From the product website (http://www.opalux.com/p-ink.php):... 5. Sub-second switching speed....
So, it might be a while before this is useful for fast-changing displays, like TVs and computer displays. Might be ok for picture frames, outdoor signage and stuff.
For people who don't know what a "short" is, it's where you borrow stock from the real holder, then sell it right away. Some time later, you buy it back at the new market price, and return it to its owner. The difference in what you sold the original stock and what you re-purchased it for is your profit. If the stock price rises, you lose money. If it drops, you make money.
My guess would be that a large number of short positions were closed today. Lots of people had shorted SCOX (i.e. borrowed them, then sold them at some earlier date). Today, when the price dropped, they re-bought the stock at the current market price and returned them to their owners. I personally haven't had enough experience with the market to know how big an influx of short closers it would take to drive the stock price back up again.
How unpatriotic of you. That sounds like terrorist talk. Won't you think of the children?
Just shut the hell up, bend over and start consuming already!
Re:All bank vaults and locks have also been cracke
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 1
I agree that it's going too far. DRM also codifies the rights that the copyright holder *thinks* you should have, regardless of the law, and that codification in theory lasts forever, regardless of changes in the law.
Re:All bank vaults and locks have also been cracke
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Unfortunately, the analogy doesn't quite hold. Breaking into bank vaults is more like performing a brute force attack on a DRM scheme, every time you wanted to break it. DRM schemes don't work like that. Typically once a scheme is compromised, it becomes possible for anyone subject to it to break it almost instantly. All it takes is for someone to write a quick tool that automates the cracking process and all the barriers presented by the DRM scheme pretty much fall away.
I'd say that DRM schemes are like having one giant bank vault. Yes, it will eventually get compromised, and once it is, everything inside is trivial to take.
I've often wondered if a well-placed lawsuit against a bank might not have the same effect. Sue the bank for failing to properly identify you and doing things with your property that you did not authorise. If you win, that'd create a nightmare for organisations that use insecure measures to identify their customers and would shift the liability away from the consumer and onto the people/organisations that can actually do something about it.
The desktop publishing fraternity has had rules for how wide lines should be for a very long time. Some of them are described here about.com. Most of them place the ideal width of text for maximum comprehension at 30-60 characters. Notice how this is done with newspapers. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to read a newspaper that spanned articles across the entire page?
Code may have slightly different numbers, but I suspect they're probably not that different. 80 characters means you don't have to spent too much time seeking back to the start of the next line and you can read the code fast. When it comes down to it, almost all code formatting rules are about maximising their comprehensibility. While technology used to be the limiting factor, the human eye/brain is now the limit, and while we can do hundreds of characters per row now, you'd be hard pressed to find a person who could read text/code formatted like that easily.
One problem I've always had with the "they would be less likely to invest the time and effort.... if they knew their competitor would just immediately copy" is that it forgets the customer. While "featureism" is one factor that sells products, it's not the only one. Brand loyalty, customer service, price, these (amongst many others) all affect how well a product sells, why such massive protection on IP,but relatively little on the rest (barring trademarks)?
A consumer advocacy group, with an extensive ISP plan database that lets you search on all the criteria you've mentioned. Anyone know if there is an equivalent in the US?
Have you tried any of the newer CFL's with non-magnetic ballasts? The oscilation frequency is now much higher, beyond what the human eye can typically perceive.
Also, CFL's come in a range of color temperatures, some of which match "warm yellow" from traditional incandescents. They're not all "hard white".
Fortunately, there is an upper limit on the bloat. The eye has a resolution of about 576 megapixels over 120 degrees (i.e. most of your field of view). Once the bloat hits that ceiling, anything bigger can simply be downscaled. Sure, it might work out at around 43.2 GByte/s (24 bits/pixel, 25fps), but we'll get there one day.
I'll add to this that there is only so much quality that you need too. Look at audio files. RAW CD data, at 44khz is pretty much at the limit of human hearing resolution. There is no point in making it bigger, bigger doesn't mean better.
I suspect at some point we'll hit the limits of human visual resolution too. At that point, any resolution above what we can actually see will be useless, and when bandwidth catches up to that amount of data, adding more data will no longer be protection (it could be stripped with no apparent loss of quality).
Re:Interested....
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Another post already mentioned this, but it's all to do with pressure. See this:
Generally, when you drop the pressure, the temperature will also drop. A drop in temperature will likely lead to condensation, which this device puports to gather.
