Colbert trumps Scientology; everyone wins. It's not mentioned in the article, but what brought this all up in the first place was the fact that "Xenu" was winning the write-in vote before he asked viewers on his show to write in his own name instead. Xenu is the galactic overlord from Scientology myth.
You make it sound as if this is a victory over scientology.
On the contrary, as I understand it, Xenu is more akin to Scientology's satan, than their god -- not a name they'd be trying to promote themselves. The effort to vote for Xenu was almost certainly an action of anti-Scientology protesters -- "Anonymous" being a likely culprit, what with their recent activity and affinity for online stunts like this. (of course, any depiction of "Anonymous" as a cohesive group with any sort of organization or leadership is misleading -- Anonymous is more of a flash mob)
Critics of the Church of Scientology have used public protests to spread the Xenu secret. This has included creating web sites with "xenu" in the domain name, and displaying the name Xenu on banners, and protest signs.
The bandwidth requirements of feeding individuals their own streams at 1080i (or even 720i) would require pretty much dedicated fiber home-to-provider. No, that doesn't exist. You can get fiber to a local node that is dedicated but then you are competing with your neighbors for bandwidth on a shared resource. And that shared resource does not have anywhere near the aggregate capacity to handle the sum of the fiber coming in to it.
When I was about 13-15, the family computer -- well, the one with internet access -- was in the living room.
When I wanted to go places I wasn't supposed to on the internet, I'd just sneak out into the living room at 2 AM when everyone was asleep. I was something of an insomniac, so I was usually awake around then anyway.
Oh, and I knew to clear the cache, and browsing history. And I was savvy enough that I probably could have worked around any sort of net nanny software, but my father never bothered to set any up in the first place. He was generally against filtering software -- I remember him regularly wearing an EFF T-shirt in the early nineties, so that probably gives you a pretty good idea of where he stood on such things.
If my parents had any idea what I was up to, they never said anything about it.
There wasn't much my parents could have done to prevent this:
Have a child who's not an insomniac
Be an insomniac yourself, so you can enforce the "stay the hell out of the living room after midnight" rule
Ensure that the computer will not be functional after midnight (short of sleeping with the modem under your pillow, a tech savvy kid will be able to work around most methods of locking the computer down, so it's difficult to do this effectively)
Accept that 13 year old males have libidos
As a now soon-to-be father myself, I'm not sure how I'd address this issue. I know that, short of locking me in a closet, there was no way to prevent me from finding porn in one way or another at that age.
I don't really think softcore did me much harm; it's all over cable TV in one form or another anyway. But I did occasionally encounter some really hardcore stuff that I found quite shocking and unpleasant at the time. And I thank god that 4chan didn't exist then...
Honestly, I think the best way to mitigate harm to myself at that age would have been to make sure that I had a safe supply of softer stuff, so I wouldn't have to run into the harder stuff trying to find it on my own. But... I don't know that I advocate parents furnishing pornography to their children.
It was purchased in the late nineties for a 3D artist at a dotcom; the company folded a year or so later. The few employees that stuck around received hardware in lieu of their final paychecks.
Dual 333 MHZ P3s. Nvidia Riva 2. Half a gig of ram. Dual 10k RPM 14GB U160 SCSI drives attached to a Adaptec 19160 (The 19160 *still* sells for at $100, 10 years later. Who knows how much it cost at the time...). High speed (for the time) Plextor SCSI CDRom reader and writer.
With a few minor upgrades here and there (video card, a little more ram, a few replaced power supplies), it remained my main system til about 2005. Even played WoW on it. The only real reason I don't use it anymore? Lack of 48-bit LBA support -- couldn't stick a drive larger than 137 gig on it, which in this day and age, just doesn't quite cut it for a desktop.
Replaced it about a year ago -- picked up $300 worth of parts at Fry's, and built a machine that out-spec'd the original in every way, except drive speed.
Those SCSI drives would still be sweet, if they weren't so damn small.
