“Good portion of the world” is probably a handful of people.
Her full quote btw:
“Once upon a time, I was the centerfold of Playboy,” says the former model in the new documentary Losing Lena. “But I retired from modeling a long time ago. It’s time I retired from tech, too.”
I found a contradicting statement where she said that she doesn't mind her picture being used in tech. Maybe even in the wikipedia article you got this quote from. I don't have the time to find it right now but here for example she says she's proud of the picture: https://archive.is/fIRoG
"Lena doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Sawchuk and his imitators for how they appropriated her image; the only note of regret she expressed was that she wasn’t better compensated. In her view, the photograph is an immense accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really proud of that picture,” she said."
I agree. I shared the quote above (cited as evidence on Wikipedia) because it’s not at all clear she said she disapproves. combined with your quote I think we have a classic case of being offended on another’s behalf.
Well, for instance, it's the official policy of the IEEE to not allow this image in new publications. And they're far from the only journal (or set of journals) that have this policy.
Given that it's use is banned in most academic journals dealing with imaging/graphics, you'd be wrong.
And as several journals have brought up in the banning, it's not even good at what it purports to be for these use cases. It's a pretty poor quality image to start off with due to being scanned to a digital file with 1970s technology.
At this point the ones defending its continued use are the vocal minority on some weird anti-woke crusade that doesn't even make sense on technical grounds.
You’re using vocal minority framing right now. When I care about it, I’m a weird crusader for caring and noticing. But then you organize a campaign to change it.
There is a large body of literature using these images so it’s helpful to have a comparison which is persistent through time and familiar.
> Given that it's use is banned in most academic journals dealing with imaging/graphics, you'd be wrong.
A copyrighted image of a nude model elected for no obvious reason has a test image in the University of South California by some pervs and then used in a lot of papers as a test image.
Or, a standard cropped image of a playgirl used in the field of image processing.
"elected for no obvious reason" isn't quite right, as a test image for computer graphics it has regions of very high frequency detail and regions of very low frequency detail which make it easier to spot various compression artifacts, and it makes a good study for edge detection, with both very clear edges along the outline, but more subjective edges in the feathering.
It's redish. Ok it has a blur and details on the foreground but could have been any image with blurred background and a face.
"very low frequency detail", we are talking about a 512x512 picture here, it has low and high frequency details (FFT speaking) like most photos.
"Good for edges detection" doesn't mean anything. Like, is the image good for edge detection or the algorithm is good at detecting edges ? What does "subjective edges" even mean ? Does it mean hard to spot ?
That looks like technical reasons but it just noise. They literally grab a playboy magazine and decided it was well enough (and indeed, it wasn't that bad, yes). Still not professional. The message is "We have playboy magazines at work and we are proud of it".
Try out running different edge detection algorithms on that image and you will see that there is a lot of disagreement amongst them in the feathering region. Exploring what the differences are, and how the algorithms lead to those differences helps build intuition about the range of things we might call an "edge", and which algorithm is appropriate for a particular task at hand.
No I think the social context is inappropriate. However I do not think possessing or liking such a picture is perverted. I also do not thinking a cropped version of the picture which has no sexual content is inappropriate.
And combined with -E, it'll quit immediately if the output is smaller than the terminal size.
...And combined with some of the other options in the post, my go-to has been "less -SEXIER" for a long time. Specifying E twice doesn't seem to do anything except make this easier to remember.
I recommend -FX instead of -EX. They both quit immediately if the output is smaller than the screen size, but -FX does not quit if the output is larger and you jump to the end of a large file, so you can continue to do things like scroll back or search.
git uses "less -FRX" by default. This is how I learned about -F.
(To be pedentic, git uses "LESS=FRX less", which accomplishes the same thing.)
I hate -E. Quitting immediately does not do good things to my muscle memory. I’m using to hitting q to quit less when I am done. Now the q key becomes part of the input to the shell prompt (or worse if there’s a different tool invoking less and now q might be interpreted differently by that tool). I value the consistency of user interaction more than saving a keystroke.
Yeah I have a couple of recent Samsung OLEDs and they're fine without an internet connection despite reports that they wouldn't be. If I press one of the annoying streaming service buttons on the remote it'll give me a setup popup which needs to be dismissed, otherwise they work fine, albeit without any built in streaming support.
I'd read reports that Q-Symphony (audio from the TV speakers and soundbar simultaneously) wouldn't work, but it does.
