Recent Posts

1201

Living Room / Re: WinXP is officially dead!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 11, 2014, 01:31 PM »

...

For a small indy developer, I think it comes down to accepting XP is now an orphan which will remain running until the inevitable major malware attack finally renders it unsafe to use under any circumstances. ...

...it's not a good idea to appear to be working at cross purposes to Microsoft. You could get taken off distribution for all the inside info (i.e the type of detail you usually need an invite and a signed non-disclosure agreement to get access to) that big devs rely on for their own product development efforts. If Microsoft says XP is over - then it's over as far as these guys are concerned.

-40hz (June 11, 2014, 12:41 PM)

And I daresay I am part of the problem who will continue to use XP even after major malware attacks! Just because I think this is a special time in computing history. The OS gang seems to want to flip their OS's really fast - MS catching up to Apple and Linux in that respect. Other than that I am a laggard, the basic run of XP feels about right to me - nice and steady. This "We'll stop supporting an OS after about four or fewer years" really makes me nervous!

This comment surprised me, and it's why I gave out one of my MouserBucks to 40hz just now. I get it if devs are just playing simple economics; while it doesn't make me happy, at least chapter 3 of the economics text explains it. And a few of the devs of my favorite apps at least promise to try to support it for a couple more years.

It's a whole other level of sinister if MS decides to get vicious and start playing "leverage games". Fine, stop supporting the OS for your own reasons, but don't turn around and start pressuring the devs of apps with information access blackmail!!

1202

General Software Discussion / Re: WinXP registry hack enables further security updates

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 11, 2014, 01:19 PM »

Yeah I just found those too, and they made me nervous compared to the prev updates as discussed in that original sensational article.

"Security Updates for XP" from the first set has a way different sound than "Update for Wepos and POSready 2009".

So I turned Auto Update totally off for now. And per my initial comment, that original article was all news of the week, but it's much harder to find info on what these new ones are doing for people who took that initial suggestion!

1203

Living Room / Re: WinXP is officially dead!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 11, 2014, 01:14 PM »

I meant I wouldn't blame MS and others for not wanting to support XP anymore. No matter how good or bad 7 or 8.

-rgdot (June 11, 2014, 08:24 AM)

I can understand Microsoft not wanting to support it, since they are not going to make any more money from XP if they do or don't, so they might as well not, and push XP users into upgrading and putting more money in their pockets. That does make sense.

What I don't understand is 3rd party developers that make their money off supporting their apps running on whatever platforms their customers are using. If there are still a large chunk of people running XP, why turn them away from buying and using your software, by not supporting XP? Flushing all that cash down the toilet is kind of self-defeating, don't you think?

-app103 (June 11, 2014, 10:20 AM)

Well I dunno if it's cash, I don't have many "subscriptions" going. But for me it's an Ill Will thing. I don't really feel I'm in any shape to upgrade right now. So I just wish the devs would roll out their updates to XP as well. A bunch of them have.

1204

Living Room / Re: Antilock-breaking (ABS) vs Stabilty Control (ESP) vs Traction Control Video

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 11, 2014, 01:09 PM »

@SeraphimLabs - Are you psychic or something? If your posts got any closer to what is going through my head I'd have to start getting paranoid!

-Stoic Joker (June 11, 2014, 12:53 PM)

That's why I invited him to DC - because he has a lot to offer!

1205

Living Room / Re: Stuff We Feel Like Bitching About

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 10, 2014, 08:54 PM »

A new angle:

What is with all these new sliding javascript teasers!?

I don't do NoScript; too many programs need scripts. But lots of the "news" sites are now sliding huge banners across my screen!



The sticky point is AdBlock doesn't capture them. So the best I can do is super-quick hit my JS disabler ad-on and reload. But then half the page doesn't load. Yuk.

1206

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 10, 2014, 07:28 PM »

Good stuff on the chem video.

That Photocopier video has been posted here before but I forget exactly which thread, either this one or the humor thread.

1207

Finished Programs / Re: [SOLVED] Ctrl+Alt+Del

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 10, 2014, 07:16 PM »

Heh sorry for always being the humanities kid in the coding room, but here goes:

What does Control-Escape even do? C-A-D I know, it's legendary. But I guess I'm a wee bit perturbed I've hung out on this forum for a couple of years and Slashdot for a *decade* and browsed my share of misc articles and I've never even *heard* of that combo!


I get the gist easily, you wanna disable the "tricks" so that script-kiddie-level twerps don't go fiddling with embedded kiosk software, but I've just never run across that combo. (And have I missed a useful trick all these years?!)

1208

Living Room / Re: Favorite Sci-fi movies?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 10, 2014, 01:06 PM »

It's also a bit of a visual nod to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in the US where a substitute high school teacher went on trial in 1925 ...