Developers should use *slow* machines That way it'll encourage them to write efficient implementations. If you give your programmers an 8-way 4GHz m/b with 64GB of memory (if sucha thing exists yet), they'll use all the processing power in dumb, inefficient algorithms, just because the development time is reduced. While those of us in the real world have to get by on "normal" machines.
No, developers should develop on fast machines... and test on slow machines.
It's a waste of money to pay your programmers $50/hr to sit and wait for compiles to complete, IDEs to load, etc. That hurts the employer, and the additional cost gets passed on to the customer. It's in everyone's best interest that developers are maximally productive.
Give them fast development environments, and realistic test environments.
Why botther at all? Better go straight to x64, I mean, even the lowliest of nvidia GPUs is already 64 bits, why bother with 32 bits technology?
They day an embedded system's CPU needs to address more than 4 gigs of memory (which is essentially why you would shift from a 32-bit to 64-bit CPU) is the day my shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet.
The iPhone packs 128 meg, as does the BlackBerry Bold. A modern smartphone packs as much ram as the average desktop did a little under a decade ago. SODIMMs (laptop ram) look to be just over $10 per gig. But hey, 640k is all anyone really needs, right?
You may notice some changes in the appearance and fragrance of your excrement in less than a decade.
If musicians get lifetime royalties for their songs, then software engineers should get lifetime royalties for their code.
I don't know about you, but I get stock for my code -- so if we do extremely well, I get a piece of that upside. That's the same basic idea behind royalties.
With ever-increasing JavaScript performance, there's a lot of cpu power available for cracking passwords and captcha's... Just include the code in an ad and you're done. No tricky installs needed, just the idletime of the user's web browser.
This is eerily plausible, but I think there's one thing keeping this from becoming a massive problem:
Anyone running a legitimate site will kick their advertiser to the curb if their ads start sucking down lots of CPU. The only people who'd allow this sort of advertising to run on their sites are already scumbags. And in that case, the bigger risk is probably picking up some sort of malware installed via the latest zero-day browser flaw.
A developer who read a book on security will get security wrong. It's a topic that simply requires a specialist.
Any developer who doesn't qualify as a "security specialist" by your definition has no business writing code in the first place.
Write secure code, and draft secure designs from the beginning. If you're a developer, security is your job, not an afterthought for someone else to layer on after the fact.
Another cool one that I'm surprised Myspace hasn't used: A great way to kill phishers is using the out-bound warning page. Re-code all outbound hyperlinks to a "Warning, this is no longer myspace" page, then allow them to click the url.
Yeah, that's a great way to make your users more aware of potential phishing attempts, except for the fact it's fucking terrible from a usability perspective.
Sure, you might help a few mouthbreathers realize they're being phished, but frankly, they aren't going to read your warning page anyway. They're the type that just click "okay" to make dialogs go away, with no thought to the consequences.
And for the rest, you're only going to annoy people who now have to go through *two* clicks and page loads for what would have otherwise been a single click. I clicked the link, I know what I'm doing. Don't make me tell you twice.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention. For the past four months, all the CEOs of all the banks have been singing the praises of communism. They were so convincing, in fact, that the government handed them $350 billion with no strings attached (which they promptly spent on themselves, bonuses for their lackeys, and on buying distressed companies).
The banks aren't any more anti-communism than Microsoft is. IE: They oppose it when it benefits others or non-executives, and support it when it keeps them and the rest of the American Aristocracy in beach houses and private jets.
No, we got a much worse deal than communism.
Had this been a communist maneuver, "we the people" would now own these companies -- and that's something bank CEOs wouldn't stand for for one second. Instead, we got nothing in return for our money.
No, bank CEOs will never support communism. A true communist revolution would strip them of their wealth and their companies
The latest Acer netbook with a 10" color backlit display has a 9 hour battery life with wireless turned off.
That's less than 1/3 of the most conservative estimates of Kindle 3 battery life.
The Kindle has a passive display. When you're reading a page, it draws no power. It powers up briefly when you change pages, but that's pretty much it.
They're not comparable. Your average netbook has a battery life measured in hours. The Kindle's battery lasts over 30 hours. In addition, people report that the display is much more comfortable to read for long periods.
