I think the point of TFA (though I haven't read it yet) is that multitasking is most likely learned behavior, versus being a basic function hard-wired in, and that this behavior can be trained via gaming.
Although, I wonder if people who are inherently already better at multitasking aren't drawn to gaming more than those who aren't...
I couldn't agree more. However, this is one of the rare cases where I would actually encourage *more* vague wording in this legislation.
I'd like to see a bill that requires software vendors to provide on demand a human-readable description of the actions that software is taking. This wouldn't be much of a problem for the open-source community, but it would stick in the craw of every company that releases black-box binaries that are opaque to anyone but those few who have the skill/patience/time to use a debugger/disassembler. It doesn't need to be source code, but the actions the software takes should be documented in enough detail to reveal security flaws and hidden functionality. This would be extremely helpful as our society as a whole is becoming more and more dependent upon not only the software we run ourselves, but that run by others.
Also, on a slightly-off-topic note, I like the part about re-evaluation after an introductory period. I think a lot of ridiculous laws would come off the books if there was a mandatory periodic review.
You haven't been able to get sound working on Linux? I remember when I had that problem, but that was in 2.0 kernel days, long before coldplug and such.
You should try booting Knoppix. If your sound works, you know there's a driver in Linux (and there probably is). You can look at lsmod's output to see what's being loaded (your sound card module will be used by sound), then manually load the module if you don't like coldplug.
If you can't even get it working in Knoppix, there's probably not a driver... though I have yet to run across that problem since before kernel 2.4, so if that's the case, you must have some pretty obscure/new hardware.
Not so. I've used Linux countless times to repair broken Windows installations, everything from replacing corrupted system files to removing spyware or viruses that are too far embedded to be removed even in safe mode (it doesn't help that Windows locks EXE files while they're running).
For me, I only run Windows once in a great while, usually when I need to test how one of my web pages renders in Exploder (and to defragment my data partition, which is FAT32 so I can share files between OSes). Thus, I don't see a need for a separate machine when I use Windows so seldom.
1) Non-administrator OS X users have access that's much closer to typical Unix root than to a typical Unix user. It's a moot point because...
2) The obession with the omnipotence of root comes from the days when all Unix use was multi-user. On a typical Linux desktop, the access a user already has is far more dangerous than anything he could do under root.
3) Please stop saying "boxen".
False. OSX and Linux won't let a normal user do "rm -fr/*" or anything like that. Even if you're an administrator, you still need to use sudo to execute privilieged commands, which prevents at the very least most dangerous typos (you might kill your data, but the system will run intact). If you had root (at least on a non-ACL-based Linux), you could do things like modify system binaries and configuration files, which is impossible as a regular user on every distro I've seen.
OSX does a great job of allowing people to run applications and such without needing enough privileges to seriously mung the system. A lot of this is due to the use of AppDirs, which I wish more Linux distros used (GoboLinux uses a scheme that's close to AppDirs). It eliminates the need for a package manager (goodbye RPM/apt!) and allows for a package to be installed or uninstalled with all dependencies in any directory; system-wide installations are only possible as superuser, but home directory installations can be done as easily and by a normal user without affecting anyone else. That may be why it seems that non-admin users have almost as much access as root; because the restrictions are only felt when you really try to do something that's going to affect the whole system.
Oh, yeah, and I'll say b0x3n whenever I damn well please. Nooch.
Re:free Puff Piece for Microsoft? Here?
on
Ballmer on Innovation
·
· Score: 0, Troll
A few more:
AOL (instant messenger, crappy overpriced internet access For Dummies)
WebTV (now owned by the new Big Blue)
XEROX (GUI)
Adobe (PDF, PageMaker)
Also, Ballmer seems to need a refresher in basic math... last I checked, 1 + 1 != 3:-P
Heh... I took a cursory look at the source code, and I thought it had permissions...
[guest]$ ls -l ls -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel bin/n.a. 2005/06/16 22:09:14 ls [guest]$ rm ls [guest]$ ls command not found: "ls" [guest]$
It won't allow deletion of/etc/passwd, however... some kind of hardwired check I wonder?
Whatever the case may be, it's still a very cool toy to play with. What I think would be a cool next step is to use AJAX and actually store data on the server... maybe I'll hack on it a little myself. Not that I could redistribute it... (the header of the sources says all rights reserved, copyright, blahblahblah...) but it might be fun.
The hardware will not prevent the user from broadcasting on licensed channels, and FCC regulations prevent software-controlled radios from allowing users to do so.
