Sony got an extra dose of fines in that one for obstructing justice with employees shredding documents. However, fines still weren't enough there since Oops they did it again. Most large corporations are amoral, they respond only to the shareholders. If guilty this time, need a heavy enough fine to be a real deterrent when the CEO is facing angry shareholders looking at the reason why there was such a loss that year.
I am actually currently in China. Sites which are carte-blance blocked include: Facebook, youtube, wikipedia, blogger.com (as a side note: Wikipedia really is useful--reminded of that now that it is not available).
The reason for blocking Facebook and company is because they are starting to work for serious political change: see today's 'No Prorouge' rallies occurring today in Canada [and at worldwide Canadian embassies] after the Canadian prime minister leader cancelled the democratically-elected parliament for weeks--these rallies are a result of over 200,000 strong grassroots Facebook group support. Concurrent to that is an evaporation of that prime ministers lead in the polls versus the opposition party.
'Omen' remake had a blunt launch date of 6/6/6 (666 is the number of the beast/devil in some Christian doctorines).
Consider the symbolism of 03-06-09, which are the compass points 3,6,9 of the clockface/watchface. It has a nice rhythm since the next in the sequence is 12 [the 'advance toward midnight' is a plot theme].
Furthermore, anticipated fanboy blockbusters like this are sure to have advance midnight screenings on their launch date to promote buzz (with inflated opening day box numbers) and have a run at opening box office records for March month.
So having the opening of 03-06-09 at 12AM is perfect since get all four clock compass points and hits the midnight theme of the movie plot.
Those familiar with the attention to recurrent puns/themes/symbolism small details in the book.
A 3/6/9@12 launch? Couldn't think of a better way to start.
If you are on OS X and would like to sample 3D navigation of disk drive content, there is a nice free project that does this, aptly named 3DOSX.
It uses Open GL to make the file system into 3D rotatable platters, and the platters are linked together. Can swim around the platters looking at the different documents.
I wrote to Google some time back with an algorithm suggestion that was adopted by them. It is certainly welcome to an open source search engine. It is a minor improvement, but every bit helps.
For citations of most websites, some of the citing people will link to http://www.someplace.com, and some will link to http://someplace.com.
Therefore, include a comparison of the pages returned by each query, and if they are the same page returned, then summate the reverse citations to calculate their total rank.
Use of -or vs. -our in programming class libraries
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Flavor vs. Flavour
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· Score: 1
In wxWindows, a GUI library, all the classes use -our. For example, the wxColour class uses the UK spelling. This reflects the origins of wx, as it started 10 years ago in the UK.
Every once in a while, the mailing lists tell how it should be converted to all US spellings.
The solution that is used is in the colour.h header, at the bottom there is a
#define wxColor wxColour
to help those who have difficulty using the UK spelling.
Methodology: A global usage share of xx percent for browser Y means that xx percent of the visitors of Internet users arrived at sites that are using one of OneStat.com's services by using browser Y.
Just as an example of why these types of numbers need to be taken with more than a single grain of salt. In the example above, Opera 7.0 (and I think 6.0) defaults to reporting itself as MSIE. So unless the user cracks open the prefs and digs deep into one of the many preferences panes and flicks a switch, those visits will be taken away from the Opera totals and heaped onto the MSIE totals.
They are most likely assessing the reported user agent string to their network of websites which may or may not be the actual browser being used.
I have thought about this for awhile now, and this is what I would like to use.
If an email author is not on my whitelist of emails, then they get a toll if they want to get through and have me download/read their letter. I can set the toll according to my own private rules. For me, it would be likely in the range of 1-10 cents (a professional might set a bounty of 20-50 cents for a stranger's email). One of my first private rules would be to double the toll if it is an HTML-formatted email, and triple the toll if their is attachments.
There is no assumption that the letter is spam content or not or restriction of speech, just that the sender will pay me for their taking of my time regardless. For 99.9% of spammers it is not feasible to pay a few cents per spam, but if they can spend that much to contact me then I am likely a likely enough target market for their service that they can pay me the money for me to skim their message.
I would have the implementation similar to how "Read receipt" messages get sent back, but instead of a dialog box that says "Mr. Jones requested a read receipt, do you wish to send it?" it would say "Mr. Jones charges a toll of 3 cents to receive unsolicited emails from people he doesn't know. Do you wish to pay this 3 cents?" There would be a "Yes/No" button to send the 3 cents to him.
There is no forcing of users to exact tolls on reading unsolicited mails, if they don't want to use this, but instead want to read them all for free, that is their choice.
The specifications would be by a internet body, like W3C or similar. The implementation would then be over to a choice of independent transaction service companies, similar to how there is a vast consumer choice of registrars for domains. Consumers can take a service that comes with lots of handholding, 24/7 live support but costs a larger percentage of the toll charged to unsolicited non-whitelisted email, or a consumer can choose a non-frills provider that gives 95% of the toll charge to the reader of the email. Consumers may wish to base part of their choice based on the perceived trustworthyness/reputation of the company. Companies that do a good job at it get more business, making a good market opportunity for companies that do the service well.