And of course, the kindle is smaller and lighter, and includes free 3G internet access.
they want to see them unquestioningly as sick pedophiles that are destroying society, inhuman evil monsters that can not be related to.
Er no. These parents don't see homosexuals as monsters or anything like that. That's an absurd characterization, and its made so that you can, in turn, demonize the opposition.
Of course, this is mostly a bunch of demagoguery, but there are some Americans that buy it -- for example, take this sampling of Arizonans. I don't really think it's fair to claim that this is "demonizing the opposition" when prominent figures have actually said these things. Publicly. On the record.
We have spent the last 20 years educating the population that "borrowing" and "sharing" is good and fine and as long as it is on the Internet nobody is harmed. Can we not understand that this is going to carry over into all walks of life. If it is OK to share music across the planet at home then at work it is going to be OK to share web content, or any other content you can lay your hands on.
I think even much of the anti-copyright crowd is still against the idea of attempting to profit off someone else's work via plagiarism.
There's a difference between me emailing the text of an AP article to a few friends, and posting the same content on my website without attribution or permission, and raking in advertising dollars.
Either way, it's a cool little piece of hardware. I'm just not quite sure what I could use it for.
I think it's pretty much a ethernet-to-USB bridge. So it's probably pretty useful for any USB device you've wanted to network-enable.
Personally, I've got a TV I'd love to stream video to from my PC on the other end of the apartment. It's too far for any sort of display cable, but not too far for ethernet.
Looks like, in theory, you could hook up one of these wall-warts to something like this.
I would recommend NOT using any special software like a wiki for your primary documentation. It should be simple and printable, and not need a special server set up to access/use your docs in case of a disaster recovery situation.
Getting your average wiki up and running from scratch should be pretty simple:
You'll need something like a LAMP stack. You've probably got at least one LAMP box left, even if your whole datacenter burnt to the ground. If push comes to shove, you can set up a package like MAMP or Apache2Triad on a desktop with zero-effort -- we're talking a half dozen mouse clicks through an installer, and you're done.
Many wikis (e.g., PMWiki) don't even require a database -- they use a file-based datastore. Unpack your gzip'd and tar'd backup of your wiki directory, and you're done
Okay, so maybe you chose a heavier-duty wiki, like MediaWiki. Ungzip your database backup, and dump it into mysql. Now you're really done
Version control, edit history, and ease of connecting documents make wikis vastly superior to a directory full of Microsoft Word documents.
I would understand if there something to gain by not having a removable battery. But really, does it save any space at all?
Apple boasts 8 hour battery life for the model in question. Most laptops can't claim that. That's what there is to gain. Reduced weight and size, and increased battery capacity -- you can squeeze more cells in your laptop design if you don't put them in a neat, removable package.
Your average user doesn't have much to lose with non-removable batteries. I understand there's a group out there that must have removable batteries (anyone who works for hours on end without access to power), but many of us don't. Between my wife and I, we've owned at least a half-dozen laptops over the last decade. We've never replaced the battery on a single one of them.
NASA probably has a good idea. Published estimates were likely wrong on purpose from the start to give them the opportunity for more media coverage and subsequently budget opportunities.
That's fairly likely -- conservative estimates are wise estimates. As they say, "Under-promise and over-deliver". But a multi-year estimate may have been a bit overly ambitious, after Pathfinder only lasted three months (which was better than the 1-4 week estimate they gave at the time).
Of course, on the other hand, both Viking landers lasted over 3 and a half years. But they weren't solar powered.
...So google already has my location data anyway. This new service gives them no more information than they already had. Instead, it simply allows me to share that data with select parties when I find it convenient.
My wife and I plan to give "Latitude" a spin. She gets lost driving in the city now and then, and gets flustered. Being able to see her location in google maps, and give talk her through directions from there should come in handy.
Slashdot Mirror
You make it sound as if this is a victory over scientology.
