For starters,
the link to Roland the Plogger's blog entry on zdnet didn't get a "nofollow" tag, and that page, in turn, has multiple links to his Plogger sites. So he's using Slashdot for "search engine optimization" again. Sigh.
As for the device itself, the manufacturer's link is this. It's just an oven with refrigeration capability and remote control. Here's the user manual (.pdf). With an EULA, no less.
Not only does this oven have an EULA. It has spyware. It phones home to the manufacturer.
TMIO, LC reserves the right to collect usage information regarding your use of the software and the
Appliance. You expressly consent to the collection of such usage data by TMIO, LC for purposes including,
but not limited to resolving issues, generating upgrades, providing service and repairs, and or transmission
to third-parties in connection with an unresolved insurance claim or other legal proceeding. The usage data
may include, but need not be limited to, frequency of use, temperatures, length of usage, features used,
commands used, and the relevant information regarding your use of the software and/or appliance. This
data may be collected via service call, upgrade installation, remotely via an Internet connection or via any
other communications employed by the appliance and TMIO, LLC.
Now that's a bit much for a home appliance.
Why this thing took ten years and NASA help to bring to market is a puzzle. It's less complicated than a high end washing machine. And far more expensive. This thing ought to be the size of a microwave oven and cost under $300.
Some of the more aggressive spyware re-installs itself if removed. Some spyware attacks removal tools. It's getting harder.
If spyware developers really tried, they could probably develop spyware that could not be removed while running from the disk that contained the spyware. Removal tools would have to run from something like a bootable CD. Really aggressive spyware might limit the ability to boot from CD by patching the BIOS. I can see the day coming when you have to physically remove the hard drive and plug it into another machine to clean it up.
Google's China unit is a subsidiary of the US company, and as such, is subject to the US regulations. Or rather, penalties can be applied to the US parent for a violation by a subsidiary.
Generally, the TRA applies to all U.S. taxpayers (and their related companies). The TRA's reporting requirements apply to taxpayers' "operations" in, with, or related to boycotting countries or their nationals. Its penalties apply to those taxpayers with foreign tax credit, foreign subsidiary deferral, FSC (Foreign Sales Corporation), and IC-DISC (Interest Charge-Domestic International Sales Corporation) benefits.
This is like the old dropping the leaflets out of the planes with the "Surrender or you will be attacked" in different languages.
An upgrade of the leaflet idea is actually in the document.
There is a requirement for a precision-guided leaflet canister. (That's easy to do. The "smart bomb" kit, the Joint Direct Attack Munition, is actually a strap-on unit for dumb bombs. All that's needed is a compatible leaflet can.)
"This message has been delivered by a precision-guided leaflet bomb aimed at you. If this had been a real bomb, you would now be dead. If you want to surrender, drop your weapons and walk east. Have a nice day."
Google's censorship might be illegal under US anti-boycott laws. The US has a law intended to keep US companies from cooperating with the Arab League's boycott of Israel. That's been in place for years, and is enforced by the US Department of Commerce.
But the law isn't Israel-specific. It prohibits US persons or entities from complying with "unsanctioned foreign boycotts".
It also prohibits any US person or entity from discriminating "against any corporation or
other organization which is a United States person
on the basis of the race, religion, sex, or national
origin of any owner, officer, director, or employee
of such corporation or organization".
So for Google's China unit to exclude the US branches of Falun Gong (a religious organization) or US branches of Taiwanese political groups (national origin discrimination) from their index seems to be a violation of US export regulations under 15 CFR 160.1.
Working through a foreign subsidiary doesn't get around these rules. That loophole has been plugged very thoroughly.
I don't feel sorry for those shmucks who somehow sold them at a loss (they should learn to use the reserve price feature).
If you watch the XBox 360 core system auctions on eBay, anything priced over $350 just does not sell. The auctions with high reserves just scroll off, unsold. You can usually get $300, and you might be able to get $325. Above that, forget it. If you've got a garage full of the things, it's time to take what you can get.
The XBox 360 just isn't selling. Maybe they're hard to find at retail, but there are thousands available on eBay. An unopened core system just sold for $255, well below the $299 list price. The speculators who bought at the launch are getting killed.
Microsoft will probably have to relaunch the product at a lower price point, and lose even more money per unit.
How much longer will Microsoft's stockholders put up with this money drain? Microsoft lost money on every original XBox, so, hoping to make some money in round two, they increased the price for the XBox 360. But the customers aren't buying.
Audio-only lectures are kind of pointless for most interesting content.
