I don't know if the "any publicity is good publicity" rule holds for consulting firms. It's a bad thing to get a reputation as a company that Doesn't Get It, when your whole business is based on the perception that you Get It.
Modern garage door openers do the same sort of thing. Dip switches are a thing of the past.
That doesn't mean much though. Garage doors aren't replaced as often as cars, I suspect that many people that bought the very first generation of garage door openers still have them installed.
That stupid little quote caps off the dumbest story I've seen on/. in MONTHS. He's so deep in his own ignorance that he figured the only way to save his silly little rant was to add a "your rights online" buzzphrase. "Honda is just like *Microsoft!*".
This dumbass is upset because a key is required to start the car. Uh, brainiac: that's the whole PURPOSE of keys. Honda is finally doing keys RIGHT, and you're bitching about it.
Also, why don't we do these robot things on the moon first before we spend a billion or so going a few miles down the road?
Once you've gotten out of earth's gravity well, the distance travelled doesn't make much of a difference in cost. It's more of a logistical challenge, but there really isn't an economic argument for a throwaway lunar trial.
You can buy Mark's robots, for about $40 a piece. Hasbro is selling BIO Bugs, a "consumerized" version. Wired has a piece on them and their development.
I know him from when he was still at the University of Waterloo many years ago. Whenever there is a piece on TV about simple, emergent robots, he's quoted without fail.
Microsoft can do to stop this sort of virus, as long as they allow execution of files direct from their email client
That's not even a root cause, it just makes things a little easier for the virus to propagate. If they made it completely impossible to execute attachements in the client, users would simply do what they then learn they're "supposed" to do with attachments -- save them to a file, and then run/view them from the shell. Boom, same result.
There is no sure-fire fix to prevent this sort of virus. It's not, at it's core, a problem with either the basic functionality of the email software (well written software can only slow down the propagation, not stop it), nor the scope of the user's permissions (it's well within the user's scope to read his own mail, execute software, read his own address book, and send mail). It's a problem with the behaviour of the user.
As long as it's possible to attach arbitrary files to emails, and run arbitrary code on a machine, they'll propagate. Making it technically impossible to do either of those things a) is difficult, and b) makes the system far less useful.
morpheus will soon be no longer. Kazaa, which runs the cache servers for morpheus and grokster, is being sued in dutch courts.
It was only a matter of time -- from the moment they intentionally broke the protocol and made it depend on a central server.
If nothing else, FastTrack provided a proof-of-concept for a node/supernode p2p system. It's only a matter of time until an OSS equivalent is established.
No Britney. <ducks> Whine all you want about how great their independent and/or progressive artists are; if you can't get whatever you want to hear, it's not as good as Morpheus.
Also, they carefully avoid mentioning bitrate anywhere on the site, which leads me to believe that it is likely less than 128Kb, which itself is barely acceptable.
but your link refers to a beta of one-version-old software
You have no idea what you're talking about. The release version of Quicktime 4 fixed none of the problems listed. Quicktime 5 still suffers from many of the same problems.
It still brazenly defies one of Apple's own cardinal rules of UI design -- that you should always use common UI elements and dialogs, so that all applications behave consistently. Instead, the Quicktime client does everything with a custom, nonstandard hack, even simply opening a file.
The UI community has learned since then that that is not always the case.
You say that like it wasn't already painfully obvious even before the software was released.
the format itself is not bad, the clients are simply horrible
I am constantly amazed at the Quicktime UI. Apple, without a doubt, has some of the most talented designers in the world. And after so many years to work on it, it still manages to release the most incredibly AWFUL client software for Quicktime.
It's an historical case study in bad interface design! And every subsequent version is just as bad. Clunky UI elements. Inconsistent behaviour. Complete absence of any sort of optimization.
The very awfulness of it is fascinating. It's the roadside car wreck of software development.
hell the current version of the Windows client still hasn't even implemented a full-screen mode...
Oh, it's there. But you have to pay extra for it! Unbelievable.
Re:It's a damn scooter
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
Pfft. We don't need no stinking wussy "wind chill" to hit -40. Parts of Canada regularly hit -60C. It's only the tropical climes of southern Ontario and BC that manage to stay above -20 all year.
Re:It's a damn scooter
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
Are we talking -40 degrees Celsius?
No, Fahrenheight. Heh.
He'd have to be from somewhere in the Northwest Territories then.
Not at all. Winnipeg (in southern Manitoba, almost on the U.S. border) hits -40 at least once a year.
The obvious solution is to run the power cable behind the wall -- so that you can install this device designed to avoid having to run cable behind the wall.
It's funny that this should follow so closely on the heels of this other slashdot article about a hardware audio player that stores uncompressed digital audio. There were several comments posted suggesting that the device should have used compression -- specificallyFLAC.
There's a rather large difference between keeping welded pipes full of water and keeping computers running.
