Yes, I was just wondering about security. As I currently use PDF, I guess it gives me two useful properties. First, I know that my editor/viewer of choice won't tweak anything (update dates fields, change page size, etc). Second, it gives a 'clean' copy without any edit history or suchlike. But I can imagine situations where it is useful to release a document that cannot easily be edited. Which leads to the question...how? Is it possible to produce a secure, uneditable, format that is also open? I could already publish hashes for a Word document, if I was so inclined, but I think we need something less crude, that does not require checking back at the original release source. Any ideas?
I'm not saying PDF's can't be edited, just that they're generally understood to be the final document, rather than a work in progress. This is how Acroread, XPDF and Evince treat them. I think this is a useful distinction. If ODF or OOXML are successful and become truly portable, I still think it will be useful to have a different document format for a work-in-progress and the finished product. Maybe you disagree...
...er, no, it means the author understands document file formats. The letter isn't meant for you or I to edit, and has a fixed layout, so PDF (being an open standard itself) is sensible.
I think that's exactly what we're meant to think. The question is who is kicking up dust, and why? Somebody seems to be gunning for Jimmy, and the mindless press just love printing wild stories. Any idea who's behind this?
To give an example from the space program, it reminds me of this story: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/08/1240226. As the owner of an old Zenit SLR camera, I can confirm that Soviet engineering was extremely tough, if a little over the top and aesthetically lacking. Solid brass body, indestructible, rather heavy.
Isn't the key word there 'trial'? According to the fine article, it happened back in '97, i.e. a decade ago. The article is interesting. It leaves me really impressed that Mir had all those troubles, but survived in orbit without killing anyone. This is meant to be cutting edge science and engineering. Things will go wrong. Yes, Mir wore out in the end, but after years of fine service.
I see you are also a member of the Rod Brooks school of thought. It's easy to write a simulation of a pencil balanced on it's point. It's much harder to set it up in real life!
'If they had set up an experiment with robots driving in a perfect circle, flow breakdown would not have occurred.'
Is that true? If the robots had been fixed to a set driving speed (open loop), maybe. But if the robots had some sort of collision avoidance, it could still happen. It's instability in the control algorithm, no?
I dress down. It's an easy way to filter people. Those that are impressed by 'dressing up' deselect themselves, leaving me more time for my life and people who actually make the effort to know me, not my trousers.
This sounds a bit like planning a holiday (vacation) using the internet. I was planning a trip to Portugal last night. I looked up lots of guest houses and hotels, saw their locations on a map, read reviews from other travellers, etc. I could even find the locations of tourist sites, see photos of them from other tourists, and get satellite photos of them from Google. I'm glad the military are catching up.
So you write a neat FOSS tool that would infringe these patents, but MS agree not to sue you. But how does it work out for Redhat (et al) who want to sell a distribution containing your tool?
I'm thinking in the opposite direction. Replace my laptop with a little box (think ipod sized) and use these for the display. The backlight is smaller, so hopefully the power consumption is low. Now all I need is an alternative to my keyboard...
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Leaps and bounds indeed. Office still does all the annoying things it did before (placing graphics and captions is nothing short of witchcraft), but now I can't find any of the menus that might help me fix the problem. I won't even start on the equation editor. But most of all - what happened to the speed? I can type faster than Word puts letters on the screen. On a 3GHz machine with 2GB RAM. And my typing skills suck.
Because a civilian couldn't figure out the potential risk? Oh, apparently not. I especially liked the "There are places where the networks are not touching, and there are places where they are" comment from the spokesgimp.
Surely the real problem is that most free (as in not used to host an actual website) domain names are taken by squatters. That means that if you want to start a neat website, you can either pay a silly amount for a good domain name (one that I might be able to remember) or pay a basic rate for something obscure. It's making the web less usable, and I don't think anyone envisaged squatters as a problem when the system was created. It has a bug, it needs patching.
We're not arguing about lame sites that nobody reads - I think the difference between a lame site and a squatter are obvious, we just need to find a way of writing that down in legalese. Or maybe limiting the number of domains that can be registered to one company?
I also use flux. I started largely for the same reason (hungry for crunch memory), but now I just like it. Plus there's a lot to said for always using the same desktop - I hate trying to remember two different systems, different keystrokes, etc. Think of flux as clean rather than primitive;-)
Maybe we should say lazy rather than bad coding? I usually use a two-stage approach to coding. First I make it work, then I make it work well. The second stage is about robustness, speed, size, understandability (clean code is often better than comments), etc. I've never seen Microsoft source, but I get the impression they use a one-stage approach. But I'd have to agree, it's an institutional problem, it's unlikely to be down to the individual coders.
No, that's normal. You also lose all the magic of pstricks. Has anyone out there found a useful replacement? My main use is to replace placeholders in figures with equations.
You can detect many things, but not eavesdropping. Your little wifi card broadcasts all kinds of data, in all directions. I can listen in and say nothing. How are you going to detect that? Warping of the ether?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I was just wondering about security. As I currently use PDF, I guess it gives me two useful properties. First, I know that my editor/viewer of choice won't tweak anything (update dates fields, change page size, etc). Second, it gives a 'clean' copy without any edit history or suchlike. But I can imagine situations where it is useful to release a document that cannot easily be edited. Which leads to the question...how? Is it possible to produce a secure, uneditable, format that is also open? I could already publish hashes for a Word document, if I was so inclined, but I think we need something less crude, that does not require checking back at the original release source. Any ideas?
