Personally I'd prefer a cleaned up version of that mess to a single window mode... but single window mode is something a lot of people want, so it's good to see it finally taking shape.
I actually prefer the floating windows (in all applications, not just gimp) although I find gimp makes them fairly unintuitive. I have several (6) monitors, and being able to spread stuff out is nice. Not sure why people have this desire to have everything crowded in one window, I mean, I get that photoshop does it that way and can see why people looking for a photoshop replacement would want this... but the preference for single window over floating window appears to be moving through all applications.
It takes getting used to and the interface definitely lacks a certain amount of polish (I like the floating window mode as I have several monitors... but I find it's management very unintuitive).
It's great for people like me... who don't do enough graphics work to justify photoshop, but don't want the open source equivilant of MS paint either. It's no photoshop, but it can do plenty once you figure out how it all works.
I'm actually curious what the effect would be, as I assume no effort is made to ground the wrap. Would it act as a shield.. or just a large antenna.
Paranoia aside, I think we actually could do with a little less RF. If this stuff just incidently provides a shield agaisnt the insane amount of random RF that we get blasted with day to day, I don't see the harm. If you want wifi outside your house, get an external antenna!
I also wonder if shielding the outside of your house would improve reception inside.
From my experience building a hobby oil cooled pc.. I can imagine oil doing a much better job.
Oil has a much greater heat capacity over air. What this translates to is the oil takes a _long_ time to heat up. In my 21 gallon rig, with no cooling or circulation... the oil just sitting still takes several hours to heat up to a dangerous temperature. Try turning off your PC fans and see how long the box lasts!
The inverse is of course true as well.. once it heats up.. it stays hot for just as long.
If you had an efficient way of keeping that oil cool and flowing at a decent rate... I can imagine this working quite well.
For the curious, my oil rig worked great until the HSF popped off the processor one day (probably a combination of weird forces on the (very large) heat sink and maybe a cheat retention clip)... then it didn't.:(
This is why I like scotch bonnets over habaneros. They both have the same heat, but I find scotch bonnets impart a nicer flavour.
I'd also note that tolorance drops quite quickly too! I had to stop eating excessively spicy food for a few months (for reasons unrelated to the food).. and I couldn't even make it through the supermarket "spicy" chili that I used to jokingly scoff at for a while afterwards.
Eating spicy food just shy of the "it tastes like pain" line is quite enjoyable. Just enough pain to release those endorphins, which have a mellow, relaxing effect.
Eating excessively spicy foods to the point where you can barely choke it down and keep a straight face... yeah.. that's for the macho types. Have to admit, I'm curious what this thing would be like. I've tried the Naga peppers.. grown locally so probably not the full deal.. but definitely wasn't especially pleasurable (not as bad as I envisioned though).
My current pain/pleasure line falls at scotch bonnets... and that tends to be chopped up and cooked into something. Beyond that... I'm not enjoying it.
I suspect he did plan on fighting it to a certain extent, but then backed off when his lawyer told him Sony was figuratively (and perhaps literallly) going to remove his testicles and serve them to him for lunch. I mean, going against a company like Sony, you'd have to expect it... but when it's actually happening the reality of the situation might be a bit more than expected. As said in my original post, in the same situation I would totally sell out at the first chance... but I'd never get myself into this kind of situation either.
I still think they guy is an ass though! And maybe with this injunction we'll stop hearing about him every other week!
I just don't like the guy! I think he's an attention seeking egomaniac who brought most of his misfortune on himself and has milked the fame of his case for every damn penny (ok, I don't blame him for that at all..) to the point where it _almost_ seems planned.
Ok, probably not fair, but from my view it parallels the whole "guy I don't like fighting a cause I believe in" type situation that geohot would have been in. At least Kevin Mitnick really did suffer in prison for a while.
Much as I think this battle needs to be fought geohot is an attention seeking ass, and it’s a shame he was the one who was slated fight it.
I think it’s actually a blessing in disguise that he decided to save his own skin. Not saying I wouldn’t do the same, I’ll admit it, when it comes to me or the greater good I’ll go with me and screw everyone else. However there are lots of noble idealists types who would fight themselves in prison and then keep at it and that’s who needs to be fighting this thing, not some annoying jackass.
As for donations wasn’t the plan for unused (so in this case, most of it) money to go to the EFF.
And just cause I’m already pseudo flamewar-ing, we really don’t need another Kevin Mitnick in the world.
Given the choice of being evacuated and being dead... I think I'd take evacuation.
I mean, that's a personal decision... but I think given the choice most people value being alive vice being able to inhabit a specific area.