For a company to be a provider of the service requires some minimum standards, pretty much similar to the standards to become an OpenSRS domain registrar. [As an aside on the subject of domain names, consider how much more junk domain names would flood the domain name registry if there wasn't a cheap cost of $6-15/year to have a domain name. 99.9% of sociopathic people are physically limited from registering 80 million new domain names per day into the DNS, because there is a cost-prohibitive toll against this abuse]. There is a somewhat stiff cost to become one, obviously, and there is a contract regarding arbitation before the council in cases of fraud or other repeat poor performance, with th e penalty of damages and the stripping of the ability to provide the service. The cost of becoming one is set high enough to make it an unviable business to defraud your customers.
I pay a fixed amount into my own chosen provider of my toll/bounty service, say about $10 for my upcoming year or two of contacting people that I don't know yet. Transactions are then handled from provider of service to provider of service moving the few cents without much human intervention and pretty low risk since there is only the short list of provider accounts that money can be sent to. Since there is low interaction and relatively low financial risk, there is a good slice of money available to be given to the bounty recipients.
Why would I use it? Since it handles my needs as both a reader and sender of email:
-I currently lose a large amount of time in dealing with the current mess of spam, where I have to sift through non-whitelisted messages looking for something important from a potential employer or an old friend that I haven't seen in a while. I
If there is any legal eagles in the audience, what is the precedent involving a seriously defective car that causes injury/death/damage? This defect would have a notice sent out somewhere/somehow offering the capacity to take the car back to the shop and replace the defective part, but the user either didn't know or didn't follow through with the effort involved.
This seems to be what this software has done: there was a defect and a capacity for a customer to do work to fix it, they didn't do it, and damage resulted.
Any cases like this with products in the automotive area, and did they favour the defendant or the plantiff?
I am a user of OSX. For them to follow through on a promise of leapfrogging competition, this is what I recommend:
-The yearly payware upgrades to the OS strongly fragment the market, as alot of software can only run on a most recent version. Contrast this to the Microsoft realm, where the mainstream apps in the stores run on the last 6-8 years (from 95-98 upwards). The minor version updates are good (and a simple way of keeping a targeted system), but either the price needs to drop on the payware upgrades, or the incompatible major version upgrades need to be spread to two years or more, so that developers can reach their audience.
-Ship hardware ordered from the factory with a recent version of the OS. The one I received was over 9 months behind. I could see how this can happen with a machine that was in a store, but straight from the factory, that is an excessive interval. When I unwrap my new computer, there is a 200+MB upgrade patch from the last 9 months to upgrade (when paying by the minute for dialup in Ireland).
-User-centered doesn't mean I am forbidden by all means of booting into OS 9 when I need to (which apparently happened as of Jan 9th). That is someone-else centered, not putting me in control of how my own computer is used. Many of the heavy CD-based applications don't run in Classic mode, rendering my software into coasters). An upgrade should either put back my own ability to start OS 9 if I want to, or else clean up Classic emulation so that it works.
-If there isn't a task sceduler already (don't know because of point above I won't upgrade). I use the GPL CronniX, but it is a small app to whip up, and something that really belongs with an OS (in the Utilities folder) and should be supported by the OS manufacturer.
-Fix cinema display or allow configuration for what "fullscreen" means. A large slice of the Mac games when I run fullscreen get horizontally stretched when run fullscreen. There is 100% hardware/software integration, so there is no excuse not to have a display preference to turn off the extra side pixels so that the display really is in a 3:4 height:width ratio.
-The Apple CD authoring software (for data) is atrocious from a UI point of view. How could they buy Astarte and still have such a subpar offering. One of the perks of such an expensive computer is that one expects to have good capabilities ready to go. iTunes does this well, and is the best music player I have seen. Data CD authoring needs to be brought up to this level.
-The bizarre removal of the capacity for me to have a heirarchal list of more rarely used applications (the Applications Apple menu in prior versions/a Windows Start menu/A KDE/Gnome start panel menu) is not user-centered. The quoted reason is "we don't want people to use menus, use the dock". This is unreasonable, as instead of organization of items into utilites, programming, in the dock there would just by over 200 minature icons in a flat bar. I had to make a poor-man's equivalent by putting a folder in the dock with folders of aliases, and then move the dock on the left side of the screen so that the menus expand to the right instead of backwards, but that is a crap workaround for an optional feature that should have been not removed from the user.
-Support a Quartz port of OpenOffice. It can't be bundled in the OS because it isn't BSD, but certainly can be a separate download, similar to how they are working on a good X11. If want to truly move away from Redmond, need to remove dependence on them for a wildly expensive Office suite, and a slick fast OpenOffice helps in that regard.
They are doing alot of things right, but as regards to besting the competition, there is certainly some work that can be done.
Interesting in light of MS's recent comment of...
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Fishing for Ideas
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The M.U.L.E. scene is alive and well, even now many years after its release. Ah planet IRATA (which was Atari spelled backwards).
While there is no GameSpy planetmule.com website for M.U.L.E, I strongly recommend World of M.U.L.E as the best starting point.
The Strategies is insightful, giving the designer's own ways of beating their enemies.
For the diehards, there is screenshots of the long-lost sequels: namely the Deluxe Amiga version, as well as "Son of M.U.L.E." which Dani discontinued because of EA's desire to add guns and bombs to her creation.
