More and more countries start to realize that relying on a foreign, closed source OS to run their government infrastructure, is uncomfortable at best, and a possible huge security issue for industrial or other spionage at worst. For this reason, some are pushing OSS to replace all closed source. So, given that Palladium is really about giving a foreign and hence untrusted/unknown third party control over what your PC will and will not allow you to do, does Microsoft agree this could lead to a much stronger rejection of their OSes by governments, educational institutions, large corporations, and so on ?
What's kind of interesting though is that in his interviews, Kasparov always places a great emphasis on "match preparation" himself. He always goes on and on about how he has these laptops with millions of moves in it, so that when he knows his opponent has a tendency to use a certain set of openings, he goes to his DB and studies those variations.
So far, no interviewer I've seen has had the balls to ask the imho logical next question : is it really Kasparov that is such a great chess player, or is it specifically the combo Kasparov + the-database-laptop ? Suppose Kasparov wins, can we really say that the human beats the machine ? From the interviews, I get the impression that he wouldn't be half as strong if he didn't have his machines to fall back to, cyborg style.
~ random doodling is likely to produce the original effects~
If your original claim about the way the brain works is correct, then it would all be too deterministic to be able to doodle at random ! Where is the randomness coming from ? Ie, shifting the problem of inspiration from the final work down to the doodling does not answer anything, it just pushes the genesis of the concept to a lower level. And, if you accept a random seed somewhere in the pipeline, then you can also view the brain as not just a database, processor and searching algo, but also as a convertor that channels the random seed into a useful result -- doodling in this case, chess intuition in the other. Which would bring the problem back to having to teach a computer to do something we currently have no mathematical concept of (the channeling).
Agreed, for some reason the default setting of making the gestures with the left mouse button is nearly unworkable. However, in Preferences, Advanced, Gestures, you can set the 'gesture hot key' to the right mouse button. That works _much_ more comfortable... and it's not really 'extra work':)
Otoh I also have to mention that for some reason, right-button-gestures are not working very well either on Linux -- context menus going bananas, stuff like that.. But on Windows, it's a blast.
Check this out then -- it's sad and hilarious at the same time, perfect drama in other words. It's mostly about business consultancy, not IT, but it's the same patterns. Highlights include Anderson getting bonuses that get higher as they manage to get more people fired at the client site.
I want to take this opportunity to pimp the imho hottest invention since sliced bread : gesture based browsing. Ok, maybe not the hottest, but certainly the most surprising; when I first heard of this, it sounded like one of those typical academic nutty ideas that all look great on a whiteboard, but are just a pain IRL (Black and White, anyone ?). But after trying it out for a month, I can say it just seriously, totally, completely, ROCKS. In fact, it is so good that I find myself trying to use gestures for regular windows stuff. Especially stuff like Minimize and Back would be really good to have systemwide, so you can just sweep a file explorer away rather than go aiming for that little '_' button..
The gestures are also a big convenience when you extensively use tabbed browsing.
In short.. if, like me, you thought this was a totally useless pet project of some academic... you're wrong. Get it now.
Well I'm not sure how but there must be some way to detect it -- since it happened to me. I didn't have cable TV since I don't have a TV, but after getting a TV card I decided to split and lo and behold, all channels were there. This was after 3 years or so of internet only. But sure enough, after about 6 months they install a filter, so my guess is that I made the split in such a crappy way that it introduced noise on the neighbor's signals (I live in an appartment), they complained, and voila. This is probably like messing with the telephone, you're not allowed to hook up selfmade electronics, but until someone complains about their reception, how will they know. I think the scenario of van-driving cable-polizei is a bit expensive for the very low percentage that doesn't own both -- and they don't just run lists of internet-only customers either since, like I said, it was ok for 3 years.
What's kinda interesting though is that the area around 500 Mhz shows some leakage, maybe the filter is not perfect, or maybe they need to leave that area open because somehow internet hookup requires it -- but in any case that leakage leaves a few channels through. Didn't bother to drop the filter though since nothing interesting was ever on anyway:)
In case the engineers at google are bored now that it's released, here's an idea;) Open up groups.google.com via a similar API so that an application can get the latest Usenet info even through proxies blocking NNTP and/or newsservers. Showing the latest threads/posts etc on a webpage could be useful too.
