Why did you let an intern deviate from company standards?
Some companies choose exactly that time to deviate from company standards: new blood sometimes brings new paradigms. Interns cost little. Interns aren't given strategic tasks. Cleaning up or redoing an intern's work costs little. If an intern does something with an unfamiliar technology, it could be worthless, or it could be the seed of a new wave of opportunity for the company.
What did Thomas Edison develop during his internship? Do you think it was "within company standards?"
Just because BIOS currently stands for "Basic Input/Output System," doesn't mean it can't be coopted for some new meaning.
I'm glad to see PCs getting something similar to the tftp and other bootprom tools which good minicomputers had. Something that will let you build a machine from nothing, or fix or salvage data devices on a damaged system.
will SOMEONE explain to me how such a thing is supposed to work?
In a nutshell, the center of mass of the whole elevator, including ribbon and cargo, is at (or near enough) the radius which provides geosynchronous orbit. This can be achieved and maintained in a number of ways, all of which are irrelevant details once you grok what 'geosynchrony' and 'orbit' really mean.
You don't see newsgroup posts on your usual searches, do you?
Yes, all the time. Try to search for anything technical, and you'll find people chattering about it on web-archived newsgroups and web-archived mailing lists. Or more likely, chattering about something else, but using your search terms in a way that you didn't anticipate.
While emblems affixed to icons are nice, that's not what the parent post was talking about.
With stateful alternative artwork, a folder icon could appear open or closed or locked or zipped. A trashcan could appear lidded, unlidded, bulging or empty. Emblems don't do that.
With stateful procedural rendering, a folder icon could appear tinted or shadowed or translucent or scaled to highlight different ownership or age or some other user-defined categorical criteria. Emblems don't do that.
With stateful procedural animation, a folder icon could glint, shudder, bulge, wave or otherwise animate when the mouse floats over the icon, or when objects change status in some way.
Further, emblems should be able to do all of these things independently from the icons themselves: the icon itself may glint and bulge while the emblems blush or twist.
Sure, bad themes would be a distraction, but good themes could provide a lot richer interface to a very dense data space. This is true of Flash, of Skinnable applications, and of GUIs in general.
I was also involved with a different project with some of the same goals. And in fact, we too chose the UT engine as a visualization. Alas, funding is hard for small inexperienced virtual companies.
There are a lot of people who seem to get stuck with the explanation "it's different every time." Usually they respond, "how can you design, nevermind test and produce, a game where you can't even predict what the NPCs are going to do?"
My response is, "there are GAMES, where there are clear objectives, and then there are TOYS, where the fun comes in experiencing and experimenting and inventing your own objectives in the moment." You can test the short list of features of a single Lego block, but you can't predict what people will do with a thousand of them.
The Sims is not a game, but a toy. You decide what your objectives may be, and you may decide whether you push a waitress into stardom, or evolve a shack into a mansion, or systematically invite every neighbor over to be killed off in the murky blue swimming pool of doom. The software doesn't care: it keeps some metrics but no "score." There's no way to "win."
Likewise, a MMSTT (massively multiplayer story-telling toy) engine shouldn't be about completing a story arc from genesis to apocalypse. It shouldn't try to assign tasks for players to perform, to help them advance to meet game-like objectives.
Instead, a toy engine should supply the NPCs, settings, metaphysics, and plot points to orchestrate meetings and storytelling sessions between human players. Let the players tell the stories, and supply them what they need to do so. The big problem to date has been that if all of these elements are too canned or prescripted or static, then the players get bored too easily.
An adaptive, evolving toy engine should (1) be hyper-extensible to allow new NPC archetypes, new storyline concepts, new world areas, and new playtime activities; and moreover, (2) observe player behavior with many invisible metrics, to assist the ongoing world design process.
In some measure, MUDs are the text-only answer, but I know that a graphical world that exhibits all of these features is both possible and necessary if the mass Internet market is to re-discover the magic of storytelling.
(Side rant: Starbucks studies their best customers and their worst customers. Verant studies their worst server-destabilizing cheaters but does not think about what they can do to appeal to wider audiences or avoid losing their best players. What's wrong with this picture?)