I've never read the fcc rules on this, so I may be completely off. That said, from what you've said there, it may be Atheros that violated the fcc rules and not anybody writing drivers. If a software-controlled radio is not allowed to let users broadcast on certain frequencies, shouldn't this be controlled internally on the card?
Perhaps I'm on crack here, but it seems that releasing a spec which clearly states what to (or not to) do to remain within the law would be a better effort to cover their asses with the fcc than making people (probably many times incorrectly, at least at first) reverse-engineer the spec from an existing binary driver and perhaps produce something which inadvertently broadcasts on licensed channels.
So a company called PatchLink is supporting microsoft... funny thing is, its server will only run on (surprise, surprise) Windows. Also, something rather interesting from their system requirements:
Minimum (for limited evaluations)
Processor Intel Pentium or compatible 1-GHz processor Memory 1024 MB of RAM Hard Disk 20 GB of available hard disk space for the server
Recommended*
Pentium 800Mhz 1024 MB of RAM 20 GB of available disk space
Since when is the recommended configuration worse than the minimal configuration? 'Cause last I checked, a gigahert was 1000MHz (or maybe 1024, I never did check that...)
I don't generally play games, but I'm able to run Emacs, Firefox, Thunderbird, Kismet, wepcrack, and 8 xterms, as well as recompile my kernel without even approaching a crash. And it's not a new computer either... slower than 1.7ghz anyway (Athlon XP-M 2000+, which is about 1.5ghz). However, the memory thing doesn't matter nearly as much when I'm in Linux, nor does the speed. I barely touch my swap in Linux... in Windows, it's constantly at least twice my ram size (480meg).
If you don't like Macs, give Linux a shot. SuSE is nice for people migrating from Windows.
Take a look at whales, for instance, with brains much larger than our own, and thusly, more neurons. A whale can't go on Slashdot and say "OMGZ first post guys" much less something of human level intelligence.
This doesn't necessarily mean lower intelligence, in my opinion. Being underwater prevents most technology (that we know of) from working, from fire and wheels to computers and airplanes.
A whale doesn't have fingers or hands, either, but whales and dolphins could well be as intelligent as (or more so than) us, but simply be less technologically advanced and unable/unwilling to communicate with us in a way we understand.
Sure, they seem dumb at Sea World- but then, if you took a human baby and put it in a cage and threw bananas at it when it did a trick for you, it would probably behave pretty stupidly. Much of our intellect is awakened by our experiences in the early 5 or so years- within limits, the more you are stimulated within this time, the smarter you will end up being. I would simply wonder what a dolphin or whale could be taught to do if stimulated properly.
An interesting and slightly off-topic side note is that whales and dolphins are conscious breathers; i.e., they must consciously surface in order to breathe, so they never go completely to sleep. Instead, half of their brain sleeps at a time- during this time, they're in a groggy half-sleeping state that allows enough consciousness to surface and to wake up if there's danger.
Intelligent and friendly on rye bread with some mayonnaise.
It's funny how among this subset of the population, April Fools Day is one of the more popular holidays with many (certainly one of my favorites). I think it reminds us once a year to be on our toes and to stay mentally alert. And, hell, I don't even always remember my own birthday, but I sure as hell remember AFD several days in advance, and am on the offensive from the moment I roll out of bed.
Linux supports IP aliasing... which means you can assign more than one IP to a network interface. I've run an IP-masquerading DSL router/firewall machine before that only had one ethernet card with aliasing. You just assign eth0 to 192.168.0.1 (or whatever your internal one is going to be) then run dhcpcd on eth0:0 (or just ipconfig with the address, whatever). Then you plug your DSL modem into the hub/switch along with everything else. Technically, (at least if you're using a hub), it's still passing the packets from the net to the internal machines, but as long as none of them have the external address assigned to them then it shouldn't be a problem.
Sure, you're reducing your bandwidth by 50% using this method, but if you're firewalling a 1.5M DSL line and the NIC is 10 or 100M, it doesn't much matter.
Looks like it's not just for linux. I found this on Google's cache:
http://fuware.nanocrew.net/pymusique/pymusique-s et up.exe
The link should work when the site recovers from the/. effect.
Also from the cache:
Requires the Gtk+/Win32 Runtime Environment. Reboot your computer after installing it. When exiting PyMusique, a messagebox ("Errors Occurred") will pop up. Ignore it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point of TFA (though I haven't read it yet) is that multitasking is most likely learned behavior, versus being a basic function hard-wired in, and that this behavior can be trained via gaming.
Although, I wonder if people who are inherently already better at multitasking aren't drawn to gaming more than those who aren't...