A good project: develop an open-source way to transmit and store presentations in a useful and navigatable form. Lectures need three streams - the audio, the presenter's face, and the graphics. The graphics need to be at much higher resolution, and should be sent as clean still images when possible. One output should be a web page, with thumbnails for the graphics and clickable audio segments. Then you can find something in the lecture when you need it.
The presentation should be run through a voice recognition system, to make the voice searchable. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough for search. Similarly, OCR the graphics and pull keywords from them.
Ed Catmull will head up the combined animation studio. Lassiter is higher up, responsible for not just the studio side but Imagineering (theme park rides), among other things.
"It wasn't clear Tuesday what role Walt Disney Feature Animation president David Stainton will play." Or, he's out, but may have a contract that gives him exit money anyway. Stainton was previously in charge of Disney's TV animation unit, DisneyToons, the unit that produced bad sequels
(The Lion King 1 1/2, Lilo and Stitch 2), The Heffalump Movie, Mickey's Twice Upon A Christmas).
Several films in the Disney pipeline ("American Dog," "Meet the Robinsons" and "Rapunzel Unbraided.") will probably be killed. Disney Animation, in beautiful downtown Burbank (once called "Mauschwitz" in the industry) will live on. Probably as a CGI shop, though; they'd already moved away from 2D animation.
Technically, one big question is whether Disney Animation will go with the Pixar "all Renderman, all the time" procedural texture approach. Pixar's house style, 100% procedural textures, is what gives that "Pixar look". Everybody else uses pictures of real objects as textures, at least some of the time.
I recently upgraded from Mozilla to Firefox, and it apparently wouldn't use the existing version of Flash from Mozilla. Downloading Flash displayed a scary EULA, so I clicked "No". So that's it for Flash, until somebody writes an open-source player for it.
Are there any plans for an open-source Flash player for Firefox?
The problem, which is obvious when you think about it, is that capitalism no longer has competition from communism. When communism promised "the worker's paradise", and at least took some steps towards delivering it, the capitalist world had to treat its workers better than the communists did, out of fear that the workers would revolt, or vote in a different system.
With that competitive threat removed, capitalism can be as nasty as it wants to be. Because it has monopoly power now.
No one wants to be that mythical "geeky" student who loves only science and has no friends. Even though such a creature rarely exists, a lot of students will shy away from science for fear of "becoming" such a wretch.
That's the official message from Disney. See "Ice Princess"."A high-school bookworm transforms into a swan".
A video game is not a "story". A video game is a place that you go.
If there's too much "story" in a video game, you end up with what the industry derisvely calls a "track ride", where the player is locked onto a track and must ride through the storyline. Once that was necessary, because we couldn't build big free-play worlds. Today, it's not. We're also past the "cut-scene era", where the cut scenes had the good graphics while the game graphics looked like crap. That's been fixed.
It's hard for screenwriters to accept that they're not in charge of the plot. This is a constant source of friction between the story-oriented types from Hollywood and game developers. (And it's a nightmare to developers stuck writing a licensed game based on a major film. Fortunately, control is moving the other way. We're now seeing successful films based on games. We all have Angelina Jolie to thank for that.)
Too much "story" in a game usually results in long periods during which the game blithers at the player, with player action locked out. This kills game flow.
GTA does not have a "story". It has subplots.
The future is AI-driven NPCs that can say and do something clever in response to events. It's not some voice-over "These are the Mountains of Dispair, which you must cross".
Google Search is great as a business. Not too expensive to run. No need to buy content. No need for a large customer support operation. Markets itself. Can support itself with minimal advertising. Great return on investment.
Everything else Google has done since then has fewer of those properties. That's the problem. Their excessive market cap forces them to "grow" into less profitable markets. That's the real problem.
Google should have taken on debt and gone private. They didn't need to raise money; they just needed to buy out the VCs. Then they could have stayed in their winning niche of "honest, non-obnoxious search".
Someone should write a book on how Sun blew it with client-side Java. They gave the product away and spent tens of millions marketing it. In a marketing sense, they succeeded; everybody has a Java interpreter on their desktop. Yet almost nobody uses them any more. Why?
Part of the problem is that Sun's top technical people, including Joy, never really figured out GUIs. Sun went through three bad in-house window systems before finally giving up and going with X-Windows. Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.
So Sun ended up as a "server company", the place SGI went after they failed to survive the transition to low-cost graphics.
Now, drive-by hacking
on
Wireless USB hubs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And exactly how does security on this thing work? Can you drive by
and connect to the USB hub? Now that's a good way to completely take over most machines.