It's not something you have to go to google for, but it'd be nice:)
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
on
Broadband Obstacles
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· Score: 2
What is illegal is using unfair trade practices to keep others out of the market,
Well, yeah, but the problem is that an unfair trade practice is rather broadly defined. For example, patents are considered fair to have by a small business to protect its R but they become unfair once the owner company gets too big. So when the DoJ goes to trial over monopolies, licensing patents at a much lower price to competitors is often part of the deal when settling out of court. Another example is bundling, eg selling someone a piece of hardware, and including the software and service/maintenance as part of the deal. Again, that's a good business practice to win customers, but when you get to big the argument is reversed, and suddenly you find yourself "unfairly blocking people who want to compete on just the software".
I don't have a monopoly myself, I learned this by reading these:) Father, Son and Co (IBM's Watson biography), Barbarians led by Bill Gates (Basically Marlin Eller's story but also describing Bill's surprise at the case).
Eh, FYI Unreal was actually one of the few games that was explicitly using software engineering principles to (a) make it more attractive for licensing, and (b) make it last longer than most games (ie past the a-few-patches-and-thats-it stage). As a result Unreal 2 was able to take a lot of the modules and swap them out for better, more up to date versions. It's the same 'engine' but with all new physics code, rendering backends, character animation systems, etc. So now you have a system that can recycle the good part (data formats, editors, etc) and at the same time evolve to remain competitive.
I hope they truly mean low end hardware, and not a Duron 1ghz and a Geforce 2
Yeah, that's how the game got its name -- after playtesting it on a 486, in 320x240 in 16 color mode to get *some* framerate, the toss-up was for "dopey" or "unreal".
I'm all for making computers affordable, but if people don't want one enough to get one, what are they going to do when it gets pushed through their door?
Although you have a valid point, you need to realize that this offer comes together with a bold move by the government to put everything on the internet; there are a lot of projects going on to make sure that in a few years time, it is possible to do everything online, from filling in taxes to paying a parking ticket. So a lot of people do not have a good use for a cheapo PC at this time, but that will change when all that stuff gets online (you need to interact with the government quite frequently in here) -- and when they only go get one at that time they may find themselves seriously lagging behind in skills compared to those who get a PC now.
It's pretty much the next logical step after setting up most public libraries with free internet connected PCs (which btw was done, at least in my town, using Windows ?.? + Netscape 4.7).
It seems to me that keeping Magic Lantern from working should be fairly easy for any terrorist who knows that much about it. [...] Once the (let's say) email is written and encrypted he puts it on a disk goes over to another computer hooked up to the web and sends it off.[...]
This would work. In fact, this is exactly the method used by amazon.com in their (very) early days to "secure" their database of credit card information. Credit card info was stored on a separate, non-networked computer. Every morning, the names of customers who had placed an order since the previous day, would be saved to a floppy disk which was then physically "carried" to the database PC to be matched up against their credit card info. That PC then generated a list (on paper) of billing requests to be sent off to Visa etc. The only way to modify the database (to add a new customer or update a credit number) was to actually call Amazon.com, and get someone on the phone to walk over to the database machine and enter some SQL woopla.
A lot of the comments here are trashing Joel for his anti-rewrite stance. I just wanted to point out that if you read some of the work on his site, he does offer advice that is more "acceptable" from a CompSci point of view, too.
One of the things in particular that striked me as suprisingly simple but yet powerful is the Zero Defect concept : in theory, you try to eliminate all bugs before adding any new code to a product. The reasons being
it's harder to hunt the bugs later when the amount of code is even higher
the longer you wait, the less you'll remember about the code containing the bug
with zero/few bugs, you can always ship a product when you have to, not "later on" when you will have "removed the bugs" -- you can always ship right here, right now, with zero bugs, only maybe not all the features you'd want.
All in all, I think this concept makes a good argument for refactoring, redesigning, partial rewrites maybe. He's just saying that it often does not make sense to fix one bug by rewriting a piece of code, in the process undoing the fixes to ten earlier bugs. So before you go trashing this guy for being a total moron, check out his site...
5. Have a combo of developers and managers explain to salespeople what the product does, what its highlights and features are, then watch those sales people take off and sell something completely different. "What do you mean, I sold something nonexisting ? The deadline is next month".
~There is simply no way a human can cover 100 meters in 5 seconds (current records are like 9.8 seconds)~
Sure there is, just crossbreed a human with a lynx or something similarly fast, and make sure the final result is genetically still more of a human than an animal, so "it" can compete at the 2064 olympics -- presto, 100 meter in 3.7 seconds.
This is exactly what the article is about... How much can you enhance a human before it is no longer a human ? Does running on 4 legs count ?
