I believe the first machine to use an explosive to launch a projectile was the cannon devised by the Chinese for the purpose of breaking seiges. The Chinese, fortunately, had some sense and realised that no one else had them so they weren't really necessary, and didn't make that many. instead they developed the fireworks that we know and love. Anyway, the point of "launching a small object in a relativly straight line" is to harm someone or something, and has been since the first cannon. You yourself say that it is no more than an advanced slingshot, so tell me what slingshots were developed for. Furthermore, I challenge you give me any other use at all for a gun.
"Guns are not inherently dangerous products at all" Are you mad? What is the sole design purpose of a gun? is it:
a) to entertain rednecks at target ranges
b) to give Stallone something to hold in Rambo
c) To kill or injure people or animals from distance
I agree that guns can be harmless when that is the intention of a well trained user, but that doesn't take anything away from the fact that a gun is an inherently very dangerous product.
RE: the cigarette comment. Used properly, in combat, a gun will always harm the victim. Secondly, the smoker has the choice whether to kill himself through nicotine, whereas the victim of a gunshot (usually) gets little choice in the matter.
I don't see your point. The analogy was based around the idea that a coder who develops an axploit/script/whatever and releases it on the internet KNOWS that it will be used for harm, just as an arms dealer who sells to terrorists (or an oppressive regime etc) KNOWS that they will be used for harm, and should carry a moral and legal burden as a result. That is not to say that the "users" should escape legal repercussions, but that the blame should not fall exclusively on the designer or the user.
Likewise, I wouldn't blame a gun manufacturer for illegal use of their product, however I think that legislation restricting the ability to purchase a gun wholly right. Consequently I think there should be legislation prohibiting the manufacture of programs whose purpose is malicious.
Now, before I get the torrent of "the internet is not policable" posts and all the rest of the freedom online thing, I have a few more things to say.
I realise that it is much harder to prevent the production of malicious code since it takes only one person using tools that are freely available. Furthermore, recent incidents (deCSS etc) have shown that it is impossble to prevent the circulation of code/binaries on the internet. However, I don't think that difficulty of enforcement is reason enough not to legislate. It would give the law enforcers at least some leverage in certain situation, that they don't have at the moment.
Secondly I realise that the line is very blurred between legitimate usefulness, and malicious, particularly with tools that can be used both maliciously and defensively, like port scanners. Again, I see this as a challenge for the courts and legislators, rather than a reason not to even attempt to legislate.
I think that it is also the responsibility of every developer to think about the potential illegal uses of their code, and the damage that their programs could cause. Since it requires a certain degree of brain power to be a developer in the first place, it shouldn't be too hard for everyone to realise that if they write a virus/scanner/exploit, and release it to the public, it will innevitably wreck someone's day, and cost someone money. Just put yourself in the position where you miss dinner with your family/have to stay up all night fixing a server because of some script-kiddie/have to pospone the family holiday because your data was wiped off your servers, and you miss a contract deadline as a result. It doesn't take long to decide not to release malicious code does it? Just remember that there's always some arsehole who think's it's cool to screw things up, and he might be doing it with your code.
Are you seriously suggesting that America the great would use the bomb?
I don't think that is the case. The days of MAD and stockpiling are over, and the future of warfare is economic, socio-political, electronic and small-scale mobile tactical units.
Get a life, other countries would be doing the same things if they had the same power
Well, isn't America so all-powerful and wise. It may be that the states is the richest nation on earth, but take a look at the violent crime statistica, or the level of income inequality, or educational inequality. America should be spending its money sorting out its social problems for all the new immigrants that you mention, before blanket spying on foreign nationals in their own countries.
Oh yeah, just because other nations are worse offenders (China), doesn't mean that privacy abuse is right. And I have lived in America, and it definitely wasn't as nice as Morocco, Germany, Thailand or the UK.
This isn't to defend the current state of the art in computer usability-- there's plenty of work to be done yet-- but I think that there is a limit on how simple we can make a computer before we start to sacrifice the essential complexity that makes computers compelling in the first place.