I wish all the best of luck to anyone who pushes the state of the art in generating stories or even just fun toys that evolve. I know it's possible. I know it's an uphill battle. I know the rewards will be far more than the investment, both financially and culturally.
Re:More fragmentation
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There are about a million and one distros who purport to do this. Why does everyone feel the need to reinvent the wheel?
Though I can't speak for the producers of ArkLinux, I will speak as someone who has been involved with them early on.
I think one of the prime motivations is to act as a 'concept' vehicle to offer innovations to the larger distributions. In Detroit, it's often difficult to get the Big Three automakers to really cut new ground and try something risky. However, they love to put a bunch of wacky ideas into concept cars, and then slowly evolve their best ideas into real products for the street.
The well-known distros like Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian are analagous to the Big Three automakers in the Linux distribution space. However, they're not in a high-markup tangible goods market like Chevrolet, GM and Ford. Thus, they can't afford to make their own 'concept' tools and services to help their own evolution.
I see all of the smaller distros as helping the evolution by giving each great idea (and tons of mediocre and bad ideas) a public forum in which they can prove themselves, and be cherry-picked by the powerhouses of Linux adoption: the Big Distros.
And frankly, Detroit isn't being robbed of available talent whenever some kid puts together a supercharged Dodge Charger with neon all over it. Likewise, Red Hat doesn't sweat it if some afficianados take a different path and try a few new things.
It seems that journaling filesystems like ext3 cause hell for secure deletions, because changes aren't always committed as the application level assumes and requires. Has anyone suggested a kernel/filesystem hook to make secure media deletions possible?
This reminded me at once of "The Difference Engine" by Sterling and Gibson.
Synopsis: A collaborative novel from the premier cyberpunk authors, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Part detective story, part historical thriller, The Difference Engine takes us not forward but back, to an imagined 1885: the Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven, cybernetic engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine, and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time.
I understand your comment, but why do you think our god is the only god? Many authors and theologans have considered that our god has peers, who may have created other universes. Our god is without peer in our universe. Heck, some religions promise we can become the gods of our own universes in our own afterlives if we're "good" enough in this lifetime.
As for how the signature fits into the book, Contact, the signature was there to prove to mankind (and alienkind) that it was indeed designed and not a freak of chance. Knowing there was a creator, beyond the reach of skepticism, changes the creatures' outlook on their universe in many ways. Only the sentient and technically adept species would be able to find such a signature. The aliens just helped Earthlings find it, as circumspect as possible, because the initial radio broadcasts from Earth made the aliens worry about whether we'd grow out of our self-destructive ways soon enough.
I'm not trying to convince anyone to challenge their own theology, I'm just relaying the interesting concept that was in a book, which was on point with the discussion of trillions of digits of pi. If you feel there's only one god, then for you, that is true. It harms me none. If I acknowledge that there are skeptics, agnostics, athiests, and pantheists in this world, it really should harm you none. The "creation" is large and we are two separate points of observation: your point of view is valid, but it doesn't invalidate my different point of view.
Of course. Though in terms of probabilities, the chances of a few million digits with equal distribution, followed by a square image of a quarter million digits with very limited distribution, followed by billions more digits with equal distribution... we're talking about a big "whoa."
I also find it funny in that it's the skeptics and agnostics who are then brought to the argument, "for without faith, He is nothing." Sure, even the circle-in-square is possibly coincidence, and sure, you could go out to the digits at 11^(-800) and find a similar stretch with a triangle, just based on the statistics. A religious God needs plausible deniability, or so says traditional theology.
In the book version of Contact by Carl Sagan, but skipped in the Jodie Foster movie, was the notion that the aliens had discovered proof that the universe was created by a higher intelligence. A God or society of Gods far higher and more advanced than the aliens. The whole point of dragging Human-kind to that remote beach to talk with daddy was to tell Human-kind that it was time for them to look for God's signature on this universe.
As any artist, the creator signed the creation. Where? Deep into the insignificant but irrefutably valid digits of several of the fundamental mathematical constants such as pi and e.