Finally, is Dani's email letter to the site shortly before her death.
A brilliant creator, I wish she was still around making great works.
JL: Right, in Q*Bert's heyday. I would love to see tapes of that. I remember they gave Q*Bert arms so he could have these adventures. He needed arms for some reason.
O: Why didn't you originally give him arms?
JL: For the game, you didn't need 'em! We just needed something that jumped around, and the arms were superfluous.
(I am posting pretty late on this article, hopefully some moderators may catch it yet, and place it so it can be seen).
I am a final year in medical school. I spend a lot of my time on various medical education internet services.
This already goes on. A better title would have been: 'Some medical schools agree to pool their resources and decide to share their online course materials'. As a matter of fact, the licensing exam in the USA is a 8 or 9 hour computer-based multiple choice test, and the students prepare for it by taking practice computer tests online.
Schools vary in their clinical vs. didactic education, but really, alot of the first 2 years of medical school getting up to speed on what the tissues are, the groups of microbes, basic genetic prinicples, major biochemical pathways. Yes their are some students that don't go to class at all for the first 2 years when all they are doing there is listening to teachers talk. Only 5% of learners are primarily auditory, and yet the lecture is primarily talk. I feel students should be allowed to pursue the path that gets the best results for them: if they can learn all their microbiology at home by spending 18 hour days, instead of wasting time in travel on a bus, then sitting to a teacher talk, they should be allowed to do so. The results at the end are what matters. All students are required to pass a licensing examination--if people think that the licensing examination somehow allows incompetent doctors through, then the exam should be changed.
Online threaded conversations allow a good archive of question and answer for learning: things like physio aren't going to change much, and nice to have access to the prior students questions and answers from previous years.
The ancillary skill of becoming computer-savvy is required for a doctor starting out now. There is an avalanche of new information to sift though online, and proper gathering techniques and critical assessment is required. One should be familiar with tech aids at the point of care if they can reduce errors (eg a PDA of drugs which can compare interactions of all 7 drugs that an elderly patient is on, to see if it causing a side effect). The latest journal articles are best found with PubMed online, if one hasn't learned the sklll of good data mining, their knowledge will fade from the cutting edge quick enough.
There is different subsets of learners. Some members of a group will have excellent communication in a live group at the start, others may feel more at ease asking/answering questions in a virtual group, and building their confidence, so that hitting the live group becomes easier.
For simulations, they make a good adjunct to the real thing. It provides a introduction to a proper case of a disease which may difficult to see in the med school's hospital. For example, Lyme disease is important to recognize on a patient, but most med students in Ireland will never see one. However, Irish citizens do to USA, get it, come back, and the result is tragic after the disease has progressed undiagnosed by the first line doctors who have never seen someone before with the classic signs.
Visiting conferences in medical education, there is a lot of schools in 2nd world countries that now have computers and a half-way decent internet connection, but there isn't enough money to fund creation of well-made high-tech content to use. Hence, willingness of the richer universities to help the developing ones in knowledge is a welcomed trend.
On of the big events The Sims is watching them respond to events, like when there is a fire on their stove.
The fires get a bit boring after a while. A nice event instead will be watching your Sim collapse in the McDonald's kiosk from a cholesterol-induced heart-attack.
Makes a nice tie in too for genuine Intel(R) products: crack open the nearby computer equipment and use the live wires to see if you can shock your Sim's heart into restarting again.
Here in Ireland, all dialup Internet access is this type of "free", in which you are billed for the phone time online.
For the phone company and ISPs, this "Free" Internet Access Is Profitable In Ireland, also.
Few people like it, and would rush to support the other side of the fence, in which there is a flat rate of about $40 euro a month for dialup, and that is it (following the typical unmetered approach available in most of North America). An option of pay-for-phonecall is good, but when the phone company colludes with ISPs to make it the only option available, it cripples the country's online growth.
The largest ISP in Ireland is IrelandOnline(IOL). The nexus of protest against this forced free-but-pay-for-the-phonecall scam is logically located at IrelandOffline.org
on the percentage success that peek-a-booty can get around a random sample of these Chinese-government blocked URLs. It would be interesting report to read, if anyone who has the capacity or people connections to can get some good effectiveness data.
Time and again creative people will leave the game when they are at the top. I forget who said it, but a nice answer that one creative person said to the question of why they chose to stop while at the zenith of their success:
I would rather leave and have them ask "Why did you leave?", instead of waiting years after my heart was no longer in it, and then have them ask "Why didn't you leave?"
An interesting picture of Tesla, under active coil
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Build Your Own Tesla Coil
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If you are interested in the picture on the website, here is an additional photograph of Tesla himself in the same pose, only his coil is giant-sized, and the arcs fill a warehouse. He is sitting reading a book under the giant coil with the million-volt sparks fly overhead.
Note that for this photo to work, it had to be reexposed several times for all the lightning forks to be catptured (and he sat at the end).
The noise genereated from the coil in the photo could be heard 10 miles away.
The example of ZD innovation they should return to
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Ziff Davis Teeters
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· Score: 2
The current ZD has gotten a bad reputation for just masquerading paid advertisers PR as pseduo-journalism, making readership fall drastically.