The legal battle to teach evolutionary theory continues to this day in America.

-40hz (June 10, 2014, 09:14 AM)

Oh, thanks, I didn't know that about the US "Scopes Monkey Trial". Amazing. There's something new to learn every day. I would guess that the POTA producers had some fun juxtaposing the contradictions in human society with those in the ape society. "Stupid apes! Oops, that means stupid humans too!" Reminds me of the fun they had in that clever Star Trek episode where the people who lived on two planets circling the same star were perpetually at war - the people on each planet were identical humanoids, except that the ones on planet A had faces which were black on the left vertical half, and white on the right, and the people on planet B had the opposite.

I also had noticed that (as you said) "The legal battle to teach evolutionary theory continues to this day in America.". That's pretty amazing too.
It's all very confusing. There are two main camps. The Theory of Evolution was apparently developed from Darwin's rational thought and observations, and he was a devout Christian, yet the Creationist "theory" is an irrational religio-political ideology favoured by the Christians - and the Islamists too, come to think of it. Mind you, the Islamists apparently also hold that the Jews are descended from apes and pigs, which is kinda half right per Evolutionary Theory, so they (Islamists) seem to have a foot in both camps to some extent, except the pig thing confuses the heck out of me.

I reckon 2001 could have got it spot-on in any event. We had some help from dem aliens...

-IainB (June 10, 2014, 12:16 PM)

Interesting that we don't do more with the franky amazing internet in school. I'd heard of the Scopes Monkey trial "backwards" through the play "Inherit the Wind" which (wait for it ... according to Wikipedia) does take a couple of dramatic finesses to make it watchable in the context of the 1950's Red Scare environment.

But look now, whenever I see new stuff, I just open a new browser tab, select either regular or Wiki search, and then pull up something, and I learn more "tangentially" in an hour than I could have learned in *years* old school style.

1209

Living Room / Re: WinXP is officially dead!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 10, 2014, 01:02 PM »

From some point of time in the month of July  Java will no longer support XP.

-Curt (June 10, 2014, 11:43 AM)

Got any documentation on that? Java 8 already doesn't support XP, I know that, but I haven't seen any annoucement about older versions, other than Java 7 going EOL from July 15th.  (Yeah, I've been watching Oracle quite closely for Java releases)

-Ath (June 10, 2014, 12:16 PM)

This is the angle that's starting to worry me.

It's one thing when MS doesn't support the OS anymore, but then all the secondary and tertiary people aren't either.

It was a long time ago, but it didn't feel this way way back in the day when Win 98 and Win 2000 dropped out of support. I had independently moved to a new comp more from hardware perspectives, so it didn't matter. But I really tried very very hard and won when I built my current project machine to make it last "almost forever" and except for a few suspicious glitches, I basically don't need anything else, so it's the "heavy" tone of the current environment that's bothering me. (Silly vampire novels aside, I specifically named it "Twilight" because I designed it to carry through the end of XP and this year it's mission is official.)

I'm not exactly in the "XP Rulez forever" camp. Win 7 is a strong contender, esp because at my other job I learned how to flip stuff back to usability. It's more like I need one of those "game show rewards" to just magically take and replace absolutely everything and replace the backbone and reload everything. I just don't have the energy to do that right now even if I magically had the money.

Plus a little part of me "feels sad for the hardware" and wants to know if my very best effort from 2006 can run the most brutally stripped copy of Win 9 which was the final design goal I envisioned way back, because then that's new enough to ride it off into the horizon for its design mission goal.

1210

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 10, 2014, 10:51 AM »

^That's come up with this 'test' in the past.

There's been some research and debate over whether letting the test subject know there's the possibility of a machine in the equation also affects people's judgement. And whether endowing the computer agent with some sort of persona is a positive or a negative addition to the mix.

In the end, I don't think it really matters. People will knowingly accept falsehood as truth if they're sufficiently motivated to do so. So the fact a certain percentage of people are fooled doesn't really say that much that you can take and run with as is. But that doesn't make it any less interesting or worthy of further study. Because each iteration seems to generate even more significant questions about human consciousness and perception.  That's why I love things like the Turing Test. We often learn as much about ourselves as we do the thing we're trying to study.

That can only be a good thing.  

-40hz (June 10, 2014, 09:25 AM)

Yep!

And I dabbled for a couple of days way back with the idea of a Turing program in one of the old AOL chat rooms (where they wouldn't be informed). Aka if the overall ambient intelligence of the environment is reduced, it's easier to pass!


But forgetting where I saw the remarks, I now like better a new test where it's less about "fooling" than "different but sufficient" "intelligence".

One of my longest little thought experiments on this stuff is building a system with one of the old Pentium 1 chips stuck in the middle of it. So sure the hard crunching is done by the newer cores, but somewhere in there the machine "can't trust" itself. So then you build in a meta routine that tells itself that! That forces a fundamental new type of computing.