Can somebody actually recommend a book that explains how to develop for Linux to experienced Win32 developers ? Most books I found either focus too much on the programming languages available (introducing C, perl, awk etc), on Linux itself (yeayea I know what a pipe is), or just assume a too basic experience level. What's needed is a book that is the bomb for getting professional Win32 developers to code for the Linux desktop : no-nonsense discussion of the best way to setup makefiles (don't explain what an.so is, but show how to port over a.dll; how to manage large projects; etc), discussion of the available packages (don't explain what TCP/IP is, instead show how winsock maps to posix or whatever), in short, a huge mapping of Win32 concepts to their Linux counterparts (including the IDE and debuggers).
It's fun to scrap together the bits and pieces myself (checking wxWindows today, KDevelop tomorrow, Bugzilla after that etc) but it's too slow and confusing to get productive. If the desktop must boom, you'll need to educate the win32 guys on how to get going (just like MS educated the DOS guys) and such a book would be a big help.. Any hints ?
Well, the audience payed up 5K to forget for a few hours that they are in a movie theater, ending up in a whole different reality (note, I'm thinking of 'real' movies, not Scream 54). So talking, burping, yelling, messing with chips, walking around, or streaming in a splash of light opening a door all snap the audience back into reality, anihilating their collective 5K trip.
I'm exagerating a bit, ofcourse:) You can get "back into it", and not all disturbances are equally bad. Still, it's sad that a lot of people these days go to the movies "to be entertained", not to see/live a great movie.
Ah hell, the whole story/newsitem is just (Score:-1, Flamebait) anyway;)
Hehehe:) Yeah, there are worse things in life than a ruined movie -- especially as most of them suck. But still, if you realize that a full house is essentially streaming 600 seats x 8 $ = 4800 $ of entertainment, then anybody who manages to ruin a delicately built atmosphere with a conversation or mass-bathroom-exodus just flushed (no pun) almost 5K. I guess most people would mind 5K in damages to their property due to inattentiveness:)
The jammer doesn't turn down the volume on a phone, it stops a call from getting through at all.
Uhuh, check the quote marks, I obviously meant that the net functional result is the same : no incoming calls. Tho' I concede vibrate slipped my mind:)
there are many people who, because of their job, need to be reachable at all times, and not simply for selfish reasons (doctors being the most salient example). They therefore can never go to movies?
I doubt that there are people who really must be available 24/7 ad infinitum. For a while, perhaps, but if new patients are roundrobin'd, I can see how a doc can claim some true time for himself once every few weeks or whatever. But when the time is there to really be available, yes, I don't think you can justify going to the movies. If the chances are high that you'll be called, you know you'll be interrupting the experience of everybody around you (even by merely walking out the door, see below).
Did you misunderstand the 'set to vibrate' concept, or am I missing your point?
Twofold reply,
1) if you're using vibrate mode because the area requires silence, you'll need to leave to handle the call and that in itself is a disturbance; if you ever went to a movie where apparently half the theatre needs to use the bathroom, you know what I mean;)
2) most comments point out that the conversation itself is often more annoying than the ringing, and I wouldn't be surprised to see people think otherwise and happily take a call, assuming they've been polite by using vibrate:)
So : I still don't expect docs to show up at movies, not even with a phone set to vibrate, ergo jam away:)
Sure it sounds nice to guarentee no interruptions in a movie theater, and while it seems like everyone has a cellphone, some people do, in fact, need them.
Your wife (or you) go(es) into labor, and the hospital pages your doctor, only they're at a movie because labor is two weeks early and they have a baby expected during any 4 week span. They don't find out because their cellphone and pager are jammed.
Hm, I don't think this holds much ground. The jammer only makes "turning the volume down" mandatory, since the phone basically stops working -- but you were already supposed to turn the volume down, anyway, when going to a movie. I agree that for a doctor at a restaurant this would be a borderline case, and jamming probably inappropriate, but for a movie, the doctor isn't supposed to be there with a live phone in the first place, so jam away. In other words, anybody who needs to be reachable and has a bit of courtesy shouldn't show up at movies (or funerals or whatever) with a live phone in the first place.
Well, I'll bet you there'll be a dozen episodes about the prototyping/betatesting/simulating of a brand new technology, which goes horribly wrong, so the crew must now rescue the world by reversing the tech's effects. Naturally such an evil technology will not show up in the 24th century. Think the omega particle, but also think first warp drives, first subspace alterers, first holodeck, first dadadee, daddaa.
And as for the thing about no-new-aliens, I think it's actually for the better. The species that kicked the Borg's ass (four thousand something) had so much potential, yet it was wasted by just using the species as a motivator for a human-Borg business deal. I'd rather not see any new species than a species that could've been a lot but never went anywhere because the soap must go on...