-b
I couldn't agree more. However, this is one of the rare cases where I would actually encourage *more* vague wording in this legislation.
I'd like to see a bill that requires software vendors to provide on demand a human-readable description of the actions that software is taking. This wouldn't be much of a problem for the open-source community, but it would stick in the craw of every company that releases black-box binaries that are opaque to anyone but those few who have the skill/patience/time to use a debugger/disassembler. It doesn't need to be source code, but the actions the software takes should be documented in enough detail to reveal security flaws and hidden functionality. This would be extremely helpful as our society as a whole is becoming more and more dependent upon not only the software we run ourselves, but that run by others.
Also, on a slightly-off-topic note, I like the part about re-evaluation after an introductory period. I think a lot of ridiculous laws would come off the books if there was a mandatory periodic review.
Actually, in this particular case, you can fix things pretty easily. Corrupted Pythuon? Here's two fixes:
./configure && make && make install
# wget http://python.org/python-source.tar.gz
# tar xzf python-source.tar.gz*
# cd python-source/ &&
-or-
# export ROOT="/mnt/gentoo"
# emerge -C python
# emerge python
* Not real URL
You haven't been able to get sound working on Linux? I remember when I had that problem, but that was in 2.0 kernel days, long before coldplug and such.
You should try booting Knoppix. If your sound works, you know there's a driver in Linux (and there probably is). You can look at lsmod's output to see what's being loaded (your sound card module will be used by sound), then manually load the module if you don't like coldplug.
If you can't even get it working in Knoppix, there's probably not a driver... though I have yet to run across that problem since before kernel 2.4, so if that's the case, you must have some pretty obscure/new hardware.
Not so. I've used Linux countless times to repair broken Windows installations, everything from replacing corrupted system files to removing spyware or viruses that are too far embedded to be removed even in safe mode (it doesn't help that Windows locks EXE files while they're running).
For me, I only run Windows once in a great while, usually when I need to test how one of my web pages renders in Exploder (and to defragment my data partition, which is FAT32 so I can share files between OSes). Thus, I don't see a need for a separate machine when I use Windows so seldom.
...Linux and Windows security are neck-and-neck...
1) Non-administrator OS X users have access that's much closer to typical Unix root than to a typical Unix user. It's a moot point because...
/*" or anything like that. Even if you're an administrator, you still need to use sudo to execute privilieged commands, which prevents at the very least most dangerous typos (you might kill your data, but the system will run intact). If you had root (at least on a non-ACL-based Linux), you could do things like modify system binaries and configuration files, which is impossible as a regular user on every distro I've seen.
2) The obession with the omnipotence of root comes from the days when all Unix use was multi-user. On a typical Linux desktop, the access a user already has is far more dangerous than anything he could do under root.
3) Please stop saying "boxen".
False. OSX and Linux won't let a normal user do "rm -fr
OSX does a great job of allowing people to run applications and such without needing enough privileges to seriously mung the system. A lot of this is due to the use of AppDirs, which I wish more Linux distros used (GoboLinux uses a scheme that's close to AppDirs). It eliminates the need for a package manager (goodbye RPM/apt!) and allows for a package to be installed or uninstalled with all dependencies in any directory; system-wide installations are only possible as superuser, but home directory installations can be done as easily and by a normal user without affecting anyone else. That may be why it seems that non-admin users have almost as much access as root; because the restrictions are only felt when you really try to do something that's going to affect the whole system.
Oh, yeah, and I'll say b0x3n whenever I damn well please. Nooch.
Also, Ballmer seems to need a refresher in basic math... last I checked, 1 + 1 != 3
The only thing better than winning the Special Olympics is not being retarded. :)
Whatever the case may be, it's still a very cool toy to play with. What I think would be a cool next step is to use AJAX and actually store data on the server... maybe I'll hack on it a little myself. Not that I could redistribute it... (the header of the sources says all rights reserved, copyright, blahblahblah...) but it might be fun.
The hardware will not prevent the user from broadcasting on licensed channels, and FCC regulations prevent software-controlled radios from allowing users to do so.
I've never read the fcc rules on this, so I may be completely off. That said, from what you've said there, it may be Atheros that violated the fcc rules and not anybody writing drivers. If a software-controlled radio is not allowed to let users broadcast on certain frequencies, shouldn't this be controlled internally on the card?
Perhaps I'm on crack here, but it seems that releasing a spec which clearly states what to (or not to) do to remain within the law would be a better effort to cover their asses with the fcc than making people (probably many times incorrectly, at least at first) reverse-engineer the spec from an existing binary driver and perhaps produce something which inadvertently broadcasts on licensed channels.
