Beyond what the authors have done, this research could be used as a basis to compare the spread of virii in fixed pool, whether biologically based or network based. While there's been a lot of speculation on the spread of computer virii before, this appears to be the first study with hard numbers that could be used for comparison.
Sure, the results aren't that surprising, but it's still an interesting comparison.
While Opera's a great program (though I've found the 5.11/5.12 versions to be doggy), there's a better reason for not including it: It's not free. Consumers are going to balk at even a reduction in the typical opera price ($40 IIRC) that an OEM might get for licensing, knowing that IE and NS (both well known names in browsers) are free.
Mind you, I'd like to see OEMs put a demo version of Opera , or a link to O's homepage, with the looser terms, on the desktop. Offer the consumer the choice. Of course, now that I think about it, most OEM's have everything default to 640x480; I dread to imagine all the icons that might be on the screen at once!!
The JRE is only around 8 to 9 megs of compressed disk space, so compared with the XP bloat, a user's not going to notice that Java's installed or not.
The JRE is an intelligent DLL under Windows in that it is not loaded until it's needed, unlike the underlying IE DLLs which are loaded at the start and take up memory even if not used. So
it's not going to slow the user or comsume memory until it's needed.
The critical thing that needs to be done by Sun with regards to Java support is to have something like Windows Update or the Quicktime Updater: the ability to run one program that will grab the newest and latest files and install them, using a diff-like method instead of downloading *everything* again. If you tell a user that they can upgrade for a quick 500k download and to just press 'here', as opposed to telling them to download the newest JRE by going to some site, and downloading ANOTHER 8meg file, you'll have more people that stay current.
When I bring it up in a CD that lists tracks, "#34" is listed at track 34. Sure, the 22 hidden tracks are just empty, unlike the NIN example where tracks 98 and 99 are rather hidden (I think I remember reading some fine print on the CD liner that mentioned those).
Note that there are other ways people have done 'hidden tracks', namely by having an unlisted track that starts off with at least 2 minutes of nothing, then starts the songs. I think TMBG did this with "Severe Tire Damage" but I don't have my CD to check. Also done on Information Society's "Peace and Love Incorporated".
Music production requires a decent amount of hardware to work right, particularly for those that like to play a instrument directly to a digital version (ala midi keyboards). Notoriously a heavy OS can get in the way as to increase latency and reduce the quality of the final product. Linux is well suited since the OS can be very small and avoid latency. I'd love to see a similar project used for video technologies too; sure Linux doesn't have a Premiere-like program, but if someone develops the groundwork for a sleek kernel to avoid interrupting digital real-time editing, someone will write the necessary tools.
Two example that I know from before are NIN's Broken (two tracks at 98 and 99), and Dave Matthew's "Under the Table..." (11 tracks, then nothing from 12 to 33, then #34 is self-titled).
The longer time could just be for reading the table completely.
While this isn't a clear cut win for the GPL, it does at least show that the GPL has some guts, else why would Vidomi settle? If they felt that the GPL was meaningless, then they most likely would have fought this all the way through. So at least two companies (Microsoft and Vidomi) are taking the GPL seriously.
It may be an annoyence to 100% of the users, but only a small minority of users actually take the steps necessary to block ads (which is why ad-blocking software has yet to be legally challenged; it's not making a major impact on advertizers bottom lines). Now, MS is going to effectively block java-based ads for 95% of the browsing market; this will not go unnoticed.
Yes, advertizing in Java is a poor choice, but we've already been through banner ads that didn't work, and there's nothing else except for Java and Flash that advertizers seem willing to try. I'm not sympathizing with the advertizers here, just trying to see it from their frame of mind, and this move by MS is very harmful to their bottom line (which has been dropping further and further over the years).
And yes, there are useful Java apps. Java games are highly popular (Bejeweled for example). I know many educators' web sites that use Java for interactive tutorials and demonstrations that could not be effectively done in large classes.
