Re:Big surprise, another postive book review
on
Perl 6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
About positive reviews,
(1) 90% of everything is crap, so why publish that many negative reviews? Publish the "wow, this was surprisingly helpful." Unless it's a hyped bestseller that failed to deliver the promised quality, don't publish the whining diatribes (see below). Infer that if you haven't seen a review, it's probably Sturgeon-bait.
(2) This site allows replies with almost the same prominence as the original. If you think it doesn't live up to the review, then post your specific opinion to its contrary. If you already didn't think it lived up to its bestseller status, why didn't you submit the bad review before this person gave it a glowing review?
About affiliate links,
If it's not affecting your price or obligating you to purchase, why bother complaining about affiliate kickbacks? Slashdot or the reviewer get an incentive to publish more content. If you don't like the model, don't give your patronage by eyeball or wallet.
When this thing is offered in the USA with Macrovision disabled, all regions playable at any time, and no forced chapters, then I'll whip out my VISA and buy one. But not until then.
I think the appropriate analogy here is that a retailer (think Wal*Mart) took down an advertising poster on their front door, but didn't remove the products from the shelf. The "shelf" is not for "highly technical users." No retailer could claim to have recalled an unsafe product without actually removing the product from those shelves or locking the entire building from public access. Removing the advertisements is not enough.
Inverse-- Luxo movie came from this work
on
Mutating Animations
·
· Score: 1
I saw this in the SIGGRAPH proceedings back when it was new. The animated short movie "Luxo Jr" came after the work creating a single-muscled walker. They used a lamp geometry in the paper. The lamp taught itself how to hop along evenly, forward flip, backflip, go up and down stairs.
Animators then went crazy with the idea and brought Luxo to life (through traditional keyframing).
There are a lot of spam filtration methods. Why can't this be used for automatic categorization and numerical analysis, instead of putting the burden on the constituent?
Analysis: opposed to Faith-Based Initiatives
Faith-Based Initiatives (four phrases)
opposition phrases (80%)
support phrases (20%)
reading level (10th grade)
geographical analysis (rural Iowa)
non-invective (no phrases found).
Uh, not to steal the punch, but there IS a 'blue' threat level: Guarded.
2. Guarded Condition (Blue). This condition is declared when there is a general risk of terrorist attacks.
I'm amazed that EQ/SWG (or any other online game service) doesn't just implement a safe escrow service and take a cut of the inevitable auction action.
If the game server could lock and summarize escrowed "assets" like characters or houses or whatever is valuable, then (1) players couldn't be scammed, (2) auctions could be flagged so social issues are minimized.
Rich Player visits eBay and finds there's a 60th Level Turnkey Mage named "LoRd.DoOfUs" (asset key 0xDEADBEEF) available. He verifies it on auctions.evercrack.com (yup, lvl60 mage 0xDEADBEEF is certified). He plunks down the $6000, and a fee goes to evercrack to effect the secure transfer of 0xDEADBEEF from one account to the other. Rich Player is allowed to change the name once, and a notice on announcements.evercrack.com proclaims that "LoRd.DoOfUs" has forever left the realms but meet "Paladink" with similar statistics.
It is an array of coefficients repersenting a set of linear transformations.
While I assume you were being glib in offering the mathematical definition, I think it's closer to the origin of that cyberpunk word than you may realize.
Rene Descartes asked, what if the world were an illusion? He discovered that unlike his physical senses, he can't be deceived from his own existence. "I think, therefore, I am." The cyberpunk concept of the Matrix is the massive rendering of a world of simulated objects which must follow the chosen rules. The Wachowski Brothers' movie world shows we live in exactly that kind of simulation, blissfully unaware of the theatrics.
If some mathematical physical model like String Theory were to correctly define our universe in (for example) eleven dimensions, then truly the real universe could just be represented with a massive matrix: eleven columns (unknowns) by rows representing any number of defined particles. Churn through the interactions for a given delta time, and you get an approximation of the forward integration of the behavior of all of those particles. Of course, the fictional Matrix has the extra issues of bending the rules and integrating human neural interfaces into the mix.
I like the computer-rendered Animatrix 'Last Flight of the Osiris'-- was that put together by the Final Fantasy movie team?
