don't want global warming under any circumstances.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, specialFX company ILM is now capable of doing realtime CGI, allowing actors and directors to see rough CGI immediately after a scene is filmed.
Wouldn't realtime by WHILE the scene is filmed
Well, it's hard to act and watch a monitor at the same time. Besides, the CGI they're doing in realtime is just a preview that they can overlay onto the video feed to see sort-of what it would look like.
That's why more people play Quake-style shooters than MOH:AA and Ghost Recon, because they see the movement physics as impairment, not realism
I dunno, I don't play Ghost Recon because my idiot characters take 15 minutes to walk up a hill, then suddenly all my guys die for no reason. I'm pretty sure they could make Ghost Recon: Saturday Afternoon where you go to a restaurant for lunch, and when you went to order your pie, you'd die for no reason. And since I get shot so often, I'd love for the physics of it all to show my corpse reacting as it gets riddled with bullets. It'd be the high point of my game.
B. Using the hottest buzzword in computers today "Linux" - The platform Novell probably the most worried about losing it's customers to.
I don't know if this is necessarily the case. I've been working on developing a solution for a problem that I've been having - distributed logons - with Linux, and have so far come away delightfully unimpressed.
First, we installed Samba, and got that working as a PDC with our W2K machines. Then, we got it working together with roaming profiles. Ok, fine, but then we went to Samba-TNG so we could use an LDAP directory backend. That'd be great, if there were any decent LDAP HOWTOs for Linux. The ones that there are are horrid, and you have to assemble them all in your head to make any sense of it. Once that was done (with the poor LDAP browsers available), we tried to move other services to it, which is a nightmare. Most of the LDAP-authenticating software we have (proftpd-ldap, etc.) just plain breaks, or doesn't work, or 'works' but doesn't (fails silently), or a myriad of other things. Figuring out how to do any of this stuff in the first place was a nightmare, and then trying to figure out what's wrong without having to source-dive is just a waste of my time. Once I finally got PAM working with LDAP, we have the problem of it asks for passwords twice, instead of automatically falling back. PITA. Then, if we wanted other systems to authenticate, we'd have a whole new bag of worms.
People say Novell is a bitch to configure. They say it's hard to learn. Yeah, but you know what? There's ways to learn. There's documentation. There's manuals. There's courses. There's books. When it comes down to it, there's $150/hr freelance CNEs or the consultants that installed your network in the first place. When customers move to Linux and try to do anything that's great about Linux (i.e. assembling their own solution) they quickly find that it may be cheaper, and it may give you more of a sense of satisfaction, but when you have to manage an entire corporate network, you don't have time to migrate everyone to Linux just because 'it's cheaper'. It's not. For the price of my time as a Linux admin, setting all this up, testing it, re-testing it, making damn sure it's not going to blow up in my face, I would suggest a Novell solution, because I know that if I set it up properly, it's going to freaking work, and if it doesn't, I don't have to worry about my boss bringing the hounds of hell down on me, because there's a support contract.
Linux is only a challenger in small business, and Novell's offering their small business starter pack for free (contact your local CNS for details). Larger business will go for solutions that they don't have to worry about. You pay for some staff to get their certification, keep them up to date, and that's it. With Linux, you only have their word that they know what they're doing, and when things explode or you have to find someone else, they have to figure out what's going on, and when the system's a melange of PHP sites calling perl scripts to manage LDAP databases of user data for the patched daemons running on colocated servers, better men than I have threw in the towel on the first day. Businesses are finding this important point out: anyone can learn 'Linux' - you can train a kitten to play with the keyboard and administer a Linux system - but when it comes down to the crunch and you need to build your own system, unless you keep excellent, centralized, readable, updated documentation, you can't just hire some Linux admin off the street - you need the guy that worked there before, and hopefully he left on good terms.
Microsoft and Novell are not out there because they're corporate whores. They're not popular because they lock people in. They're not even popular because managers have heard of them. They're popular because if I'm Novell certified in the relevant products, I can walk into any Novell business and sit down and administer the network. It's consistant. It's coherant. It's easier to just get to work, because if you know it you know it. Until Linux gets this, it won't be popular.
Back to OSX... No, I have not switched to "the dark side" yet. I am waiting for Apple to natively support x86, which shouldn't be too complicated considering that the software they used to build the operating system is relatively portable. I would be all over an x86 Apple iBook. It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.