So when you ask it "when will this comet next pass Earth", instead of peeling out an answer like 2.673 days, the machine has to say something else like "About two and a half days". And when you go into "Chat Mode", the machine knows why it's flawed and has a routine that says stuff like "Sorry, I just can't get any more accurate than that because of my design".

1211

Living Room / Re: Antilock-breaking (ABS) vs Stabilty Control (ESP) vs Traction Control Video

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 10, 2014, 09:27 AM »

Tough call here.

Driving reflexes are a bit tricky, and if two types of vehicles "encourage" opposite styles of driving like this whole ABS discussion, that feels tricky. I don't know what to think. I'm only a mediocre driver, and in an emergency I don't think I'm fast enough to figure out which of two braking reflexes I should be using!

1212

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 10, 2014, 09:13 AM »

Well, replacing "Ukraine" with any number of other countries, I think it's an interesting twist on the Turing problem to "adjust" people's reactions.

1213

Living Room / Re: Micro-Fundraiser for the Official DonationCoder CodyMobile!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 09, 2014, 04:16 PM »

Thought you might enjoy seeing a photo of me taking a leisurely drive in the codymobile: (see attachment in previous post)

-mouser (June 09, 2014, 01:17 PM)

That would be an awesome practical joke if you had one of those Google driverless cars. You're cruising along, maybe hiding tucked behind the back seat, and people are freaking out that a cat is apparently driving a car. Esp when the cop pulls you over!

1214

Site/Forum Features / Re: Long time members with over 50 posts, report for disbursement duty

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 08, 2014, 03:29 PM »

Should we share who we have/plan to distribute to?

I think I found my first proposed recipient of a MouserBuck.

1215

Site/Forum Features / Re: Long time members with over 50 posts, report for disbursement duty

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 07, 2014, 06:54 AM »

Received, now to start thinking about candidates. : )

1216

Adventures of Baby Cody / Re: Baby Cody 2014!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 06, 2014, 04:55 PM »

Baby Cody has returned home to visit me and take a trip in the Codymobile.

He will be ready to fly out to visit someone new next week.. Is there anyone who would like to host him?

-mouser (June 06, 2014, 03:08 PM)

Do you have pics coming?

1217

Site/Forum Features / Re: Long time members with over 50 posts, report for disbursement duty

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 06, 2014, 04:52 PM »

Heh I'm a procrastinating git these days, but I'd like to do this too.

I'm not sure who of the newer members has really caught my eye yet though.

1218

General Software Discussion / Re: How to do the dirty on google, or almost? Could we learn something here?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 06, 2014, 04:50 PM »

"As Google becomes aware of loopholes, they close them."

That's common sense, and is certainly true in the normal course of things, and that's why I'm wondering since my point b) above would indicate that this is not about "becoming aware" at some point in time, but of it "being evident to google" that those cannot be valid links/hits. And that's why I say point a) above is the key to my question: If we better understood how/why that site makes money, we could perhaps grasp why google plays their game, open-eyed. ;-)


(edited for plenty of typos: sorry for the inconvenience)

-peter.s (June 06, 2014, 02:45 PM)

Between this and the prior quote, in some ways Google is not "monolithic" like the Borg. Rather, it's Matt Cutts' crew that is directly in charge of all this stuff. For all their other evils about info usage, Google search must at least be the easiest product to "dogfood" aka Google uses it themselves along with everyone else.

So you can bet these spam links show up to them as fast as anywhere else. So some Google employee gets grumpy for 30 seconds, throws their bouncy ball against the wall, then fires off an email to Matt C.

It might just take some time for them to eval each source of "spam links" without breaking something else.

1219

Living Room / Re: The Dreams thread...

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 06, 2014, 01:28 PM »

I think it's amazing that another part of our deep cultural indoctrination is that even when talking about dreams we're still "Rated G through R". I find surreal NSFW daydreaming relaxing to help me go to sleep. No details here, but just mentioning that it is possible to angle your dreams based on your initial mood in the twilight period before full sleep.

1220

Living Room / Re: What modern music (today) is considered to be both pop AND intellectual?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 06, 2014, 05:08 AM »

Nilsson!!  I've always considered him a "fifth Beatle".  Incredible vocal range and brilliant songwriter.  

-Edvard (June 05, 2014, 11:43 PM)

Sometimes you can "back into" a great singer from a cover. Nilsson's re-arrangement of "Without You" is one I first learned about through an Air Supply cover. ("Semi-RIP" Russell Hitchcock. Back as a youngster when I used to follow this stuff intently, I think he got ill or something because he lost about half an octave on his range in about two years and this was the last song he could nail his signature tenor.)