On the contrary, as I understand it, Xenu is more akin to Scientology's satan, than their god -- not a name they'd be trying to promote themselves. The effort to vote for Xenu was almost certainly an action of anti-Scientology protesters -- "Anonymous" being a likely culprit, what with their recent activity and affinity for online stunts like this. (of course, any depiction of "Anonymous" as a cohesive group with any sort of organization or leadership is misleading -- Anonymous is more of a flash mob)
The WP article on Xenu seems to support this theory:
Someone should tell AT&T that they've done the impossible.
When I was about 13-15, the family computer -- well, the one with internet access -- was in the living room.
When I wanted to go places I wasn't supposed to on the internet, I'd just sneak out into the living room at 2 AM when everyone was asleep. I was something of an insomniac, so I was usually awake around then anyway.
Oh, and I knew to clear the cache, and browsing history. And I was savvy enough that I probably could have worked around any sort of net nanny software, but my father never bothered to set any up in the first place. He was generally against filtering software -- I remember him regularly wearing an EFF T-shirt in the early nineties, so that probably gives you a pretty good idea of where he stood on such things.
If my parents had any idea what I was up to, they never said anything about it.
There wasn't much my parents could have done to prevent this:
As a now soon-to-be father myself, I'm not sure how I'd address this issue. I know that, short of locking me in a closet, there was no way to prevent me from finding porn in one way or another at that age.
I don't really think softcore did me much harm; it's all over cable TV in one form or another anyway. But I did occasionally encounter some really hardcore stuff that I found quite shocking and unpleasant at the time. And I thank god that 4chan didn't exist then...
Honestly, I think the best way to mitigate harm to myself at that age would have been to make sure that I had a safe supply of softer stuff, so I wouldn't have to run into the harder stuff trying to find it on my own. But... I don't know that I advocate parents furnishing pornography to their children.
You know, you're right. I confused it with the machine I had before it.
It was actually dual 600 mhz P3s, now that I think about it.
The machine it replaced had a single P2 processor -- I think 233 mhz at first, which I later swapped out for a 333 mhz proc.
It's been years, you'll have to forgive me for getting my clockrates backward.
That flickr page serves as an odd timeline of events
Man. He didn't even have the bike a whole month before he crashed it.
It was purchased in the late nineties for a 3D artist at a dotcom; the company folded a year or so later. The few employees that stuck around received hardware in lieu of their final paychecks.
Dual 333 MHZ P3s. Nvidia Riva 2. Half a gig of ram. Dual 10k RPM 14GB U160 SCSI drives attached to a Adaptec 19160 (The 19160 *still* sells for at $100, 10 years later. Who knows how much it cost at the time...). High speed (for the time) Plextor SCSI CDRom reader and writer.
With a few minor upgrades here and there (video card, a little more ram, a few replaced power supplies), it remained my main system til about 2005. Even played WoW on it. The only real reason I don't use it anymore? Lack of 48-bit LBA support -- couldn't stick a drive larger than 137 gig on it, which in this day and age, just doesn't quite cut it for a desktop.
Replaced it about a year ago -- picked up $300 worth of parts at Fry's, and built a machine that out-spec'd the original in every way, except drive speed.
Those SCSI drives would still be sweet, if they weren't so damn small.
If you're not eating your own dogfood, you're doing yourself and your users a disservice.
No, developers should develop on fast machines... and test on slow machines.
It's a waste of money to pay your programmers $50/hr to sit and wait for compiles to complete, IDEs to load, etc. That hurts the employer, and the additional cost gets passed on to the customer. It's in everyone's best interest that developers are maximally productive.
Give them fast development environments, and realistic test environments.
The iPhone packs 128 meg, as does the BlackBerry Bold. A modern smartphone packs as much ram as the average desktop did a little under a decade ago. SODIMMs (laptop ram) look to be just over $10 per gig. But hey, 640k is all anyone really needs, right?
You may notice some changes in the appearance and fragrance of your excrement in less than a decade.
I don't know about you, but I get stock for my code -- so if we do extremely well, I get a piece of that upside. That's the same basic idea behind royalties.
This is eerily plausible, but I think there's one thing keeping this from becoming a massive problem:
Anyone running a legitimate site will kick their advertiser to the curb if their ads start sucking down lots of CPU. The only people who'd allow this sort of advertising to run on their sites are already scumbags. And in that case, the bigger risk is probably picking up some sort of malware installed via the latest zero-day browser flaw.