Then you'll be waiting a long long time. Why on earth would Apple ever switch to x86? The power use is astronomical, the architecture is ungainly, ALL mac software would have to be ported (and believe me, that's no easy task), and it would lose all the hardware advantages it has - altivec, fast FPU instructions, the RISC-ish architecture.
Apple has the PPC970 coming out from IBM, which will be (relatively) low power, fast, support vector instructions, and run at a 900 MHz DDR bus, to name a few. Why on earth would they throw away speed, compatibility, and reliability just to have a processor that's only better in name and for a few applications. Nonsense.
Accept it. x86 is not going to happen, nor should it happen. It would suck, period. The machines wouldn't become any cheaper, they wouldn't become any faster, and the battery life would be cut in half if not more. Bad bad ugly idea.
--Dan
Re:Hold those who host spammers responsible
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AOL Sues Spammers
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· Score: 1
This is definitely true. My former boss, who is a big friend of Alan Ralsky himself (one of my co-workers has actually had to deal with him personally) was thinking about moving all of his operaetions to Rackspace, because they don't honestly care.
My coworker tried to persuade the boss to go a route of 'well, if we have to spam, can we at least try not to get caught, or try not to burn our bridges,' in the hopes that when he finally left that hellhole, he could still have his calls to data centres returned afterwards.
In the end, the company had to move offices, and their ISP refused to relocate their connection without a signed statement that they would never again support spam, and also a $10,000 deposit, 'just in case'. Said company will probably go out of business if they have to compete on the basis of the quality of their products and services.
I was wondering just how common place Slashdot readers have found errata in the code examples of programming books they have purchased?
I'm not really the most commonplace of Slashdot users, but I usually find errata by looking on the book's website, or trying the code. I suspect the more common-place of slashdotters use the same strategy.
AOL is part of a large multinational conglomerate who, until losing more money in a year than actually existed at the time, were the largest whatever it was they were (I'm not too clear on what all they do).
Netscape is a corporation that created the first mass-market browser, the first (usable, but dumb) WYSIWYG editor, and completely beat Microsoft to the punch, before dying with a fizzle after coughing up the Mozilla project while AOL was tearing NS's throat out.
Mozilla was a flagship open-source application that the media started paying attention to as soon as it was announced. It took several years, but it now has what some would argue to be the rendering engine that has both the largest standards compliance support and the largest open-sourceness. Apple is working very hard to change this with their WebCore (KHTML) mods, but Mozilla's still the standard.
Opera made a decent browser and charged money for it. Until version 7, it didn't even properly support the CSS width: attribute on table cells, and was astonishingly broken in a myriad of other ways. Opera 7 works, it's fast, and it's reliable, and it looks good, but it's still one browser, and that's all it is. It's not a media conglomerate, it's not an internet pioneer, and it's not an open-source product that has given anything to the people. It's just a company that makes a browser that people use. Not very exciting to me personally, and a waste of a topic, since the only real content would be releases, which you can get at their website.
but my only problem with Matrix is that it borrows heavily from other sources of pop culture
It also borrows heavily from classical philosophy as well. The general idea parallels one of the ideas that Plato writes of in The Republic, namely the allegory of the cave.
I personally think the Matrix is cheese, it doesn't have a strong message, and is a little too melodramatic...
To put it briefly, what if a group of people lived in darkness, chained in a cave. What if they could only face forward, and all they could ever see is shadows ahead of them, shadows of people travelling by behind a wall. If they spent their whole lives like this, they would believe that the shadows were the people, they were the objects. What if, then, you 'liberated' someone from their chains, and took them outside? Showed them the real physical objects, not just the shadows? Socrates argues that he would be overwhelmed by this reality, but that he would eventually get used to it. If he returned to his friends in the cave, however, they would not believe him, could not believe him, unless they were shown for themselves.
Socrates uses this as an allegory of his own life, and of the struggles of philosophers - the cave-dwellers are the general populace, and Socrates is the one who returned to the populace with tales of 'reality' which they did not believe. The cost of his attempt to convince them was his own life.
Sound similar? Neo is the one who has seen shadows. 'It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes', blinding him from the reality that Morpheus showed him. Still, when he returns to the Matrix, he could not just tell everyone the truth, because no one would believe him. No one would accept the truth.