Then again, I'm Canadian... we have lots of room. Hell, you could take out an area the size of japan, and people could probably relocate without too much difficulty. Losing a big chunk of land in Japan is probably a considerably bigger deal.
And if you replaced all of the coal-fired power plants around the world with nuclear, how many accidents do you think we would be having annually?
This is why stats are given in relation to energy generated. Even conservative estimates have coal's power to death ratio _way_ higher than nuclear. Adding more power plants shouldn't change the rough percentage.
Truth is, nuclear accidents are just way more dramatic... toxins and CO emissions from coal, not to mention mining accidents just don't make headlines the way "OMG NUCLEAR MELTDOWN" does. Even by conservative estimate, coal kills more people under ordinary circumstances than the disaster in Japan will.
And I agree nuclear isn't ideal either... but we need _something_... and solar/wind/geothermal just isn't gonna happen yet.
I'd also add (for some more pro-nuclear wanking) that considering what it took to actually cause the disaster in japan, that I too would rather see a new nuclear plant go up in my neighbourhood vice a coal or oil plant.
Nuclear accidents are a lot like train derailments and airplane crashes.
Statistically, air and train (and nuclear) are very safe but when something goes wrong, it’s very dramatic. Even looking at very conservative statistics for death vs power generated, coal is much, much worse it just kills people at a slow, steady rate such that it seems normal and doesn't get headlines.
I think schools need to go heavy into _both_ approaches.
There is a lot of cool software for doing math, some of which enables you to do stuff wildly out of scope of pencil and paper... it should be taught rather than trying to pretend it doesn't exist.
But you also need the "you and your brain" stuff... that is, nothing but pencil and paper.
I don't see why schools try to find a middle ground... they should do both in a relatively separate manner.
Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?
Cause the large portion of students are untrustable cheating bastards? Ok, a little bit of hyperbole, but that really is the reason. In addition to web browsing, you could also load equation solvers and all manner of tools to enable one to cheat their way through math. The old way overpriced graphing calculators can be wiped before a test, and offer the right mixture of functionality and cripple that schools want.
The price I think is just a function of having a captive consumer base. They charge as much for something that should cost so very little because the people who need it are going to buy it.
And yes, I'm sure the ol` "in real life I'd google the answer anyway" point is going to come up, and while I agree for most traditional memorize and regurgitate type courses, I still think math should be tough with a reasonable distance from crutches, while at the same time not trying to pretend they don't exist either. Show them matlab, but make `em work it out on paper on the test.
Possibly because it's a file system level encryption tool vice a full disk encryption tool. Then again, they included cryptsetup which is just a userspace utility for dm-crypt, so I'd chalk this up to just being a lame article!
But yeah, truecrypt and dmcrypt are all people really need to know about. They both do mostly the same thing with slight variation, which people choose is down to preference.
LoopAES is outdated, cryptsetup is a userspace tool linked to dm-crypt, and the other is specialized.
Scarily I've actually seen efficiency in both types of large organization.
The key is kind of what I've mentioned in my original post. You need to have a process in place for "small stuff" and the ability to get it going without too much overhead. Private companies seem better at this because they are tighter with their money, and anything that sounds like it will cost less generally finds some success if the right people are pitching the idea. Government is historically (and somewhat necessarily) riddled with process, but I think this "small, agile (required buzzword) teams to handle smaller projects" mentality is making headway due to a somewhat proven record of being cheaper.
You still need the big team(s) for the big stuff... but I think there is going to be a trend towards having additional smaller teams less burdened with process to deal with smaller tasks.
I can actually see how this happens. Large organizations spending millions and taking years to do something a small team could whip up (and probably do a better job of) in a few months.
Different team sizes are required for different tasks. Some companies get this and put small teams together and have flexible processes that can scale to project size. Other companies can only do things one way, and that’s where you end up with insanity such as this.
You end up with layers and layers of process controlling huge unwieldy teams. You spend months just drafting the process by which you’ll operate under, and then it needs to be reviewed and this is before development even begins! You end up with 5 layers of management, each providing no real value to anything... but adding lots of time and cost.
You’ll need to gather metrics of course, so you need to figure out what metrics you need, and how you will analyse them, and how they will feed back into the dev process. And of course you’ll need someone to actually facilitate all this with some kind of metric crunching tool (which has to be bought and admined as well).
Id also add that google's "internet through the sewer thing" back in "the day" actually got me. This is the kind of good April fools joke. On the surface it seemed plausible. I actually started going: "hey, that kinda makes sense.. " before I caught on.
The "zomg Microsoft is using the linux kernel in the next release of windows and is decomissioning internet explorer in favour of google chrome" type stories have no humor value to me. Even less so when, as you said, they just come as a constant stream.