The Air Supply version:
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=IjxEB-oM2WQ

Which led me to the Nillson version:
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=_bQGRRolrg0

1221

Living Room / Re: What modern music (today) is considered to be both pop AND intellectual?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 06, 2014, 04:58 AM »

One of my quiet little hobbies is taking a song that feels "promising" but not quite right for me, and doing about one to three easy mods to it, such as chopping out an annoying part, then fiddling with the tempo and pitch. I end up with "my song". No once else has to agree with the result, though I'm sure seven people in the world would. Because once the song is given to me, I get to share in the experience. I get the artist's vision, but then their control leaves.

-TaoPhoenix (June 05, 2014, 02:40 PM)

Congratulations, you're a "re-mix artist".  Seriously, there are some folks making careers out of the stuff.  If you come up with anything that really tickles, let us hear it.  

-Edvard (June 05, 2014, 07:20 PM)

Heh not really, it's more like "with an audience of one you can't fail". I just smashed out versions to loop during work just to help me concentrate. Basically my tastes run towards speed and tempo down from the originals, so I can't tell what would be any runaway hit.

A better way to do that is to make a new thread of people wanting to do that to songs and we can trade notes.

I also have to say I don't have any attention to the fine crafting, so it's more like a musical version of a pencil sketch.

But per my point, parody or no, "W-D-F-S" has some three or four melodic themes in the verses and bridges, so it's a little bit like "if your parody is too perfect, it becomes the thing." Certainly lyrics like "The secret of the Fox, and ancient mystery..." isn't any less valid than "real song" lyrics of hundreds of staple songs we can all come up with!

1222

Living Room / Re: What modern music (today) is considered to be both pop AND intellectual?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 05, 2014, 02:44 PM »

That's why we turned them into rules - sort of a crutch for the creativity impaired.

-Vurbal (June 05, 2014, 11:37 AM)

FWIW I think some "rules" are actually liberating. And creativity by itself is vastly over-hyped in my opinion. A musical idea is cheap. Most of us can crank out a dozen or more on demand. Finding one that's worth doing something with, and knowing how to do something with it, is an altogether different thing. Therein lies (to me) the difference between creativity and art. Creativity is just the raw material - not the finished piece. Or the process leading to it. You need both. But music isn't just about being creative.

-40hz (June 05, 2014, 02:05 PM)

I'll give you an easy rule.
Of course there are thunderous tons of exceptions, but if your melodic singing contains less than five notes, be very careful unless you're sure you know you have it down. This is why I have trouble with lots of those D list garage bands - I can't focus on the instruments if the singer is tanking it. Rap is tight-pitched, but it's a special case. It's that droning anti-shoegaze turkey gravy style of singing I can't stand.

1223

Living Room / Re: What modern music (today) is considered to be both pop AND intellectual?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 05, 2014, 02:40 PM »

I wanna stress a brand new angle that hasn't been possible until very recently.

One of my quiet little hobbies is taking a song that feels "promising" but not quite right for me, and doing about one to three easy mods to it, such as chopping out an annoying part, then fiddling with the tempo and pitch. I end up with "my song". No once else has to agree with the result, though I'm sure seven people in the world would. Because once the song is given to me, I get to share in the experience. I get the artist's vision, but then their control leaves.

1224

Living Room / Re: What modern music (today) is considered to be both pop AND intellectual?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 05, 2014, 09:24 AM »

Hmm, there's a couple of threads here that I think are fighting each other a bit.

One of the big problems I have with the "Alternative" scene especially beginning around the '90's is that the word itself was in reverse, a negative. Supposedly people wanted "Alternatives to crap" ... but what if the alternative to "overpolished stadium rock crap" is ... "semi-melodic uncrafted crap"?

I saw news of a study once to the effect that you can get a "listenable" pop song with relatively little craft in "innovation" as long as the individual pieces fit together. From my own little pet project, I took the music program Audacity and chopped up "What does the Fox Say?" and re-spliced the verses minus the raucous chorus and wound up with something that is surprisingly listenable.

A new problem is emerging with the intersection of Viral and modern over-mixing effects. I put Gagnam Style in that group. Trying to stay on track, the lyrics might actually be "intelligent" because they parody a part of Korean culture not everyone agrees with. ("Gangnam" refers to an upscale district considered to be snooty but has a lot of what we would call "wannabes" mixed in. So the song parodies the wannabe-posh people.)

But below that clever level, the actual song is just rather standard techno - it doesn't make sense that it's the most watched item on YouTube *of all time*. I think today's social media amplifying tools can over-promote stuff that would normally before have just been kinda "underground".

1225

Living Room / Re: What modern music (today) is considered to be both pop AND intellectual?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on June 04, 2014, 06:18 PM »

My vote might be European melodic metal, soft or hard to your taste.

Just as one fun example:
Blind Guardian Nightfall
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=IoyToHOWSV8