Canada, being part of the British Commonwealth, tends to use British spelling for stuff. Defence vs Defense, Licence vs License, Colour vs Color, Cheque vs Check, Tyre vs Tire, etc....
Not everybody cares about going to the gym regularly
Which is fair enough, but kind of denies the reality of being a human being. If you don't maintain your body, it's going to break down. It doesn't have to be a gym, but exercise is one of the easiest ways to keep your body in good running order. It's your choice whether you want to do that or not, but if you're fit and you eat well, you'll live longer (http://www.tfn.net/HealthGazette/longev.html) and be happier (http://www.mercola.com/2001/mar/31/depression.htm ), have fewer health problems (http://onhealth.webmd.com/script/main/art.asp?art iclekey=56296), etc, etc, ad nauseum.
If you don't want any of those things, then feel free to not exercise, it's entirely up to you.
Now you're in denial. Unfortunately, we're all stuck in the same universe together, we can't just up and leave when we don't like the way things work. In the real world, there are two ways to get rewarded: 1 - do something worth being rewarded for; or 2 - convince others that you should be rewarded (without actually doing anything). They're both valid ways to get rewards. Because doing things worth being rewarded for is actually difficult, you can often get better rewards and more often, simply by talking people into giving them to you, rather than doing any real work.
You're going to have to either ignore it, or play it. No-body is making the rules up, that's just the way the universe works.
Complain as much as you'd like, but if your measure of success is place in the hierarchy and size of paycheck, then these guys are better at the game than you. You may not like it, but life's like that. It's kind of like complaining when you lose at a game of poker because your style of play calls for putting your cards face-up on the table.
While it'd be nice if promotion and salary were neatly tied to ability and achievements, that ain't the case. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending the rules are something they're not is just going to make you bitter and twi....oh wait, you already are.
You either need start playing by their rules in order to compete with them, or stop thinking of yourself as "the bottom doing real work". Pretend you're at the top, and they're all moving sideways under you. Does that make you feel better?
While the people who get suckered into phishing scams probably aren't paying enough attention to the world they live in, I still think that the banks are failing somewhat in their duty to properly identify their customers, whose money they're holding in trust.
It's telling that none of the banks want to let things go to court for this stuff. They probably realise that the fault is really in their identification processes but don't want to be held accountable for it (it would require huge change, if it's even possible to do satisfactorily at all).
If you're releasing a product to the public, the one word you need to keep in the back of your mind at all times is "reproducability". Can you, at any point in the future, reproduce whatever version it is that customer X is having trouble with?
There are many ways to do this, ranging from taking complete snapshots of each "build" (requires lots of space, but fast to reproduce), to keeping a short list of the Debian packages installed (not much space, but slower to reproduce). It's a classic space-vs-time tradeoff.
I'd suggest you attempt to automate the system build as much as you can. Use virtualization tools like VMWare to help perform "builds" of your OS images. Most Linux distros have automated install processes. RedHat has "kickstart", Debian has "fai" (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/). At the minimum, you should version control the script you use to build your vmaware images, and the configuration script for fai/kickstart. This should let you re-build everything at some later stage.
When it comes to customising Debian systems, customised Debian packages are the way to go. If you're adding new files, package them up and deploy them as part of the automated install. If you're customising existing packages, edit their source and rebuild them with customised version numbers, and list those versions of the packages in your fai script. You'll need to go through the whole version control process with each customised package too. (i.e. check it's source into a version control tool, tag it, apply your changes, tag it again, then build your.deb file). You can provide "answers" files for debconf so that no questions are asked during installation, and you can tweak various settings as you go along. If you've taken the VMWare approach, you can always login to the image and make final adjustments (just make sure they're scripted and version controlled) after the Debian install is complete.
Do a search for "customized debian", there are quite a few people doing similar things already.
Basically, make sure that the end product requires nothing more than a button push to produce. Anything less and you'll introduce the risk of someone forgetting to perform a step, or doing it wrong. That'll create a support nightmare down the track.
If you can reproduce easily what your customer has, you can also easily make a minimally invasive fix for them. That'll make them happy:-)
If you're looking for resources on this stuff in general, "configuration mangement" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_manage ment) is what you want to search for. Librarianship for software systems, kind of dry and boring, but oh-so-necessary.