More gaming magazines are one approach I guess, but ZD's current fare is pretty much the same content as would find almost everywhere else among its many competitors on the bookstore shelf.
There was a time though, when ZD had great innovative original work that tech people did come to read. These innovative times were typified by "Computer Stew": very cheap to make and distribute, original content that wouldn't find elsewhere, great content, wide readership, and outstanding reader loyalty.
If for some reason you missed out on Computer Stew, the episodes are archvied on a back corner insid the zdnet.com domain: http://www.zdnet.com/computerstew/html/in dex_episo des.html
I recommend "Times Square" episode to start, then you can venture off into others.
ZDNet doesn't need to go off the air, as long as they get back a few brilliant writers whose innovate content makes people want to read.
There is very little emotion in either my post or my decision.
The question posed by the article was "Would you use an open-source implementation of the.NET Framework?"
I listed the reasons why.NET was not taken as the platform of choice and the reasons were not technical. I think.NET will certainly be competent, as the technical lead was the guy behind Delphi.
I am a GPL software author. C# is an unproven new language to assess in my choices. I am absolutely going to judge the likely future of a language by looking at the past history of the company who will be managing its development.
Microsoft has quite openly stated that they think GPL is a virus, and there has been rumblings of making it illegal to use their development tools in the creation/conjunction of GPL software or libraries (which is their right to do).
However, a major software project is a large commitment of time--porting to another language down the road is unlikely to be trivial. if Microsoft takes their familar road with C#, and my code becomes illegal to compile, or I now everyone who wants to work on the software now has to fork over $500 a year for a MS-blessed C# compiler to be able to contribute to the GPL project, I will have regretted my choice of.NET. The possibilty of that occurring moves.NET to the back of the pack as their counterparts can already do what I need without that extra weight looming over the project.
But the results also matter. Here are some development snapshot screenshots, fresh off a clean compile on Linux and MSW, built with wxWindows with no MFCs, Microsoft dlls or anything else that can be made illegal or prohibitively expensive later on:
Look at the toolsets, the final contenders I looked at for a cross-platform GUI toolkit were:.NET Trolltech Qt GTK Delphi/Kylix wxWindows.NET: -Poor history of MSW undocumented APIs. -Poor history of MSW trying to break other toolsets not blessed by the company. -Poor history of MSW once actually finishing a piece of software's features (eg Office) trying to find other ways to pinch money off people. -Poor history towards GPL software.
Qt: -A strong contender: good documentation, tools. -Lost out because they say the Windows version requires a purchased copy of Visual C++ to do any compiling with it. -Emulates widgets instead of using native.
GTK (1.2 back then, I can't comment on 2.0): -Very free. -A lot of component scattered libraries makes documentation difficult. -Sometimes higher level widgets don't exist: need to make them from scratch using the window primitives. -MSW port is a bit rough.
Delphi/Kylix: -Easy to use, a company respected by me that makes good software. -No Mac available. -Proprietary, liable to not be maintained if company goes under. -Free version is nagware under Linux, I believe their documentation said.
wxWindows: -Works out of the box, now. -A single project can be compiled for MSW, GTK, OSX and less commons like X11 embedded. -Good documentation, sample code, etc. -Core team is *very* accepting to new features and sharper code. -Native widgets always used, where they exist makes a proper look and feel for an application. -The open library in unencumbered by a company that needs to ship new versions of tools or the library. -Fast: native compiles so no runtimes needed. -The C++ is designed to by truly compatible with almost any compiler, toolset, not ones blessed by one certain company. -Well tested (10 years). -Tools and library are no cost, (or nagware). Free compilers exist on all supported platforms.
wxWindows was the one that was selected, and now 10 months into the project, I am very satisfied with the results from that toolkit choice.
...actually the handheld's killer app in education, once the notes can be passed globally.
I curate MedicalMnemonics.com which is a non-profit database of mnemonics for medical students, which includes a port to the PalmOS.
In the pre-handheld days, you could dream something up, and share it with someone nearby. Now a button click on the handheld shares your new studying technique to about 40,000 other students trying to learn the same thing as you are.
The implementation has received good feedback from the pretty much all the students who use it. Some buy their handhelds, others get them provided by the school. Laptops aren't nearly as popular as handhelds, since walking around all day on the wards in the clinical years--never really sitting down to be able to open up a laptop.
Since slashdot is a technology site, the mechanism of global sharing, used in the application, might prove interesting too: To avoid custom HotSync conduit problems on Linux and other platforms:
Button click on the PalmOS application makes an XML record of the new entry to be shared.
Place the XML record in the email application's outbox (including a b64 text version of any picture that was drawn).
Now are automatically piggy-backing on the existing online email, or desktop email conduit, to email the XML record off to the server.
Server checks the addition's email address every few minutes, and parses any XML records it finds, adding new entries to the server database, and queuing modifications to existing entries for later inspection.
Every few weeks, server builds an update pack of new records to download, which patches the existing database on the handheld.
Slashdot Mirror
If found guilty, I hope the fines go well beyond damages and are punitive enough to give CEOs pause before repeating.