Yeah, and for the moderators, Matrix Determinant, Matrix Convoluted, Matrix Decomposed, Matrix Unraveled.
er, Bill Nye [nt]
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I meant Bill Nye, not 'Phil Nye,' discovered from his appearances on "Almost Live" in Seattle.
Just mentioned the Club...
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I was just mentioning the 'geek' books which have fallen out of print, or out of favor, in the children's section at libraries. Seems maybe a few of these are being retrofitted and re-released.
The Mad Scientists' Club series
Alfred Hitchcock's The Three Investigators series
Encyclopedia Brown series
The Great Brain series
...
For a while, Disney boosted Phil Nye the Science Guy, and there was a competing concept hitting TV at the same time, but these are science magazine formats. Many kids need more inspiration, often from personable fiction scenarios like these books offered.
Section 8. The Congress shall have Power...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited
Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
Writings and Discoveries;
Funny, I don't see the word President in there anywhere. Dean may be the most enlightened politician in terms of intellectual property since Jefferson said an idea was like a flame shared from taper (candle) to taper. That doesn't mean much.
A good President could veto a bad copyright bill brought to his desk, but typically this is a very loaded thing to do. A really good President could draft some legislation or ask for good copyright law to be drafted, just as any corporation or lobbyist could do, but honestly, I don't like the idea of external drafts.
I'd rather the President focus on putting a leash on tyrannical law enforcement and reign in our undue influence (read: meddling) on other sovereign nations.
A lot of times, the artist is putting a fair chunk of creativity into producing the disc, selecting the appropriate instrumentation, and getting things done in general. I could see a decent disc requiring the same creative effort as performing on stage, if not more when they go multinational.
I don't think it's wholly inappropriate. I know we're paying more for concerts than we probably should, but the one has nothing to do with the other.
(Artists work their ass off to create new music, and get left only a few scraps on the initial sales. They don't retain copyrights, they don't get paid a substantial royalty, they don't see direct income from other artists who sample, they don't see direct income when Muzak destroys their rockin' ballad. The artist says goodbye to the wife for a few months of hauling their equipment from Fuckbum Indiana to Bumfuck Illinois to do a gig at Beerapalooza, which is a promotion in and of itself to entice the fans into donating to BorgUniversalSonyWarnerBMI. I think the artist and crew should get all the cash the ticket sales raise.)
If you were bothered to read the text, there's a reason I put ??? there. up2date is only for Red Hat Linux users, and only covers Red Hat Linux official packages. I use it. I subscribe. But it's not the only tool out there and it doesn't cover all it should.
There are different levels of package management which often confuses the newcomer into believing (dogmatically) that one is better than the other.
The installable packages themselves have to have flexible dependency markings and coherent version markings. The low-level package tool has to be able to install and uninstall packages cleanly and repeatably. Seems like the dpkg/deb suite and the rpm suite are quite comparable here.
The package manager has to be able to build a requirements tree for a desired package, and then fetch all of the required packages to fulfill those dependencies on the local system. It should offer trust or signature verification to ensure only trusted repositories and trusted packages are used. The apt tool seems to be cross-platform, while non-Debian distros often spin their own service model here: up2date, Red Carpet, and whatever Mandrake and Lindows offer are each commercialized with some amount of sample access.
Lastly, the most important criteria, is the repository itself: it should contain packages which are clean and trustworthy. There have been cracking incidents, and there will be more. The quality of code between distro-produced packages and externally-produced packages can be as different as night and day. The package's meta-data and manifesting information can be crap, or it can be carefully constructed. The embedded installation scripts can be trivially exploitable or they can be carefully scrutinized against unexpected results.
Even if your package format is cool, and your package manager is cool, consider the repository. If the repository is not secure and offers poorly tested packages, many folks are going to unfairly blame it on the tools.
It costs money and time and expertise to establish a world-wide shipping channel. You have to know a lot more about international trade law, and liabilities in cases of returns/exchanges/credits are much more complex.
Most small companies can't be bothered to grow that kind of capability, as the short-sighted shareholders (public or private) won't accept the large up-front cost in that kind of expansion.
Nice thought, but too late. I think every other state has withdrawn from the case. West Virginia was the last holdout besides Massachussetts, and they dropped their case recently.
There was a slick plastic game called Black Box back when thinking games like Mastermind were raking in the dough. There are Java and PalmOS varieties of the game. It's a nice three-minute game to while away a bus stop wait, and it helps you get in the mindset of what reverse engineering really means.