The whole idea of "e-Ink" (which, in its present form, is just a layer on top of an LCD) is to improve contrast. If it doesn't do that, there's no point.
First, since the "do not call" list, outgoing call centers are a dying breed. And anyone who works in one now is working in a criminal enterprise.
If someone calls your inbound call center, it's because your web site didn't work for them. As web sites get better (not "Web 2.0", but really good order tracking), there's less work for the call center. Of course, many call centers are already offshored. So that's a dead-end job.
We also rounded up people of a certain ethnicity and tossed them into camps for a few years.
And we're still doing that.
There are people in Guantanamo that even the Army says haven't done anything against the US.
Even the supposed terrorists are kind of lame. We have bin Laden's driver. We have some guy who didn't make the cut for 9/11. We have a low-grade crook from Chicago who latched onto the Taliban. And those are the ones the public knows about. This isn't al-Queda's A-team. This is their awkward squad.
What Wired claims is a picture of the screen looks terrible. The text is dark grey on light grey. The bezel has more contrast than the screen. Standard LCDs look better. If that's "E-Ink", it's a nonstarter.
The US opened, and censored, international mail during WWII. This was no secret. The US was very open about it; letters were resealed with the marking"Opened By Censor."
Slashdot Mirror
As for the device itself, the manufacturer's link is this. It's just an oven with refrigeration capability and remote control. Here's the user manual (.pdf). With an EULA, no less.
Not only does this oven have an EULA. It has spyware. It phones home to the manufacturer.
Now that's a bit much for a home appliance.
Why this thing took ten years and NASA help to bring to market is a puzzle. It's less complicated than a high end washing machine. And far more expensive. This thing ought to be the size of a microwave oven and cost under $300.
If spyware developers really tried, they could probably develop spyware that could not be removed while running from the disk that contained the spyware. Removal tools would have to run from something like a bootable CD. Really aggressive spyware might limit the ability to boot from CD by patching the BIOS. I can see the day coming when you have to physically remove the hard drive and plug it into another machine to clean it up.
Generally, the TRA applies to all U.S. taxpayers (and their related companies). The TRA's reporting requirements apply to taxpayers' "operations" in, with, or related to boycotting countries or their nationals. Its penalties apply to those taxpayers with foreign tax credit, foreign subsidiary deferral, FSC (Foreign Sales Corporation), and IC-DISC (Interest Charge-Domestic International Sales Corporation) benefits.
An upgrade of the leaflet idea is actually in the document. There is a requirement for a precision-guided leaflet canister. (That's easy to do. The "smart bomb" kit, the Joint Direct Attack Munition, is actually a strap-on unit for dumb bombs. All that's needed is a compatible leaflet can.)
"This message has been delivered by a precision-guided leaflet bomb aimed at you. If this had been a real bomb, you would now be dead. If you want to surrender, drop your weapons and walk east. Have a nice day."
But the law isn't Israel-specific. It prohibits US persons or entities from complying with "unsanctioned foreign boycotts". It also prohibits any US person or entity from discriminating "against any corporation or other organization which is a United States person on the basis of the race, religion, sex, or national origin of any owner, officer, director, or employee of such corporation or organization".
So for Google's China unit to exclude the US branches of Falun Gong (a religious organization) or US branches of Taiwanese political groups (national origin discrimination) from their index seems to be a violation of US export regulations under 15 CFR 160.1.
Working through a foreign subsidiary doesn't get around these rules. That loophole has been plugged very thoroughly.
This could be a real problem for Google.
If you watch the XBox 360 core system auctions on eBay, anything priced over $350 just does not sell. The auctions with high reserves just scroll off, unsold. You can usually get $300, and you might be able to get $325. Above that, forget it. If you've got a garage full of the things, it's time to take what you can get.
Microsoft will probably have to relaunch the product at a lower price point, and lose even more money per unit.
How much longer will Microsoft's stockholders put up with this money drain? Microsoft lost money on every original XBox, so, hoping to make some money in round two, they increased the price for the XBox 360. But the customers aren't buying.
A good project: develop an open-source way to transmit and store presentations in a useful and navigatable form. Lectures need three streams - the audio, the presenter's face, and the graphics. The graphics need to be at much higher resolution, and should be sent as clean still images when possible. One output should be a web page, with thumbnails for the graphics and clickable audio segments. Then you can find something in the lecture when you need it.
The presentation should be run through a voice recognition system, to make the voice searchable. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough for search. Similarly, OCR the graphics and pull keywords from them.