Are these women mostly nerds as well?
I hope so. Nothing turns me on more than a geek chick!
So a company called PatchLink is supporting microsoft... funny thing is, its server will only run on (surprise, surprise) Windows. Also, something rather interesting from their system requirements:
Minimum (for limited evaluations)
Processor Intel Pentium or compatible 1-GHz processor
Memory 1024 MB of RAM
Hard Disk 20 GB of available hard disk space for the server
Recommended*
Pentium 800Mhz
1024 MB of RAM
20 GB of available disk space
Since when is the recommended configuration worse than the minimal configuration? 'Cause last I checked, a gigahert was 1000MHz (or maybe 1024, I never did check that...)
I don't generally play games, but I'm able to run Emacs, Firefox, Thunderbird, Kismet, wepcrack, and 8 xterms, as well as recompile my kernel without even approaching a crash. And it's not a new computer either... slower than 1.7ghz anyway (Athlon XP-M 2000+, which is about 1.5ghz). However, the memory thing doesn't matter nearly as much when I'm in Linux, nor does the speed. I barely touch my swap in Linux... in Windows, it's constantly at least twice my ram size (480meg).
If you don't like Macs, give Linux a shot. SuSE is nice for people migrating from Windows.
Without the razor-sharp teeth? When's the last time you were around a four-year-old? :)
You know... it's funny... as I read this, I'm eating a Beef N Cheddar and washing it down with Mt. Dew Code Red.
The one I've always heard is that if you get attacked by a Great White its probably because they've mistaken you for a Seal.
:)
Oh, OK, just as long as it's an accident.
The mod points, evidently...
Take a look at whales, for instance, with brains much larger than our own, and thusly, more neurons. A whale can't go on Slashdot and say "OMGZ first post guys" much less something of human level intelligence.
This doesn't necessarily mean lower intelligence, in my opinion. Being underwater prevents most technology (that we know of) from working, from fire and wheels to computers and airplanes.
A whale doesn't have fingers or hands, either, but whales and dolphins could well be as intelligent as (or more so than) us, but simply be less technologically advanced and unable/unwilling to communicate with us in a way we understand.
Sure, they seem dumb at Sea World- but then, if you took a human baby and put it in a cage and threw bananas at it when it did a trick for you, it would probably behave pretty stupidly. Much of our intellect is awakened by our experiences in the early 5 or so years- within limits, the more you are stimulated within this time, the smarter you will end up being. I would simply wonder what a dolphin or whale could be taught to do if stimulated properly.
An interesting and slightly off-topic side note is that whales and dolphins are conscious breathers; i.e., they must consciously surface in order to breathe, so they never go completely to sleep. Instead, half of their brain sleeps at a time- during this time, they're in a groggy half-sleeping state that allows enough consciousness to surface and to wake up if there's danger.
Intelligent and friendly on rye bread with some mayonnaise.
It's funny how among this subset of the population, April Fools Day is one of the more popular holidays with many (certainly one of my favorites). I think it reminds us once a year to be on our toes and to stay mentally alert. And, hell, I don't even always remember my own birthday, but I sure as hell remember AFD several days in advance, and am on the offensive from the moment I roll out of bed.
It? Heh.
Define hipocracy
I think it's "hypocrisy"...
Linux supports IP aliasing... which means you can assign more than one IP to a network interface. I've run an IP-masquerading DSL router/firewall machine before that only had one ethernet card with aliasing. You just assign eth0 to 192.168.0.1 (or whatever your internal one is going to be) then run dhcpcd on eth0:0 (or just ipconfig with the address, whatever). Then you plug your DSL modem into the hub/switch along with everything else. Technically, (at least if you're using a hub), it's still passing the packets from the net to the internal machines, but as long as none of them have the external address assigned to them then it shouldn't be a problem.
Sure, you're reducing your bandwidth by 50% using this method, but if you're firewalling a 1.5M DSL line and the NIC is 10 or 100M, it doesn't much matter.
We have evolutionary pressure to cherish the animals and plants because we depend upon them to survive. A scary 2-ton metal bug would likely not.
Looks like it's not just for linux. I found this on Google's cache:
s et up.exe
/. effect.
http://fuware.nanocrew.net/pymusique/pymusique-
The link should work when the site recovers from the
Also from the cache:
Requires the Gtk+/Win32 Runtime Environment. Reboot your computer after installing it.
When exiting PyMusique, a messagebox ("Errors Occurred") will pop up. Ignore it.