Slashdot Mirror
More and more countries start to realize that relying on a foreign, closed source OS to run their government infrastructure, is uncomfortable at best, and a possible huge security issue for industrial or other spionage at worst. For this reason, some are pushing OSS to replace all closed source. So, given that Palladium is really about giving a foreign and hence untrusted/unknown third party control over what your PC will and will not allow you to do, does Microsoft agree this could lead to a much stronger rejection of their OSes by governments, educational institutions, large corporations, and so on ?
I'd been wondering where all that spam was suddenly coming from. Thanks, Finland.
So far, no interviewer I've seen has had the balls to ask the imho logical next question : is it really Kasparov that is such a great chess player, or is it specifically the combo Kasparov + the-database-laptop ? Suppose Kasparov wins, can we really say that the human beats the machine ? From the interviews, I get the impression that he wouldn't be half as strong if he didn't have his machines to fall back to, cyborg style.
~ random doodling is likely to produce the original effects~
If your original claim about the way the brain works is correct, then it would all be too deterministic to be able to doodle at random ! Where is the randomness coming from ? Ie, shifting the problem of inspiration from the final work down to the doodling does not answer anything, it just pushes the genesis of the concept to a lower level.
And, if you accept a random seed somewhere in the pipeline, then you can also view the brain as not just a database, processor and searching algo, but also as a convertor that channels the random seed into a useful result -- doodling in this case, chess intuition in the other. Which would bring the problem back to having to teach a computer to do something we currently have no mathematical concept of (the channeling).
Otoh I also have to mention that for some reason, right-button-gestures are not working very well either on Linux -- context menus going bananas, stuff like that..
But on Windows, it's a blast.
Spamming this until everyone uses it ! :) It si teh rox.
Check this out then -- it's sad and hilarious at the same time, perfect drama in other words. It's mostly about business consultancy, not IT, but it's the same patterns. Highlights include Anderson getting bonuses that get higher as they manage to get more people fired at the client site.
I want to take this opportunity to pimp the imho hottest invention since sliced bread : gesture based browsing. Ok, maybe not the hottest, but certainly the most surprising; when I first heard of this, it sounded like one of those typical academic nutty ideas that all look great on a whiteboard, but are just a pain IRL (Black and White, anyone ?). But after trying it out for a month, I can say it just seriously, totally, completely, ROCKS. In fact, it is so good that I find myself trying to use gestures for regular windows stuff. Especially stuff like Minimize and Back would be really good to have systemwide, so you can just sweep a file explorer away rather than go aiming for that little '_' button..
The gestures are also a big convenience when you extensively use tabbed browsing.
In short.. if, like me, you thought this was a totally useless pet project of some academic... you're wrong. Get it now.
What's kinda interesting though is that the area around 500 Mhz shows some leakage, maybe the filter is not perfect, or maybe they need to leave that area open because somehow internet hookup requires it -- but in any case that leakage leaves a few channels through. Didn't bother to drop the filter though since nothing interesting was ever on anyway
(BTW this is all with UPC in Europe)
It's not something you have to go to google for, but it'd be nice
Well, yeah, but the problem is that an unfair trade practice is rather broadly defined. For example, patents are considered fair to have by a small business to protect its R but they become unfair once the owner company gets too big. So when the DoJ goes to trial over monopolies, licensing patents at a much lower price to competitors is often part of the deal when settling out of court. Another example is bundling, eg selling someone a piece of hardware, and including the software and service/maintenance as part of the deal. Again, that's a good business practice to win customers, but when you get to big the argument is reversed, and suddenly you find yourself "unfairly blocking people who want to compete on just the software".
I don't have a monopoly myself, I learned this by reading these
Eh, FYI Unreal was actually one of the few games that was explicitly using software engineering principles to (a) make it more attractive for licensing, and (b) make it last longer than most games (ie past the a-few-patches-and-thats-it stage). As a result Unreal 2 was able to take a lot of the modules and swap them out for better, more up to date versions. It's the same 'engine' but with all new physics code, rendering backends, character animation systems, etc. So now you have a system that can recycle the good part (data formats, editors, etc) and at the same time evolve to remain competitive.
Yeah, that's how the game got its name -- after playtesting it on a 486, in 320x240 in 16 color mode to get *some* framerate, the toss-up was for "dopey" or "unreal".
Although you have a valid point, you need to realize that this offer comes together with a bold move by the government to put everything on the internet; there are a lot of projects going on to make sure that in a few years time, it is possible to do everything online, from filling in taxes to paying a parking ticket. So a lot of people do not have a good use for a cheapo PC at this time, but that will change when all that stuff gets online (you need to interact with the government quite frequently in here) -- and when they only go get one at that time they may find themselves seriously lagging behind in skills compared to those who get a PC now.