Java is not a bad technology; it's just a technology that was used badly that turned many people off of it.
The spokesman said the Java support in Windows up until now "is a lot of code that many users don't need..."
...users will be directed to download a plug-in from Microsoft's Web site (www.microsoft.com) to make Java-based programs work. Without this step, "any Web page that contains Java applications will not run -- it will be a dead page,"
Apparently, Microsoft execs have not surfed the web recent; it's hard to find a mainstream site which at some point doesn't use Java-based ads. I wonder if this move may entice some web advertizers to take issue with MS for removing a key component for viewing their ads.
The problem with any technological solution is that it will be expensive relative to any mechanical solution; in addition, in the fallout from the election when a national standard for voting was suggested, it was well decided that there would be very little finacial help from the federal government, putting the most of the cost of the new machines on taxpayers.
Sure, my idea still requires a 'computer' at each site, but this is only one per site as opposed to 10 voting booths per site. I would presume that this is much more reasonable and less of a load on cash-strapped districts than getting lots of expensive voting machines.
Plus, I feel that if we went totally computerized, there would be a significant portion of the population that would have resistence to it, whether being ludites, conspiracy theory nuts, or for some other reason.
I agree that net voting is a highly questionable thing, and there's still too many barriers to it.
What I would like to see before 2004 is the following:
Make the November election day a national holiday: employers must give workers at least 4 hrs off during the day as to help improve voter turnout.
Standardize on one voting method across the nation. Since this potentially can be very expensive, I propose using the punchcard/butterfly ballot method (!) which is inexpensive.
However, along with that, strict rules on how the butterfly ballow can be presented should be determined. E.g. nothing with the potental confusion as with the Florida ballot. All names must be on the same side, and everything should be larger to avoid poor eyesight errors.
In addition to the cheap punchcards, each voting site would have a 'ballot check' machine, which electronically scans the punched card and reports any no-votes or duplicated votes, and allows the voter to either redo their card, or to sign off on the ballet to state that that was their intent (Probably more important in the non-vote catagory). Note that this box does NOT count votes; it only knows that, say, presidental candidates are in boxes 1-8, a senator race in 12-15, etc...
In conjunction with that, each butterfly ballot book would have a DIFFERENT ORDERING of the names within each race. So one might have "Bush/Gore/Nader", another might be "Nader/Bush/Gore", etc. You'd still be making your mark in boxes 1-8, but a Bush vote on one card might be box 1, while the vote on another card would be box 3. The specific butterfly book that you vote from would be marked by the voting official that is there to avoid an error here (since this is significant!); basically when they tell you to go to a specific machine, they know which book is there, so they'll punch out the right slot before that time.
Votes are still counted off the voting site at some central facility. Again, those little boxes can only check for "X of N choices" in a range of boxes, nothing else.
I think this is a nice cheap method, and would help reduce much of errors and problems that we had in the last election. There's other, less technical things that I'd love to see changed (like removing the winner-take-all) provision, but that's less likely to happen.
FYI, it's now 20 years but starting when the patent was applied for as opposed to previously when it was 17 years from when the patent was granted.
And I don't think this is retroactive. Patents before some date in 1999 (IIRC) are still 17 years from awarding; anything after is 20 years from filing.
Many companies, notably drug makers, used the prior rules, and the fact that they could accidently 'forgot' to fill in paperwork that would keep the patent approval process going, the USPTO charging them a minimal fee ( I think $500.00 ) for this 'late filing' charge. However, during this time, while the patent wasn't granted, the company filing did have some basic protection on the patent, and the patent documents were not public, so an enterprising company could easily get about 22 years of protection for a small incidental fee.
Note that the typical time between submission and awarding of a patent is around 2 to 3 years in the first place (assuming that everyone plays by the rules).
The new system says that once you've submitted a patent, the 20 year timeline starts ticking. In addition, as soon as it's reasonably possible, the patent document is placed in the public domain (eg USPTO's website), though the company does have protection on it's invention. This still gives companies sufficient protection on their inventions, but does prevent abuses of the system.
