I'm a bit surprised a hacker-catcher would take a luddite view...
If you read his book, you might remember that he logged the "hacker's" activities by copying them to printers and displays rather than to another computer's disk files. (You can see this by going to Google Books, then searching for Cuckoo's Egg, then searching for printer. See page 24 or so.) So he might have been a hacker-catcher and a luddite too. Or, as we call them now, steampunks.
I went to college when I was 15 and was graduated at 19 (in the 1970s at a New England engineering school). I was bored in high school, where I had good test scores and mediocre grades. I had skipped 5th grade, then the college asked if I wanted to enroll before my final year of high school.
I was not ready either emotionally or academically, but I went to college and struggled through. I did enjoy myself, and I did learn a lot, but I wasn't ready. Engineering school was tough. If I went to liberal arts school, I think I would have had a harder time socially and an easier time academically. I think engineering schools are easier socially, because all the kids are nerds, and they tend to be more open-minded, more practical, and less socially exclusive than liberal arts students.
I think that most kids who are academically ready for college two years early probably aren't ready socially. And it's not good that they are thrust into the role of "fully responsible wage earner" two years early. I don't really see what problem this is trying to solve.
I agree that it's interesting to read the manuscript, I enjoyed looking at it. I agree that it's interesting to think about the Newton's apple story. But I think the way the BBC describes the project is simply misleading. They write:
"The UK's Royal Society converted the fragile manuscript into an electronic book, which anybody with internet access will now be able to read."
Saying "will now be able to read" implies that we were not able to read it before. That's just not true. Yes, we can see the image of the manuscript. But it would have been as easy to ponder the credibility of the story while reading a printed copy of the text (which has always been available), which we settle for in every other case in literature.
The patterns generated by 2 pages of text superimposed on each other (with one set in mirror image) are not impossible to read. Take a two-sided page and hold it up to the light and try to read it. It may seem difficult, the symbols may be fully or partially superimposed, but it's not impossible. It may be solvable with sufficient computes, which means that if you can't do it now, you'll probably be able to do it on your cell phone in 10 years.
As for finding the boundaries between books in a stack, if a scanner can scan pages in a closed book, I think it will have little trouble separating the books.
Lossless compression also works by throwing away data. In a simple case, if you have a still image and you store it in a file that's 1000x1000 pixels and 24 bits deep with 8 bits each of red, green, and blue, you store that uncompressed in 3 megabytes. 24 bits of color isn't infinite, it's a palette of 16.77 million colors. And you're not saving every micron of the image. You are dicing the image into 1000x1000. If you are taking a picture of a scene that's 10 meters by 10 meters, you are stuffing a square 10x10 mm into each pixel. And also, your recorded image isn't perfect anyway, it's not perfectly focused and color reproduction is not exact. Information is lost.
If you use those same 3 megabytes to store a lossy jpeg, you can store a lot more detail in the same file space - at typical compression rates, it might be 5-10 times more detail. I am often puzzled by folks who hate lossy and love lossless, because lossless isn't simply lossless, it's smarter about what it chooses to lose.
I understand that the process of uncompressing and recompressing a lossy image is a lossy process, but we're not talking about multiple recompressions here, we're talking about one cycle. This is true for both broadcast video and for playing back your personal music. And especially if you listen with earbuds, it's silly to worry about audio compression loss, since the earbuds are very lossy. I know that this is a discussion of video, but the same rules apply.
I have a dual boot (vista/ubuntu) toshiba laptop that I bought in the early vista days.
I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 last night.
I'm an experienced hacker (Unix since the late 70's, PDP10s before that).
The upgrade asked me about the grub.conf, and it was pretty cryptic, as the diffs it displayed weren't showing all the kernels I thought I had. I told it to leave the original grub.conf there, assuming I could reboot into the old kernel and then run update-grub and look at the grub.conf and hack it by hand if necessary. When it rebooted into my old kernel, the system didn't see my lappy touchpad, so I couldn't use the GUI. So I hit ctl-alt-f1 and used a text window to log in (the keyboard worked). As I recall, update-grub wasn't adding the new kernel at that point, so I just edited grub.conf by hand and added it in. I rebooted into the new kernel, which understood my touchpad. After that, I was able to run update-grub, and it found the new kernel, and reboots after that seem ok.