Sony in particular--it was only 2+ years since their fines part for collusion for price fixing for Beta-type tapes.
http://broadcastengineering.com/news/eu-fines-betacom-1126/
Sony got an extra dose of fines in that one for obstructing justice with employees shredding documents. However, fines still weren't enough there since Oops they did it again. Most large corporations are amoral, they respond only to the shareholders. If guilty this time, need a heavy enough fine to be a real deterrent when the CEO is facing angry shareholders looking at the reason why there was such a loss that year.
I am actually currently in China. Sites which are carte-blance blocked include: Facebook, youtube, wikipedia, blogger.com (as a side note: Wikipedia really is useful--reminded of that now that it is not available).
The reason for blocking Facebook and company is because they are starting to work for serious political change: see today's 'No Prorouge' rallies occurring today in Canada [and at worldwide Canadian embassies] after the Canadian prime minister leader cancelled the democratically-elected parliament for weeks--these rallies are a result of over 200,000 strong grassroots Facebook group support. Concurrent to that is an evaporation of that prime ministers lead in the polls versus the opposition party.
'Omen' remake had a blunt launch date of 6/6/6 (666 is the number of the beast/devil in some Christian doctorines).
Consider the symbolism of 03-06-09, which are the compass points 3,6,9 of the clockface/watchface. It has a nice rhythm since the next in the sequence is 12 [the 'advance toward midnight' is a plot theme].
Furthermore, anticipated fanboy blockbusters like this are sure to have advance midnight screenings on their launch date to promote buzz (with inflated opening day box numbers) and have a run at opening box office records for March month.
So having the opening of 03-06-09 at 12AM is perfect since get all four clock compass points and hits the midnight theme of the movie plot.
Those familiar with the attention to recurrent puns/themes/symbolism small details in the book.
A 3/6/9@12 launch? Couldn't think of a better way to start.
If you are on OS X and would like to sample 3D navigation of disk drive content, there is a nice free project that does this, aptly named 3DOSX.
It uses Open GL to make the file system into 3D rotatable platters, and the platters are linked together. Can swim around the platters looking at the different documents.
Some screenshots are here:
3DOSX Screenshots
The project homepage is here:
3DOSX Homepage
It is an interesting look into alternative ways of doing things.
For citations of most websites, some of the citing people will link to http://www.someplace.com, and some will link to http://someplace.com.
Therefore, include a comparison of the pages returned by each query, and if they are the same page returned, then summate the reverse citations to calculate their total rank.
Every once in a while, the mailing lists tell how it should be converted to all US spellings.
The solution that is used is in the
colour.h header, at the bottom there is a
#define wxColor wxColour
to help those who have difficulty using the UK spelling.
7. Opera 6.0 0.6%
Methodology: A global usage share of xx percent for browser Y means that xx percent of the visitors of Internet users arrived at sites that are using one of OneStat.com's services by using browser Y.
Just as an example of why these types of numbers need to be taken with more than a single grain of salt. In the example above, Opera 7.0 (and I think 6.0) defaults to reporting itself as MSIE. So unless the user cracks open the prefs and digs deep into one of the many preferences panes and flicks a switch, those visits will be taken away from the Opera totals and heaped onto the MSIE totals.
They are most likely assessing the reported user agent string to their network of websites which may or may not be the actual browser being used.
I have thought about this for awhile now, and this is what I would like to use.
If an email author is not on my whitelist of emails, then they get a toll if they want to get through and have me download/read their letter. I can set the toll according to my own private rules. For me, it would be likely in the range of 1-10 cents (a professional might set a bounty of 20-50 cents for a stranger's email). One of my first private rules would be to double the toll if it is an HTML-formatted email, and triple the toll if their is attachments.
There is no assumption that the letter is spam content or not or restriction of speech, just that the sender will pay me for their taking of my time regardless. For 99.9% of spammers it is not feasible to pay a few cents per spam, but if they can spend that much to contact me then I am likely a likely enough target market for their service that they can pay me the money for me to skim their message.
I would have the implementation similar to how "Read receipt" messages get sent back, but instead of a dialog box that says "Mr. Jones requested a read receipt, do you wish to send it?" it would say "Mr. Jones charges a toll of 3 cents to receive unsolicited emails from people he doesn't know. Do you wish to pay this 3 cents?" There would be a "Yes/No" button to send the 3 cents to him.
There is no forcing of users to exact tolls on reading unsolicited mails, if they don't want to use this, but instead want to read them all for free, that is their choice.
The specifications would be by a internet body, like W3C or similar. The implementation would then be over to a choice of independent transaction service companies, similar to how there is a vast consumer choice of registrars for domains. Consumers can take a service that comes with lots of handholding, 24/7 live support but costs a larger percentage of the toll charged to unsolicited non-whitelisted email, or a consumer can choose a non-frills provider that gives 95% of the toll charge to the reader of the email. Consumers may wish to base part of their choice based on the perceived trustworthyness/reputation of the company. Companies that do a good job at it get more business, making a good market opportunity for companies that do the service well.
