vault_

If you're using Youtube's html5 beta(and are on a supporting browser) the video uses webm. That's the first I've seen it out in the wild.

The lack of sharp edges are what make it safe for everyday users!

I think more interesting than this article are the self-enumerating pangrams described in the one linked to it.

First thought: having it fade in like that is rather distracting and annoying.

Second thought: so I'll be able to turn this off tomorrow right?

In theory, EFI is supposed to have a shell available, which could make diagnosing low-level problems easier. This is of course assuming that the manufacturers can be arsed to include it alongside their 'point and click guis'.

Well, I can't get the initial installation to work right, because access is denied to a zip file it tries to download off of AWS (I don't know why it's necessary or denied).

I do think, however, that this is a step in the right direction. In my opinion, GUI apps on Linux are for the most part extremely uninspired, and in spite of popular opinions to the contrary, I still prefer to use a native application in lieu of a web-based one. I think that webkit could be an awesome platform for desktop apps, both in ease of development and quality of finished product.

I don't think that this is quite a big enough step towards that though. For one, it makes the developer write html, css, and javascript. This means that ultimately the applications produced aren't going to really feel native on any platform. Rather, they'll feel like quick web app running in its own window. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it could be better.

In my ideal world, this would be somewhat closer to a traditional widget toolkit, but built on top of webkit. It would still be html and js at its core, but from a developers perspective it would be closer to using something like SproutCore.

As I said though, I can't get it to run properly, so I may be way off base from just looking at the code for the sample applications. I think it may also be possible to get what I'm describing on top of Bowline. There's definitely some potential in this area though, and I'm going to mess with it some more and keep and eye on it.

Wow, that's extremely cool. I remember checking Twilio out before, but I didn't quite get what the use case might be for it. This example has managed to flick on a light switch in my head, and I see that with a platform like this you could build some amazing applications. I will be playing with it more in the future.

I'm a fan of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (http://learnyouahaskell.com/). It's not quite done (a couple of advanced topics are absent at the moment) but it's a good introduction to the language, and is somewhat less dry to read than your average programming language book.

I wouldn't say that it's the holy grail, but there are several reasons why it's good to know, and also many why we'll probably start seeing a lot more of it.

The biggest reason that its' a good thing to learn a functional language is a lot like the reason that it's a good idea to learn more languages than just Java. In this case, all you have is one paradigm to think in (object-oriented (probably procedural as well, but...)). Functional programming is a completely different beast that requires different ways of thinking. Lots of the neater concepts of many popular languages now are lifted right out of functional ones. Python's list comprehensions and generators come to mind.

A more pragmatic reason to learn about functional programming is that it is becoming increasingly useful. Functional languages are, in general, much easier to parallelize. More importantly than that though, they make it easier to make _correct_ parallel and multi-threaded programs.

As for why these are often presented as the 'holy grail' of programming, many of features exist to make it simple to create concise, correct programs. The features are all the foreign-sounding buzzwords that people tend to rave about: composition, laziness, currying, lambda-functions, monads, strong type systems, type inference, higher-order functions, loop abstractions, and any number of other nifty things.

If you're interested in learning more, check out the Haskell or Ocaml languages (or Lisp, but Lisp isn't entirely functional).

You can also hit 'space' after cmd+shift+4 to get a little camera icon that takes a screenshot of only the window you click on. It works for any window, the desktop, the menu bar, any menu, and interestingly enough: all of the icons sitting on your desktop independent of anything else.

I just finished a 2 year course on Physics from a high school that was algebra based. I'll attest that algebra based Physics is the biggest waste of time ever. The worst part, if you know some calculus, is that you can glimpse what is happening behind the scenes of the formulas they give you. All I really learned from the course was a shortcut for doing the homework problems: make your givens somehow come out to the units required by the solution; double or halve in special cases. I just hope that mindset won't get in the way when I take a real physics course.

Interestingly, to make a decision like that for which single programming language you'd have to learn, you'd have to know enough about each language in question to make a good choice.

Here's my revised method of picking:

    * make a list of 5-10 languages that seem neat
    * spend a few days on each one, learning the syntax and what it's useful for and what
      libraries are available
    * pick the one you like the best

The remark about most people being afraid of computers is dead on. Lots of people, even people growing up around computers see them as big baroque systems of buttons and menus that they don't really understand. My mom uses an iMac, and for the most part, I don't think she realizes that there are other programs you might want to put on it aside from MS Office. With her iPhone, she has not only found and installed apps, but she actually _uses_ them. I it's think that one of the biggest successes of it all has been what Dan describes: regular people understanding what software is, and how it can make their lives better.