Ed Catmull will head up the combined animation studio. Lassiter is higher up, responsible for not just the studio side but Imagineering (theme park rides), among other things.
"It wasn't clear Tuesday what role Walt Disney Feature Animation president David Stainton will play." Or, he's out, but may have a contract that gives him exit money anyway. Stainton was previously in charge of Disney's TV animation unit, DisneyToons, the unit that produced bad sequels (The Lion King 1 1/2, Lilo and Stitch 2), The Heffalump Movie, Mickey's Twice Upon A Christmas).
Several films in the Disney pipeline ("American Dog," "Meet the Robinsons" and "Rapunzel Unbraided.") will probably be killed. Disney Animation, in beautiful downtown Burbank (once called "Mauschwitz" in the industry) will live on. Probably as a CGI shop, though; they'd already moved away from 2D animation.
Technically, one big question is whether Disney Animation will go with the Pixar "all Renderman, all the time" procedural texture approach. Pixar's house style, 100% procedural textures, is what gives that "Pixar look". Everybody else uses pictures of real objects as textures, at least some of the time.
Are there any plans for an open-source Flash player for Firefox?
With that competitive threat removed, capitalism can be as nasty as it wants to be. Because it has monopoly power now.
That's the official message from Disney. See "Ice Princess". "A high-school bookworm transforms into a swan".
If there's too much "story" in a video game, you end up with what the industry derisvely calls a "track ride", where the player is locked onto a track and must ride through the storyline. Once that was necessary, because we couldn't build big free-play worlds. Today, it's not. We're also past the "cut-scene era", where the cut scenes had the good graphics while the game graphics looked like crap. That's been fixed.
It's hard for screenwriters to accept that they're not in charge of the plot. This is a constant source of friction between the story-oriented types from Hollywood and game developers. (And it's a nightmare to developers stuck writing a licensed game based on a major film. Fortunately, control is moving the other way. We're now seeing successful films based on games. We all have Angelina Jolie to thank for that.) Too much "story" in a game usually results in long periods during which the game blithers at the player, with player action locked out. This kills game flow.
GTA does not have a "story". It has subplots.
The future is AI-driven NPCs that can say and do something clever in response to events. It's not some voice-over "These are the Mountains of Dispair, which you must cross".
Everything else Google has done since then has fewer of those properties. That's the problem. Their excessive market cap forces them to "grow" into less profitable markets. That's the real problem.
Google should have taken on debt and gone private. They didn't need to raise money; they just needed to buy out the VCs. Then they could have stayed in their winning niche of "honest, non-obnoxious search".
Someone should write a book on how Sun blew it with client-side Java. They gave the product away and spent tens of millions marketing it. In a marketing sense, they succeeded; everybody has a Java interpreter on their desktop. Yet almost nobody uses them any more. Why?
Part of the problem is that Sun's top technical people, including Joy, never really figured out GUIs. Sun went through three bad in-house window systems before finally giving up and going with X-Windows. Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.
So Sun ended up as a "server company", the place SGI went after they failed to survive the transition to low-cost graphics.
And exactly how does security on this thing work? Can you drive by and connect to the USB hub? Now that's a good way to completely take over most machines.
Ah. That's a good solution. Thanks.
How about this? When Roland the Plogger posts a story, replace the link to his web site with his e-mail address.
The whole idea of "e-Ink" (which, in its present form, is just a layer on top of an LCD) is to improve contrast. If it doesn't do that, there's no point.
Self-sealing aircraft fuel tanks date back to WWII. This is a comparable level of self-repair: a material that expands to fill and seal gaps.
If someone calls your inbound call center, it's because your web site didn't work for them. As web sites get better (not "Web 2.0", but really good order tracking), there's less work for the call center. Of course, many call centers are already offshored. So that's a dead-end job.
And we're still doing that.
There are people in Guantanamo that even the Army says haven't done anything against the US.
Even the supposed terrorists are kind of lame. We have bin Laden's driver. We have some guy who didn't make the cut for 9/11. We have a low-grade crook from Chicago who latched onto the Taliban. And those are the ones the public knows about. This isn't al-Queda's A-team. This is their awkward squad.
What Wired claims is a picture of the screen looks terrible. The text is dark grey on light grey. The bezel has more contrast than the screen. Standard LCDs look better. If that's "E-Ink", it's a nonstarter.
The US opened, and censored, international mail during WWII. This was no secret. The US was very open about it; letters were resealed with the marking"Opened By Censor."
But, unlike Pixar. which is really run by Lassiter, running Disney is a full time job. Jobs would have to give up Apple, and move to LA.