There is also another similarity to these two stories, and that is of Jesus from the Bible. The lives of Jesus and Socrates are remarkably parallel, with the crux of the difference being that Jesus rose again after death - as did Neo.
The Matrix actually has a lot of Christian themes, which go well with its being released on Easter weekend, which was no accident. Consider Neo - Greek for 'new', and an anagram for 'one'. Consider Thomas Anderson - a doubting Thomas (John 20:24-29) who does not accept the unreality of the Matrix, or the reality of his abilities and identity - and an Anderson (Swedish for 'Andrew's son' from the Greek root andr-, meaning 'man'), a 'son of man'. He's your saviour, man. Your own personal Jesus Christ.
Another one: Descartes' classic 'I think therefore I am'. To us, it's a cliched phrase, but consider what it meant when he originally concieved of the notion. In his time, mankind lived through the church, and existed by the grace of god. We humans were His creation, and owed our existance to him, we did not exist without His grace. Then Descartes, laying in bed until noon as he usually did, closed his eyes to disbelieve everything he could. He decided to try to disbelieve everything that he could not prove, and in the end, with his eyes closed, trying all though he might, the only thing he knew for sure was that he existed. He knew this, because if he didn't exist, then who was it that was so certain he existed? What made him him existed, his thoughts and feelings and memories, so therefore, he was himself, no matter what, and no one could take that away from him.
In The Matrix, humans are turned, as Morpheus points out, into batteries. Stuck in pods, the Matrix gives them a false reality, with false people and false lives, doing false actions in false places. In this dehumanizing state, nothing is real, so what is the value of anything? What is the value in not going on a killing spree? It doesn't matter, in the end, because it's all false, but no matter what you do, you are still you, and no one, not even the Mach
But, MAN, how can he take $2,000,000 from the US Gov't and still criticize them at the same time?
He can do this because he's not selling out. He's taking the money to help him do what he's been doing all along, because it benefits everyone. Just because someone pays you to do something (business) doesn't mean you can't dislike them (personal), it just means you can't let your bias determine how you react.
This shows me that De Raadt is mature enough to know the difference between business affairs and personal affairs, and doesn't let his (world) politics get in the way of doing what he thinks is right, and getting paid for it to boot.
No, you probably just aren't familiar with the shell. Many very good typists get very frustrated with UNIX because of the need to understand the shell.
I have chronic tendonitis and nerve damage in both arms... with documents, I run a spellchecker, print it out, mark it up, and have multiple chances to get it right. With a CLI, it either works, or it doesn't, or it does something I didn't intend for it to do if I happen to issue a command that is legal.
$ ls hello.h ebonics.h ebonics.o ebonics.c hello.c hello.o whatup* $ rm -rf *.o rm:.o: File not found $ ls $
Noam Chomsky has this to say on the issue, as relates to Iraq currently:
In the last few months, there has been a spectacular achievement of government-media propaganda, very visible in the polls. The international polls show that support for the war is higher in the United States than in other countries. That is, however, quite misleading, because if you look a little closer, you find that the United States is also different in another respect from the rest of the world. Since September 2002, the United States is the only country in the world where 60 per cent of the population believes that Iraq is an imminent threat - something that people do not believe even in Kuwait or Iran.
Furthermore, about 50 per cent of the population now believes that Iraq was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center. This has happened since September 2002. In fact, after the September 11 attack, the figure was about 3 per cent. Government-media propaganda has managed to raise that to about 50 per cent. Now if people genuinely believe that Iraq has carried out major terrorist attacks against the United States and is planning to do so again, well, in that case people will support the war.
This has happened, as I said, after September 2002. September 2002 is when the government-media campaign began and also when the mid-term election campaign began. The Bush Administration would have been smashed in the election if social and economic issues had been in the forefront, but it managed to suppress those issues in favor of security issues - and people huddle under the umbrella of power.
This is exactly the way the country was run in the 1980s. Remember that these are almost the same people as in the Reagan and the senior Bush Administrations. Right through the 1980s they carried out domestic policies that were harmful to the population and which, as we know from extensive polls, the people opposed. But they managed to maintain control by frightening the people. So the Nicaraguan Army was two days' march from Texas and about to conquer the United States, and the airbase in Granada was one from which the Russians would bomb us. It was one thing after another, every year, every one of them ludicrous. The Reagan Administration actually declared a national Emergency in 1985 because of the threat to the security of the United States posed by the Government of Nicaragua.
