Wasn't the "leaked code" just connected to a certain Service Pack to one variety of Windows? If so, was it even the full source to each patched executable (such as EXPLORER.EXE or KRNL32.EXE)?
I would be very happy if camera vendors and review sites started prominently listing sensor surface area as prominent figure of merit.
One, any camera supporting EXIF will likely include sensor dimension information in every photograph. Two, looking at the stats listed on www.dpreview.com, this sort of information is readily accessible. Just because c|net doesn't list it for the point'n'shop consumers, doesn't mean you can't make YOUR purchasing decision with that information.
You never owned a spring-loaded toy car? You back it up a few inches, and it drives forward more than a yard, until it disappears under your refrigerator. The spring stores the energy of your ARM, not the potential INCHES which you rolled it backward.
Cynical comment of the day. The FBI doesn't catch terrorists. When they DO find terrorists, they box them in until they shoot themselves, or they get a sniper to shoot their families instead.
The scientists quoted on NPR said that the all-maternal mice were created by a similar process but they were not sure that it would actually fall into the definition of Parthenogenesis. They did not just activate the cells to spur them into self-subdivision. They basically cultivated the proteins or hormones to make them more "male-like," I suppose so that the cells would do the activation (fertilization) themselves. They said that the overall chemistry isn't so black-and-white, male-and-female, but that the scientists could get the cells to fulfill the male and female requirements for fertilization without actually having the male genetic component present.
Okay, maybe YOU scratch your CDs way too quickly. My mom raised me on vinyl as a kid, so maybe I handle media a lot more carefully. That is, I *respect* something I would find inconvenient to replace.
If scratches are your problem, but you like the formfactor of CDs, consider trunk-mount or behind-seat-mount jukeboxes. Load them into the cartridges when you're at your desk, not stopped at a green light at Fifth & Main with angry commuters behind you.
whereas Slashdot tries to pass it's rumormongering and hearsay off as real reporting
Slashdot is schizophrenic with regard to their opinion and support for "real reporting." Some editors bend over backward to say full-disclosure things like "OSDN is the parent of Slashdot and " while others publically and vehemently refuse to improve the site for accuracy and basic professionalism.
Duplicate stories, poor grammar, weak disclosure, no appearance of impartiality, no proactive rebuttal, and other factors just show that the parent company likes the ad revenue but doesn't care about the rest. The editors are not editors at all, it's a kid's club blog which happens to have a huge readership.
Only you and Alanis have been able to torture the word 'ironic' quite that far. Freedom is only guaranteed by the creation and adherence to the laws of the land.
Re:It's so obvious it should be Gary Oldman..
on
Kernel 2.4.26 Out
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· Score: 1
The argument is usually phrased as "Convenience vs Security." They can be seen as being opposed. That's not quite the same as "Usability vs Vulnerability" but that's the direction your friends' arguments were pointing.
I'm not sure that it always holds true that you have a single gradient between Convenience and Security. You can have elements of both, and it's not just a fractional position between two extremes.
For example, the 'root' problem is that root or Administrator can do anything on the system, so cracker types will focus their attention on the major prize. The alternative would be to spread rights and responsibilities into fine-grained accounts like "backup" and "network" and "installer" and other capabilities. An attacker has to work harder, but the machine's owner does too.
However, that doesn't mean that you're going to have to allow web browsers and email clients to execute unknown privileged code. Many of Microsoft's engineers in the 90s had no concept of trust and privilege, and it showed. Those few who understood the implications couldn't drive the rest of the overwhelmingly "convenience-driven" corporate culture to really care about the down-sides to an all-root-all-the-time lack of security. Now that Microsoft knows the implications, their inertia has them at a strict disadvantage: they must change, and in so changing, they break their #1 asset: long-term backwards compatibility.
Microsoft doesn't have a competeing language to C, doesn't want control of C, and basically doesn't give two shits about C.
Sure, tell that to Philippe "the Barbarian" Khan, formerly of Borland. I'm sure he'll agree that Microsoft left the entire C and C++ toolchain market to them all through the 80s and early 90s.
As soon as I saw the headline to this news item, I was reminded of the interview with the "genious" in the Princess Bride. With the double-psychology and the hired kidnapping plot to begin with. Pretty much every line of that scene could apply, or is in danger of having a geeky rewrite.