The main character finds one of the signatures at the end of the book: if calculating digits of pi in base 11, after a few million or billion places, a 500x500 digit span is almost entirely zeros. If the span was rendered as a square of pixels, the non-zero digits drew a perfect circle inscribed in the square. A circle in a square. The key concept defining pi, in the digits of pi itself. The whole way the universe works is affected by that constant, so any such 'design' in it has, if you pardon the pun, a transcendental import.
Why base 11? It's left to the reader to decide, but I expect Sagan wrote it because it is considered one of the possible designs of the universe, one of the string theories is based on an 11-dimensional all-inclusive physics model.
As the alien explains to the main character, it wouldn't be base 10, because what's the likelihood that the creator also happened to have ten fingers?
'Those you see there,' replied his master, 'with their long arms. Some giants have them about six miles long.'
'Take care, your worship,' said Sancho; 'those things over there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails, which are whirled round in the wind and make the millstone turn.'
'It is quite clear,' replied Don Quixote, 'that you are not experience in this matter of adventures. They are giants, and if you are afraid, go away and say your prayers, whilst I advance and engage them in fierce and unequal battle.'
Am I the only one who gets the image of Longhorn looking like Cartman's TrapperKeeper?
Ah always, Ah say Ah always think of "Foghorn Leghorn," th' barnyard rooster always tryin', Ah say always tryin' to outsmart that wiley Dawg. Now Ah come to think of it, the Chicken Hawk looks a lot like Bill Gates.
Yes, I was one of those kid-geeks who tried to squeeze in a visit to Radio Shack after dinner but before the dreaded 8pm closing time. Since the mid-70s, I've answered, "no thanks" to the question about an address. It used to go fine.
A few months ago, the sales guys stopped taking "no thanks" for an answer. I abandoned my pending sales right there on the counter. I switched store locations twice, and hit two more obstinant clerks who wouldn't let me buy without giving my marketing information. I was ready to write off RadioShack completely.
My firesafe came with a large packet of dessicant for just that reason. If you open the safe on a regular basis, this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Silica gel is the most common type of dessicant. That's the little packet labeled "DO NOT EAT" in just about any consumer electronics packaging. I've saved the little packets in a jar for years, but I'm sure you can also buy them directly.
I recommended to a friend who wanted to save some backup CDRs that they put a small firesafe (the kind with a handle) inside a larger firesafe. Put CDRs and silica gel in the smaller one; put hanging folders in the remaining space in the larger one. (The moderate moisture is fine for paper storage when the temperature is rising, but not as good for the CDRs.)
Actually, I think Hilary has a copy of one of my copyrighted files. Yeah, that's it. And she might be copying it to Ashcroft. Uh huh. And with the latest push towards allowing copyright owners to become vigilan^W self-reliant, then I (or any designated third party) can and should ensure that their machines are unable to propagate their nefarious activities.
They have IDs, they don't have encryption. They're like channels on the television, or channels between wireless home phones.
When you connect the device, you push a little "I'm Here" button on the device and a matching little "Who is There?" button on the receiver. They lock in on the chosen channels until you play that game again. It remembers the match-up even when powering off the PC for a few days, or across typical battery-replacement interruptions in the device.
If you're not TRYING to intercept or interject, it works fine. We have two computers in the same room with wireless Logitech mice and wireless Logitech keyboards. No interference.
If you're TRYING to intercept or interject, it would be trivial to walk all 4096 channels. Once you "tune in" to the right channel, it's all cleartext. Again, that's not encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did you let an intern deviate from company standards?
Some companies choose exactly that time to deviate from company standards: new blood sometimes brings new paradigms. Interns cost little. Interns aren't given strategic tasks. Cleaning up or redoing an intern's work costs little. If an intern does something with an unfamiliar technology, it could be worthless, or it could be the seed of a new wave of opportunity for the company.
What did Thomas Edison develop during his internship? Do you think it was "within company standards?"
Several releases of Emacs have also used a kitchen sink as a launcher icon.