I see your point, and that is not what I am arguing. What I am saying is that the "essential complexity" interests me, and most of the other/. users, bores the shit out of most of the users in "the real world". What they want is apps that are as easy to use as possible, and that includes the OS.
in answer to your comment on the functionality of cars: Most people use computers for only a few tasks, rather than stretching their abilities. The ability to get from A to B is synononymous with word processing a document. The internals are beyond their knowledge and the knowledge that they care about. The fact that a computer is perhaps more advanced than a modern car (although I would contest that) is irrelevant - both machines are way beyond the John Smith mentality, knowlwdge, and understanding. Consequently how far they are beyond is of no importance: the fact is that it makes no difference to the average person how something works as long as it gets the job done, adn win32 gets the job done when it comes to making word processing and browsing the internet easy.
Lastly, I don't think that the limit on making interfaces simple is that dependant on the complexity of the underlying operation. For example the core of the software that I am working on is very complex, but just as much research goes into making the UI usable. Once the UI is very good, it will most likely not change very much, but the core will continue to evolve.
When it does you begin sacrificing quality to serve the idiots, who then continue to complain "It's too hard! Make it easier!" simply because they don't want to learn. MAKE THEM LEARN
It may surprise you, but 95% of the millions of computer users out there use computers as a tool to get their job done. This may be by using the web to research things, or by using email or a word processor. These people do not care or want to care about how the system works. They will buy whatever system puts the technicalities as far away from them as possible, because it does not benefit them to know how to configure their machine.
There is absolutely no reason for them to learn how their machine operates. Many people drive a car, but it is not mandatory for all drivers to be experts on how their car works. They just use it to get from A to B.
Just take some time to put yourself in the shoes of the average user, and realise that they have different expectations from a computer to you.
OK, so there have been a few other people saying that Linux/*BSD/GPL/Free Software isn't the answer to everything, and that MS products are not all useless etc, but the vast majority just slag off MS and get moderated up for it.
Wake up and realise that just because MS have used some pretty bad corporate tactics, their products are not necessarily bad. An analogy might be Nestle. Just because their agressive marketing of baby formula in the 3rd world has caused lots of harm, doesn't mean that a Kit-Kat bar is a bad product. (I don't know if they have them in the states, so a Kit-Kat is a chocolate wafer bar thing)
I think that win32 is a reasonably good OS for the task it sets itself. It was designed to be easy to use rather than incredibly stable and secure. If you want five nines reliability, you buy an S/390. If you want to word process and browse the internet easily, you buy MacOS or windows. If you want better stability, and lower-level acces to your machine on Intel, you use Linux. The point is that not everyone knows how to install linux, and even more people would be terrified by an x-term. Windows is aimed at people who just want to use a given set of apps without worrying about how it works, and it does a reasonably good job at it.
NT is a good system, as was proven by the recent Mindcraft benchmarks (and before you complain about the validity, I mean the SECOND set, that were carried out with Linux techs on hand to tune the Linux system). Stop just mindlessly hammering MS products because MS isn't the most friendly corporation in the world.
Oh yeah, according to another poster, because I don't slag off MS at every opportunity I must be "stupid". So feel free to disregard everything I say because I am "stupid".
actually you can draw the supply/demand curves for the market given some parameters that are normally drawn from comparable industries. Hence you can determine to some extent what the price of the product would have been given other market conditions.
does having a dual 550 make that much difference to a single 550. I'm just interested because I didn't know that any of the major games supported SMP, so I wouldn't think there's be much of a speed improvement.
from the BBC, whom I think are the most trustworthy news organisation, even if their interviewees split the odd infinitive.
"...But predicting meteor storms is never easy. The 1998 event did not live up to the forecasts and most experts were also caught out by its timing - the storm turned up 14 hours earlier than expected."
"The best time to look is from 2300 local time onwards, with the peak expected around 0200 GMT (0300 Central European Time)."