I stuck an OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) box to the back of both of them so they can play stuff from my NAS. They're not the cheapest solution and I realise Kodi/XBMC on which they're based isn't everyone's jam (I grew up with XBMC on an Xbox so it is very much mine) - but they play everything, have wifi, HDMI-CEC, integrated RF remote, and work out of the box.
Model numbers if anyone cares: Samsung QE65S95C, Samsung QE77S95F. I believe S95, S90 and S85 (at least up to F) are all very similar so they should all work but ofc ymmv.
This OSMC box looks interesting, but does it allow to run arbitrary programs like a plain Linux box? What I have in mind here are things such as VacuumTube (YoutubeTV front end), a Web browser to stream from various online sources, etc. I found KODI (as running on Linux) far too restrictive when it comes to streaming from the Internet, and the add ons to be terrible. (In particular the YouTube add-on requires an API key registered with Google, which makes it a far worse proposition than using VacuumTube anonymously.)
Yeah that OSMC box is just running Debian with their stuff coming from its own package repo. You can get a root shell. I realise I could have built something myself (and have in the past) but it's absolutely worth the money to me to get everything in a tiny package and working perfectly from day one.
I wouldn't recommend Kodi for streaming, it kinda works but the experience isn't great. I use it exclusively for playing stuff from my server full of legally acquired public domain videos (ahem).
I do watch YouTube videos on it, but I use TubeArchivist (basically a fancy wrapper for yt-dlp) to pull them onto the server first, and a script to organise them into nicely-named directories.
Thanks for mentioning VacuumTube, it sounds useful.
I’m using a Minix Z100 running Gnome and Kodi. I use a simple Bluetooth keyboard, the interface is clunky but it does the job. I use Samba to also share files to VNC running on iOS and Android on the same network.
I tried using fancier solutions but anything that browses content without involving directories always break for some specific content in unpredictable ways.
That has been my experience as well. So far nothing has come close to the flexibility of Gnome (upscaled) with an airmouse. I am keeping an eye on the Plasma Bigscreen project however (10-foot UI for Plasma).
An alternative could be some x86 Android TV build like Lineage, but I have not seen very convincing demonstrations that this is truly viable.
My recent TCL TV forces you agree to Google's terms and conditions, and you aren't even provided the text of what you're agreeing to unless you connect the TV to the internet.
It is technically illegal if that is how it is configured. Go get ‘em.
But kidding aside, who are we even really kidding anymore, even if you were provided the TOS would you simply not use the device of there were something in the TOS you disagreed with? How about when you’ve been using the device and all the sudden they change the TOS and force agreement as you are about to start a tv evening with the family?
The people simply accepted their enslavement, the taking of your agency, because we all allowed or were overwhelmed with it.
They take our agency through process just like they’ve taken our freedom and rights in so many different ways, just like through YC funded Flock, where treasonous mass surveillance cameras just show up over night and most here seem unaware it’s a YC company that now provides a mass surveillance network to the government and global government tightening its noose around humanity’s neck.
I have a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV. We never use anything mode of the TV. (Then again, I have zero streaming services, so perhaps I am not who this article is for.)
Neither do I, but what about YouTube? Not letting your TV manufacturer sell your watching habits is already a big win, and on macOS you can further block telemetry. A big chunk of my YouTube consumption happens through yt-dlp using a VPN provider that presumably does not cooperate with Google.
Sadly, there's just a keyboard + trackpad sitting on my TV-audio console (a kind of home made speaker credenza I built years ago).
So no remote. I get up, hit the spacebar to pause/play. The audio is into a multi-channel receiver though so audio has mute/volume controls on a remote.
I have a Lenovo used minipc connected to mine and I just use a Logitech K400+, it runs Linux with KDE. I will never need a smart tv, or want one, for that matter.
I get that people would rather have a remote but I personally actually don't like remotes at all. My TV is basically a screen only.
A guest logged into Wi-Fi on a Vizio of mine and there was conveniently no way to disconnect/forget it without a factory reset back to motion smoothing hell.
Change your network name. When the TV prompts you to connect, join the renamed network. Then, rename it back so everything else can connect again and the TV can't. I can think of a few potential problems with this, but, it might work?
Or blacklist the TV's MAC address in your router settings. Didn't think of that first for some reason.
You gave me flashbacks to my Samsung washing machine that needed a factory reset after changing my SSID. Which also reset the service life of filters and liquids and such which was somewhat of a hassle. Such a dumb design not being able to change the wireless network.