No worries. If you have access to a Mac, I'd also recommend http://www.pixelglow.com/graphviz/. The raster formats that can come out of GraphViz can be huge (i.e. 100,000x100,000 pixels), they can be quite difficult to deal with sometimes, the GUI these guys have written can deal with even huge graphs pretty snappily.
You can then go on to group things together so they show up in meaningful locations on the diagram, associate pictures with certain nodes, put labels on things, make things in colour, etc.
GraphViz takes care of the laying out parts (where best to put nodes and edges). Sometimes it takes a while to define everything in format that gets draw neatly, the results are often impressive and very useful.
On coming to a new job, I've used it to draw all the dependencies between a collection of a couple of hundred SQL stored procedures in our database. The locals were horrified to have what they all knew in their gut depicted to them on 35 A3 sheets of paper on a wall:-) It was quite useful for identifying things recursive calls ("Oh, *thats* why that proc sometimes never ends...").
It's not that simple. Google is a middle-man, they're not creating the ads. Joes Pizza shop pays Google to display their ad when certain keywords are found on a web-page. They pay different rates for different words, and they pay by the number of times their ad is displayed.
Click-fraud hurts Joes Pizza because hey's paying Google to show his ad to potential customers, but during click-fraud, no-one is actually seeing it. He's paying for nothing. Google just takes a cut of what Joe paid, and passes the rest on to the websites that actually displayed the ads (or claimed they did).
Google only cares about this because if Joe thinks he's paying for nothing (i.e. no real people are actually seeing his ads, and all the "clicks" he's charged for are actually fraud), he might stop paying Google to farm out his ads. If that happens, Google loses their revenue stream.
Lots of clicks are good for Google, they get to charge Joes Pizza more. But they're only good if Joe thinks he's getting his message out to lots of people.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like there's a business model there too:
http://www.cleanpowerfinance.com/
These guys appear to do loans specifically for that (I'm not associated with them in any way).
From the product website (http://www.opalux.com/p-ink.php): ... ...
5. Sub-second switching speed.
So, it might be a while before this is useful for fast-changing displays, like TVs and computer displays.
Might be ok for picture frames, outdoor signage and stuff.
For people who don't know what a "short" is, it's where you borrow stock from the real holder, then sell it right away. Some time later, you buy it back at the new market price, and return it to its owner. The difference in what you sold the original stock and what you re-purchased it for is your profit. If the stock price rises, you lose money. If it drops, you make money.
My guess would be that a large number of short positions were closed today. Lots of people had shorted SCOX (i.e. borrowed them, then sold them at some earlier date). Today, when the price dropped, they re-bought the stock at the current market price and returned them to their owners.
I personally haven't had enough experience with the market to know how big an influx of short closers it would take to drive the stock price back up again.
How unpatriotic of you. That sounds like terrorist talk. Won't you think of the children?
Just shut the hell up, bend over and start consuming already!
I agree that it's going too far. DRM also codifies the rights that the copyright holder *thinks* you should have, regardless of the law, and that codification in theory lasts forever, regardless of changes in the law.
Unfortunately, the analogy doesn't quite hold. Breaking into bank vaults is more like performing a brute force attack on a DRM scheme, every time you wanted to break it. DRM schemes don't work like that. Typically once a scheme is compromised, it becomes possible for anyone subject to it to break it almost instantly. All it takes is for someone to write a quick tool that automates the cracking process and all the barriers presented by the DRM scheme pretty much fall away.
I'd say that DRM schemes are like having one giant bank vault. Yes, it will eventually get compromised, and once it is, everything inside is trivial to take.
I've often wondered if a well-placed lawsuit against a bank might not have the same effect. Sue the bank for failing to properly identify you and doing things with your property that you did not authorise. If you win, that'd create a nightmare for organisations that use insecure measures to identify their customers and would shift the liability away from the consumer and onto the people/organisations that can actually do something about it.
The desktop publishing fraternity has had rules for how wide lines should be for a very long time. Some of them are described here about.com. Most of them place the ideal width of text for maximum comprehension at 30-60 characters. Notice how this is done with newspapers. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to read a newspaper that spanned articles across the entire page?