Re:OS X Finder Laundry List - Please add yours.
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A Better Finder?
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Renaming files: There is a delay in renaming that makes me crazy. I'll click on a file and it won't go into the rename unless I wait a moment and click again.
This is intentional. I don't know for sure about OS X, but in OS everythingelse, you could click on the name and then move the mouse, and it would go into rename mode immediately. Just a few pixels will do.
Labels: If you haven't blah blah...
Clearly, you've never discovered Unsanity Software's products. Their haxies are a must-have for any OS X user. Check it out.
The soldier firing would still have to rely on firing basics, breathing and trigger squeeze for instance
One of the things I was thinking about on the way home today was whether or not the thing would actually need a 'trigger' that you squeeze. Presumably, you could figure out a better method of doing it, such as a touch-sensitive pad (or two, preferably), so that when it (or they) are pressed (simultaneously) the gun fires. This would allow a very light touch, which would be keen for snipers especially. Added to this would be the possibility of using mirrors to 'bank' shots, etc, and to shoot someone while only providing a vague idea of direction (at the immediate time). With today's rifles, if I pop a guy in the chest from dead on, he's going to go backwards. If I shoot at a 45 degree angle, he's probably going to have a little spin imparted to him, and will probably fall in the direction of the bullet, etc. With lasers, unless it shot a hole clean through the guy, you wouldn't know immediately which direction the shot came from.
The main disadvantage I see is not that people wouldn't know you're laying down cover fire (when plants/grass/comrades start bursting into flame, you know to get down), but rather that laser weapons aren't really that hard to defend against. One quick and relatively effective method might be tinfoil, for example. Lasers are still light, and obey the properties inherant therein.
That being said, if it were powerful enough, there would be enough energy build-up on the tinfoil that it would melt eventually, and then you'd have a hole in the enemy's armor. In the meantime though, even if it only takes a second to form that hole, the soldier would only have to hit the ground to prevent that from becoming an issue.
Interesting idea. However, I don't trust the system not to just process whoever they can at whatever rate they can.
A Canadian citizen of Iranian birth was living in New York. It wasn't widely publicized (enough, apparantly), but all foreign nationals born in Muslim countries were required to register themselves at the police station for fingerprinting, etc, but wasn't sure that he had to, being Canadian, so he stopped in to ask them. Turns out he was two days past the deadline.
So they put him in shackles, threw him in lockup in San Diego, and treated him about as badly as they could get away with.
The one thing I've learned from stories lately is 'Don't trust American authorities'. After all, you too could be a terrorist without even knowing it.
The clone of Armillaria ostoyae--the tree-killing fungus that causes Armillaria root disease--covers an area of 9.65 square kilometres, about the size of 6000 hockey rinks or 1600 football fields.
Talk about frustrating. Hockey rinks? Football fields? I thought the standard unit of area was olympic-sized swimming pools now. Can journalists just not keep up?
GSM is a digital voice protocol with data services built on top of it. CDMA is a digital data protocol over which voice is one of the things you can send.
CDMA has a lot of things going over GSM, technically-wise, which I'm not going to bother to get into, because I haven't had several years of education in data encoding and communications so I can't speak with any great deal of force, but I do know that CDMA offers high-bandwidth, very reliable service (assuming the network is built properly), it's a newer protocol that builds upon the faults in GSM, TDMA, etc., and the method they use for encoding the data is just plain cool.
In the end, I vote CDMA, because other countries should consider upgrading (when GSM was the latest greatest thing, Europe locked themselves into it), and if I ever (read: when) go to Baghdad, I'd like to be able to use the phone I have now and just get subscription or roaming. It sucks that I can't do that anywhere else because the US and Canada are, amazingly, ahead of the cellular game for once.
This sounds like Microsoft's philosophy - bloat because we can afford to.
Not bloat at all. It's using a language with less optimized compilers, and they're only less optimized right now. That being said, unlike Microsoft's software, you're trading off for something - security, and, in large part, rapid development - Java lets me do some things faster than standard C does - strings don't need bounds checking, for example, in Java, but in C, I have to bounds check my code manually, or use another library. It's a fair tradeoff to me.
The game is pretty fun to play if it wouldn't crash all the time and reboot my system because my video card was a ATI Radeon 7200 and they can't make the game not crash on anything lesser then a 7500.