The inside of the Black Box is an 8x8 square. There are 8 ports on each side of the square. One player sets some marbles inside the covered square, and the other player tries to deduce their locations by the behavior of "rays" entering and exiting the box ports. Some rays go all the way through, some reflect off the balls inside, and some glance off the balls and go out some other side of the box.
not being vulnerable to viruses made for the mainstream platform,
has source code available so you can tinker or learn,
has public bug reporting so bugs you discover have a chance at being fixed,
experiment more openly with Human-Computer Interface concepts.
Some people like the look and feel of XP (though I don't). Some people like the product but despise the creator. Some people want to recreate effects they've seen in code, because they wonder if they can reverse-engineer it accurately.
I saw this and wondered, "what if the mouse pointer were the light source for GUI shadows hanging off menus and window frames; would it be horribly distracting or helpful for tracking the mouse pointer intuitively?" I value experimentation over one-size-fits-all, so that's one reason I choose Linux.
The goal of security is not to make the undesirable impossible, but to make the undesirable suitably impractical.
Today, a hijacker needs only point a gun at a pilot, or learn a few fundamentals of cockpit systems, and can then do anything the plane is physically capable of doing. If the plane itself are hardened against manual plane-to-ground maneuvering, then the hijacker has a far more difficult task, with a wide variety of new security barriers that must be overcome.
Scenario: the Miami to Paris flight has ground-controllable avionics. Now hijack teams on the ground are able to explore and overcome the security barriers without being on the plane. The Walt Disney World Epcot Center ball and/or the Space Shuttle Discovery atop its launchpad catches fire on the Fourth of July.
Scenario: the Miami to Paris flight has only preprogrammed hardened avionics. Now hijack teams must prepare a civil plane by sabotaging it during service periods before takeoff, and/or technical team support during the target flight. During a flight, there's a lot of areas on a plane that are not physically accessible.
If the number of systemic barriers is high enough, and/or if the technical capabilities required are high enough, and/or the number of failsafe detection barriers are high enough, then the prospect of using a modern airliner as a weapon becomes less and less likely. No opportunist Richard Reids. No "flight school for a week" militant cell groups. And the remaining terrorists capable of pulling it off probably have funding to acquire their own weapons anyway. Jets as a weapon becomes suitably impractical.
Slashdot Mirror
About positive reviews,
(1) 90% of everything is crap, so why publish that many negative reviews? Publish the "wow, this was surprisingly helpful." Unless it's a hyped bestseller that failed to deliver the promised quality, don't publish the whining diatribes (see below). Infer that if you haven't seen a review, it's probably Sturgeon-bait.
(2) This site allows replies with almost the same prominence as the original. If you think it doesn't live up to the review, then post your specific opinion to its contrary. If you already didn't think it lived up to its bestseller status, why didn't you submit the bad review before this person gave it a glowing review?
About affiliate links,
If it's not affecting your price or obligating you to purchase, why bother complaining about affiliate kickbacks? Slashdot or the reviewer get an incentive to publish more content. If you don't like the model, don't give your patronage by eyeball or wallet.
Drink water when you are thirsty. Stop when you are not.
When you are "thirsty," your body is already in hydration deficit. You're too late. Drink before you're thirsty.
When this thing is offered in the USA with Macrovision disabled, all regions playable at any time, and no forced chapters, then I'll whip out my VISA and buy one. But not until then.
I think the appropriate analogy here is that a retailer (think Wal*Mart) took down an advertising poster on their front door, but didn't remove the products from the shelf. The "shelf" is not for "highly technical users." No retailer could claim to have recalled an unsafe product without actually removing the product from those shelves or locking the entire building from public access. Removing the advertisements is not enough.
Animators then went crazy with the idea and brought Luxo to life (through traditional keyframing).
The password 'inkblot' has just debuted in the top ten and is climbing fast.
'Rorschach' would be a better password, but people can never remember how to spell it.
Analysis: opposed to Faith-Based Initiatives
Faith-Based Initiatives (four phrases)
opposition phrases (80%)
support phrases (20%)
reading level (10th grade)
geographical analysis (rural Iowa)
non-invective (no phrases found).
Uh, not to steal the punch, but there IS a 'blue' threat level: Guarded. 2. Guarded Condition (Blue). This condition is declared when there is a general risk of terrorist attacks.
