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Comment Re:Apple and Microsoft are so much alike (Score 1) 179

I rummaged around the file system. I did not find /Masters folder in my $home. There is no /Master folder in the root. I just checked. I know my way around the file system, enough to discover a clever way to keep your AVCHD folders any way you liked them and mounting them as fresh camera repository to their video editor using symbolic links. (Search for symbolic link, avchd in the same 140mandak262jamuna handle.) I know I can take anything out any way I want to. But it was not easy, not was not intuitive. I was probably expecting more and it needed a lot of work.

My biggest beef was it was converting all my videos to quicktime. And it id not support mpg files directly. It wanted me to buy some software for jpg support. After shelling out 1300$ I hated being nickel and dimed for stupid mpg2 support. At that point I lost interest and just gave the machine to my kid. It still works it is on the next desk. But I touch it rarely. When I got it fresh, I did lots of stuff with ffmpg, scripting it to reencode some videos etc. I had an external hard disk that failed and after that there were so many dead links it was a pain to use iPhoto. I was not willing to spend the time to learn enough to clean it up.

Unless you are careful and know your way around unix basics, Apple will trap you into their walled garden. They have their own video format, audio format, image format, even ascii files have a different line ending.

Comment Re:No (Score 2, Insightful) 180

No it is not good enough. Commercial aircraft is flown by people with constant training, check lists, protocols, under the guidance of air traffic control. They are supposed to be not drunk, supposed to be well rested. Cars? driven by everyone from pimply teens giggling and texting while driving all the way up to 90 year old grandma who only has a vague nebulous feedback from her right foot when she is on arthritis medication.

Comment Apple and Microsoft are so much alike (Score 1, Informative) 179

They both believe in vendor lock. When I got my iMac it converted my photos from my camera to some iPhoto library from which it was quite difficult to take it out in simple jog files. For the two years I used iMac my videos and photos were all so locked up I actually lost interest and reduced my shutter bug instincts a lot.

Comment Will this be cheaper? (Score 0) 167

by 140Mandak262Jamuna (#46370337) Attached to: How To Take Apart Fukushima's 3 Melted-Down Reactors
Dig a hole adjacent to the powerplant, about 1 km deep.

Build an enclosure covering both the top of the hole and the power plant.

Set off series of small explosives to reduce the power plant to small sized rubble. The enclosure should be able to contain the debris and be airtight. They could spray gasoline on the debris and burn them repeatedly to weaken the structures before setting off these small explosives. The explosives will be set using remote controlled vehicles.

User remote controlled bulldozers to push the rubble into the hole

Back fill the hole with the tilings.

Cover it with a concrete slab some 30 meters thick.

Comment Demo looks suspect (Score 0) 216

by 140Mandak262Jamuna (#46368343) Attached to: Wolfram Language Demo Impresses
The red line in the map does not seem to match the output from the program

1. Gibraltor and Madrid are the end nodes. It is not on either end of the red line.

2. Rome to Athens with one stop over. I dont see that at all in the red line

Is the output real, or is it "simulated for advertisement" we used to see in the old print ads for TV sets?
Open Source

Video 'Write the Docs' is a Conference for People Who Write Software Docs (Video) 24

Posted by Roblimo from the documentation-makes-software-more-usable dept.
There is this guy, Eric Holscher, who has been doing FOSS development for quite a while. He's been on GitHub since 2008, and got involved in Gittip not long after it started in 2012. Not long after that, Eric started thinking about how open source software developers have all kinds of conferences and have many communities they can join and learn from each other, while those who write documentation, especially for FOSS, typically work all alone in a vacuum.

So why not have a conference for documentation writers (and developers who want to hook up with writers who can help them make high-quality docs)? Don't limit it to FOSS, but make sure that's the emphasis. Call the conference 'Write the Docs' and have the first conference in Portland, Oregon, in 2013. Which is exactly what Eric did. A year later, a second 'Write the Docs' conference is scheduled in Budapest (Hungary) at the end of March, and the next Portland conference is set for May 5.

Comment Re:What surprises me... (Score 1) 62

by 140Mandak262Jamuna (#46359863) Attached to: The Phone Dragnet That Caught the World's Top Drug Lord
It would too difficult to erase it in an emergency. Better criminals would use some kind of encryption layer so that the data can not be decrypted. And a special "unlock" code, which they will reveal to the cops after putting enough of a show, that will actually erase everything.

It is a good thing you and I are not criminals. The cops would be so totally outsmarted.

Comment We need to publicize this widely (Score -1) 62

by 140Mandak262Jamuna (#46358565) Attached to: The Phone Dragnet That Caught the World's Top Drug Lord
We should figure out exactly how the law enforcement traced these phones and understand it. Then we should employ people of the caliber of Bill Nye or Neil Degraase Tyson to explain the complexities in a language the dim witted drug pushers would understand. We should make such dragnets and arrests of drug kingpins should never ever happen again. Because FREEDOM!

Comment Re:Is IE Really to Blame? (Score 4, Informative) 93

by 140Mandak262Jamuna (#46347011) Attached to: IE Vulnerability Exposing Banking Logins, Spreading Rapidly
Microsoft says "The vulnerability exists in the way that Internet Explorer accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated".

Clearly the wild pointer read error is in IE not in the server. They need to hack the server to post the exploit code in their server. But they could also create the same vulnerability in a site owned by them. No need to hack. But it is more difficult to lure visitors to the newly created malware site. That is why they need to hack a well visited site to upload the hack. But all visitors to that site using Chrome and Firefox and other versions of IE are not affected. Fault lies solely on these versions of IE

Comment Yes, IE is to be blamed. (Score 2, Insightful) 93

by 140Mandak262Jamuna (#46346969) Attached to: IE Vulnerability Exposing Banking Logins, Spreading Rapidly
The hackers have to lure you into visiting the compromised website. How difficult is that? Once you visit that site using IE, it corrupts the memory. Then it takes advantage of a wild pointer read error in IE to get remote execution ability.

Of course Secunia will count this is as "one bug", after Microsoft agrees it is a bug. On the other hand, it will look at bugzilla of Firefox, and every bug report by everyone will be counted towards the total bug count on Firefox. Microsoft will continue to insist its browser has fewer bugs than Firefox. Gartner will issue a TCO report based on these numbers. And everyone will be scratching their head, why IE market share continues to fall when all these numbers say IE is the safest browser in the world.

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