I guess that means that the best time to look at it in the states is as soon as it goes dark
I think that with the advent of e-commerce it is becomming harder to draw the line between a business model (which shouldn't be patentable) and the underlying technological system (which should).
If they were to say that "We would like to patent selling custimised CDs over the internet using such and such a process with a particular system for data capture, indexing, manufacture, shipping and tracking" then that would be reasonable.
However attempting to patent the concept of selling CDs over the internet is the same as attempting to patent selling any other product over the internet with a range of options that can be customised by the user. For example, it would be ridiculous to take out a pent on selling cars over the web with the option to select the colour/trim level/engine etc.
It is a "stupid" patent because the idea is already in the public domain, and it is business model rather than an invention or design.
That's not entirely correct. the free electrons in a conductor will still hit the fixed positive ions fairly frequently, stopping them dead. They will then accellerate again as the electric force acts on them. for example the mobility of copper is 0.0035 M^2/(V.s), and say the field was 1 V/m, then the average speed of an electron would be ~3.5 mm/s. clearly this is not anywhere close to the speed of light. As I stated above, it is the speed at which the knock on effect passes information on that is important. Think of it like one of those eighties-tastic executive desk toys that has a row of ball-bearings suspended by thin threads. Th balls individually don't move fast, but the information is passed through very quickly.
That's the refractive index difference between the fiber's core and the cladding, which is much smaller.
Furthermore, most communications fibres have a graduated difference between the refractive index of the core and the cladding, so that the light doesn't "bounce" but is "bent" instead, in a curved fashion. These fibres are called graded-index fibres. The advantage is that all paths through the fibre are of approcimately equal length, so synchronisation is easier than for step-index fibres
no. The information carried electrically travels at the speed of light, but the speed of the electrons themselves depends on the field (and hence the voltage), and the mobility. The formaula is normally written as = mu.E or average speed = electron mobility times field
It is not the "real" speed that is an issue, but the amount of data you can cram down a line per second - normally referred to as bandwidth, and it is this barrier that the boys and girls at bell labs have raised.
why do you say that MS are incompetent? As far as I am aware, their OS is the most widely used in the world, and they are amongst the most profitable companies in the world. I am *NOT* saying that win98/NT is the best OS for all purposes, and neither am I condoning their abuse of monopoly power and the FUD that they have spread.
However, I am saying that you have no idea that they will screw up this Taiwanese ISP, adn I'm sure that the decision to partner MS on their broadband venture was made on Microsoft's ability to provide content as well as the technology behind the venture. They are not stupid, and do not need to be "protected" from MS.
Did you read the aricle? it acknowledges that it has been reported as a mis-translation, and looks at the implication of the phrase "...future of Sega is in the internet...". This inmplies to many people that Sega will be moving towards software development only for other platforms, with the competitive advantage coming from brand strength and network delivery methods.
last year I thought it'd be fun to test some text-to-speech systems by sticking the output through a speech recogniser, and comparing to the original input.
needless to say there's still a lot of work to do on TTS
Slashdot Mirror
a) to entertain rednecks at target ranges
b) to give Stallone something to hold in Rambo
c) To kill or injure people or animals from distance
I agree that guns can be harmless when that is the intention of a well trained user, but that doesn't take anything away from the fact that a gun is an inherently very dangerous product.
RE: the cigarette comment. Used properly, in combat, a gun will always harm the victim. Secondly, the smoker has the choice whether to kill himself through nicotine, whereas the victim of a gunshot (usually) gets little choice in the matter.
I don't see your point. The analogy was based around the idea that a coder who develops an axploit/script/whatever and releases it on the internet KNOWS that it will be used for harm, just as an arms dealer who sells to terrorists (or an oppressive regime etc) KNOWS that they will be used for harm, and should carry a moral and legal burden as a result. That is not to say that the "users" should escape legal repercussions, but that the blame should not fall exclusively on the designer or the user.
Now, before I get the torrent of "the internet is not policable" posts and all the rest of the freedom online thing, I have a few more things to say.