Just because BIOS currently stands for "Basic Input/Output System," doesn't mean it can't be coopted for some new meaning.
I'm glad to see PCs getting something similar to the tftp and other bootprom tools which good minicomputers had. Something that will let you build a machine from nothing, or fix or salvage data devices on a damaged system.
will SOMEONE explain to me how such a thing is supposed to work?
In a nutshell, the center of mass of the whole elevator, including ribbon and cargo, is at (or near enough) the radius which provides geosynchronous orbit. This can be achieved and maintained in a number of ways, all of which are irrelevant details once you grok what 'geosynchrony' and 'orbit' really mean.
You don't see newsgroup posts on your usual searches, do you?
Yes, all the time. Try to search for anything technical, and you'll find people chattering about it on web-archived newsgroups and web-archived mailing lists. Or more likely, chattering about something else, but using your search terms in a way that you didn't anticipate.
They're called emblems.
While emblems affixed to icons are nice, that's not what the parent post was talking about.
With stateful alternative artwork, a folder icon could appear open or closed or locked or zipped. A trashcan could appear lidded, unlidded, bulging or empty. Emblems don't do that.
With stateful procedural rendering, a folder icon could appear tinted or shadowed or translucent or scaled to highlight different ownership or age or some other user-defined categorical criteria. Emblems don't do that.
With stateful procedural animation, a folder icon could glint, shudder, bulge, wave or otherwise animate when the mouse floats over the icon, or when objects change status in some way.
Further, emblems should be able to do all of these things independently from the icons themselves: the icon itself may glint and bulge while the emblems blush or twist.
Sure, bad themes would be a distraction, but good themes could provide a lot richer interface to a very dense data space. This is true of Flash, of Skinnable applications, and of GUIs in general.
I was also involved with a different project with some of the same goals. And in fact, we too chose the UT engine as a visualization. Alas, funding is hard for small inexperienced virtual companies.
There are a lot of people who seem to get stuck with the explanation "it's different every time." Usually they respond, "how can you design, nevermind test and produce, a game where you can't even predict what the NPCs are going to do?"
My response is, "there are GAMES, where there are clear objectives, and then there are TOYS, where the fun comes in experiencing and experimenting and inventing your own objectives in the moment." You can test the short list of features of a single Lego block, but you can't predict what people will do with a thousand of them.
The Sims is not a game, but a toy. You decide what your objectives may be, and you may decide whether you push a waitress into stardom, or evolve a shack into a mansion, or systematically invite every neighbor over to be killed off in the murky blue swimming pool of doom. The software doesn't care: it keeps some metrics but no "score." There's no way to "win."
Likewise, a MMSTT (massively multiplayer story-telling toy) engine shouldn't be about completing a story arc from genesis to apocalypse. It shouldn't try to assign tasks for players to perform, to help them advance to meet game-like objectives.
Instead, a toy engine should supply the NPCs, settings, metaphysics, and plot points to orchestrate meetings and storytelling sessions between human players. Let the players tell the stories, and supply them what they need to do so. The big problem to date has been that if all of these elements are too canned or prescripted or static, then the players get bored too easily.
An adaptive, evolving toy engine should (1) be hyper-extensible to allow new NPC archetypes, new storyline concepts, new world areas, and new playtime activities; and moreover, (2) observe player behavior with many invisible metrics, to assist the ongoing world design process.
In some measure, MUDs are the text-only answer, but I know that a graphical world that exhibits all of these features is both possible and necessary if the mass Internet market is to re-discover the magic of storytelling.
(Side rant: Starbucks studies their best customers and their worst customers. Verant studies their worst server-destabilizing cheaters but does not think about what they can do to appeal to wider audiences or avoid losing their best players. What's wrong with this picture?)
I wish all the best of luck to anyone who pushes the state of the art in generating stories or even just fun toys that evolve. I know it's possible. I know it's an uphill battle. I know the rewards will be far more than the investment, both financially and culturally.
There are about a million and one distros who purport to do this. Why does everyone feel the need to reinvent the wheel?
Though I can't speak for the producers of ArkLinux, I will speak as someone who has been involved with them early on.