Well, uh, okay then.
I'm amazed that EQ/SWG (or any other online game service) doesn't just implement a safe escrow service and take a cut of the inevitable auction action.
If the game server could lock and summarize escrowed "assets" like characters or houses or whatever is valuable, then (1) players couldn't be scammed, (2) auctions could be flagged so social issues are minimized.
Rich Player visits eBay and finds there's a 60th Level Turnkey Mage named "LoRd.DoOfUs" (asset key 0xDEADBEEF) available. He verifies it on auctions.evercrack.com (yup, lvl60 mage 0xDEADBEEF is certified). He plunks down the $6000, and a fee goes to evercrack to effect the secure transfer of 0xDEADBEEF from one account to the other. Rich Player is allowed to change the name once, and a notice on announcements.evercrack.com proclaims that "LoRd.DoOfUs" has forever left the realms but meet "Paladink" with similar statistics.
It is an array of coefficients repersenting a set of linear transformations.
While I assume you were being glib in offering the mathematical definition, I think it's closer to the origin of that cyberpunk word than you may realize.
Rene Descartes asked, what if the world were an illusion? He discovered that unlike his physical senses, he can't be deceived from his own existence. "I think, therefore, I am." The cyberpunk concept of the Matrix is the massive rendering of a world of simulated objects which must follow the chosen rules. The Wachowski Brothers' movie world shows we live in exactly that kind of simulation, blissfully unaware of the theatrics.
If some mathematical physical model like String Theory were to correctly define our universe in (for example) eleven dimensions, then truly the real universe could just be represented with a massive matrix: eleven columns (unknowns) by rows representing any number of defined particles. Churn through the interactions for a given delta time, and you get an approximation of the forward integration of the behavior of all of those particles. Of course, the fictional Matrix has the extra issues of bending the rules and integrating human neural interfaces into the mix.
I like the computer-rendered Animatrix 'Last Flight of the Osiris'-- was that put together by the Final Fantasy movie team?
Yeah, and for the moderators, Matrix Determinant, Matrix Convoluted, Matrix Decomposed, Matrix Unraveled.
I meant Bill Nye, not 'Phil Nye,' discovered from his appearances on "Almost Live" in Seattle.
I was just mentioning the 'geek' books which have fallen out of print, or out of favor, in the children's section at libraries. Seems maybe a few of these are being retrofitted and re-released.
For a while, Disney boosted Phil Nye the Science Guy, and there was a competing concept hitting TV at the same time, but these are science magazine formats. Many kids need more inspiration, often from personable fiction scenarios like these books offered.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Funny, I don't see the word President in there anywhere. Dean may be the most enlightened politician in terms of intellectual property since Jefferson said an idea was like a flame shared from taper (candle) to taper. That doesn't mean much.
A good President could veto a bad copyright bill brought to his desk, but typically this is a very loaded thing to do. A really good President could draft some legislation or ask for good copyright law to be drafted, just as any corporation or lobbyist could do, but honestly, I don't like the idea of external drafts.
I'd rather the President focus on putting a leash on tyrannical law enforcement and reign in our undue influence (read: meddling) on other sovereign nations.
I don't think it's wholly inappropriate. I know we're paying more for concerts than we probably should, but the one has nothing to do with the other.
(Artists work their ass off to create new music, and get left only a few scraps on the initial sales. They don't retain copyrights, they don't get paid a substantial royalty, they don't see direct income from other artists who sample, they don't see direct income when Muzak destroys their rockin' ballad. The artist says goodbye to the wife for a few months of hauling their equipment from Fuckbum Indiana to Bumfuck Illinois to do a gig at Beerapalooza, which is a promotion in and of itself to entice the fans into donating to BorgUniversalSonyWarnerBMI. I think the artist and crew should get all the cash the ticket sales raise.)
If you were bothered to read the text, there's a reason I put ??? there. up2date is only for Red Hat Linux users, and only covers Red Hat Linux official packages. I use it. I subscribe. But it's not the only tool out there and it doesn't cover all it should.
There are different levels of package management which often confuses the newcomer into believing (dogmatically) that one is better than the other.
The installable packages themselves have to have flexible dependency markings and coherent version markings. The low-level package tool has to be able to install and uninstall packages cleanly and repeatably. Seems like the dpkg/deb suite and the rpm suite are quite comparable here.