I haven't used it for more than 15 minutes, but it saw my disk, keyboard, touchpad, and wireless. I didn't notice anything else ailing, but I haven't looked carefully.
But the way grub handles the new kernel does seem broken.
In seamonkey, when I have a group of tabs open, and I invoke "Bookmarks:Bookmark This Group of Tabs" it saves a bookmark list entry so that when I select it, it opens the tabs immediately. This seems to be the behavior a sensible user would want.
In firefox, when when I have a group of tabs open, and I invoke "Bookmarks:Bookmark All Tabs..." it saves a bookmark list entry so that when I select it, a menu rolls down with links to the individual tabs, and then at the bottom, there is the item "Open All in Tabs." Yes, I want to open them all in tabs. That's why I saved them as a group of tabs, not as a bookmark folder.
I do not understand how to mimic this seamonkey bookmark "group of tabs" handling behavior in firefox. And I cannot imagine why anyone would want firefox to behave the way it does.
Me too. I like the way seamonkey handles tabs, that's mostly why I use it. I use it for most of my browsing, and was long suffering with an obsolete rendering engine. I have not been able to figure out how to mimic seamonkey's tabs behavior on firefox. Is it possible to get the seamonkey tabs behavior on firefox (with existing settings or add-ons)?
-Andy
Absolutely nothing was shown here....except the correlation you suggest may be caused by lack of education. Or maybe it's not, and candy really does cause violence.
the first-ever sequencing done for the Human Genome Project, which cost $3 billion.
The biggest problem with this sentence is its misplaced prepositional phrase. The Human Genome Project probably cost $3B up to some point, but the sentence may imply that the first sequencing cost $3B. There was a
recent article
in the NY Times discussing this problem.
The "dumbest" article is tallking about awareness of local cultural history. Antietam? Is that really intelligence? Does the average person outside the USA study particular battles in the American Civil War? If not, are they dumb?
Last week, I was surprised to be playing Taboo with well-educated 20-something American folks at a party, and I referred to "the Monitor and the Merrimac" in a clue, and drew a dozen blank stares.
But then hang around with folks over 50 and try discussing life in the web world or the gaming world, or music, film, or anything relevant to a young person, and you'll get blank stares too.
So do we call the young the dumbest generation because they don't know about button hooks and buggy whips, or do we call elders the dumb ones because they can't use a cell phone and they can't tell the difference between a phishing page and a firefox update request?
Slashdot Mirror
If you read his book, you might remember that he logged the "hacker's" activities by copying them to printers and displays rather than to another computer's disk files. (You can see this by going to Google Books, then searching for Cuckoo's Egg, then searching for printer. See page 24 or so.) So he might have been a hacker-catcher and a luddite too. Or, as we call them now, steampunks.
Defense lawyers don't defend their clients' crimes. They defend their clients' rights.
I was not ready either emotionally or academically, but I went to college and struggled through. I did enjoy myself, and I did learn a lot, but I wasn't ready. Engineering school was tough. If I went to liberal arts school, I think I would have had a harder time socially and an easier time academically. I think engineering schools are easier socially, because all the kids are nerds, and they tend to be more open-minded, more practical, and less socially exclusive than liberal arts students.
I think that most kids who are academically ready for college two years early probably aren't ready socially. And it's not good that they are thrust into the role of "fully responsible wage earner" two years early. I don't really see what problem this is trying to solve.
Saying "will now be able to read" implies that we were not able to read it before. That's just not true. Yes, we can see the image of the manuscript. But it would have been as easy to ponder the credibility of the story while reading a printed copy of the text (which has always been available), which we settle for in every other case in literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery
I guess most slashdot readers never read that story.
for example, search for this text:
"amidst other discourse he told me he was just in the same situation"
As for finding the boundaries between books in a stack, if a scanner can scan pages in a closed book, I think it will have little trouble separating the books.