Going from 17 to 20 years really doesn't drastically extend the protection a patent gives it's owners with the given rules, it simply helps avoid abuses in the system.
The way I read the article, if book publishers had their way, they would strictly want to go to a e-format, completely dropping dead tree publishing, such that they can fully go pay-per-view. The only reasons they haven't done it yet is the lack of securing pay-per-view methods, and the lack of e-book support in all aspects of society.
Ten years down the road, when print and real-world formats will (might) go by the wayside, the concerns by the librarians today will be vital, and unless we heed them today, libraries may not legally exist in 10 years.
Actually, you also must remember that much of these clearinghouses may not be on the consumer networks. While the top 4 ISPs control 90% of the consumer market, I would expect a much smaller fraction of content sites to be in conjunctions with those ISPs, and instead on business networks (eg uunet, sprint, etc). And these are the sites that will probably want to charge you, as those sites on consumer ISP networks (like CNN.com for AOL/TW people) simply need to ask for premium placement on the ISP's main page or software installs, in order to get eyeballs; sites like zdnet, on the other hand, would have to institute this fee to AOL/TW to 'make up' for lost ad profits.
It's still all BS. There is no magical pile of money to be made on the Internet alone. Charging for content will simply cause the Internet to revert back to the ways of pre AOL; sites on the net for the sake of being on the net without commercial interference.
Bakula probably has a larger range of emotions that he can play moreso than any of the actors on Star Trek ever had, and Quantum Leap was a great show that allowed him to explore those roles (Remember, Bakula was a stage actor before he was on QL). Some of the episodes showed off these abilities moreso than others; the finale, the one where he saves his brother in 'nam, the one where he leaps into the mentally challenged people (the first one, not the one that was part of the Evil Leaper triology), as examples.
Sure, the last season had rather hooky plots; the one where Al became the Leaper, the entire Evil Leaper thing, for example. But that typically happens to any show that gets more than a couple seasons on air...
More likely, they're trying to fend off the problem that.biz is already in active use by an alternive system (I think opennic), particularlly now that ICANN's version of.biz is now open to registeration. (None of NewNet's names conflict with ICANN's system, though it includes ones that were considered buy ignored). If an ISP is
using Opennic's as well as ICANN's root servers, what happens when a.biz address is requested?
ICANN has a reasonable question in terms of that situation, but only because they let that situation happen (they were fully aware of the alternate.biz domain when they approved it).
Hope this works with Out-of-Print books...
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 2
One of the easy benefits I see is for printing
Out-Of-Print books on demand. A great example
is a scientific textbook in my field on catalysis; it was published in '91, so most of the information is sufficiently current, and is an excellent resource. However, the book was last printed in 1995. Finding used copies is not only hard, but impossible, given the attention this book gets. Imagine being able to pay the royalities on the book + cost of printing + small fee for owner of machine to get a copy, even if
not the highest quality (since you'd be using plain copy paper).
Another possibility would be for faster distribution of overseas printings. For example, I try to follow the Dr. Who original novles published by BBC; these are typically printed and released in EU about a month or two before they get to the stands. In addition, the cost in the States tends to be higher due to the cost of import. I'd love to have a slightly cheaper-made copy that was in my hands earlier, as long as everyone in the chain of distribution was getting the appropriate amount of reward.
But I think even more so, this device could empower more would-be-but-neglicted authors to get their works out in the public; I'm not about to read a 500 page work on-line, but if I could just tell the owner of this machine to print out something from a URL in book form, there's a much more likely chance that I would read that instead.
I know that from doing some research into racks at work for other purposes, that electronic component companies (such as Newark offer numerous styles and sizes of racks; Obviously, you want something sturdy so you are going to have to spend a few bucks to get something good, but in terms of sizes, I've seen anywhere from a 16" high rack to 8-9 feet tall ones.
(Unfortunately, Newark's online catalog is poorly organized, the print version is much easier to follow, IMO).