It's pretty much the next logical step after setting up most public libraries with free internet connected PCs (which btw was done, at least in my town, using Windows ?.? + Netscape 4.7).
This would work. In fact, this is exactly the method used by amazon.com in their (very) early days to "secure" their database of credit card information. Credit card info was stored on a separate, non-networked computer. Every morning, the names of customers who had placed an order since the previous day, would be saved to a floppy disk which was then physically "carried" to the database PC to be matched up against their credit card info. That PC then generated a list (on paper) of billing requests to be sent off to Visa etc. The only way to modify the database (to add a new customer or update a credit number) was to actually call Amazon.com, and get someone on the phone to walk over to the database machine and enter some SQL woopla.
Interesting.
I suppose the judges' next call will be that DeCSS should really be available on Windows, and be able to decrypt the latest WMF too.
One of the things in particular that striked me as suprisingly simple but yet powerful is the Zero Defect concept : in theory, you try to eliminate all bugs before adding any new code to a product. The reasons being
All in all, I think this concept makes a good argument for refactoring, redesigning, partial rewrites maybe. He's just saying that it often does not make sense to fix one bug by rewriting a piece of code, in the process undoing the fixes to ten earlier bugs. So before you go trashing this guy for being a total moron, check out his site...
Real story.
Sure there is, just crossbreed a human with a lynx or something similarly fast, and make sure the final result is genetically still more of a human than an animal, so "it" can compete at the 2064 olympics -- presto, 100 meter in 3.7 seconds.
This is exactly what the article is about... How much can you enhance a human before it is no longer a human ? Does running on 4 legs count ?
It's fun to scrap together the bits and pieces myself (checking wxWindows today, KDevelop tomorrow, Bugzilla after that etc) but it's too slow and confusing to get productive. If the desktop must boom, you'll need to educate the win32 guys on how to get going (just like MS educated the DOS guys) and such a book would be a big help.. Any hints ?
I'm exagerating a bit, ofcourse :) You can get "back into it", and not all disturbances are equally bad. Still, it's sad that a lot of people these days go to the movies "to be entertained", not to see/live a great movie.
Ah hell, the whole story/newsitem is just (Score:-1, Flamebait) anyway ;)
Hm, this ain't going anywhere :)
Uhuh, check the quote marks, I obviously meant that the net functional result is the same : no incoming calls. Tho' I concede vibrate slipped my mind :)
there are many people who, because of their job, need to be reachable at all times, and not simply for selfish reasons (doctors being the most salient example). They therefore can never go to movies?
I doubt that there are people who really must be available 24/7 ad infinitum. For a while, perhaps, but if new patients are roundrobin'd, I can see how a doc can claim some true time for himself once every few weeks or whatever. But when the time is there to really be available, yes, I don't think you can justify going to the movies. If the chances are high that you'll be called, you know you'll be interrupting the experience of everybody around you (even by merely walking out the door, see below).
Did you misunderstand the 'set to vibrate' concept, or am I missing your point?
Twofold reply, ;)
:)
1) if you're using vibrate mode because the area requires silence, you'll need to leave to handle the call and that in itself is a disturbance; if you ever went to a movie where apparently half the theatre needs to use the bathroom, you know what I mean
2) most comments point out that the conversation itself is often more annoying than the ringing, and I wouldn't be surprised to see people think otherwise and happily take a call, assuming they've been polite by using vibrate
So : I still don't expect docs to show up at movies, not even with a phone set to vibrate, ergo jam away :)
Your wife (or you) go(es) into labor, and the hospital pages your doctor, only they're at a movie because labor is two weeks early and they have a baby expected during any 4 week span. They don't find out because their cellphone and pager are jammed.
Hm, I don't think this holds much ground. The jammer only makes "turning the volume down" mandatory, since the phone basically stops working -- but you were already supposed to turn the volume down, anyway, when going to a movie. I agree that for a doctor at a restaurant this would be a borderline case, and jamming probably inappropriate, but for a movie, the doctor isn't supposed to be there with a live phone in the first place, so jam away. In other words, anybody who needs to be reachable and has a bit of courtesy shouldn't show up at movies (or funerals or whatever) with a live phone in the first place.
And as for the thing about no-new-aliens, I think it's actually for the better. The species that kicked the Borg's ass (four thousand something) had so much potential, yet it was wasted by just using the species as a motivator for a human-Borg business deal. I'd rather not see any new species than a species that could've been a lot but never went anywhere because the soap must go on...