I think one of the prime motivations is to act as a 'concept' vehicle to offer innovations to the larger distributions. In Detroit, it's often difficult to get the Big Three automakers to really cut new ground and try something risky. However, they love to put a bunch of wacky ideas into concept cars, and then slowly evolve their best ideas into real products for the street.
The well-known distros like Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian are analagous to the Big Three automakers in the Linux distribution space. However, they're not in a high-markup tangible goods market like Chevrolet, GM and Ford. Thus, they can't afford to make their own 'concept' tools and services to help their own evolution.
I see all of the smaller distros as helping the evolution by giving each great idea (and tons of mediocre and bad ideas) a public forum in which they can prove themselves, and be cherry-picked by the powerhouses of Linux adoption: the Big Distros.
And frankly, Detroit isn't being robbed of available talent whenever some kid puts together a supercharged Dodge Charger with neon all over it. Likewise, Red Hat doesn't sweat it if some afficianados take a different path and try a few new things.
It seems that journaling filesystems like ext3 cause hell for secure deletions, because changes aren't always committed as the application level assumes and requires. Has anyone suggested a kernel/filesystem hook to make secure media deletions possible?
Jenna Bush's garbage is more likely to give away info that she gets stoned.
Jenna Bush: likely drunk,
Noelle Bush: likely stoned.
Keep it straight.
This reminded me at once of "The Difference Engine" by Sterling and Gibson.
Synopsis: A collaborative novel from the premier cyberpunk authors, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Part detective story, part historical thriller, The Difference Engine takes us not forward but back, to an imagined 1885: the Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven, cybernetic engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine, and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time.
I understand your comment, but why do you think our god is the only god? Many authors and theologans have considered that our god has peers, who may have created other universes. Our god is without peer in our universe. Heck, some religions promise we can become the gods of our own universes in our own afterlives if we're "good" enough in this lifetime.
As for how the signature fits into the book, Contact, the signature was there to prove to mankind (and alienkind) that it was indeed designed and not a freak of chance. Knowing there was a creator, beyond the reach of skepticism, changes the creatures' outlook on their universe in many ways. Only the sentient and technically adept species would be able to find such a signature. The aliens just helped Earthlings find it, as circumspect as possible, because the initial radio broadcasts from Earth made the aliens worry about whether we'd grow out of our self-destructive ways soon enough.
I'm not trying to convince anyone to challenge their own theology, I'm just relaying the interesting concept that was in a book, which was on point with the discussion of trillions of digits of pi. If you feel there's only one god, then for you, that is true. It harms me none. If I acknowledge that there are skeptics, agnostics, athiests, and pantheists in this world, it really should harm you none. The "creation" is large and we are two separate points of observation: your point of view is valid, but it doesn't invalidate my different point of view.
Of course. Though in terms of probabilities, the chances of a few million digits with equal distribution, followed by a square image of a quarter million digits with very limited distribution, followed by billions more digits with equal distribution... we're talking about a big "whoa."
I also find it funny in that it's the skeptics and agnostics who are then brought to the argument, "for without faith, He is nothing." Sure, even the circle-in-square is possibly coincidence, and sure, you could go out to the digits at 11^(-800) and find a similar stretch with a triangle, just based on the statistics. A religious God needs plausible deniability, or so says traditional theology.
Here's a program written in BrainF*ck to calculate pi: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jafowler/pi/pi. b
Here's the analysis of the program, and a link to what the Turing-inspired BrainF*ck programming language is about.
In the book version of Contact by Carl Sagan, but skipped in the Jodie Foster movie, was the notion that the aliens had discovered proof that the universe was created by a higher intelligence. A God or society of Gods far higher and more advanced than the aliens. The whole point of dragging Human-kind to that remote beach to talk with daddy was to tell Human-kind that it was time for them to look for God's signature on this universe.
As any artist, the creator signed the creation. Where? Deep into the insignificant but irrefutably valid digits of several of the fundamental mathematical constants such as pi and e.
