Comment Re: Prosecutors (Score 1) 670
This appeal probably more to do with the sort of lawyer drawn to the prosecution field than anything related to the politics of the executive branch.
Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 333
Just as a gag, based on a string of comments made on an earlier date about Google vs. Bing, I typed "2^2^2^2" into Google, Bing, Wolfram|Alpha, and Yahoo. Google, Wolfram|Alpha, and Yahoo all provided the correct answer of 65536 (2^(2^(2^2))), while Bing provides 256 (((2^2)^2)^2). That alone makes Bing's search results less reliable than the others, in my opinion.
Comment Re:New wiki user (Score 1) 632
I love the lawnmower vs. rabbit... rabbit's in the bag ;)
But seriously, i used to spend about an hour or so a night adding to articles helping out and such, They just keep coming with more hoops and crap to waste my time - so finally I say screw em'
But seriously, i used to spend about an hour or so a night adding to articles helping out and such, They just keep coming with more hoops and crap to waste my time - so finally I say screw em'
Comment Re:Unconstitutional (Score -1, Troll) 327
Ayn Rand fans should be horrified at the outcome here. Here is a businessman who is engaging in pure, free capitalism. Takes a lower quality product and sells it as a higher quality product. The government has no business getting involved in this man's pursuit of making a profit. If they don't like what he has to sell, they can take their business to another capitalist who offers better products and better service. Let the market sort itself out!
Comment Re:Clarity? (Score 0, Redundant) 364
If I want to walk a windows user through changing the desktop resolution, it's easy. Good luck doing those in linux.
ssh -X into the machine, and run:
xdpyinfo | grep dimensions
I have no idea why "a low end non power user" would know or care what their display resolution is. Its like complaining that linux is not ready for the desktop because a sterotypical grannie would have a hard time setting up a hard-realtime CNC controller. Who cares?
I don't print much. Didn't even own a printer from 1995 thru 2009. Based on my recent experiences, seems that changing the default printer is much simpler than understanding the concept of even having a default printer, or the concept of being able to print to multiple printers.
Comment Re:Frankly I'm siding with Verizon. Good for Veriz (Score 1) 593
This situation highlights the gap between technology and policy. My guess is, that if things don't get completely ignored after this news item falls from focus, then whatever policy changes are implemented will be ponderous and draconian and will not prevent this scenario from recurring.
Comment Re:Idiot Police imho (Score 5, Funny) 593
For ten and a half hours, the officer was on hold.
Comment Re:This seems abrupt (Score 1) 856
'Are you going to assume I'm ignorant of how Windows works, or can we have a reasonable discussion? '
Of course I'm going to assume you are ignorant of how windows works. You and everyone else I encounter.
Perhaps the tone of my response was a bit mocking and biting but turnabout is fair play and you invited it.
Of course, none of that changes that my post was accurate.
Comment Re:If you don't like it... (Score 1) 318
>The real solution is to stop voting for incumbents. Nothing's
>going to change until we get rid of career politicians.
We tried that in 1996. It did not work very well.
Submission + - One-Laptop-Per-Child application development
An anonymous reader writes: This OLPC (One-Laptop-Per-Child) tutorial teaches you how to develop Python activities for the XO laptop. It covers the ins and outs of Sugar (the XO user interface, or UI) and the details behind activity development. You will also learn about Python programming, Sugar application program interfaces (APIs) for Python, and platform emulation with QEMU. Learn OLPC application development and help the worlds children.
Submission + - Wikipedia, Relevance and Zealotry (an article) 2
gmezero writes: "It's been over two years now since I finally became so fed up with Wikipedia that I finally had to start editing, and from then on I have become embroiled in an ongoing love hate relationship with the site. Actually, in hind-sight, it's probably less of a hate the site issue, and more of a hate the clueless and opinionated, so called WikiCops, that more often than not detract from content quality.
One of my chief complaints is the abuse of the issue of relevance. This one ranks up there at the same levels of disgust as people who have received a college degree and actually think they are now an authority on a subject when they've never even worked in the field.
What has brought me to this article though is first hand experience with Wikipedia amnesia. The notion that if a dozen people who are zealots on a given subject matter decide that since they have not heard of something, then it must not be relevant to the world.
This is fast becoming a problem for Internet only history from the early 1990's for one as nearly all of the websites that might be used to reference events, have in many cases long disappeared from existence before 1996, when Archive.org initially started it's woefully incomplete collection of websites online at the time. So unless it managed to transfer over to the print world, or rise to a high level of visibility in the UseNet, a sole voice trying to preserve an important element of history becomes irrelevant in the eyes of the WikiCop.