I'm not saying PDF's can't be edited, just that they're generally understood to be the final document, rather than a work in progress. This is how Acroread, XPDF and Evince treat them. I think this is a useful distinction. If ODF or OOXML are successful and become truly portable, I still think it will be useful to have a different document format for a work-in-progress and the finished product. Maybe you disagree...
...er, no, it means the author understands document file formats. The letter isn't meant for you or I to edit, and has a fixed layout, so PDF (being an open standard itself) is sensible.
I think that's exactly what we're meant to think. The question is who is kicking up dust, and why? Somebody seems to be gunning for Jimmy, and the mindless press just love printing wild stories. Any idea who's behind this?
To give an example from the space program, it reminds me of this story: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/08/1240226. As the owner of an old Zenit SLR camera, I can confirm that Soviet engineering was extremely tough, if a little over the top and aesthetically lacking. Solid brass body, indestructible, rather heavy.
Isn't the key word there 'trial'? According to the fine article, it happened back in '97, i.e. a decade ago. The article is interesting. It leaves me really impressed that Mir had all those troubles, but survived in orbit without killing anyone. This is meant to be cutting edge science and engineering. Things will go wrong. Yes, Mir wore out in the end, but after years of fine service.
I see you are also a member of the Rod Brooks school of thought. It's easy to write a simulation of a pencil balanced on it's point. It's much harder to set it up in real life!
'If they had set up an experiment with robots driving in a perfect circle, flow breakdown would not have occurred.'
Is that true? If the robots had been fixed to a set driving speed (open loop), maybe. But if the robots had some sort of collision avoidance, it could still happen. It's instability in the control algorithm, no?
To make slashdotters and script kiddies happy. Look again at that figure: $1337 billion
I dress down. It's an easy way to filter people. Those that are impressed by 'dressing up' deselect themselves, leaving me more time for my life and people who actually make the effort to know me, not my trousers.
This sounds a bit like planning a holiday (vacation) using the internet. I was planning a trip to Portugal last night. I looked up lots of guest houses and hotels, saw their locations on a map, read reviews from other travellers, etc. I could even find the locations of tourist sites, see photos of them from other tourists, and get satellite photos of them from Google. I'm glad the military are catching up.
So you write a neat FOSS tool that would infringe these patents, but MS agree not to sue you. But how does it work out for Redhat (et al) who want to sell a distribution containing your tool?
This is a slow-news-day even for PC world. Back in the old days, cheap keyboards weren't nice. Shocker.
I'm thinking in the opposite direction. Replace my laptop with a little box (think ipod sized) and use these for the display. The backlight is smaller, so hopefully the power consumption is low. Now all I need is an alternative to my keyboard...
Leaps and bounds indeed. Office still does all the annoying things it did before (placing graphics and captions is nothing short of witchcraft), but now I can't find any of the menus that might help me fix the problem. I won't even start on the equation editor. But most of all - what happened to the speed? I can type faster than Word puts letters on the screen. On a 3GHz machine with 2GB RAM. And my typing skills suck.
Oh for mod points. I think that's the most insightful comment I've ever read on /. (okay, so the bar's not so high, but even so)
Because a civilian couldn't figure out the potential risk? Oh, apparently not. I especially liked the "There are places where the networks are not touching, and there are places where they are" comment from the spokesgimp.
Surely the real problem is that most free (as in not used to host an actual website) domain names are taken by squatters. That means that if you want to start a neat website, you can either pay a silly amount for a good domain name (one that I might be able to remember) or pay a basic rate for something obscure. It's making the web less usable, and I don't think anyone envisaged squatters as a problem when the system was created. It has a bug, it needs patching.
We're not arguing about lame sites that nobody reads - I think the difference between a lame site and a squatter are obvious, we just need to find a way of writing that down in legalese. Or maybe limiting the number of domains that can be registered to one company?
I also use flux. I started largely for the same reason (hungry for crunch memory), but now I just like it. Plus there's a lot to said for always using the same desktop - I hate trying to remember two different systems, different keystrokes, etc. Think of flux as clean rather than primitive ;-)
Maybe we should say lazy rather than bad coding? I usually use a two-stage approach to coding. First I make it work, then I make it work well. The second stage is about robustness, speed, size, understandability (clean code is often better than comments), etc. I've never seen Microsoft source, but I get the impression they use a one-stage approach. But I'd have to agree, it's an institutional problem, it's unlikely to be down to the individual coders.
Oh, so you mean both of them then?
No, that's normal. You also lose all the magic of pstricks. Has anyone out there found a useful replacement? My main use is to replace placeholders in figures with equations.
Rasterman, is that you?
Fair enough. Like a good ./'er I haven't read it, of course ;-)
You can detect many things, but not eavesdropping. Your little wifi card broadcasts all kinds of data, in all directions. I can listen in and say nothing. How are you going to detect that? Warping of the ether?