The package manager has to be able to build a requirements tree for a desired package, and then fetch all of the required packages to fulfill those dependencies on the local system. It should offer trust or signature verification to ensure only trusted repositories and trusted packages are used. The apt tool seems to be cross-platform, while non-Debian distros often spin their own service model here: up2date, Red Carpet, and whatever Mandrake and Lindows offer are each commercialized with some amount of sample access.
Lastly, the most important criteria, is the repository itself: it should contain packages which are clean and trustworthy. There have been cracking incidents, and there will be more. The quality of code between distro-produced packages and externally-produced packages can be as different as night and day. The package's meta-data and manifesting information can be crap, or it can be carefully constructed. The embedded installation scripts can be trivially exploitable or they can be carefully scrutinized against unexpected results.
Even if your package format is cool, and your package manager is cool, consider the repository. If the repository is not secure and offers poorly tested packages, many folks are going to unfairly blame it on the tools.
And the other joke of an Object-Oriented COBOL being named, ADD ONE TO COBOL.
(Pardon if any of these links are going stale.)
It costs money and time and expertise to establish a world-wide shipping channel. You have to know a lot more about international trade law, and liabilities in cases of returns/exchanges/credits are much more complex.
Most small companies can't be bothered to grow that kind of capability, as the short-sighted shareholders (public or private) won't accept the large up-front cost in that kind of expansion.
Be Judicious
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations and articulating your superficial, psychological and sentimental observation.
Awkward to parse, but a complete sentence.
Be judicious
...in promulgating your esoteric cogitations and articulating your superficial, psychological and sentimental observation.
Nice thought, but too late. I think every other state has withdrawn from the case. West Virginia was the last holdout besides Massachussetts, and they dropped their case recently.
There was a slick plastic game called Black Box back when thinking games like Mastermind were raking in the dough. There are Java and PalmOS varieties of the game. It's a nice three-minute game to while away a bus stop wait, and it helps you get in the mindset of what reverse engineering really means.
The inside of the Black Box is an 8x8 square. There are 8 ports on each side of the square. One player sets some marbles inside the covered square, and the other player tries to deduce their locations by the behavior of "rays" entering and exiting the box ports. Some rays go all the way through, some reflect off the balls inside, and some glance off the balls and go out some other side of the box.
To some people, "alternative" means:
not spending their money for Microsoft,
not being vulnerable to viruses made for the mainstream platform,
has source code available so you can tinker or learn,
has public bug reporting so bugs you discover have a chance at being fixed,
experiment more openly with Human-Computer Interface concepts.
Some people like the look and feel of XP (though I don't). Some people like the product but despise the creator. Some people want to recreate effects they've seen in code, because they wonder if they can reverse-engineer it accurately.
I saw this and wondered, "what if the mouse pointer were the light source for GUI shadows hanging off menus and window frames; would it be horribly distracting or helpful for tracking the mouse pointer intuitively?" I value experimentation over one-size-fits-all, so that's one reason I choose Linux.
Today, a hijacker needs only point a gun at a pilot, or learn a few fundamentals of cockpit systems, and can then do anything the plane is physically capable of doing. If the plane itself are hardened against manual plane-to-ground maneuvering, then the hijacker has a far more difficult task, with a wide variety of new security barriers that must be overcome.
Scenario: the Miami to Paris flight has ground-controllable avionics. Now hijack teams on the ground are able to explore and overcome the security barriers without being on the plane. The Walt Disney World Epcot Center ball and/or the Space Shuttle Discovery atop its launchpad catches fire on the Fourth of July.
Scenario: the Miami to Paris flight has only preprogrammed hardened avionics. Now hijack teams must prepare a civil plane by sabotaging it during service periods before takeoff, and/or technical team support during the target flight. During a flight, there's a lot of areas on a plane that are not physically accessible.
If the number of systemic barriers is high enough, and/or if the technical capabilities required are high enough, and/or the number of failsafe detection barriers are high enough, then the prospect of using a modern airliner as a weapon becomes less and less likely. No opportunist Richard Reids. No "flight school for a week" militant cell groups. And the remaining terrorists capable of pulling it off probably have funding to acquire their own weapons anyway. Jets as a weapon becomes suitably impractical.