I have also noticed that as Internet users age, they're usage patterns change as well. When people are younger they tend to be more active in Social Media projects. As they get older, they gravitate back to a few communities that have persisted with them, or drop back into a more passive, consumption mode due to the burdens of everyday life. This has resulted in a large number of Internet users who; A) have no familiarity with the early web because they either weren't an early adopter or aren't old enough to know; or B) have moved on in their life and are not aware that their personal experiences and knowledge have value to the collective of society as a whole.
My fights within the video game related pages of Wikipedia if nothing else have given me strong cause to question the quality and validity of all of the material on the site.
One personal case in point is the very page that brought me in to the wiki, and as I write this, continues to be a battle ground: "Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar". In April of 2005 I added to items to this page. I significant piece of historical trivia, and links to unofficial textfile based maps of the game that were distributed when the game was officially released.
I eventually gave up the fight over the trivia as it wore me down, and someone eventually promised to make a trivia specific page to hold the data. Of course since most WikiCops are about 12 years old from best I can tell, none of them understand the relevancy of trivia, and I finally caved. It disgusts me, but there it is.
The second item, and more contentious in my mind though is the t-files links.
Unfortunately I have a personal relationship with the content in the files, which weakens my case and brings me back to the "relevance" issue.
In the early to mid 1980's I was an Apple // software pirate, and I had reached a level of distribution access where I was frequently second in line in the food chain of distribution (the first being the cracker or their friend that made the first upload to the team's home transfer site). It was during this time that I collected a final version of Ultima IV before its commercial release. I had been a long fan of the Ultima series having purchased II and III and I had IV on pre-order at the time because I just couldn't resist the cloth maps.
Anyways, as I had already authored quite a few game maps by that point for many of the early Infocom titles, I took it upon myself to make a complete map of the overworld of Ultima IV so I could release it in time for the game's commercial release. I mapped while awake, and distributed U4 while I was asleep, and somehow squeezed high-school in between the hours. And then, at the allotted hour I bundled up the maps and began uploading them at the top of the distribution chains... By the sixth site I called, the maps had already started cross-propagating, and my work was done. Not but a year later I myself dropped out of the scene, but from then on I enjoyed meeting people across the country (other Apple gamers, as well as IBM and C64 players) who not only had downloaded my maps, but also, by design, had printed them out and hung them on their wall. Even I was surprised at how many people in the oddest of places seemed to have seen the files.
So here we are going into the later half of the 2007, and how many of you, my dear reader were involved in the Apple gaming community in the 80's? Let's be honest... statistically? Not that many of you. How many of you were more than casually involved in software piracy in the 80's? Probably even less that the previous number. And how many of you kept the text files you downloaded and not only saved them, but actively format/platform shifted it over the years so as not to loose them? Let's guess, about 10 of you right?... or wait, that's 11 if you count me.
Currently Jason Scott's TextFiles archive has grown to become the definitive source for files like this though, so am I to think that since he doesn't have a copy of my maps on his site that somehow they weren't relevant? Hardly, my personal collection of textiles from those days totals over 1500 at my best estimate, and I know from a cursory scan that I have many files that Jason doesn't. I'm going to bet that someone else out there also has a large collection that varies from both of ours as well, but Jason's is the only one collated an online, so does that make it the only valid source? Why haven't I sent mine to Jason? Well, I would like to clean up the file naming, and purge any duplicates first... and I'm to busy fighting with WikiCops on Wikipedia to actually get that done.
So my dilemma. The Ultima IV world maps I created were highly relevant to a specific demographic of gamers in the late 1980's and they are still useful to this very day to players of the game, so since it was highly unlikely anyone else was going to do it, I took it upon myself to host the files and link them into the article where they persisted for two years, unchallenged through over 100 edits until an anonymous IP user decided to clip them from the page. After which the WikiCop Xihr decided that it could not be re-added to the page as he decided it was linkspam.
There is no other host for this 20 year old text file.
The wiki links go directly to the original un-edited files.
There are no links on the pages.
There are no ads on the pages.
There is not even links to the other files available from each file.
The site the files are hosted on is not a commercial site.
So, how does one resolve this situation. Do I sit back and concede to this WikiCop? Do I do the more distasteful thing in my mind of contriving another host for the files and ask a friend to reinstate the links to the new host (as is a very frequent activity in Wikipedia).