[Guy 1]Hey, Fred, ready to go bar-hopping tonight?
[Guy 2]Oh, man! No way! My Microsoft licenses have all expired, and I've been phone-tagging between IT and the 1-900 number trying to get them back. And all I need to do is give my boss this damned memo tomorrow morning!
[Guy 1]Oh well, your loss.
...
[Guy 1]Hey Sam, ready to go bar-hopping tonight?
[Guy 2]Sure, I just finished up that 100 page
report in AbiWord, and port scanned that 'lite
hacker at 127.0.0.1, all thanks to Redhat Linux!
Let's go find some babes!
[Announcer]RedHat Linux 7 : Because someone is going to get laid tonight.
Browser-based solutions are a good idea. I would love to block images that match certain dimensions (1x1) or have a URL that matches some regexp (/ads/).
The 1x1 gif is a valid, though questionable, way of doing some basic page layout, since you can easily scale it using just HEIGHT and WIDTH tags. (Mind you, I know that you're talking about blocking done when the HTML stream reports HEIGHT & WIDTH both equal to 1).
A better solution for images is to prevent resources located on a different network from being used. For example, if at amazon.com, I'd expect that "ad.amazon.com" would be on the same network, but not "ad.x10.com". This would prevent the typical 1x1 gif trick from being used.
I remember watching the "most recent questions" at Ask Jeeves while watching Millionaire at the same time, and (un?)surprisingly, most of those upper level millionaire questions showed up right after they were asked.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, the results aren't that surprising, but it's still an interesting comparison.
Where have I heard that before? :-)
</joke
You mean that crappy movie that was in the theaters was only a 'beta'? I want my 8 bucks back!
</joke>
Mind you, I'd like to see OEMs put a demo version of Opera , or a link to O's homepage, with the looser terms, on the desktop. Offer the consumer the choice. Of course, now that I think about it, most OEM's have everything default to 640x480; I dread to imagine all the icons that might be on the screen at once!!
The JRE is an intelligent DLL under Windows in that it is not loaded until it's needed, unlike the underlying IE DLLs which are loaded at the start and take up memory even if not used. So it's not going to slow the user or comsume memory until it's needed.
The critical thing that needs to be done by Sun with regards to Java support is to have something like Windows Update or the Quicktime Updater: the ability to run one program that will grab the newest and latest files and install them, using a diff-like method instead of downloading *everything* again. If you tell a user that they can upgrade for a quick 500k download and to just press 'here', as opposed to telling them to download the newest JRE by going to some site, and downloading ANOTHER 8meg file, you'll have more people that stay current.
Note that there are other ways people have done 'hidden tracks', namely by having an unlisted track that starts off with at least 2 minutes of nothing, then starts the songs. I think TMBG did this with "Severe Tire Damage" but I don't have my CD to check. Also done on Information Society's "Peace and Love Incorporated".
The longer time could just be for reading the table completely.
Yes, advertizing in Java is a poor choice, but we've already been through banner ads that didn't work, and there's nothing else except for Java and Flash that advertizers seem willing to try. I'm not sympathizing with the advertizers here, just trying to see it from their frame of mind, and this move by MS is very harmful to their bottom line (which has been dropping further and further over the years).
And yes, there are useful Java apps. Java games are highly popular (Bejeweled for example). I know many educators' web sites that use Java for interactive tutorials and demonstrations that could not be effectively done in large classes.
Java is not a bad technology; it's just a technology that was used badly that turned many people off of it.
Apparently, Microsoft execs have not surfed the web recent; it's hard to find a mainstream site which at some point doesn't use Java-based ads. I wonder if this move may entice some web advertizers to take issue with MS for removing a key component for viewing their ads.
Sure, my idea still requires a 'computer' at each site, but this is only one per site as opposed to 10 voting booths per site. I would presume that this is much more reasonable and less of a load on cash-strapped districts than getting lots of expensive voting machines.