There were a couple of things that I noticed that I don't think are correct. I thought it was fine up through the first 3, more or less. One issue that kind of bugged me was that it seemed to imply that spaces cannot be curved. The video I think would suggest that the surface of a sphere is 3-dimensional when it's actually only 2. Calling infinity a point in the seventh dimension also bugged me.

Overall, it seems like the creator of it knew a little bit of math, and probably some physics, and extrapolated from there. More probable though is that their only knowledge of the subject came from philosophy, or epistemology.

It's not even that hard:

    while [ true ]; do
        curl www.google.com
    done

What bugs me is that his last post from about a year ago says that there are still three more. I've found all of his writings very interesting, and am kind of sad that there probably won't be any more.

Can anyone explain what they mean by "disabling outputs"? Perhaps I'm just not computing this right at the moment, but what exactly is this article saying is being done?

I don't even think that what they're doing is particularly novel. Blizzard has been distributing World of Warcraft via bittorrent for a while now, and other games I've downloaded have essentially had their own front-end on a torrent client.

What I think is more interesting though is the idea of distributing it for free on channels that are usually limited to less legal endeavors, and later patching in a monetization scheme.

In my experience, using Word for that hasn't been a whole lot more pleasant.

I use this all the time in my chemistry class when I don't feel like exerting the effort to open my book. It's superbly helpful.

It's a problem for anyone whose work is based on offering services.

My dad is a contractor, and my mom is an interior designer. Family members, people from church, and random people alike assume that means that they can come fix whatever little problem they're having, or pick out drapes and furniture for their living room.

A good reminder that people overreacting is often just as much of a problem as whatever they're trying to solve.

One issue I had with the article though, is the overuse of hyperbole. There is no indication of how much of it was fact, and how much was embellishments and exaggerations.

Are there any software packages out there that do? Word doesn't, and I don't think that InDesign does.

Working on an experiment for my psychology class. It's fun because I made it a web application, and it's been a good chance to mess with Couchdb. (project is here(http://github.com/vault/Word-Superiority-Effect), it's pretty crappy currently)

I'm not sure, because I haven't really looked at any of the api's, but I'm pretty sure that it's hardware controlled. Internally it's hooked up via USB, and none of the software I've seen has used the camera without the light on (including non-Apple software).

Minor point, but since the laptops in question are Macbooks, there is most certainly a visible indicator; a little green light next to the camera comes on when it is active.

Overall, I agree with you though, there really are no safeguards to stop administrators from abusing their power. They only thing that I can think of to help curtail this sort of abuse is restricting the use of their remote control software to the networks explicitly provided by the school.

That's interesting to see from an administrator point of view, but also quite disturbing.

The school I go to now has a similar program (Macbooks for every student), and the Remote Desktop program is used on our laptops as well. It used to be a serious point of contention between the administration and the students. A large number of students actually covered up the webcams on their computer with tape or similar to stop people from watching them.

In theory, the requirements for monitoring were that every once in a while, everyone's computer would have its desktop monitored without their knowledge. If they were doing anything that they weren't supposed to (e.g. on Facebook (via proxies), or looking at porn) Photo Booth, the webcam application, would be opened and a screenshot would be taken, capturing both the offending behavior and the offender.

I know that on a computer provided by the school, any preconception of privacy should be abandoned, but it still seems like a bit much. It seems to me that simply logging activity and then punishing the student after it had been reviewed would be easier and more transparent.

You can get a similar effect if you use VLC and open your screen as a video capture device. Or if you use screen sharing software, to have two computer share each other's screens.

No echoing audio effects unfortunately.

My biggest issue with it, and other constraints like this though is that it just feels rather contrived.

That and it took far too long to some up with a password passing the description...

Wow, that's pretty bad, but it's got nothing on one 'security' measure I ran into on an online college application site.

To enumerate, the password had to:

- have exactly 8 characters

- contain characters from 3 of the following 4 groups

-- lowercase letters

-- uppercase letters

-- numbers

-- ? . , _ - + = $ ! –

There were also some things that the password could not do:

- be a dictionary word

- contain any series of characters in your username

All of this was enforced.