I realise that it is much harder to prevent the production of malicious code since it takes only one person using tools that are freely available. Furthermore, recent incidents (deCSS etc) have shown that it is impossble to prevent the circulation of code/binaries on the internet. However, I don't think that difficulty of enforcement is reason enough not to legislate. It would give the law enforcers at least some leverage in certain situation, that they don't have at the moment.
Secondly I realise that the line is very blurred between legitimate usefulness, and malicious, particularly with tools that can be used both maliciously and defensively, like port scanners. Again, I see this as a challenge for the courts and legislators, rather than a reason not to even attempt to legislate.
I think that it is also the responsibility of every developer to think about the potential illegal uses of their code, and the damage that their programs could cause. Since it requires a certain degree of brain power to be a developer in the first place, it shouldn't be too hard for everyone to realise that if they write a virus/scanner/exploit, and release it to the public, it will innevitably wreck someone's day, and cost someone money. Just put yourself in the position where you miss dinner with your family/have to stay up all night fixing a server because of some script-kiddie/have to pospone the family holiday because your data was wiped off your servers, and you miss a contract deadline as a result. It doesn't take long to decide not to release malicious code does it? Just remember that there's always some arsehole who think's it's cool to screw things up, and he might be doing it with your code.
I don't think that is the case. The days of MAD and stockpiling are over, and the future of warfare is economic, socio-political, electronic and small-scale mobile tactical units.
Get a life, other countries would be doing the same things if they had the same power
Well, isn't America so all-powerful and wise. It may be that the states is the richest nation on earth, but take a look at the violent crime statistica, or the level of income inequality, or educational inequality. America should be spending its money sorting out its social problems for all the new immigrants that you mention, before blanket spying on foreign nationals in their own countries.
Oh yeah, just because other nations are worse offenders (China), doesn't mean that privacy abuse is right. And I have lived in America, and it definitely wasn't as nice as Morocco, Germany, Thailand or the UK.
I see your point, and that is not what I am arguing. What I am saying is that the "essential complexity" interests me, and most of the other /. users, bores the shit out of most of the users in "the real world". What they want is apps that are as easy to use as possible, and that includes the OS.
in answer to your comment on the functionality of cars: Most people use computers for only a few tasks, rather than stretching their abilities. The ability to get from A to B is synononymous with word processing a document. The internals are beyond their knowledge and the knowledge that they care about. The fact that a computer is perhaps more advanced than a modern car (although I would contest that) is irrelevant - both machines are way beyond the John Smith mentality, knowlwdge, and understanding. Consequently how far they are beyond is of no importance: the fact is that it makes no difference to the average person how something works as long as it gets the job done, adn win32 gets the job done when it comes to making word processing and browsing the internet easy.
Lastly, I don't think that the limit on making interfaces simple is that dependant on the complexity of the underlying operation. For example the core of the software that I am working on is very complex, but just as much research goes into making the UI usable. Once the UI is very good, it will most likely not change very much, but the core will continue to evolve.
It may surprise you, but 95% of the millions of computer users out there use computers as a tool to get their job done. This may be by using the web to research things, or by using email or a word processor. These people do not care or want to care about how the system works. They will buy whatever system puts the technicalities as far away from them as possible, because it does not benefit them to know how to configure their machine.
There is absolutely no reason for them to learn how their machine operates. Many people drive a car, but it is not mandatory for all drivers to be experts on how their car works. They just use it to get from A to B.
Just take some time to put yourself in the shoes of the average user, and realise that they have different expectations from a computer to you.
Wake up and realise that just because MS have used some pretty bad corporate tactics, their products are not necessarily bad. An analogy might be Nestle. Just because their agressive marketing of baby formula in the 3rd world has caused lots of harm, doesn't mean that a Kit-Kat bar is a bad product. (I don't know if they have them in the states, so a Kit-Kat is a chocolate wafer bar thing)
I think that win32 is a reasonably good OS for the task it sets itself. It was designed to be easy to use rather than incredibly stable and secure. If you want five nines reliability, you buy an S/390. If you want to word process and browse the internet easily, you buy MacOS or windows. If you want better stability, and lower-level acces to your machine on Intel, you use Linux. The point is that not everyone knows how to install linux, and even more people would be terrified by an x-term. Windows is aimed at people who just want to use a given set of apps without worrying about how it works, and it does a reasonably good job at it.