About 8y ago we were looking at a used Mini Cooper. Car Fax reported no major problems. I went to the bank to get a loan. They reported 2 minor and 1 major accident that the car had been in that were NOT reported by Car Fax. Once we knew where to look we were able to see evidence of the damage & repairs to the car.
I think that if lending institutions don't trust Car Fax then we probably shouldn't either.
Nah, it can still connect through the smart TV of the neighbours.
They probably have cross-brand agreements in place to let any "offline" device access advertisement networks. Your data is a very profitable business for them.
Yeah this is something I feel like doesn't get talked about enough. I have a raspberry PI that acts as my streaming device connected to my Samsung "Smart" TV and since Samsung can't get on the WIFI it's effectively just a display terminal.
To be fair, if I needed something optimal or it was used often enough to matter, I'd probably reach for the original data in a real language. For a one-off, I can tell what grep/awk/sed does immediately - but I need to stop and think for the efficient solution.
Shouldn't the first one be `grep -F/--fixed-strings "${partition}"? The second example will break in any case where $partition contains special characters.
At some point I should probably write an article about the 20k lines of bash and a little python that power my homelab and various automations. Bash isn't perfect but often 99% good enough is fine.
"I'm not sure why it is that Windows 3.1 is the go-to when people name a Windows OS of this era."
It's because business was the primary market for PCs and Windows 3.11 added a network stack and changed everything. Networking was no longer an arcane science that required 3rd party software. Office networks became almost trivial to set up. The impact of this on the world is impossible to overstate. Everybody who used Windows in this era used Win 3.1(1).
Windows 3.1 also hit a sweet spot for OEMs; with RAM becoming larger and cheaper, and 486 PCs delivering speed. That was when PC games that targeted Windows started to arrive in reasonable numbers.
Microsoft also made a big push at this time for preinstalled Windows to be considered the baseline configuration instead of treating it as an optional upsell. It probably also didn't hurt that 3.1 was when Windows was seen as having properly matured (cf. Vista vs. 7). Basically, the 3.1 era was when Windows went from being a novelty/luxury to being everywhere practically overnight.
Works 2 was released for Windows a year earlier, but I think the 3 release was what really shone. IIRC, that was the version I had bundled with our home PC:
I don't think any of the common suspects targeted Win 3.1 (or its beta version of Win32). Most of them shipped with a DPMI kernel (Dos4GW being common), which Win3.1 happened to also provide, but I can't recall if, say, DOOM even ran under Win3.1 at the time as 4GW did a lot more than DPMI.
No, it became what some of us called "plug and pray". You plug it in, and it's supposed to work. You install the driver, reboot, uninstall the driver, reboot, clear some temporary files, re-install the driver, try a slightly different driver on the same disk, uninstall the driver, reboot, re-install the driver, and it suddenly works! Then you reboot it and it stops working again.
I remember it differently, as I rarely encountered office networks then, and when I did, they were still 3rd party (Netware mostly).
The reason I always remember 3.1 is that 3.0 was a "big" upgrade, but it was a dog, so they released a vastly-improved 3.1 pretty quickly, so many people got that as the default, and the upgrade was pretty widespread.
This was over maybe a 4-year period in the mid-90s. My memory may be hazy, and I was a university student, so my exposure may have been limited, but myself and my friends never really reference 3.11 because it wasn't used/needed, and indeed most of us used Trumpet Winsock as a TCP/IP stack (3rd party) until the release of Windows 95.
Apple isn't creating neural hashes for CSAM detection, as they'd have to be in possession of source material to create them, so they're getting them from someone else. Since it's indistinguishable in it's hash form, when the supplier becomes interested in looking for something else, nobody will ever know.
Do not let Apple off the hook. This must be removed.
This functionality will be used in other global jurisdictions to clamp down on freedom. In a world where we cede more control and increasingly subjugate ourselves, it's only a matter of time before it's used against us too.
But they aren’t monitoring. And a hash doesn’t help you monitor unless you’ve got a hash of another image like CSAM. And you can turn this off if you want.
Honestly I know everyone thinks that everything is a slippery slope to death camps. But sometimes it’s just a cool helpful feature.
The suppliers are well documented and it takes two suppliers agreeing on the same neural hash.
So, when the US center for missing and exploited children decides to collide with the Japanese equivalent to detect IDK what, yea, you wouldn’t know. Assuming those agencies don’t operate with transparency.
Requiring two suppliers to agree is simply the current policy. I think the GPs concern is that Apple's policies can change without warning or notice. That seems like a pretty valid concern to me, which Apple has zero interesting in mollifying.