Code may have slightly different numbers, but I suspect they're probably not that different. 80 characters means you don't have to spent too much time seeking back to the start of the next line and you can read the code fast. When it comes down to it, almost all code formatting rules are about maximising their comprehensibility. While technology used to be the limiting factor, the human eye/brain is now the limit, and while we can do hundreds of characters per row now, you'd be hard pressed to find a person who could read text/code formatted like that easily.
Sure, they do *now*, but who knows?
m PatentLaw/USPhar32.html
http://www.ladas.com/Patents/Biotechnology/USPhar
One problem I've always had with the "they would be less likely to invest the time and effort .... if they knew their competitor would just immediately copy" is that it forgets the customer. While "featureism" is one factor that sells products, it's not the only one. Brand loyalty, customer service, price, these (amongst many others) all affect how well a product sells, why such massive protection on IP ,but relatively little on the rest (barring trademarks)?
If you were in Australia, you could use http://www.whirlpool.net.au/.
A consumer advocacy group, with an extensive ISP plan database that lets you search on all the criteria you've mentioned. Anyone know if there is an equivalent in the US?
Have you tried any of the newer CFL's with non-magnetic ballasts? The oscilation frequency is now much higher, beyond what the human
eye can typically perceive.
Also, CFL's come in a range of color temperatures, some of which match "warm yellow" from traditional incandescents. They're not all "hard white".
A quick reference: http://medfordcan.home.comcast.net/Myths.html
Fortunately, there is an upper limit on the bloat. The eye has a resolution of about 576 megapixels over 120 degrees (i.e. most of your field of view). Once the bloat hits that ceiling, anything bigger can simply be downscaled. Sure, it might work out at around 43.2 GByte/s (24 bits/pixel, 25fps), but we'll get there one day.
I'll add to this that there is only so much quality that you need too. Look at audio files. RAW CD data, at 44khz is pretty much at the limit of human hearing resolution. There is no point in making it bigger, bigger doesn't mean better.
I suspect at some point we'll hit the limits of human visual resolution too. At that point, any resolution above what we can actually see will be useless, and when bandwidth catches up to that amount of data, adding more data will no longer be protection (it could be stripped with no apparent loss of quality).
Another post already mentioned this, but it's all to do with pressure. See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfoil
when air moves over something like an airfoil, a low pressure area is created.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law
Generally, when you drop the pressure, the temperature will also drop. A drop in temperature will likely lead to condensation, which this device puports to gather.
Canada, being part of the British Commonwealth, tends to use British spelling for stuff. Defence vs Defense, Licence vs License, Colour vs Color, Cheque vs Check, Tyre vs Tire, etc....
Extensive further references available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_English
Note: I am Australian, we spell much like the Canadians.
It's called "exercise". I believe Chuck Norris has a patent on it.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/exercise/HQ01676 (see point 5)
Which is fair enough, but kind of denies the reality of being a human being. If you don't maintain your body, it's going to break down. It doesn't have to be a gym, but exercise is one of the easiest ways to keep your body in good running order. It's your choice whether you want to do that or not, but if you're fit and you eat well, you'll live longer (http://www.tfn.net/HealthGazette/longev.html) and be happier (http://www.mercola.com/2001/mar/31/depression.ht
If you don't want any of those things, then feel free to not exercise, it's entirely up to you.
Now you're in denial. Unfortunately, we're all stuck in the same universe together, we can't just up and leave when we don't like the way things work. In the real world, there are two ways to get rewarded: 1 - do something worth being rewarded for; or 2 - convince others that you should be rewarded (without actually doing anything). They're both valid ways to get rewards. Because doing things worth being rewarded for is actually difficult, you can often get better rewards and more often, simply by talking people into giving them to you, rather than doing any real work.
You're going to have to either ignore it, or play it. No-body is making the rules up, that's just the way the universe works.
Green with envy?
Complain as much as you'd like, but if your measure of success is place in the hierarchy and size of paycheck, then these guys are better at the game than you. You may not like it, but life's like that. It's kind of like complaining when you lose at a game of poker because your style of play calls for putting your cards face-up on the table.
While it'd be nice if promotion and salary were neatly tied to ability and achievements, that ain't the case. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending the rules are something they're not is just going to make you bitter and twi....oh wait, you already are.
You either need start playing by their rules in order to compete with them, or stop thinking of yourself as "the bottom doing real work". Pretend you're at the top, and they're all moving sideways under you. Does that make you feel better?