NT is a good system, as was proven by the recent Mindcraft benchmarks (and before you complain about the validity, I mean the SECOND set, that were carried out with Linux techs on hand to tune the Linux system). Stop just mindlessly hammering MS products because MS isn't the most friendly corporation in the world.
Oh yeah, according to another poster, because I don't slag off MS at every opportunity I must be "stupid". So feel free to disregard everything I say because I am "stupid".
does having a dual 550 make that much difference to a single 550. I'm just interested because I didn't know that any of the major games supported SMP, so I wouldn't think there's be much of a speed improvement.
Of course it depends if it clouds over. It's been clear (and chuffing freezing) in Cambridge all day, so fingers crossed.
BTW. (offtopic) Scotland outplayed us, but still lost. (sincere apologies: the brits will understand)
"...But predicting meteor storms is never easy. The 1998 event did not live up to the forecasts and most experts were also caught out by its timing - the storm turned up 14 hours earlier than expected."
"The best time to look is from 2300 local time onwards, with the peak expected around 0200 GMT (0300 Central European Time)."
I guess that means that the best time to look at it in the states is as soon as it goes dark
If they were to say that "We would like to patent selling custimised CDs over the internet using such and such a process with a particular system for data capture, indexing, manufacture, shipping and tracking" then that would be reasonable.
However attempting to patent the concept of selling CDs over the internet is the same as attempting to patent selling any other product over the internet with a range of options that can be customised by the user. For example, it would be ridiculous to take out a pent on selling cars over the web with the option to select the colour/trim level/engine etc.
It is a "stupid" patent because the idea is already in the public domain, and it is business model rather than an invention or design.
oh well, such is life.
does the other guy get moderated up for being wrong? YES
That's not entirely correct. the free electrons in a conductor will still hit the fixed positive ions fairly frequently, stopping them dead. They will then accellerate again as the electric force acts on them. for example the mobility of copper is 0.0035 M^2/(V.s), and say the field was 1 V/m, then the average speed of an electron would be ~3.5 mm/s. clearly this is not anywhere close to the speed of light. As I stated above, it is the speed at which the knock on effect passes information on that is important. Think of it like one of those eighties-tastic executive desk toys that has a row of ball-bearings suspended by thin threads. Th balls individually don't move fast, but the information is passed through very quickly.
Furthermore, most communications fibres have a graduated difference between the refractive index of the core and the cladding, so that the light doesn't "bounce" but is "bent" instead, in a curved fashion. These fibres are called graded-index fibres. The advantage is that all paths through the fibre are of approcimately equal length, so synchronisation is easier than for step-index fibres
or average speed = electron mobility times field
It is not the "real" speed that is an issue, but the amount of data you can cram down a line per second - normally referred to as bandwidth, and it is this barrier that the boys and girls at bell labs have raised.
not the rig, the frame interpolation hardware.
I'm sure there is a technical name for the above, but I don't know it.
Also there are a lot of FX companies in London, and this is set to grow as the British film industry seems to be making a comeback
However, I am saying that you have no idea that they will screw up this Taiwanese ISP, adn I'm sure that the decision to partner MS on their broadband venture was made on Microsoft's ability to provide content as well as the technology behind the venture. They are not stupid, and do not need to be "protected" from MS.
Did you read the aricle? it acknowledges that it has been reported as a mis-translation, and looks at the implication of the phrase "...future of Sega is in the internet...". This inmplies to many people that Sega will be moving towards software development only for other platforms, with the competitive advantage coming from brand strength and network delivery methods.
last year I thought it'd be fun to test some text-to-speech systems by sticking the output through a speech recogniser, and comparing to the original input.
needless to say there's still a lot of work to do on TTS