They really need to intersperse real stories in with the lame April fools ones, and make at least some of the April fools ones plausible.
It would draw in the crowd of people who mostly ignore Slashdot once the April fools stuff starts up and might add a bit more humour to the April fools stories as people wouldn’t immediately assume they were jokes.
People might have to think about whether the articles are plausible. You’d need to have an extra line that _clearly_ makes it an obvious joke in the actual comments page or something, to prevent the inevitable fake story that everyone believes.
Isn't reading slashdot in general "clowning and goofing off". Unless you can justify "staying up to date on the world of technology" as part of your job, which I think most of could kinda do, but would just get told to get back to work!.
I do agree with the sentiment though. I wish they'd at least intersparse some real stuff (it may even add to the humour of the fake stuff).
I actually think solar is the future. And future really is the key word.
The technology is still evolving.. slowly. Right now it’s impractical on the large scale, but there appears to be enough drive behind it to keep research going until it is. One day I think it will be able to meet demand _and_ be cost effective but it’s still in its’ relative infancy. Stuff doesn't happen on the large scale because it's the right thing to do. It happens when it becomes the cheapest thing to do. We see this in all technology.
When an electric car goes further than a gas powered car, costs less, and needs less maintenence... _thats_ when they'll take off. Some hippy types will convince themselves and others that it's a smart move to go electric now... but people won't do it en-masse until it actually makes sense. This is fine, you need early adopters.. but they always end up getting screwed in the end. The people who paid for solar panels now and won't see it pay back for 15 years... they are necessary, but will be bitter when the technology evolves and the cost plummets.
Wind can work now, but wind seems to have problems. It can only be built in specific areas, takes up land, creates noise that a certain chunk of the population is bothered by, etc. The nice thing about solar is it can go just about anywhere. On top of buildings, in large fields, theoretically the ocean if there was any reason to.
And for the record, I’m no hippy! My power comes from an embarrassingly dirty coal plant and I have several computers (including an energy hungry file server) running around the clock.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I'd prefer a cleaned up version of that mess to a single window mode... but single window mode is something a lot of people want, so it's good to see it finally taking shape.
And what's wrong with the name!
I actually prefer the floating windows (in all applications, not just gimp) although I find gimp makes them fairly unintuitive. I have several (6) monitors, and being able to spread stuff out is nice. Not sure why people have this desire to have everything crowded in one window, I mean, I get that photoshop does it that way and can see why people looking for a photoshop replacement would want this... but the preference for single window over floating window appears to be moving through all applications.
When did floating windows become a bad thing :(
It takes getting used to and the interface definitely lacks a certain amount of polish (I like the floating window mode as I have several monitors... but I find it's management very unintuitive).
It's great for people like me... who don't do enough graphics work to justify photoshop, but don't want the open source equivilant of MS paint either. It's no photoshop, but it can do plenty once you figure out how it all works.
This is nothing that can't be solved with a few repaters.
Or some wires!
Ok, I get that for laptops wifi makes sense .. but if it's a desktop... wire that up!
And if your gonna run some wires, for the love of the great fire cactus, put some conduit in place and leave a permanent wire pull!
I'm actually curious what the effect would be, as I assume no effort is made to ground the wrap. Would it act as a shield.. or just a large antenna.
Paranoia aside, I think we actually could do with a little less RF. If this stuff just incidently provides a shield agaisnt the insane amount of random RF that we get blasted with day to day, I don't see the harm. If you want wifi outside your house, get an external antenna!
I also wonder if shielding the outside of your house would improve reception inside.
From my experience building a hobby oil cooled pc .. I can imagine oil doing a much better job.
Oil has a much greater heat capacity over air. What this translates to is the oil takes a _long_ time to heat up. In my 21 gallon rig, with no cooling or circulation... the oil just sitting still takes several hours to heat up to a dangerous temperature. Try turning off your PC fans and see how long the box lasts!
The inverse is of course true as well.. once it heats up.. it stays hot for just as long.
If you had an efficient way of keeping that oil cool and flowing at a decent rate... I can imagine this working quite well.
For the curious, my oil rig worked great until the HSF popped off the processor one day (probably a combination of weird forces on the (very large) heat sink and maybe a cheat retention clip)... then it didn't. :(
Agreed.
This is why I like scotch bonnets over habaneros. They both have the same heat, but I find scotch bonnets impart a nicer flavour.
I'd also note that tolorance drops quite quickly too! I had to stop eating excessively spicy food for a few months (for reasons unrelated to the food) .. and I couldn't even make it through the supermarket "spicy" chili that I used to jokingly scoff at for a while afterwards.