Runs fine on a 32 meg original Radeon DDR, and 32 meg Radeon All-in-Wonder.
Maybe your drivers, OS, or other hardware sucks, or it's a card-specific issue, but I've had no problems (except when it thought my installation was crax0red and quit every two minutes).
Slashdot Mirror
4) Canada benefits more than other countries from global warming
Canada doesn't benefit at all from global warming. I don't particularly want Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria underwater (from icecap melting due to heat increases), which doesn't matter, because the temperature isn't likely to increase much anyway.
If it does: we lose our most beautiful cities, and Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta get warmer. Like anyone cares. Hell, I lived there and I wouldn't care, it's a dry cold, it's entirely livable.
If it doesn't: well, then what's the point? Damage the environment, for what? A little extra profit margin the easy way?
If you're going to be/talk stupid or Albertan or whatever you are - and that's fine - please don't give away the fact that you're Canadian, you'll give us all a bad name. Most (halfway educated) Canadians don't want global warming under any circumstances.
--Dan
Wouldn't realtime by WHILE the scene is filmed
Well, it's hard to act and watch a monitor at the same time. Besides, the CGI they're doing in realtime is just a preview that they can overlay onto the video feed to see sort-of what it would look like.
That's why more people play Quake-style shooters than MOH:AA and Ghost Recon, because they see the movement physics as impairment, not realism
I dunno, I don't play Ghost Recon because my idiot characters take 15 minutes to walk up a hill, then suddenly all my guys die for no reason. I'm pretty sure they could make Ghost Recon: Saturday Afternoon where you go to a restaurant for lunch, and when you went to order your pie, you'd die for no reason. And since I get shot so often, I'd love for the physics of it all to show my corpse reacting as it gets riddled with bullets. It'd be the high point of my game.
--Dan
B. Using the hottest buzzword in computers today "Linux" - The platform Novell probably the most worried about losing it's customers to.
I don't know if this is necessarily the case. I've been working on developing a solution for a problem that I've been having - distributed logons - with Linux, and have so far come away delightfully unimpressed.
First, we installed Samba, and got that working as a PDC with our W2K machines. Then, we got it working together with roaming profiles. Ok, fine, but then we went to Samba-TNG so we could use an LDAP directory backend. That'd be great, if there were any decent LDAP HOWTOs for Linux. The ones that there are are horrid, and you have to assemble them all in your head to make any sense of it. Once that was done (with the poor LDAP browsers available), we tried to move other services to it, which is a nightmare. Most of the LDAP-authenticating software we have (proftpd-ldap, etc.) just plain breaks, or doesn't work, or 'works' but doesn't (fails silently), or a myriad of other things. Figuring out how to do any of this stuff in the first place was a nightmare, and then trying to figure out what's wrong without having to source-dive is just a waste of my time. Once I finally got PAM working with LDAP, we have the problem of it asks for passwords twice, instead of automatically falling back. PITA. Then, if we wanted other systems to authenticate, we'd have a whole new bag of worms.
People say Novell is a bitch to configure. They say it's hard to learn. Yeah, but you know what? There's ways to learn. There's documentation. There's manuals. There's courses. There's books. When it comes down to it, there's $150/hr freelance CNEs or the consultants that installed your network in the first place. When customers move to Linux and try to do anything that's great about Linux (i.e. assembling their own solution) they quickly find that it may be cheaper, and it may give you more of a sense of satisfaction, but when you have to manage an entire corporate network, you don't have time to migrate everyone to Linux just because 'it's cheaper'. It's not. For the price of my time as a Linux admin, setting all this up, testing it, re-testing it, making damn sure it's not going to blow up in my face, I would suggest a Novell solution, because I know that if I set it up properly, it's going to freaking work, and if it doesn't, I don't have to worry about my boss bringing the hounds of hell down on me, because there's a support contract.
Linux is only a challenger in small business, and Novell's offering their small business starter pack for free (contact your local CNS for details). Larger business will go for solutions that they don't have to worry about. You pay for some staff to get their certification, keep them up to date, and that's it. With Linux, you only have their word that they know what they're doing, and when things explode or you have to find someone else, they have to figure out what's going on, and when the system's a melange of PHP sites calling perl scripts to manage LDAP databases of user data for the patched daemons running on colocated servers, better men than I have threw in the towel on the first day. Businesses are finding this important point out: anyone can learn 'Linux' - you can train a kitten to play with the keyboard and administer a Linux system - but when it comes down to the crunch and you need to build your own system, unless you keep excellent, centralized, readable, updated documentation, you can't just hire some Linux admin off the street - you need the guy that worked there before, and hopefully he left on good terms.