What would you do? The sad part is that I have many times found myself at the reading pages pages that I would love to contribute to as an authority or expert on the subject matter but due to the behavior of clueless high-school and college kids, or worse yet the guy who bitches about girls with sharp knees needing a sandwich... and my contribution ends up becoming a daily fight of education for those that care to listen that just wears me down. If I go away for a couple of months, I have to start back over because the burnout rate of people with a clue that care is so high they've eventually quit the site in disgust themselves.
I'm becoming of the mind as many others around me have already stated that Wikipedia is itself the most destructive and least relevant utilities for knowledge accumulation, and that truly makes me sad, because it really could be an invaluable resource in all matters.
Should I bother, or just brush my hands and walk away?"
One of my chief complaints is the abuse of the issue of relevance. This one ranks up there at the same levels of disgust as people who have received a college degree and actually think they are now an authority on a subject when they've never even worked in the field.
What has brought me to this article though is first hand experience with Wikipedia amnesia. The notion that if a dozen people who are zealots on a given subject matter decide that since they have not heard of something, then it must not be relevant to the world.
This is fast becoming a problem for Internet only history from the early 1990's for one as nearly all of the websites that might be used to reference events, have in many cases long disappeared from existence before 1996, when Archive.org initially started it's woefully incomplete collection of websites online at the time. So unless it managed to transfer over to the print world, or rise to a high level of visibility in the UseNet, a sole voice trying to preserve an important element of history becomes irrelevant in the eyes of the WikiCop.
I have also noticed that as Internet users age, they're usage patterns change as well. When people are younger they tend to be more active in Social Media projects. As they get older, they gravitate back to a few communities that have persisted with them, or drop back into a more passive, consumption mode due to the burdens of everyday life. This has resulted in a large number of Internet users who; A) have no familiarity with the early web because they either weren't an early adopter or aren't old enough to know; or B) have moved on in their life and are not aware that their personal experiences and knowledge have value to the collective of society as a whole.
My fights within the video game related pages of Wikipedia if nothing else have given me strong cause to question the quality and validity of all of the material on the site.
One personal case in point is the very page that brought me in to the wiki, and as I write this, continues to be a battle ground: "Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar". In April of 2005 I added to items to this page. I significant piece of historical trivia, and links to unofficial textfile based maps of the game that were distributed when the game was officially released.
I eventually gave up the fight over the trivia as it wore me down, and someone eventually promised to make a trivia specific page to hold the data. Of course since most WikiCops are about 12 years old from best I can tell, none of them understand the relevancy of trivia, and I finally caved. It disgusts me, but there it is.
The second item, and more contentious in my mind though is the t-files links.
Unfortunately I have a personal relationship with the content in the files, which weakens my case and brings me back to the "relevance" issue.
In the early to mid 1980's I was an Apple
Anyways, as I had already authored quite a few game maps by that point for many of the early Infocom titles, I took it upon myself to make a complete map of the overworld of Ultima IV so I could release it in time for the game's commercial release. I mapped while awake, and distributed U4 while I was asleep, and somehow squeezed high-school in between the hours. And then, at the allotted hour I bundled up the maps and began uploading them at the top of the distribution chains... By the sixth site I called, the maps had already started cross-propagating, and my work was done. Not but a year later I myself dropped out of the scene, but from then on I enjoyed meeting people across the country (other Apple gamers, as well as IBM and C64 players) who not only had downloaded my maps, but also, by design, had printed them out and hung them on their wall. Even I was surprised at how many people in the oddest of places seemed to have seen the files.
So here we are going into the later half of the 2007, and how many of you, my dear reader were involved in the Apple gaming community in the 80's? Let's be honest... statistically? Not that many of you. How many of you were more than casually involved in software piracy in the 80's? Probably even less that the previous number. And how many of you kept the text files you downloaded and not only saved them, but actively format/platform shifted it over the years so as not to loose them? Let's guess, about 10 of you right?... or wait, that's 11 if you count me.
Currently Jason Scott's TextFiles archive has grown to become the definitive source for files like this though, so am I to think that since he doesn't have a copy of my maps on his site that somehow they weren't relevant? Hardly, my personal collection of textiles from those days totals over 1500 at my best estimate, and I know from a cursory scan that I have many files that Jason doesn't. I'm going to bet that someone else out there also has a large collection that varies from both of ours as well, but Jason's is the only one collated an online, so does that make it the only valid source? Why haven't I sent mine to Jason? Well, I would like to clean up the file naming, and purge any duplicates first... and I'm to busy fighting with WikiCops on Wikipedia to actually get that done.