It's like bragging about having the largest sub-compact car.
If you use those same 3 megabytes to store a lossy jpeg, you can store a lot more detail in the same file space - at typical compression rates, it might be 5-10 times more detail. I am often puzzled by folks who hate lossy and love lossless, because lossless isn't simply lossless, it's smarter about what it chooses to lose.
I understand that the process of uncompressing and recompressing a lossy image is a lossy process, but we're not talking about multiple recompressions here, we're talking about one cycle. This is true for both broadcast video and for playing back your personal music. And especially if you listen with earbuds, it's silly to worry about audio compression loss, since the earbuds are very lossy. I know that this is a discussion of video, but the same rules apply.
Ink made out of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires? That will be almost as expensive as inkjet ink.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
Hell if I know.
The upgrade asked me about the grub.conf, and it was pretty cryptic, as the diffs it displayed weren't showing all the kernels I thought I had. I told it to leave the original grub.conf there, assuming I could reboot into the old kernel and then run update-grub and look at the grub.conf and hack it by hand if necessary. When it rebooted into my old kernel, the system didn't see my lappy touchpad, so I couldn't use the GUI. So I hit ctl-alt-f1 and used a text window to log in (the keyboard worked). As I recall, update-grub wasn't adding the new kernel at that point, so I just edited grub.conf by hand and added it in. I rebooted into the new kernel, which understood my touchpad. After that, I was able to run update-grub, and it found the new kernel, and reboots after that seem ok.
I haven't used it for more than 15 minutes, but it saw my disk, keyboard, touchpad, and wireless. I didn't notice anything else ailing, but I haven't looked carefully. But the way grub handles the new kernel does seem broken.
In seamonkey, when I have a group of tabs open, and I invoke "Bookmarks:Bookmark This Group of Tabs" it saves a bookmark list entry so that when I select it, it opens the tabs immediately. This seems to be the behavior a sensible user would want.
In firefox, when when I have a group of tabs open, and I invoke "Bookmarks:Bookmark All Tabs..." it saves a bookmark list entry so that when I select it, a menu rolls down with links to the individual tabs, and then at the bottom, there is the item "Open All in Tabs." Yes, I want to open them all in tabs. That's why I saved them as a group of tabs, not as a bookmark folder.
I do not understand how to mimic this seamonkey bookmark "group of tabs" handling behavior in firefox. And I cannot imagine why anyone would want firefox to behave the way it does.
Yeah, I saw that and also immediately thought Bone Fone. Here's a link.
Me too. I like the way seamonkey handles tabs, that's mostly why I use it. I use it for most of my browsing, and was long suffering with an obsolete rendering engine. I have not been able to figure out how to mimic seamonkey's tabs behavior on firefox. Is it possible to get the seamonkey tabs behavior on firefox (with existing settings or add-ons)? -Andy
Ahem.
If you like puzzles and you don't need dazzling graphics, these are fun:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
Or maybe violence causes candy.
The biggest problem with this sentence is its misplaced prepositional phrase. The Human Genome Project probably cost $3B up to some point, but the sentence may imply that the first sequencing cost $3B. There was a recent article in the NY Times discussing this problem.
And it cost $15 billion for the first person to drive into Boston after the Big Dig. That's creative accounting.
Right, but the Newsweek article referenced, and the book it discusses, are called "The Dumbest Generation."
Last week, I was surprised to be playing Taboo with well-educated 20-something American folks at a party, and I referred to "the Monitor and the Merrimac" in a clue, and drew a dozen blank stares.
But then hang around with folks over 50 and try discussing life in the web world or the gaming world, or music, film, or anything relevant to a young person, and you'll get blank stares too.
So do we call the young the dumbest generation because they don't know about button hooks and buggy whips, or do we call elders the dumb ones because they can't use a cell phone and they can't tell the difference between a phishing page and a firefox update request?