I discovered this when I was looking into home racks a few years ago. The plastic portable audio gig racks looked good for what I wanted, but the computer would have to stick out the back. The computing half-racks were way heavier and far more expensive. The only benefit the computing half-rack had besides the measurements was slightly better ventilation design.
Perl, SDL, OpenGL, Festival, kids...
on
A Babe in Tuxland
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· Score: 3, Informative
In the evenings where I'm not busy, I've been writing my own Linux application for edutainment purposes. I call it Toy::World. My daughter is now four years old, and just the other day I created a new account on one home Linux machine for her to use.
Perl A kid's application should be like clay, changing it on a whim to try new things quickly.
SDL This Perl module provides scripted access to the SDL (Simple Direct-media Layer) libraries. Hopefully, this whole thing will be mostly portable to Windows.
OpenGL When the graphics are simple, and hardware assisted, a scripting language like Perl starts making more sense. The actual application logic doesn't need a lot of horsepower.
Festival I pipe many text messages off to Festival, since young kids aren't going to be able to read a prompt like "How many apples do you see?" I wish the TTS community had better packaging for alternative voices like MBROLA's extensions... I've yet to get anything but three pure Festival voices working.
OpenDE I want to develop Perl bindings to the Open Dynamics Engine, letting the on-screen toys "fall" and "bounce" and interact realistically. It looks very promising, but I'll save that work for later.
Toy::World My library consists of about 3000 lines so far, not counting the docs and auxilliary helper routines. I'm working to make extensions as simple and flexible as possible, so the curriculum can grow quickly and spontaneously.
Toy::World will be able to handle basic lessons and drills at first, such as counting and adding, letter and shape identification. I want to start building on those ideas into the usual early-childhood skills of understanding money, subtraction, words, matching, memory skills, and animal identification.
I've yet to work out the basic reward system, but I'm thinking of a sort of token-winning, token-spending theme, where you can play certain lessons to win on-screen coin tokens Mario-style, and some lessons may require spending those same tokens (or Mom can check out the totals for a few real-world benefits).
With a lot more work, I want to get into more hands-on experimentation. Simulated water-pouring, block-stacking, multiplication drills, cause/effect lessons, and even networked "shared toys" simulations involving small groups of children.
By that time I hope to have opened the project to community help. Contact me if you're interested.
If the links provided are actually on-topic, this isn't a bad thing. Mention stock annuities and get pointed to the stock annuities definition on Charles Schwab's site.
But we all know that it's not going to be like that. Someone's going to use the word 'prevention' when discussing Enron finances, and the link will jump to the site of Trojan prophylactics.
The best we can hope for is a few really badly conceived links, or news stories which start to look like an Everything2 node with fifty links per paragraph, so that this form of ad will fade away, too.
You can't really break a rule unless you know it's a rule.
We see the world through cultural and physiological biases, and those ever-changing biases have been studied for millenia by artist-scientist types. These teachings are employed by artist-engineer types to express a message as effectively as possible.
For example, to add tension, you can use angular shapes, discordant color combinations, and uneven spacing. If tension is useful to your artistic message, use them. If tension is antithetical to your message, then don't use them.
If you don't learn what these "rules" are, then you'll be stuck with the scattershot or monte carlo approach at communication. Sometimes effective, sometimes not effective, and sometimes counter-productive.
Your jab about being born on April 1st has a ring of history to it. The whole origin of April Fools' Day, or All Fools' Day, is the change of the Christian calendar to appoint 1 January as new years, instead of the longstanding 1 April. Those who continued the practice of celebrating the new year three months later were the fools.
Choice is fine for larger and more personal things, such as a few styles for laying out your information, or whether you want cargo space or sport performance out of your vehicle.
Choice becomes a barrier to entry when you can't stick to a consistent set of basic interface standards, such as what the right mouse button should do to most visual elements, and where the turn signals and brake petals are positioned.
Well I wish Slashdot would append [&partner=] to the links by default.
When YOU abuse their lax partner system, the NYT isn't going to waste their time. When a company, OSDN, or its officers abuse their lax partner system, it is (1) a potential legal liability on the part of OSDN, and (2) going to make NYT change their whole system, probably for the worse.