Any developer who doesn't qualify as a "security specialist" by your definition has no business writing code in the first place.
Write secure code, and draft secure designs from the beginning. If you're a developer, security is your job, not an afterthought for someone else to layer on after the fact.
Yeah, that's a great way to make your users more aware of potential phishing attempts, except for the fact it's fucking terrible from a usability perspective.
Sure, you might help a few mouthbreathers realize they're being phished, but frankly, they aren't going to read your warning page anyway. They're the type that just click "okay" to make dialogs go away, with no thought to the consequences.
And for the rest, you're only going to annoy people who now have to go through *two* clicks and page loads for what would have otherwise been a single click. I clicked the link, I know what I'm doing. Don't make me tell you twice.
No, we got a much worse deal than communism.
Had this been a communist maneuver, "we the people" would now own these companies -- and that's something bank CEOs wouldn't stand for for one second. Instead, we got nothing in return for our money.
No, bank CEOs will never support communism. A true communist revolution would strip them of their wealth and their companies
That's an eerily accurate description of me playing FFVII and VIII in highschool...
That's less than 1/3 of the most conservative estimates of Kindle 3 battery life.
The Kindle has a passive display. When you're reading a page, it draws no power. It powers up briefly when you change pages, but that's pretty much it.
Netbooks have a fraction of the battery life, are heavier, are bigger, and are harder to read for long periods of time.
Try to spend 12 hours on the beach reading from a netbook, and from a Kindle. You'll see the difference.
They're not comparable. Your average netbook has a battery life measured in hours. The Kindle's battery lasts over 30 hours. In addition, people report that the display is much more comfortable to read for long periods.
And of course, the kindle is smaller and lighter, and includes free 3G internet access.
Different tools for different jobs.
Most don't. Some do.
References:
Of course, this is mostly a bunch of demagoguery, but there are some Americans that buy it -- for example, take this sampling of Arizonans. I don't really think it's fair to claim that this is "demonizing the opposition" when prominent figures have actually said these things. Publicly. On the record.
I think even much of the anti-copyright crowd is still against the idea of attempting to profit off someone else's work via plagiarism.
There's a difference between me emailing the text of an AP article to a few friends, and posting the same content on my website without attribution or permission, and raking in advertising dollars.
I think it's pretty much a ethernet-to-USB bridge. So it's probably pretty useful for any USB device you've wanted to network-enable.
Personally, I've got a TV I'd love to stream video to from my PC on the other end of the apartment. It's too far for any sort of display cable, but not too far for ethernet.
Looks like, in theory, you could hook up one of these wall-warts to something like this.
Getting your average wiki up and running from scratch should be pretty simple:
Version control, edit history, and ease of connecting documents make wikis vastly superior to a directory full of Microsoft Word documents.
Apple boasts 8 hour battery life for the model in question. Most laptops can't claim that. That's what there is to gain. Reduced weight and size, and increased battery capacity -- you can squeeze more cells in your laptop design if you don't put them in a neat, removable package.
Your average user doesn't have much to lose with non-removable batteries. I understand there's a group out there that must have removable batteries (anyone who works for hours on end without access to power), but many of us don't. Between my wife and I, we've owned at least a half-dozen laptops over the last decade. We've never replaced the battery on a single one of them.
That's fairly likely -- conservative estimates are wise estimates. As they say, "Under-promise and over-deliver". But a multi-year estimate may have been a bit overly ambitious, after Pathfinder only lasted three months (which was better than the 1-4 week estimate they gave at the time).
Of course, on the other hand, both Viking landers lasted over 3 and a half years. But they weren't solar powered.
...So google already has my location data anyway. This new service gives them no more information than they already had. Instead, it simply allows me to share that data with select parties when I find it convenient.
My wife and I plan to give "Latitude" a spin. She gets lost driving in the city now and then, and gets flustered. Being able to see her location in google maps, and give talk her through directions from there should come in handy.