For a company to be a provider of the service requires some minimum standards, pretty much similar to the standards to become an OpenSRS domain registrar. [As an aside on the subject of domain names, consider how much more junk domain names would flood the domain name registry if there wasn't a cheap cost of $6-15/year to have a domain name. 99.9% of sociopathic people are physically limited from registering 80 million new domain names per day into the DNS, because there is a cost-prohibitive toll against this abuse]. There is a somewhat stiff cost to become one, obviously, and there is a contract regarding arbitation before the council in cases of fraud or other repeat poor performance, with th e penalty of damages and the stripping of the ability to provide the service. The cost of becoming one is set high enough to make it an unviable business to defraud your customers.
I pay a fixed amount into my own chosen provider of my toll/bounty service, say about $10 for my upcoming year or two of contacting people that I don't know yet. Transactions are then handled from provider of service to provider of service moving the few cents without much human intervention and pretty low risk since there is only the short list of provider accounts that money can be sent to. Since there is low interaction and relatively low financial risk, there is a good slice of money available to be given to the bounty recipients.
Why would I use it? Since it handles my needs as both a reader and sender of email:
-I currently lose a large amount of time in dealing with the current mess of spam, where I have to sift through non-whitelisted messages looking for something important from a potential employer or an old friend that I haven't seen in a while. I
If there is any legal eagles in the audience, what is the precedent involving a seriously defective car that causes injury/death/damage? This defect would have a notice sent out somewhere/somehow offering the capacity to take the car back to the shop and replace the defective part, but the user either didn't know or didn't follow through with the effort involved.
This seems to be what this software has done: there was a defect and a capacity for a customer to do work to fix it, they didn't do it, and damage resulted.
Any cases like this with products in the automotive area, and did they favour the defendant or the plantiff?
Best wishes,
Robert
I am a user of OSX. For them to follow through on a promise of leapfrogging competition, this is what I recommend:
-The yearly payware upgrades to the OS strongly fragment the market, as alot of software can only run on a most recent version. Contrast this to the Microsoft realm, where the mainstream apps in the stores run on the last 6-8 years (from 95-98 upwards). The minor version updates are good (and a simple way of keeping a targeted system), but either the price needs to drop on the payware upgrades, or the incompatible major version upgrades need to be spread to two years or more, so that developers can reach their audience.
-Ship hardware ordered from the factory with a recent version of the OS. The one I received was over 9 months behind. I could see how this can happen with a machine that was in a store, but straight from the factory, that is an excessive interval. When I unwrap my new computer, there is a 200+MB upgrade patch from the last 9 months to upgrade (when paying by the minute for dialup in Ireland).
-User-centered doesn't mean I am forbidden by all means of booting into OS 9 when I need to (which apparently happened as of Jan 9th). That is someone-else centered, not putting me in control of how my own computer is used. Many of the heavy CD-based applications don't run in Classic mode, rendering my software into coasters). An upgrade should either put back my own ability to start OS 9 if I want to, or else clean up Classic emulation so that it works.
-If there isn't a task sceduler already (don't know because of point above I won't upgrade). I use the GPL CronniX, but it is a small app to whip up, and something that really belongs with an OS (in the Utilities folder) and should be supported by the OS manufacturer.
-Fix cinema display or allow configuration for what "fullscreen" means. A large slice of the Mac games when I run fullscreen get horizontally stretched when run fullscreen. There is 100% hardware/software integration, so there is no excuse not to have a display preference to turn off the extra side pixels so that the display really is in a 3:4 height:width ratio.
-The Apple CD authoring software (for data) is atrocious from a UI point of view. How could they buy Astarte and still have such a subpar offering. One of the perks of such an expensive computer is that one expects to have good capabilities ready to go. iTunes does this well, and is the best music player I have seen. Data CD authoring needs to be brought up to this level.
-The bizarre removal of the capacity for me to have a heirarchal list of more rarely used applications (the Applications Apple menu in prior versions/a Windows Start menu/A KDE/Gnome start panel menu) is not user-centered. The quoted reason is "we don't want people to use menus, use the dock". This is unreasonable, as instead of organization of items into utilites, programming, in the dock there would just by over 200 minature icons in a flat bar. I had to make a poor-man's equivalent by putting a folder in the dock with folders of aliases, and then move the dock on the left side of the screen so that the menus expand to the right instead of backwards, but that is a crap workaround for an optional feature that should have been not removed from the user.
-Support a Quartz port of OpenOffice. It can't be bundled in the OS because it isn't BSD, but certainly can be a separate download, similar to how they are working on a good X11. If want to truly move away from Redmond, need to remove dependence on them for a wildly expensive Office suite, and a slick fast OpenOffice helps in that regard.
They are doing alot of things right, but as regards to besting the competition, there is certainly some work that can be done.
...that they were were seeing Google as more and more of a competitor and you will recall that Google had a similar contest to solicit ideas.
I suppose one could comment on such a drought of new ideas at Redmond that they have to start using ideas from competitors on how to get ideas.
The M.U.L.E. scene is alive and well, even now many years after its release. Ah planet IRATA (which was Atari spelled backwards).
While there is no GameSpy planetmule.com website for M.U.L.E, I strongly recommend World of M.U.L.E as the best starting point.
The Strategies is insightful, giving the designer's own ways of beating their enemies.
For the diehards, there is screenshots of the long-lost sequels: namely the Deluxe Amiga version, as well as "Son of M.U.L.E." which Dani discontinued because of EA's desire to add guns and bombs to her creation.