Re:This sounds like a good time for you
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
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· Score: 1
I'd like to see a post on/. where it didn't degenerate into the "this or that is better" arguements but where Gimp users shared their tips and tricks more.
Slashdot Mirror
The site religioustolerance.org has a good debunking page on D&D specifically.
Wasn't the "leaked code" just connected to a certain Service Pack to one variety of Windows? If so, was it even the full source to each patched executable (such as EXPLORER.EXE or KRNL32.EXE)?
I would be very happy if camera vendors and review sites started prominently listing sensor surface area as prominent figure of merit.
One, any camera supporting EXIF will likely include sensor dimension information in every photograph. Two, looking at the stats listed on www.dpreview.com, this sort of information is readily accessible. Just because c|net doesn't list it for the point'n'shop consumers, doesn't mean you can't make YOUR purchasing decision with that information.
Can't go any further than you wind it...
You never owned a spring-loaded toy car? You back it up a few inches, and it drives forward more than a yard, until it disappears under your refrigerator. The spring stores the energy of your ARM, not the potential INCHES which you rolled it backward.
but I forget which one of them said that, when and where.
The whole 70's has a similar ring to it.
I'll see your schadenfreude and karma, and raise you ennui.
Cynical comment of the day. The FBI doesn't catch terrorists. When they DO find terrorists, they box them in until they shoot themselves, or they get a sniper to shoot their families instead.
The scientists quoted on NPR said that the all-maternal mice were created by a similar process but they were not sure that it would actually fall into the definition of Parthenogenesis. They did not just activate the cells to spur them into self-subdivision. They basically cultivated the proteins or hormones to make them more "male-like," I suppose so that the cells would do the activation (fertilization) themselves. They said that the overall chemistry isn't so black-and-white, male-and-female, but that the scientists could get the cells to fulfill the male and female requirements for fertilization without actually having the male genetic component present.
If scratches are your problem, but you like the formfactor of CDs, consider trunk-mount or behind-seat-mount jukeboxes. Load them into the cartridges when you're at your desk, not stopped at a green light at Fifth & Main with angry commuters behind you.
OT sig note: I had forgotten the bit about "e to the i times pi equals negative one." I tried google.
e ^ (i * pi)
Pretty weird, huh?
whereas Slashdot tries to pass it's rumormongering and hearsay off as real reporting
Slashdot is schizophrenic with regard to their opinion and support for "real reporting." Some editors bend over backward to say full-disclosure things like "OSDN is the parent of Slashdot and " while others publically and vehemently refuse to improve the site for accuracy and basic professionalism.
Duplicate stories, poor grammar, weak disclosure, no appearance of impartiality, no proactive rebuttal, and other factors just show that the parent company likes the ad revenue but doesn't care about the rest. The editors are not editors at all, it's a kid's club blog which happens to have a huge readership.
Only you and Alanis have been able to torture the word 'ironic' quite that far. Freedom is only guaranteed by the creation and adherence to the laws of the land.
CmdrTaco [yelling]: Did you order a subscription?
The argument is usually phrased as "Convenience vs Security." They can be seen as being opposed. That's not quite the same as "Usability vs Vulnerability" but that's the direction your friends' arguments were pointing.
I'm not sure that it always holds true that you have a single gradient between Convenience and Security. You can have elements of both, and it's not just a fractional position between two extremes.
For example, the 'root' problem is that root or Administrator can do anything on the system, so cracker types will focus their attention on the major prize. The alternative would be to spread rights and responsibilities into fine-grained accounts like "backup" and "network" and "installer" and other capabilities. An attacker has to work harder, but the machine's owner does too.
However, that doesn't mean that you're going to have to allow web browsers and email clients to execute unknown privileged code. Many of Microsoft's engineers in the 90s had no concept of trust and privilege, and it showed. Those few who understood the implications couldn't drive the rest of the overwhelmingly "convenience-driven" corporate culture to really care about the down-sides to an all-root-all-the-time lack of security. Now that Microsoft knows the implications, their inertia has them at a strict disadvantage: they must change, and in so changing, they break their #1 asset: long-term backwards compatibility.
Microsoft doesn't have a competeing language to C, doesn't want control of C, and basically doesn't give two shits about C.
Sure, tell that to Philippe "the Barbarian" Khan, formerly of Borland. I'm sure he'll agree that Microsoft left the entire C and C++ toolchain market to them all through the 80s and early 90s.
As soon as I saw the headline to this news item, I was reminded of the interview with the "genious" in the Princess Bride. With the double-psychology and the hired kidnapping plot to begin with. Pretty much every line of that scene could apply, or is in danger of having a geeky rewrite.
I discovered this when I was looking into home racks a few years ago. The plastic portable audio gig racks looked good for what I wanted, but the computer would have to stick out the back. The computing half-racks were way heavier and far more expensive. The only benefit the computing half-rack had besides the measurements was slightly better ventilation design.
A kid's application should be like clay, changing it on a whim to try new things quickly.
This Perl module provides scripted access to the SDL (Simple Direct-media Layer) libraries. Hopefully, this whole thing will be mostly portable to Windows.
When the graphics are simple, and hardware assisted, a scripting language like Perl starts making more sense. The actual application logic doesn't need a lot of horsepower.
I pipe many text messages off to Festival, since young kids aren't going to be able to read a prompt like "How many apples do you see?" I wish the TTS community had better packaging for alternative voices like MBROLA's extensions... I've yet to get anything but three pure Festival voices working.
I want to develop Perl bindings to the Open Dynamics Engine, letting the on-screen toys "fall" and "bounce" and interact realistically. It looks very promising, but I'll save that work for later.
My library consists of about 3000 lines so far, not counting the docs and auxilliary helper routines. I'm working to make extensions as simple and flexible as possible, so the curriculum can grow quickly and spontaneously.
Toy::World will be able to handle basic lessons and drills at first, such as counting and adding, letter and shape identification. I want to start building on those ideas into the usual early-childhood skills of understanding money, subtraction, words, matching, memory skills, and animal identification.
I've yet to work out the basic reward system, but I'm thinking of a sort of token-winning, token-spending theme, where you can play certain lessons to win on-screen coin tokens Mario-style, and some lessons may require spending those same tokens (or Mom can check out the totals for a few real-world benefits).
With a lot more work, I want to get into more hands-on experimentation. Simulated water-pouring, block-stacking, multiplication drills, cause/effect lessons, and even networked "shared toys" simulations involving small groups of children.
By that time I hope to have opened the project to community help. Contact me if you're interested.
But we all know that it's not going to be like that. Someone's going to use the word 'prevention' when discussing Enron finances, and the link will jump to the site of Trojan prophylactics.
The best we can hope for is a few really badly conceived links, or news stories which start to look like an Everything2 node with fifty links per paragraph, so that this form of ad will fade away, too.
Absolute rules are to be broken absolutely.
You can't really break a rule unless you know it's a rule.
We see the world through cultural and physiological biases, and those ever-changing biases have been studied for millenia by artist-scientist types. These teachings are employed by artist-engineer types to express a message as effectively as possible.
For example, to add tension, you can use angular shapes, discordant color combinations, and uneven spacing. If tension is useful to your artistic message, use them. If tension is antithetical to your message, then don't use them.
If you don't learn what these "rules" are, then you'll be stuck with the scattershot or monte carlo approach at communication. Sometimes effective, sometimes not effective, and sometimes counter-productive.
Oh, and happy birthday.
Choice becomes a barrier to entry when you can't stick to a consistent set of basic interface standards, such as what the right mouse button should do to most visual elements, and where the turn signals and brake petals are positioned.
When I loaded this story page, it had an add [sic] for Google between the story and the comments.
That WAS the story, you insensitive clod!
Well I wish Slashdot would append [&partner=] to the links by default.
When YOU abuse their lax partner system, the NYT isn't going to waste their time. When a company, OSDN, or its officers abuse their lax partner system, it is (1) a potential legal liability on the part of OSDN, and (2) going to make NYT change their whole system, probably for the worse.
I'd like to see a post on /. where it didn't degenerate into the "this or that is better" arguements but where Gimp users shared their tips and tricks more.
Here's a tutorial I wrote a couple years ago. http://www.halley.cc/ed/linux/multexp/