Eating spicy food just shy of the "it tastes like pain" line is quite enjoyable. Just enough pain to release those endorphins, which have a mellow, relaxing effect.
Eating excessively spicy foods to the point where you can barely choke it down and keep a straight face... yeah.. that's for the macho types. Have to admit, I'm curious what this thing would be like. I've tried the Naga peppers.. grown locally so probably not the full deal.. but definitely wasn't especially pleasurable (not as bad as I envisioned though).
My current pain/pleasure line falls at scotch bonnets... and that tends to be chopped up and cooked into something. Beyond that... I'm not enjoying it.
I suspect he did plan on fighting it to a certain extent, but then backed off when his lawyer told him Sony was figuratively (and perhaps literallly) going to remove his testicles and serve them to him for lunch. I mean, going against a company like Sony, you'd have to expect it... but when it's actually happening the reality of the situation might be a bit more than expected. As said in my original post, in the same situation I would totally sell out at the first chance... but I'd never get myself into this kind of situation either.
I still think they guy is an ass though! And maybe with this injunction we'll stop hearing about him every other week!
I just don't like the guy! I think he's an attention seeking egomaniac who brought most of his misfortune on himself and has milked the fame of his case for every damn penny (ok, I don't blame him for that at all..) to the point where it _almost_ seems planned.
Ok, probably not fair, but from my view it parallels the whole "guy I don't like fighting a cause I believe in" type situation that geohot would have been in. At least Kevin Mitnick really did suffer in prison for a while.
Much as I think this battle needs to be fought geohot is an attention seeking ass, and it’s a shame he was the one who was slated fight it.
I think it’s actually a blessing in disguise that he decided to save his own skin. Not saying I wouldn’t do the same, I’ll admit it, when it comes to me or the greater good I’ll go with me and screw everyone else. However there are lots of noble idealists types who would fight themselves in prison and then keep at it and that’s who needs to be fighting this thing, not some annoying jackass.
As for donations wasn’t the plan for unused (so in this case, most of it) money to go to the EFF.
And just cause I’m already pseudo flamewar-ing, we really don’t need another Kevin Mitnick in the world.
Given the choice of being evacuated and being dead... I think I'd take evacuation.
I mean, that's a personal decision... but I think given the choice most people value being alive vice being able to inhabit a specific area.
Then again, I'm Canadian... we have lots of room. Hell, you could take out an area the size of japan, and people could probably relocate without too much difficulty. Losing a big chunk of land in Japan is probably a considerably bigger deal.
A coal plant doesn't make large areas of land uninhabitable for decades
It just makes the entire world slightly less inhabitable little by little.
Obviously neither is really desirable .. it's kind of depressing really.
And if you replaced all of the coal-fired power plants around the world with nuclear, how many accidents do you think we would be having annually?
This is why stats are given in relation to energy generated. Even conservative estimates have coal's power to death ratio _way_ higher than nuclear. Adding more power plants shouldn't change the rough percentage.
Truth is, nuclear accidents are just way more dramatic ... toxins and CO emissions from coal, not to mention mining accidents just don't make headlines the way "OMG NUCLEAR MELTDOWN" does. Even by conservative estimate, coal kills more people under ordinary circumstances than the disaster in Japan will.
And I agree nuclear isn't ideal either... but we need _something_ ... and solar/wind/geothermal just isn't gonna happen yet.
I'd also add (for some more pro-nuclear wanking) that considering what it took to actually cause the disaster in japan, that I too would rather see a new nuclear plant go up in my neighbourhood vice a coal or oil plant.
Nuclear accidents are a lot like train derailments and airplane crashes.
Statistically, air and train (and nuclear) are very safe but when something goes wrong, it’s very dramatic. Even looking at very conservative statistics for death vs power generated, coal is much, much worse it just kills people at a slow, steady rate such that it seems normal and doesn't get headlines.
I think schools need to go heavy into _both_ approaches.
There is a lot of cool software for doing math, some of which enables you to do stuff wildly out of scope of pencil and paper... it should be taught rather than trying to pretend it doesn't exist.
But you also need the "you and your brain" stuff... that is, nothing but pencil and paper.
I don't see why schools try to find a middle ground... they should do both in a relatively separate manner.
Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?
Cause the large portion of students are untrustable cheating bastards? Ok, a little bit of hyperbole, but that really is the reason. In addition to web browsing, you could also load equation solvers and all manner of tools to enable one to cheat their way through math. The old way overpriced graphing calculators can be wiped before a test, and offer the right mixture of functionality and cripple that schools want.
The price I think is just a function of having a captive consumer base. They charge as much for something that should cost so very little because the people who need it are going to buy it.