So my dilemma. The Ultima IV world maps I created were highly relevant to a specific demographic of gamers in the late 1980's and they are still useful to this very day to players of the game, so since it was highly unlikely anyone else was going to do it, I took it upon myself to host the files and link them into the article where they persisted for two years, unchallenged through over 100 edits until an anonymous IP user decided to clip them from the page. After which the WikiCop Xihr decided that it could not be re-added to the page as he decided it was linkspam.
There is no other host for this 20 year old text file.
The wiki links go directly to the original un-edited files.
There are no links on the pages.
There are no ads on the pages.
There is not even links to the other files available from each file.
The site the files are hosted on is not a commercial site.
So, how does one resolve this situation. Do I sit back and concede to this WikiCop? Do I do the more distasteful thing in my mind of contriving another host for the files and ask a friend to reinstate the links to the new host (as is a very frequent activity in Wikipedia).
What would you do? The sad part is that I have many times found myself at the reading pages pages that I would love to contribute to as an authority or expert on the subject matter but due to the behavior of clueless high-school and college kids, or worse yet the guy who bitches about girls with sharp knees needing a sandwich... and my contribution ends up becoming a daily fight of education for those that care to listen that just wears me down. If I go away for a couple of months, I have to start back over because the burnout rate of people with a clue that care is so high they've eventually quit the site in disgust themselves.
I'm becoming of the mind as many others around me have already stated that Wikipedia is itself the most destructive and least relevant utilities for knowledge accumulation, and that truly makes me sad, because it really could be an invaluable resource in all matters.
Should I bother, or just brush my hands and walk away?"
Submission + - Accellerated X drivers coming for PS3 Linux (ps2dev.org)
t0qer writes: Over at the PS2dev forums a hacker named Ironpeter has successfully managed to bypass the PS3's Hypervisor to gain direct access to it's Nvidia RSX GPU.
This is s first step and far from a complete working driver, but it seems as word of this spreads, more people are helping with the effort to hunt down the Hypervisors Fifo/Push buffer. It won't be long before we're playing tux racer on the PS3 in it's full OpenGL glory.
This is s first step and far from a complete working driver, but it seems as word of this spreads, more people are helping with the effort to hunt down the Hypervisors Fifo/Push buffer. It won't be long before we're playing tux racer on the PS3 in it's full OpenGL glory.
Submission + - Multiformat Listening Test at 64kbps 1
prospective_user writes: "Do you think you have good ears? Think again.
The community at Hydrogenaudio has prepared a Public Listening Test for comparison of the most popular audio codecs (AAC, Vorbis, and Microsoft's WMA included) in a battle to see how they stand at compressing audio at 64kbps.
Many of the participants right now have expressed their surprise at being unable to determine which is the original and which is the compressed version of 18 samples covering a vast amount of musical styles.
The results of this test (and other that are conducted at Hydrogenaudio) will be used by the developers of the codecs to further improve the "transparency" and let this kind of test be even harder.
Everyone is invited to participate and show how good your listening is!"
The community at Hydrogenaudio has prepared a Public Listening Test for comparison of the most popular audio codecs (AAC, Vorbis, and Microsoft's WMA included) in a battle to see how they stand at compressing audio at 64kbps.
Many of the participants right now have expressed their surprise at being unable to determine which is the original and which is the compressed version of 18 samples covering a vast amount of musical styles.
The results of this test (and other that are conducted at Hydrogenaudio) will be used by the developers of the codecs to further improve the "transparency" and let this kind of test be even harder.
Everyone is invited to participate and show how good your listening is!"
Submission + - 'Sidejacking ' On WiFi
ancientribe writes: As if you need another reason not to use WiFi unprotected, here's one: a researcher has released a tool that lets hackers "sidejack" your machine and access your Web accounts. Called Hamster, the tool basically clones the victim's cookies by sniffing their session IDs and controlling their Website accounts.
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=130 692&WT.svl=news1_2
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=13
Submission + - IT ads from the past: From the quaint to the weird (computerworld.com)
PetManimal writes: "Computerworld has dug up some funny IT advertising gems from decades past. The highlights include "The Personal Mainframe", Elvira hawking engineering software, and an image of the earliest screenless "briefcase portables." Strange to think that people not only took these technologies so seriously, but also paid big bucks for gear that seems positively primitive now."