I've used XFCE seemingly forever, at least 20 years.
In recent years I've grown to dislike Thunar and a variety of other things that were mostly GTK issues and some XFCE issues. I was really frustrated with clicking on the system tray and having that click register as a click on the menu that popped up, that just so happened to be 'Quit', and closing the app.
Then I upgraded my computer in a huge jump. Sure, games were faster, but I wouldn't enjoy the results of my investment at any given moment. So I switched to KDE for the first time ever, with animations and sexiness everywhere. It's got it's issues, and it's multi-monitor support is really sub-par, but so many things suddenly work better.
Best example: The flow of clicking on a ZIP to download and ultimately looking at the extacted output in new folder is suddenly effortless and intuitive.
I love the polish of KDE and while I'm tempted to give XFCE another try, the thought of giving up on the effortless sanity of KDE for GTK funk makes me shudder.
I didn't really like the default look of version 4. Oxygen had depressing colors, it lacked fineness. I always switched the theme to Fusion, or Cleanlooks, which imitated the Clearlooks GTK theme.
Version 5, with Breeze, is really good. Very elegant. By the way I also tend to find Gnome with the Breeze theme way nicer than with Adwaita (which is already fine).
The only DE I find almost as nice looking as Plasma with the default settings is macOS.
They are also constantly cleaning up the UI and making it simpler, bit by bit.
"... a terminate-and-stay-resident program (or TSR) was a computer program running under DOS that uses a system call to return control to DOS as though it has finished, but remains in computer memory so it can be reactivated later. Needless to say, this was extremely unreliable."
There were very likely some hacky TSRs that caused problems, but in my experience most were extremely reliable. We used an off-the-shelf TSR to enhance a motion control system that laser scribed ceramic vacuum checks for silicon wafer fabrication. Those things cost $5k in 1990, and took ~20h of processing, increasing their value to $15k; we wouldn't screw around with something that was inherently "extremely unreliable".
stop_clock: All it did was stop the real time clock of the system from counting up when you pressed the alt key and started it again on a 2nd press. However, this was enough to stop the timer of a typing speed program we used in high school. Magically, I was a VERY fast typist. :-)
stay_on: When you pressed a certain key sequence it would start the floppy drive motor and a 2nd press would turn it off. The goal was to speed up floppy accesses by not needing to spin up the motor all the time. Unfortunately, I got up one day to find my floppy drive motor dead. I suspect I forgot to turn off the motor (there was no idle timeout...I was a kid, never even crossed my mind!)
I had one TSR that let you allocate RAM and switch between up to 3 programs. Of course, they had to be small programs due to the 640KB limit. But it was still quite useful in the days before hard drives, to be able to have a couple of utilities (like a text editor) loaded without having to keep swapping floppy disks.
Also wrote a couple of TSRs of my own as a kid learning to program. Sure you could crash the system, as you could with any program, but they were as reliable as anything else.
The only thing special was that you generally didn't want to run two TSRs that naively hooked the same interrupt without chaining properly. But back then we didn't have thousands of mysterious background processes always running in the background. You knew what few programs you had run, so it wasn't really a problem.
Yes. DOS itself came with several TSRs, for example keyboard drivers. They were absolutelt commonplace and, if written properly, nowhere as unreliable as claimed.
Interestingly, the author updated the post, which now says "this was not 100% reliable".
There isn't anything inherently unreliable with TSRs; DOS even provided interrupts for this specific operation (although some malware would not use them).
I think (although not entirely sure) that some mouse drivers were, for example, TSRs.
The problem is that there was a wide range of purposes and implementations, including malware, so the argument is similar to "BTC is mostly used for dirty money, so BTC is inherently criminal".
All DOS mouse drivers were TSRs. The driver would hook INT 33h (which is the mouse driver "API" entrypoint) and whatever IRQ (ie. 4 or 12) that the actual hardware used. The IRQ handler would then update the driver's internal state according to data received from the mouse and if enabled draw the mouse cursor into frame buffer and/or call registered user event function (which runs in the interrupt context).
My 486 had boot sector protection in the BIOS. It would pop up a Y/N confirmation in text mode during boot sector overwrite.
This froze the windows 95 setup in graphical mode. Although the text prompt appeared for whatever reason the Y/N didn’t work and we could never continue.
I used a TSR to run protected mode software under early Microsoft Windows back in the day. Effectively it was letting me have the big allocations I needed while using Windows as a portable display driver.