The main character finds one of the signatures at the end of the book: if calculating digits of pi in base 11, after a few million or billion places, a 500x500 digit span is almost entirely zeros. If the span was rendered as a square of pixels, the non-zero digits drew a perfect circle inscribed in the square. A circle in a square. The key concept defining pi, in the digits of pi itself. The whole way the universe works is affected by that constant, so any such 'design' in it has, if you pardon the pun, a transcendental import.
Why base 11? It's left to the reader to decide, but I expect Sagan wrote it because it is considered one of the possible designs of the universe, one of the string theories is based on an 11-dimensional all-inclusive physics model. As the alien explains to the main character, it wouldn't be base 10, because what's the likelihood that the creator also happened to have ten fingers?
'What giants?' asked Sancho Panza.
'Those you see there,' replied his master, 'with their long arms. Some giants have them about six miles long.'
'Take care, your worship,' said Sancho; 'those things over there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails, which are whirled round in the wind and make the millstone turn.'
'It is quite clear,' replied Don Quixote, 'that you are not experience in this matter of adventures. They are giants, and if you are afraid, go away and say your prayers, whilst I advance and engage them in fierce and unequal battle.'
--Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter 8
http://www.addamsfamily.com/addams/train.jpg
Get the "Statue of Liberty" model, or the similarly sized Yoda. Then you're flush with light green parts.
Am I the only one who gets the image of Longhorn looking like Cartman's TrapperKeeper?
Ah always, Ah say Ah always think of "Foghorn Leghorn," th' barnyard rooster always tryin', Ah say always tryin' to outsmart that wiley Dawg. Now Ah come to think of it, the Chicken Hawk looks a lot like Bill Gates.
Hm, according to this portion:
Limekiller
----[%end ]----
Total Charge: $90.00 USD
The actual value of your opinion is $0.02, while your fee is $90.00. Pretty nice mark-up!
Yes, I was one of those kid-geeks who tried to squeeze in a visit to Radio Shack after dinner but before the dreaded 8pm closing time. Since the mid-70s, I've answered, "no thanks" to the question about an address. It used to go fine.
A few months ago, the sales guys stopped taking "no thanks" for an answer. I abandoned my pending sales right there on the counter. I switched store locations twice, and hit two more obstinant clerks who wouldn't let me buy without giving my marketing information. I was ready to write off RadioShack completely.
I hope the new policy sticks.
1. Visit the Oakland County real estate records. ...
2.
3. Profit!!
Oh, wrong joke. Can the guys who are collecting a few tons of AOL CDs please drop them off at THAT house, not back to Virginia? Thank you.
My firesafe came with a large packet of dessicant for just that reason. If you open the safe on a regular basis, this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Silica gel is the most common type of dessicant. That's the little packet labeled "DO NOT EAT" in just about any consumer electronics packaging. I've saved the little packets in a jar for years, but I'm sure you can also buy them directly.
I recommended to a friend who wanted to save some backup CDRs that they put a small firesafe (the kind with a handle) inside a larger firesafe. Put CDRs and silica gel in the smaller one; put hanging folders in the remaining space in the larger one. (The moderate moisture is fine for paper storage when the temperature is rising, but not as good for the CDRs.)
Actually, I think Hilary has a copy of one of my copyrighted files. Yeah, that's it. And she might be copying it to Ashcroft. Uh huh. And with the latest push towards allowing copyright owners to become vigilan^W self-reliant, then I (or any designated third party) can and should ensure that their machines are unable to propagate their nefarious activities.
They have IDs, they don't have encryption. They're like channels on the television, or channels between wireless home phones.
When you connect the device, you push a little "I'm Here" button on the device and a matching little "Who is There?" button on the receiver. They lock in on the chosen channels until you play that game again. It remembers the match-up even when powering off the PC for a few days, or across typical battery-replacement interruptions in the device.
If you're not TRYING to intercept or interject, it works fine. We have two computers in the same room with wireless Logitech mice and wireless Logitech keyboards. No interference.
If you're TRYING to intercept or interject, it would be trivial to walk all 4096 channels. Once you "tune in" to the right channel, it's all cleartext. Again, that's not encryption.