Yeah, water's a lot harder to manage, and the stakes are higher when it fails. When's the last time people died because their internet connection wasn't properly maintained?
Internet would be a breeze compared to water and power.
50K? What were you sending them, a raw TCP dump of your entire day's POP/SMTP sessions? Anything more than the headers of the email you received is just extra garbage for them to wade through.
Given that they do have (for now) some sort of immunity, it opens a loophole for publishing illegal data. Simply set up your site with all of Metallica's lyrics / guitar scores (all 5 of them, heh). Submit it for indexing to Google, but don't otherwise attract attention to the site. When you see the spider hit, take it offline. Now the data is available to anyone who searches for it on Google, but you're not liable for anything. The process could be repeated to update the cache.
God is the Creator, so anything involving the creation of life should be banned, because only God should do that.
These "moral and ethical" Christians are also wondering right now whether a child that isn't created "naturally" by God even has a soul.
Given that human cloning will take place somewhere, probably sooner rather than later, the implication is of course that it'd be fine to butcher these babies old-testament-style, since they aren't really human and are an affront to God.
A man and woman (or either alone) want to have a child and are unable to naturally
They consult a specialist who does this sort of thing
They have egg cells, sperm, other cells taken
Either the woman or volunteer hosts the embryo
Failure by stillbirth, premature birth, defects, etc. happen.
Illustrate the emotional cost of dead or ill formed and living children
Did you plan to write that list so that it didn't mention cloning and could apply to nearly any assisted-fertilization effort by the parents? If not, maybe you should think about just what the fundamental difference is anyway.
And by failure I mean all outcomes other than healthy with ten fingers and toes and will live to be 75 and have average intelligence and lead a normal life.
So we should ban any kind of reproduction altogether, because entirely natural methods haven't even come close to hitting that target.
What you get is just a blur of all windows that happen to be ontop of one another (and the background if you have a background/wallpaper image).
Yeah, and it's bad to have a display that supports "color", because it's hard to edit text that is constantly flashing in rainbow colors while you're working.
I wonder if there is any possibility that there are cases where not all the windows have to be transparent all the time? Consider an application-switching mechanism that lets you hold a key to fade all windows, at which point you can select a window to bring to front. It then becomes opaque, and you continue working.
YOU do the math, unsold XBoxes = $400 loss per console,
They are *all* going to be sold, one way or another, for the next year or more. If you don't believe that, you're deluding yourself. So the worst case for MS is if those boxes go to people who aren't going to subsequently buy games.
Not only would it reduce that but it would also increase the distance one could live from work. [...] It seems like an obvious evolution in our transportation systems, really, since long commutes are getting more and more common and traffic is constantly getting worse.
It's only as "obvious" a solution to the problem as perpetually adding more and more freeways to cities. Or making cars smaller. You don't think urban sprawl is bad enough yet? Increasing the average commute distance can only make the problem worse.
The solution isn't to make commuting faster, or more convenient. Moving people large distances, every day, regardless how efficiently, is simply a bad idea. The only solution is to reduce the NEED for commuting at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if the "any publicity is good publicity" rule holds for consulting firms. It's a bad thing to get a reputation as a company that Doesn't Get It, when your whole business is based on the perception that you Get It.
That doesn't mean much though. Garage doors aren't replaced as often as cars, I suspect that many people that bought the very first generation of garage door openers still have them installed.
That stupid little quote caps off the dumbest story I've seen on /. in MONTHS. He's so deep in his own ignorance that he figured the only way to save his silly little rant was to add a "your rights online" buzzphrase. "Honda is just like *Microsoft!*".
This dumbass is upset because a key is required to start the car. Uh, brainiac: that's the whole PURPOSE of keys. Honda is finally doing keys RIGHT, and you're bitching about it.
Once you've gotten out of earth's gravity well, the distance travelled doesn't make much of a difference in cost. It's more of a logistical challenge, but there really isn't an economic argument for a throwaway lunar trial.
I know him from when he was still at the University of Waterloo many years ago. Whenever there is a piece on TV about simple, emergent robots, he's quoted without fail.
That's not even a root cause, it just makes things a little easier for the virus to propagate. If they made it completely impossible to execute attachements in the client, users would simply do what they then learn they're "supposed" to do with attachments -- save them to a file, and then run/view them from the shell. Boom, same result.
There is no sure-fire fix to prevent this sort of virus. It's not, at it's core, a problem with either the basic functionality of the email software (well written software can only slow down the propagation, not stop it), nor the scope of the user's permissions (it's well within the user's scope to read his own mail, execute software, read his own address book, and send mail). It's a problem with the behaviour of the user.
As long as it's possible to attach arbitrary files to emails, and run arbitrary code on a machine, they'll propagate. Making it technically impossible to do either of those things a) is difficult, and b) makes the system far less useful.
It was only a matter of time -- from the moment they intentionally broke the protocol and made it depend on a central server.