Plus, I feel that if we went totally computerized, there would be a significant portion of the population that would have resistence to it, whether being ludites, conspiracy theory nuts, or for some other reason.
What I would like to see before 2004 is the following:
I think this is a nice cheap method, and would help reduce much of errors and problems that we had in the last election. There's other, less technical things that I'd love to see changed (like removing the winner-take-all) provision, but that's less likely to happen.
And I don't think this is retroactive. Patents before some date in 1999 (IIRC) are still 17 years from awarding; anything after is 20 years from filing.
Many companies, notably drug makers, used the prior rules, and the fact that they could accidently 'forgot' to fill in paperwork that would keep the patent approval process going, the USPTO charging them a minimal fee ( I think $500.00 ) for this 'late filing' charge. However, during this time, while the patent wasn't granted, the company filing did have some basic protection on the patent, and the patent documents were not public, so an enterprising company could easily get about 22 years of protection for a small incidental fee. Note that the typical time between submission and awarding of a patent is around 2 to 3 years in the first place (assuming that everyone plays by the rules).
The new system says that once you've submitted a patent, the 20 year timeline starts ticking. In addition, as soon as it's reasonably possible, the patent document is placed in the public domain (eg USPTO's website), though the company does have protection on it's invention. This still gives companies sufficient protection on their inventions, but does prevent abuses of the system.
Going from 17 to 20 years really doesn't drastically extend the protection a patent gives it's owners with the given rules, it simply helps avoid abuses in the system.
Ten years down the road, when print and real-world formats will (might) go by the wayside, the concerns by the librarians today will be vital, and unless we heed them today, libraries may not legally exist in 10 years.
It's still all BS. There is no magical pile of money to be made on the Internet alone. Charging for content will simply cause the Internet to revert back to the ways of pre AOL; sites on the net for the sake of being on the net without commercial interference.
Sure, the last season had rather hooky plots; the one where Al became the Leaper, the entire Evil Leaper thing, for example. But that typically happens to any show that gets more than a couple seasons on air...
Another possibility would be for faster distribution of overseas printings. For example, I try to follow the Dr. Who original novles published by BBC; these are typically printed and released in EU about a month or two before they get to the stands. In addition, the cost in the States tends to be higher due to the cost of import. I'd love to have a slightly cheaper-made copy that was in my hands earlier, as long as everyone in the chain of distribution was getting the appropriate amount of reward.
But I think even more so, this device could empower more would-be-but-neglicted authors to get their works out in the public; I'm not about to read a 500 page work on-line, but if I could just tell the owner of this machine to print out something from a URL in book form, there's a much more likely chance that I would read that instead.
(Unfortunately, Newark's online catalog is poorly organized, the print version is much easier to follow, IMO).
[Guy 1]Hey, Fred, ready to go bar-hopping tonight?
...
[Guy 2]Oh, man! No way! My Microsoft licenses have all expired, and I've been phone-tagging between IT and the 1-900 number trying to get them back. And all I need to do is give my boss this damned memo tomorrow morning!
[Guy 1]Oh well, your loss.
[Guy 1]Hey Sam, ready to go bar-hopping tonight? [Guy 2]Sure, I just finished up that 100 page report in AbiWord, and port scanned that 'lite hacker at 127.0.0.1, all thanks to Redhat Linux! Let's go find some babes!
[Announcer]RedHat Linux 7 : Because someone is going to get laid tonight.
The 1x1 gif is a valid, though questionable, way of doing some basic page layout, since you can easily scale it using just HEIGHT and WIDTH tags. (Mind you, I know that you're talking about blocking done when the HTML stream reports HEIGHT & WIDTH both equal to 1).
A better solution for images is to prevent resources located on a different network from being used. For example, if at amazon.com, I'd expect that "ad.amazon.com" would be on the same network, but not "ad.x10.com". This would prevent the typical 1x1 gif trick from being used.
Damn, those /. trollers are going to have to find a new tag line... :-)