Microsoft and Novell are not out there because they're corporate whores. They're not popular because they lock people in. They're not even popular because managers have heard of them. They're popular because if I'm Novell certified in the relevant products, I can walk into any Novell business and sit down and administer the network. It's consistant. It's coherant. It's easier to just get to work, because if you know it you know it. Until Linux gets this, it won't be popular.
--Dan
Back to OSX... No, I have not switched to "the dark side" yet. I am waiting for Apple to natively support x86, which shouldn't be too complicated considering that the software they used to build the operating system is relatively portable. I would be all over an x86 Apple iBook. It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.
Then you'll be waiting a long long time. Why on earth would Apple ever switch to x86? The power use is astronomical, the architecture is ungainly, ALL mac software would have to be ported (and believe me, that's no easy task), and it would lose all the hardware advantages it has - altivec, fast FPU instructions, the RISC-ish architecture.
Apple has the PPC970 coming out from IBM, which will be (relatively) low power, fast, support vector instructions, and run at a 900 MHz DDR bus, to name a few. Why on earth would they throw away speed, compatibility, and reliability just to have a processor that's only better in name and for a few applications. Nonsense.
Accept it. x86 is not going to happen, nor should it happen. It would suck, period. The machines wouldn't become any cheaper, they wouldn't become any faster, and the battery life would be cut in half if not more. Bad bad ugly idea.
--Dan
This is definitely true. My former boss, who is a big friend of Alan Ralsky himself (one of my co-workers has actually had to deal with him personally) was thinking about moving all of his operaetions to Rackspace, because they don't honestly care.
My coworker tried to persuade the boss to go a route of 'well, if we have to spam, can we at least try not to get caught, or try not to burn our bridges,' in the hopes that when he finally left that hellhole, he could still have his calls to data centres returned afterwards.
In the end, the company had to move offices, and their ISP refused to relocate their connection without a signed statement that they would never again support spam, and also a $10,000 deposit, 'just in case'. Said company will probably go out of business if they have to compete on the basis of the quality of their products and services.
--Dan
I was wondering just how common place Slashdot readers have found errata in the code examples of programming books they have purchased?
I'm not really the most commonplace of Slashdot users, but I usually find errata by looking on the book's website, or trying the code. I suspect the more common-place of slashdotters use the same strategy.
--Dan
Contrast this with Russian Ark. You really have to watch the trailer for an idea of its scale and majesty, but for those of you without Quicktime:
single
continuous
shot
--Dan
since CSS does not allow you to say "width=[400..800]" or something like that
You mean like the CSS min-width and max-width attributes?
--Dan
"The combination of alcohol and caffeine should be addictive as heroin but so far the sales haven't borne that out."
--Dan
AOL is part of a large multinational conglomerate who, until losing more money in a year than actually existed at the time, were the largest whatever it was they were (I'm not too clear on what all they do).
Netscape is a corporation that created the first mass-market browser, the first (usable, but dumb) WYSIWYG editor, and completely beat Microsoft to the punch, before dying with a fizzle after coughing up the Mozilla project while AOL was tearing NS's throat out.
Mozilla was a flagship open-source application that the media started paying attention to as soon as it was announced. It took several years, but it now has what some would argue to be the rendering engine that has both the largest standards compliance support and the largest open-sourceness. Apple is working very hard to change this with their WebCore (KHTML) mods, but Mozilla's still the standard.
Opera made a decent browser and charged money for it. Until version 7, it didn't even properly support the CSS width: attribute on table cells, and was astonishingly broken in a myriad of other ways. Opera 7 works, it's fast, and it's reliable, and it looks good, but it's still one browser, and that's all it is. It's not a media conglomerate, it's not an internet pioneer, and it's not an open-source product that has given anything to the people. It's just a company that makes a browser that people use. Not very exciting to me personally, and a waste of a topic, since the only real content would be releases, which you can get at their website.
--Dan
but my only problem with Matrix is that it borrows heavily from other sources of pop culture
It also borrows heavily from classical philosophy as well. The general idea parallels one of the ideas that Plato writes of in The Republic, namely the allegory of the cave.
I personally think the Matrix is cheese, it doesn't have a strong message, and is a little too melodramatic...
To put it briefly, what if a group of people lived in darkness, chained in a cave. What if they could only face forward, and all they could ever see is shadows ahead of them, shadows of people travelling by behind a wall. If they spent their whole lives like this, they would believe that the shadows were the people, they were the objects. What if, then, you 'liberated' someone from their chains, and took them outside? Showed them the real physical objects, not just the shadows? Socrates argues that he would be overwhelmed by this reality, but that he would eventually get used to it. If he returned to his friends in the cave, however, they would not believe him, could not believe him, unless they were shown for themselves.
Socrates uses this as an allegory of his own life, and of the struggles of philosophers - the cave-dwellers are the general populace, and Socrates is the one who returned to the populace with tales of 'reality' which they did not believe. The cost of his attempt to convince them was his own life.
Sound similar? Neo is the one who has seen shadows. 'It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes', blinding him from the reality that Morpheus showed him. Still, when he returns to the Matrix, he could not just tell everyone the truth, because no one would believe him. No one would accept the truth.
There is also another similarity to these two stories, and that is of Jesus from the Bible. The lives of Jesus and Socrates are remarkably parallel, with the crux of the difference being that Jesus rose again after death - as did Neo.
The Matrix actually has a lot of Christian themes, which go well with its being released on Easter weekend, which was no accident. Consider Neo - Greek for 'new', and an anagram for 'one'. Consider Thomas Anderson - a doubting Thomas (John 20:24-29) who does not accept the unreality of the Matrix, or the reality of his abilities and identity - and an Anderson (Swedish for 'Andrew's son' from the Greek root andr-, meaning 'man'), a 'son of man'. He's your saviour, man. Your own personal Jesus Christ.
Another one: Descartes' classic 'I think therefore I am'. To us, it's a cliched phrase, but consider what it meant when he originally concieved of the notion. In his time, mankind lived through the church, and existed by the grace of god. We humans were His creation, and owed our existance to him, we did not exist without His grace. Then Descartes, laying in bed until noon as he usually did, closed his eyes to disbelieve everything he could. He decided to try to disbelieve everything that he could not prove, and in the end, with his eyes closed, trying all though he might, the only thing he knew for sure was that he existed. He knew this, because if he didn't exist, then who was it that was so certain he existed? What made him him existed, his thoughts and feelings and memories, so therefore, he was himself, no matter what, and no one could take that away from him.
In The Matrix, humans are turned, as Morpheus points out, into batteries. Stuck in pods, the Matrix gives them a false reality, with false people and false lives, doing false actions in false places. In this dehumanizing state, nothing is real, so what is the value of anything? What is the value in not going on a killing spree? It doesn't matter, in the end, because it's all false, but no matter what you do, you are still you, and no one, not even the Mach
Need anything else?
Yeah, uh, could I get a copy of Windows XP Home, Unreal II, and Office XP? Oh, and 3D Studio Max, thanks.
Btw, I prefer keygen over crack. TIA!
--Dan
But, MAN, how can he take $2,000,000 from the US Gov't and still criticize them at the same time?
He can do this because he's not selling out. He's taking the money to help him do what he's been doing all along, because it benefits everyone. Just because someone pays you to do something (business) doesn't mean you can't dislike them (personal), it just means you can't let your bias determine how you react.
This shows me that De Raadt is mature enough to know the difference between business affairs and personal affairs, and doesn't let his (world) politics get in the way of doing what he thinks is right, and getting paid for it to boot.
--Dan
Google Posting
$ ls
hello.h ebonics.h ebonics.o ebonics.c hello.c hello.o whatup*
$ rm -rf *
rm:
$ ls
$
--Dan
From Indymedia.org.
--Dan
Renaming files: There is a delay in renaming that makes me crazy. I'll click on a file and it won't go into the rename unless I wait a moment and click again.
This is intentional. I don't know for sure about OS X, but in OS everythingelse, you could click on the name and then move the mouse, and it would go into rename mode immediately. Just a few pixels will do.
Labels: If you haven't blah blah...
Clearly, you've never discovered Unsanity Software's products. Their haxies are a must-have for any OS X user. Check it out.