If nothing else, FastTrack provided a proof-of-concept for a node/supernode p2p system. It's only a matter of time until an OSS equivalent is established.
No Britney. <ducks> Whine all you want about how great their independent and/or progressive artists are; if you can't get whatever you want to hear, it's not as good as Morpheus.
Also, they carefully avoid mentioning bitrate anywhere on the site, which leads me to believe that it is likely less than 128Kb, which itself is barely acceptable.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The release version of Quicktime 4 fixed none of the problems listed. Quicktime 5 still suffers from many of the same problems.
It still brazenly defies one of Apple's own cardinal rules of UI design -- that you should always use common UI elements and dialogs, so that all applications behave consistently. Instead, the Quicktime client does everything with a custom, nonstandard hack, even simply opening a file. The UI community has learned since then that that is not always the case.
You say that like it wasn't already painfully obvious even before the software was released.
I am constantly amazed at the Quicktime UI. Apple, without a doubt, has some of the most talented designers in the world. And after so many years to work on it, it still manages to release the most incredibly AWFUL client software for Quicktime.
It's an historical case study in bad interface design! And every subsequent version is just as bad. Clunky UI elements. Inconsistent behaviour. Complete absence of any sort of optimization.
The very awfulness of it is fascinating. It's the roadside car wreck of software development.
hell the current version of the Windows client still hasn't even implemented a full-screen mode...
Oh, it's there. But you have to pay extra for it! Unbelievable.
Pfft. We don't need no stinking wussy "wind chill" to hit -40. Parts of Canada regularly hit -60C. It's only the tropical climes of southern Ontario and BC that manage to stay above -20 all year.
No, Fahrenheight. Heh.
He'd have to be from somewhere in the Northwest Territories then.
Not at all. Winnipeg (in southern Manitoba, almost on the U.S. border) hits -40 at least once a year.
The obvious solution is to run the power cable behind the wall -- so that you can install this device designed to avoid having to run cable behind the wall.
I wonder if somebody at Linn reads /.!
Yeah, water's a lot harder to manage, and the stakes are higher when it fails. When's the last time people died because their internet connection wasn't properly maintained?
Internet would be a breeze compared to water and power.
50K? What were you sending them, a raw TCP dump of your entire day's POP/SMTP sessions? Anything more than the headers of the email you received is just extra garbage for them to wade through.
Clarke is a scientist with many credientials completely separate from his fiction writing.
Given that they do have (for now) some sort of immunity, it opens a loophole for publishing illegal data. Simply set up your site with all of Metallica's lyrics / guitar scores (all 5 of them, heh). Submit it for indexing to Google, but don't otherwise attract attention to the site. When you see the spider hit, take it offline. Now the data is available to anyone who searches for it on Google, but you're not liable for anything. The process could be repeated to update the cache.
These "moral and ethical" Christians are also wondering right now whether a child that isn't created "naturally" by God even has a soul.
Given that human cloning will take place somewhere, probably sooner rather than later, the implication is of course that it'd be fine to butcher these babies old-testament-style, since they aren't really human and are an affront to God.
A man and woman (or either alone) want to have a child and are unable to naturally
They consult a specialist who does this sort of thing
They have egg cells, sperm, other cells taken
Either the woman or volunteer hosts the embryo
Failure by stillbirth, premature birth, defects, etc. happen.
Illustrate the emotional cost of dead or ill formed and living children
Did you plan to write that list so that it didn't mention cloning and could apply to nearly any assisted-fertilization effort by the parents? If not, maybe you should think about just what the fundamental difference is anyway.
And by failure I mean all outcomes other than healthy with ten fingers and toes and will live to be 75 and have average intelligence and lead a normal life.
So we should ban any kind of reproduction altogether, because entirely natural methods haven't even come close to hitting that target.
Yeah, and it's bad to have a display that supports "color", because it's hard to edit text that is constantly flashing in rainbow colors while you're working.
I wonder if there is any possibility that there are cases where not all the windows have to be transparent all the time? Consider an application-switching mechanism that lets you hold a key to fade all windows, at which point you can select a window to bring to front. It then becomes opaque, and you continue working.
They are *all* going to be sold, one way or another, for the next year or more. If you don't believe that, you're deluding yourself. So the worst case for MS is if those boxes go to people who aren't going to subsequently buy games.
It's only as "obvious" a solution to the problem as perpetually adding more and more freeways to cities. Or making cars smaller. You don't think urban sprawl is bad enough yet? Increasing the average commute distance can only make the problem worse.
The solution isn't to make commuting faster, or more convenient. Moving people large distances, every day, regardless how efficiently, is simply a bad idea. The only solution is to reduce the NEED for commuting at all.
Huh. I even tried to confirm it...
For those geeks too clumsy or impatient to fly expensive, fragile helicopters, you could always try a nice, slow blimp instead.