While the people who get suckered into phishing scams probably aren't paying enough
attention to the world they live in, I still think that the banks are failing somewhat
in their duty to properly identify their customers, whose money they're holding in
trust.
It's telling that none of the banks want to let things go to court for this stuff.
They probably realise that the fault is really in their identification processes
but don't want to be held accountable for it (it would require huge change,
if it's even possible to do satisfactorily at all).
If you're releasing a product to the public, the one word you need to keep in the back of your mind at all times is "reproducability".
.deb file). You can provide "answers" files for debconf so that no questions are asked during installation, and you can tweak various settings as you go along. If you've taken the VMWare approach, you can always login to the image and make final adjustments (just make sure they're scripted and version controlled) after the Debian install is complete.
:-)
e ment) is what you want to search for. Librarianship for software systems, kind of dry and boring, but oh-so-necessary.
Can you, at any point in the future, reproduce whatever version it is that customer X is having trouble with?
There are many ways to do this, ranging from taking complete snapshots of each "build" (requires lots of space, but fast to reproduce), to keeping a short list of the Debian packages installed (not much space, but slower to reproduce). It's a classic space-vs-time tradeoff.
I'd suggest you attempt to automate the system build as much as you can. Use virtualization tools like VMWare to help perform "builds" of your OS images. Most Linux distros have automated install processes. RedHat has "kickstart", Debian has "fai" (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/). At the minimum, you should version control the script you use to build your vmaware images, and the configuration script for fai/kickstart. This should let you re-build everything at some later stage.
When it comes to customising Debian systems, customised Debian packages are the way to go. If you're adding new files, package them up and deploy them as part of the automated install. If you're customising existing packages, edit their source and rebuild them with
customised version numbers, and list those versions of the packages in your fai script. You'll need to go through the whole version control process with each customised package too. (i.e. check it's source into a version control tool, tag it, apply your changes, tag it again, then build your
Do a search for "customized debian", there are quite a few people doing similar things already.
Basically, make sure that the end product requires nothing more than a button push to produce. Anything less and you'll introduce the risk of someone forgetting to perform a step, or doing it wrong. That'll create a support nightmare down the track.
If you can reproduce easily what your customer has, you can also easily make a minimally invasive fix for them. That'll make them happy
If you're looking for resources on this stuff in general, "configuration mangement" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_manag
No worries. If you have access to a Mac, I'd also recommend http://www.pixelglow.com/graphviz/. The raster formats that
can come out of GraphViz can be huge (i.e. 100,000x100,000 pixels), they can be quite difficult to deal
with sometimes, the GUI these guys have written can deal with even huge graphs pretty snappily.
You can probably draw the picture you want with GraphViz, found here http://www.graphviz.org/
...
:-) It was quite useful for
To use it, you create a text file that defines all your dependencies, it'll look something like this:
digraph thingies {
"app1" -> "SAN";
"app1" -> "Java";
"client1" -> "app1";
}
You can then go on to group things together so they show up in meaningful locations on the diagram,
associate pictures with certain nodes, put labels on things, make things in colour, etc.
GraphViz takes care of the laying out parts (where best to put nodes and edges). Sometimes it takes
a while to define everything in format that gets draw neatly, the results are often impressive and
very useful.
On coming to a new job, I've used it to draw all the dependencies between a collection of a couple
of hundred SQL stored procedures in our database. The locals were horrified to have what they all
knew in their gut depicted to them on 35 A3 sheets of paper on a wall
identifying things recursive calls ("Oh, *thats* why that proc sometimes never ends...").
It's not that simple. Google is a middle-man, they're not creating the ads. Joes Pizza shop pays Google to display their ad when certain keywords are found on a web-page. They pay different rates for different words, and they pay by the number of times their ad is displayed.
Click-fraud hurts Joes Pizza because hey's paying Google to show his ad to potential customers, but during click-fraud, no-one is actually seeing it. He's paying for nothing. Google just takes a cut of what Joe paid, and passes the rest on to the websites that actually displayed the ads (or claimed they did).
Google only cares about this because if Joe thinks he's paying for nothing (i.e. no real people are actually seeing his ads, and all the "clicks" he's charged for are actually fraud), he might stop paying Google to farm out his ads. If that happens, Google loses their revenue stream.
Lots of clicks are good for Google, they get to charge Joes Pizza more. But they're only good if Joe thinks he's getting his message out to lots of people.