Finally, is Dani's email letter to the site shortly before her death.
A brilliant creator, I wish she was still around making great works.
...is on the Onion A.V. Club interviews. They interviewed Jeff Lee, a Q*Bert creator, a while back, to see what he was up to.
e 3513b.html
Here is the article: http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3513/avfeatur
Here is a sample excerpt:
O: There was a TV show once, a cartoon.
JL: Right, in Q*Bert's heyday. I would love to see tapes of that. I remember they gave Q*Bert arms so he could have these adventures. He needed arms for some reason.
O: Why didn't you originally give him arms?
JL: For the game, you didn't need 'em! We just needed something that jumped around, and the arms were superfluous.
...would screen-print a giant appropriate response mozilla advertisement about butterfies and drape it down the side of the building.
. jpg
My recommendation:
http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/new/humor/mozilla1280
(I am posting pretty late on this article, hopefully some moderators may catch it yet, and place it so it can be seen).
I am a final year in medical school. I spend a lot of my time on various medical education internet services.
This already goes on. A better title would have been: 'Some medical schools agree to pool their resources and decide to share their online course materials'. As a matter of fact, the licensing exam in the USA is a 8 or 9 hour computer-based multiple choice test, and the students prepare for it by taking practice computer tests online.
Schools vary in their clinical vs. didactic education, but really, alot of the first 2 years of medical school getting up to speed on what the tissues are, the groups of microbes, basic genetic prinicples, major biochemical pathways.
Yes their are some students that don't go to class at all for the first 2 years when all they are doing there is listening to teachers talk. Only 5% of learners are primarily auditory, and yet the lecture is primarily talk. I feel students should be allowed to pursue the path that gets the best results for them: if they can learn all their microbiology at home by spending 18 hour days, instead of wasting time in travel on a bus, then sitting to a teacher talk, they should be allowed to do so. The results at the end are what matters. All students are required to pass a licensing examination--if people think that the licensing examination somehow allows incompetent doctors through, then the exam should be changed.
Online threaded conversations allow a good archive of question and answer for learning: things like physio aren't going to change much, and nice to have access to the prior students questions and answers from previous years.
The ancillary skill of becoming computer-savvy is required for a doctor starting out now. There is an avalanche of new information to sift though online, and proper gathering techniques and critical assessment is required. One should be familiar with tech aids at the point of care if they can reduce errors (eg a PDA of drugs which can compare interactions of all 7 drugs that an elderly patient is on, to see if it causing a side effect). The latest journal articles are best found with PubMed online, if one hasn't learned the sklll of good data mining, their knowledge will fade from the cutting edge quick enough.
There is different subsets of learners. Some members of a group will have excellent communication in a live group at the start, others may feel more at ease asking/answering questions in a virtual group, and building their confidence, so that hitting the live group becomes easier.
For simulations, they make a good adjunct to the real thing. It provides a introduction to a proper case of a disease which may difficult to see in the med school's hospital. For example, Lyme disease is important to recognize on a patient, but most med students in Ireland will never see one. However, Irish citizens do to USA, get it, come back, and the result is tragic after the disease has progressed undiagnosed by the first line doctors who have never seen someone before with the classic signs.
Visiting conferences in medical education, there is a lot of schools in 2nd world countries that now have computers and a half-way decent internet connection, but there isn't enough money to fund creation of well-made high-tech content to use. Hence, willingness of the richer universities to help the developing ones in knowledge is a welcomed trend.
and a fine addition to the game.
On of the big events The Sims is watching them respond to events, like when there is a fire on their stove.
The fires get a bit boring after a while. A nice event instead will be watching your Sim collapse in the McDonald's kiosk from a cholesterol-induced heart-attack.
Makes a nice tie in too for genuine Intel(R) products: crack open the nearby computer equipment and use the live wires to see if you can shock your Sim's heart into restarting again.
Here in Ireland, all dialup Internet access is this type of "free", in which you are billed for the phone time online.
For the phone company and ISPs, this "Free" Internet Access Is Profitable In Ireland, also.
Few people like it, and would rush to support the other side of the fence, in which there is a flat rate of about $40 euro a month for dialup, and that is it (following the typical unmetered approach available in most of North America). An option of pay-for-phonecall is good, but when the phone company colludes with ISPs to make it the only option available, it cripples the country's online growth.
The largest ISP in Ireland is IrelandOnline(IOL).
The nexus of protest against this forced free-but-pay-for-the-phonecall scam is logically located at IrelandOffline.org
What is wrong with this crowd?
When someone finally in lucky enough to come up with one of the few business models that is actually successfully making money on the Internet everyone has to jumb all over it, and make them out to be an evil empire.
Sidenote: I have to hand it to the makers of eGray. Brilliant pastiche guys. Couldn't have better timing today.
on the percentage success that peek-a-booty can get around a random sample of these Chinese-government blocked URLs. It would be interesting report to read, if anyone who has the capacity or people connections to can get some good effectiveness data.
Time and again creative people will leave the game when they are at the top. I forget who said it, but a nice answer that one creative person said to the question of why they chose to stop while at the zenith of their success:
I would rather leave and have them ask "Why did you leave?", instead of waiting years after my heart was no longer in it, and then have them ask "Why didn't you leave?"