And yes, I'm sure the ol` "in real life I'd google the answer anyway" point is going to come up, and while I agree for most traditional memorize and regurgitate type courses, I still think math should be tough with a reasonable distance from crutches, while at the same time not trying to pretend they don't exist either. Show them matlab, but make `em work it out on paper on the test.
Possibly because it's a file system level encryption tool vice a full disk encryption tool. Then again, they included cryptsetup which is just a userspace utility for dm-crypt, so I'd chalk this up to just being a lame article!
dmcrypt for me!
But yeah, truecrypt and dmcrypt are all people really need to know about. They both do mostly the same thing with slight variation, which people choose is down to preference.
LoopAES is outdated, cryptsetup is a userspace tool linked to dm-crypt, and the other is specialized.
Pretty lame article.
Scarily I've actually seen efficiency in both types of large organization.
The key is kind of what I've mentioned in my original post. You need to have a process in place for "small stuff" and the ability to get it going without too much overhead. Private companies seem better at this because they are tighter with their money, and anything that sounds like it will cost less generally finds some success if the right people are pitching the idea. Government is historically (and somewhat necessarily) riddled with process, but I think this "small, agile (required buzzword) teams to handle smaller projects" mentality is making headway due to a somewhat proven record of being cheaper.
You still need the big team(s) for the big stuff... but I think there is going to be a trend towards having additional smaller teams less burdened with process to deal with smaller tasks.
I can actually see how this happens. Large organizations spending millions and taking years to do something a small team could whip up (and probably do a better job of) in a few months.
Different team sizes are required for different tasks. Some companies get this and put small teams together and have flexible processes that can scale to project size. Other companies can only do things one way, and that’s where you end up with insanity such as this.
You end up with layers and layers of process controlling huge unwieldy teams. You spend months just drafting the process by which you’ll operate under, and then it needs to be reviewed and this is before development even begins! You end up with 5 layers of management, each providing no real value to anything... but adding lots of time and cost.
You’ll need to gather metrics of course, so you need to figure out what metrics you need, and how you will analyse them, and how they will feed back into the dev process. And of course you’ll need someone to actually facilitate all this with some kind of metric crunching tool (which has to be bought and admined as well).
Id also add that google's "internet through the sewer thing" back in "the day" actually got me. This is the kind of good April fools joke. On the surface it seemed plausible. I actually started going: "hey, that kinda makes sense.. " before I caught on.
The "zomg Microsoft is using the linux kernel in the next release of windows and is decomissioning internet explorer in favour of google chrome" type stories have no humor value to me. Even less so when, as you said, they just come as a constant stream.
Indeed. This falls flat big time.
They really need to intersperse real stories in with the lame April fools ones, and make at least some of the April fools ones plausible.
It would draw in the crowd of people who mostly ignore Slashdot once the April fools stuff starts up and might add a bit more humour to the April fools stories as people wouldn’t immediately assume they were jokes.
People might have to think about whether the articles are plausible. You’d need to have an extra line that _clearly_ makes it an obvious joke in the actual comments page or something, to prevent the inevitable fake story that everyone believes.
Isn't reading slashdot in general "clowning and goofing off". Unless you can justify "staying up to date on the world of technology" as part of your job, which I think most of could kinda do, but would just get told to get back to work!.
I do agree with the sentiment though. I wish they'd at least intersparse some real stuff (it may even add to the humour of the fake stuff).
I actually think solar is the future. And future really is the key word.
The technology is still evolving.. slowly. Right now it’s impractical on the large scale, but there appears to be enough drive behind it to keep research going until it is. One day I think it will be able to meet demand _and_ be cost effective but it’s still in its’ relative infancy. Stuff doesn't happen on the large scale because it's the right thing to do. It happens when it becomes the cheapest thing to do. We see this in all technology.
When an electric car goes further than a gas powered car, costs less, and needs less maintenence ... _thats_ when they'll take off. Some hippy types will convince themselves and others that it's a smart move to go electric now... but people won't do it en-masse until it actually makes sense. This is fine, you need early adopters.. but they always end up getting screwed in the end. The people who paid for solar panels now and won't see it pay back for 15 years... they are necessary, but will be bitter when the technology evolves and the cost plummets.
Wind can work now, but wind seems to have problems. It can only be built in specific areas, takes up land, creates noise that a certain chunk of the population is bothered by, etc. The nice thing about solar is it can go just about anywhere. On top of buildings, in large fields, theoretically the ocean if there was any reason to.
And for the record, I’m no hippy! My power comes from an embarrassingly dirty coal plant and I have several computers (including an energy hungry file server) running around the clock.