--Dan
The soldier firing would still have to rely on firing basics, breathing and trigger squeeze for instance
One of the things I was thinking about on the way home today was whether or not the thing would actually need a 'trigger' that you squeeze. Presumably, you could figure out a better method of doing it, such as a touch-sensitive pad (or two, preferably), so that when it (or they) are pressed (simultaneously) the gun fires. This would allow a very light touch, which would be keen for snipers especially. Added to this would be the possibility of using mirrors to 'bank' shots, etc, and to shoot someone while only providing a vague idea of direction (at the immediate time). With today's rifles, if I pop a guy in the chest from dead on, he's going to go backwards. If I shoot at a 45 degree angle, he's probably going to have a little spin imparted to him, and will probably fall in the direction of the bullet, etc. With lasers, unless it shot a hole clean through the guy, you wouldn't know immediately which direction the shot came from.
The main disadvantage I see is not that people wouldn't know you're laying down cover fire (when plants/grass/comrades start bursting into flame, you know to get down), but rather that laser weapons aren't really that hard to defend against. One quick and relatively effective method might be tinfoil, for example. Lasers are still light, and obey the properties inherant therein.
That being said, if it were powerful enough, there would be enough energy build-up on the tinfoil that it would melt eventually, and then you'd have a hole in the enemy's armor. In the meantime though, even if it only takes a second to form that hole, the soldier would only have to hit the ground to prevent that from becoming an issue.
Things to think about.
--Dan
...Apple will be around for years to come, say journalists.
Interesting idea. However, I don't trust the system not to just process whoever they can at whatever rate they can.
A Canadian citizen of Iranian birth was living in New York. It wasn't widely publicized (enough, apparantly), but all foreign nationals born in Muslim countries were required to register themselves at the police station for fingerprinting, etc, but wasn't sure that he had to, being Canadian, so he stopped in to ask them. Turns out he was two days past the deadline.
So they put him in shackles, threw him in lockup in San Diego, and treated him about as badly as they could get away with.
The one thing I've learned from stories lately is 'Don't trust American authorities'. After all, you too could be a terrorist without even knowing it.
--Dan
You must be a thrill at parties. It was a joke. I'm Canadian, we use metric. Sheesh.
--Dan
From the article:
The clone of Armillaria ostoyae--the tree-killing fungus that causes Armillaria root disease--covers an area of 9.65 square kilometres, about the size of 6000 hockey rinks or 1600 football fields.
Talk about frustrating. Hockey rinks? Football fields? I thought the standard unit of area was olympic-sized swimming pools now. Can journalists just not keep up?
--Dan
GSM is a digital voice protocol with data services built on top of it. CDMA is a digital data protocol over which voice is one of the things you can send.
CDMA has a lot of things going over GSM, technically-wise, which I'm not going to bother to get into, because I haven't had several years of education in data encoding and communications so I can't speak with any great deal of force, but I do know that CDMA offers high-bandwidth, very reliable service (assuming the network is built properly), it's a newer protocol that builds upon the faults in GSM, TDMA, etc., and the method they use for encoding the data is just plain cool.
In the end, I vote CDMA, because other countries should consider upgrading (when GSM was the latest greatest thing, Europe locked themselves into it), and if I ever (read: when) go to Baghdad, I'd like to be able to use the phone I have now and just get subscription or roaming. It sucks that I can't do that anywhere else because the US and Canada are, amazingly, ahead of the cellular game for once.
--Dan
This sounds like Microsoft's philosophy - bloat because we can afford to.
Not bloat at all. It's using a language with less optimized compilers, and they're only less optimized right now. That being said, unlike Microsoft's software, you're trading off for something - security, and, in large part, rapid development - Java lets me do some things faster than standard C does - strings don't need bounds checking, for example, in Java, but in C, I have to bounds check my code manually, or use another library. It's a fair tradeoff to me.
--Dan
The game is pretty fun to play if it wouldn't crash all the time and reboot my system because my video card was a ATI Radeon 7200 and they can't make the game not crash on anything lesser then a 7500.
Runs fine on a 32 meg original Radeon DDR, and 32 meg Radeon All-in-Wonder.
Maybe your drivers, OS, or other hardware sucks, or it's a card-specific issue, but I've had no problems (except when it thought my installation was crax0red and quit every two minutes).
--Dan