If you are interested in the picture on the website, here is an additional photograph of Tesla himself in the same pose, only his coil is giant-sized, and the arcs fill a warehouse. He is sitting reading a book under the giant coil with the million-volt sparks fly overhead.
Note that for this photo to work, it had to be reexposed several times for all the lightning forks to be catptured (and he sat at the end).
Picture of Tesla under his giant active coil
The noise genereated from the coil in the photo could be heard 10 miles away.
The current ZD has gotten a bad reputation for just masquerading paid advertisers PR as pseduo-journalism, making readership fall drastically.
n dex_episo des.html
More gaming magazines are one approach I guess, but ZD's current fare is pretty much the same content as would find almost everywhere else among its many competitors on the bookstore shelf.
There was a time though, when ZD had great innovative original work that tech people did come to read. These innovative times were typified by "Computer Stew": very cheap to make and distribute, original content that wouldn't find elsewhere, great content, wide readership, and outstanding reader loyalty.
If for some reason you missed out on Computer Stew, the episodes are archvied on a back corner insid the zdnet.com domain:
http://www.zdnet.com/computerstew/html/i
I recommend "Times Square" episode to start, then you can venture off into others.
ZDNet doesn't need to go off the air, as long as they get back a few brilliant writers whose innovate content makes people want to read.
There is very little emotion in either my post or my decision.
.NET Framework?"
.NET was not taken as the platform of choice and the reasons were not technical. I think .NET will certainly be competent, as the technical lead was the guy behind Delphi.
.NET. The possibilty of that occurring moves .NET to the back of the pack as their counterparts can already do what I need without that extra weight looming over the project.
The question posed by the article was "Would you use an open-source implementation of the
I listed the reasons why
I am a GPL software author. C# is an unproven new language to assess in my choices. I am absolutely going to judge the likely future of a language by looking at the past history of the company who will be managing its development.
Microsoft has quite openly stated that they think GPL is a virus, and there has been rumblings of making it illegal to use their development tools in the creation/conjunction of GPL software or libraries (which is their right to do).
However, a major software project is a large commitment of time--porting to another language down the road is unlikely to be trivial. if Microsoft takes their familar road with C#, and my code becomes illegal to compile, or I now everyone who wants to work on the software now has to fork over $500 a year for a MS-blessed C# compiler to be able to contribute to the GPL project, I will have regretted my choice of
But the results also matter. Here are some development snapshot screenshots, fresh off a clean compile on Linux and MSW, built with wxWindows with no MFCs, Microsoft dlls or anything else that can be made illegal or prohibitively expensive later on:
http://www.clinicalexam.com/pluckerdesktop/tour
Look at the toolsets, the final contenders I looked at for a cross-platform GUI toolkit were: .NET .NET:
Trolltech Qt
GTK
Delphi/Kylix
wxWindows
-Poor history of MSW undocumented APIs.
-Poor history of MSW trying to break other toolsets not blessed by the company.
-Poor history of MSW once actually finishing a piece of software's features (eg Office) trying to find other ways to pinch money off people.
-Poor history towards GPL software.
Qt:
-A strong contender: good documentation, tools.
-Lost out because they say the Windows version requires a purchased copy of Visual C++ to do any compiling with it.
-Emulates widgets instead of using native.
GTK (1.2 back then, I can't comment on 2.0):
-Very free.
-A lot of component scattered libraries makes documentation difficult.
-Sometimes higher level widgets don't exist: need to make them from scratch using the window primitives.
-MSW port is a bit rough.
Delphi/Kylix:
-Easy to use, a company respected by me that makes good software.
-No Mac available.
-Proprietary, liable to not be maintained if company goes under.
-Free version is nagware under Linux, I believe their documentation said.
wxWindows:
-Works out of the box, now.
-A single project can be compiled for MSW, GTK, OSX and less commons like X11 embedded.
-Good documentation, sample code, etc.
-Core team is *very* accepting to new features and sharper code.
-Native widgets always used, where they exist makes a proper look and feel for an application.
-The open library in unencumbered by a company that needs to ship new versions of tools or the library.
-Fast: native compiles so no runtimes needed.
-The C++ is designed to by truly compatible with almost any compiler, toolset, not ones blessed by one certain company.
-Well tested (10 years).
-Tools and library are no cost, (or nagware). Free compilers exist on all supported platforms.
wxWindows was the one that was selected, and now 10 months into the project, I am very satisfied with the results from that toolkit choice.
...actually the handheld's killer app in education, once the notes can be passed globally.
I curate MedicalMnemonics.com which is a non-profit database of mnemonics for medical students, which includes a port to the PalmOS.
In the pre-handheld days, you could dream something up, and share it with someone nearby. Now a button click on the handheld shares your new studying technique to about 40,000 other students trying to learn the same thing as you are.
The implementation has received good feedback from the pretty much all the students who use it. Some buy their handhelds, others get them provided by the school. Laptops aren't nearly as popular as handhelds, since walking around all day on the wards in the clinical years--never really sitting down to be able to open up a laptop.
Since slashdot is a technology site, the mechanism of global sharing, used in the application, might prove interesting too: To avoid custom HotSync conduit problems on Linux and other platforms: