What I can't work out is the motive for enforcing face recognition biometrics. Human beings are so good at face recognition and machines so bad at it that it's hard to believe anyone would propose such a system unless there was some other payoff, but I can;'t think what it might be.
I don't know about OpenBSD [...] but NetBSD and Linux do this all kernel-level, including transparently mixing multiple keyboard and mouse inputs, and don't need anything in user-space [...]. This is clearly the better way to approach USB.
Why?
Generally speaking everything which needs to be in the kernel is an indication of a kernel design failure. Ideally the kernel would be empty:-)
Given they are rakeing in truckloads of money, in a market (web advertising) which most people consider dead,they can't be pegging their prices down so very low.
Which enables us to answer the question of if it will improve service.
Of course it won't, Sony have a policy of `once we have your money we don't care anymore'. They wouldn't even tell me who their local service agent for my area was.
Actually, I'll have to contradict myself. I finally found their service agent by talking informally to a man in the Sony shop. So, to the extent a shop allows you to deal with real people rather than corporate phone-droids, it may improve service against the will of the company itself.
Why compare Sony stores with Apple and Dell? Sony is a conumer electronics firm with a small sideline in computers. The shops (which seem to have existed more or less everywhere except the US for years) are primarilly places to sell Expensive TVs and music gear to normal people, not Vaios to nerds.
Errrrmmm.. I hate to play devil's advocate here, but yeah.
As I read that he's not saying the paperclip is good, but that the context sensitive help is. I was thinking of the design meeting where they came up with the idea of a really anoying animated character, the one where they selected that fingernails-down-blackboard tapping noise etc.
As for the help, I don't use office much, but on my occasional scuffles with it it seems to always tell me how to do the thing I just tried which failed miserably.
It's absolutely amazing that the head of one the biggest corporations can publcily say something so totally and utterly stupid.
Don't you remember 650K is enough for anyone, no one needs to run more than one program at once, the intenet is just for a few accademics and geeks etc. etc.
Saying stupid things is what got M$ where they are today. The trick is that they are very clever at working out which idiotic statements will be swallowed whole by the PHBs.
Technically they are crap, in design terms they are crap (do you know anyone who thought the paperclip was good/useful?), but in marketing (is etupid lies for PHBs) they are absolutely the world's number one. If they were 1/10-th as good at design and implementation as they are at marketing, we would all be in computing heaven, all the competition (free and commercial) would be dead and we wouldn't miss them.
Uhm, TightVNC supports it. Just cut, or paste at whichever end you need. Works fine for me.
It's always a bit hit and miss for me, I end up using F8 every time, because I can't predict what will happen otherwise.
And emacs is hopeless. Even using F8 I can hardly ever manage to make a local and VNCed emacs swap text with cut and paste, I end up pasting into an xterm and copying from there.
If OS X were to move to x86, Apple would have to take into consideration the prospect of having it be run on literally millions of different combinations of hardware.
No, they could port it and specifically list supported hardware. Notice that the BSDs and Linux manage on a reasonable wide range of hardware. Maybe they squeeze a bit more performance out of the hardware they know, but that just means they could keep charging a premium for their kit.
The main reason Apple has always only supported their own weirdo hardware is that it gives them something concrete to sell. Apple can shift relatively few boxes and make enough money to keep going. If they went into direct conflict with Microsoft, selling an OS, they would have to shift up a few thousand gears, and persuade Microsoft to port Office to their competitor or else come up with a comeplete office replacement.
Apple's business model has always been, except for their brief fling with trying to live purely by taking people to court, to sell pretty, but technically so-so, hardware at a huge markup by creating software people want which will only work on that hardware. iTunes/iPod is just the latest instantiation of that model.
The real question about our government's swaddling security measures is whether they provide us more freedom than they take away.
Only if you value freedom above all else. For most people this is not the case.
Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that for most people freedom is not an end at all, but a means. The remaining few go off to live in caves up mountains in the hope they will be forgotten and so have as much freedom as the laws of physics etc will allow them.
Security is useless if it does not allow us freedom, the concept upon which this nation was founded.
You need to be more careful with your demonstrative pronouns.
Anyway, that nation was founded on the concept of limited freedom for land owning, white, male people.
[...] a country which promises freedom. Of course, based on your URL, you don't seem to live in one anyway.
I don't value promises from politicians as highly as you seem to.
But you are drifting from the point which was simply that there really is a trade off between liberty and security, there is no point wishing there wasn't. If you wish to live with the liberties of an adult, you have to let go of the security of childhood. If you want to regain that security you have to give up some of your liberty.
People know this and make their own choices. There is no point telling people they can't get security from the reduction of liberty, because they can see that their life is more secure than the hairy bloke living in the cave up the mountain.
The secret of living in civilisation is to live as if you had the liberty while taking the security when available. To sit at the front of the bus, you have to have both an attitude and a bus.
No. For instance, unless you were very unlucky you probably had much more security as a child than you do now because you had much less freedom.
Someone else having complete control of your financial life meant you had no money troubles, Someone else deciding where you were allowed to go meant you had better physical security.
And history shows that people have a lot more to fear from their own government than from external threats.
And most child abuse happens within the family. The problem is not that people don't gain security from the reduced freedom, but that the failure mode of that security is catastrophic.
So we get to pay tomorrow for a false sense of security today.
Why wait?:-)
Given where the dollar has been for the past few years, and the proportion of nerd-related goods which come from outside the US, you are paying for it right now. Not to mention what has happened to any dollar valued savings you might have.
One of the, er, nice things about markets is that when a government makes it clear they are financially incontinent, everything adjusts around them as people try and find the best place to stand to catch the money being pissed away.
All of these spam identification methods merely provide reliable authentication of the sender's domain.
What is the point of verifying that an email came from a web email service? Someone who spoofs one of these addresses is just making it more likely their email will be treated as spam.
The problem is email which claims to come from somewhere which we might presume sends non-spam mail. Telling me that `this really came from gmail/yahoo/hotmail and so may really be spam is not really very useful. Someone who spoofs one of these addresses is just making it more likely their email will be treated as spam.
if the segway becomes a device for the disabled, there can be no law to stop their usage on sidewalks, or even inside malls, as the American with Disabilities Act would prevent that.
By this logic, any disabled person with a specially adapted car would be legally entitled to drive it through crowds of pedestrians. Maybe I give the US legal system too much credit, but I find it hard to believe they have drifted quite that far from sanity.
What happens when we start to clone the "perfect" human for soldiers?
To the extent that it works (which is probably small, the environmental affects being what they are) we end up with an army all of whose soldiers have the same weaknesses.
It's like monocultures in agricultre, except people wil be explicitly looking for ways to kill off the clone.
Except for very special circumstances, evolution is hard on groups with low gentic diversity, and the selective pressure on a battlefield is quite intense.
Perhaps he thinks the improvements are not worth the hastle for a big operation.
The cost of freash yeast may be trivial compared to whatever operation you have to perform to un-bond spent yeast.
And speed is going to be less important for a big plant which is operating more or less as a pipeline, compared to a small operation doing batches of different products.
Slashdot Mirror
And crap (well even more crap than the usual crapulatity of biometrics) biometrics at that. BBC report about tests of the system.
What I can't work out is the motive for enforcing face recognition biometrics. Human beings are so good at face recognition and machines so bad at it that it's hard to believe anyone would propose such a system unless there was some other payoff, but I can;'t think what it might be.
Why?
Generally speaking everything which needs to be in the kernel is an indication of a kernel design failure. Ideally the kernel would be empty:-)
Given they are rakeing in truckloads of money, in a market (web advertising) which most people consider dead,they can't be pegging their prices down so very low.
Which enables us to answer the question of if it will improve service.
Of course it won't, Sony have a policy of `once we have your money we don't care anymore'. They wouldn't even tell me who their local service agent for my area was.
Actually, I'll have to contradict myself. I finally found their service agent by talking informally to a man in the Sony shop. So, to the extent a shop allows you to deal with real people rather than corporate phone-droids, it may improve service against the will of the company itself.
Why compare Sony stores with Apple and Dell? Sony is a conumer electronics firm with a small sideline in computers. The shops (which seem to have existed more or less everywhere except the US for years) are primarilly places to sell Expensive TVs and music gear to normal people, not Vaios to nerds.
As I read that he's not saying the paperclip is good, but that the context sensitive help is. I was thinking of the design meeting where they came up with the idea of a really anoying animated character, the one where they selected that fingernails-down-blackboard tapping noise etc.
As for the help, I don't use office much, but on my occasional scuffles with it it seems to always tell me how to do the thing I just tried which failed miserably.
Don't you remember 650K is enough for anyone, no one needs to run more than one program at once, the intenet is just for a few accademics and geeks etc. etc.
Saying stupid things is what got M$ where they are today. The trick is that they are very clever at working out which idiotic statements will be swallowed whole by the PHBs.
Technically they are crap, in design terms they are crap (do you know anyone who thought the paperclip was good/useful?), but in marketing (is etupid lies for PHBs) they are absolutely the world's number one. If they were 1/10-th as good at design and implementation as they are at marketing, we would all be in computing heaven, all the competition (free and commercial) would be dead and we wouldn't miss them.
It's always a bit hit and miss for me, I end up using F8 every time, because I can't predict what will happen otherwise.
And emacs is hopeless. Even using F8 I can hardly ever manage to make a local and VNCed emacs swap text with cut and paste, I end up pasting into an xterm and copying from there.
No, they could port it and specifically list supported hardware. Notice that the BSDs and Linux manage on a reasonable wide range of hardware. Maybe they squeeze a bit more performance out of the hardware they know, but that just means they could keep charging a premium for their kit.
The main reason Apple has always only supported their own weirdo hardware is that it gives them something concrete to sell. Apple can shift relatively few boxes and make enough money to keep going. If they went into direct conflict with Microsoft, selling an OS, they would have to shift up a few thousand gears, and persuade Microsoft to port Office to their competitor or else come up with a comeplete office replacement.
Apple's business model has always been, except for their brief fling with trying to live purely by taking people to court, to sell pretty, but technically so-so, hardware at a huge markup by creating software people want which will only work on that hardware. iTunes/iPod is just the latest instantiation of that model.
Only if you value freedom above all else. For most people this is not the case.
Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that for most people freedom is not an end at all, but a means. The remaining few go off to live in caves up mountains in the hope they will be forgotten and so have as much freedom as the laws of physics etc will allow them.
Security is useless if it does not allow us freedom, the concept upon which this nation was founded.
You need to be more careful with your demonstrative pronouns.
Anyway, that nation was founded on the concept of limited freedom for land owning, white, male people.
[...] a country which promises freedom. Of course, based on your URL, you don't seem to live in one anyway.
I don't value promises from politicians as highly as you seem to.
But you are drifting from the point which was simply that there really is a trade off between liberty and security, there is no point wishing there wasn't. If you wish to live with the liberties of an adult, you have to let go of the security of childhood. If you want to regain that security you have to give up some of your liberty. People know this and make their own choices. There is no point telling people they can't get security from the reduction of liberty, because they can see that their life is more secure than the hairy bloke living in the cave up the mountain.
The secret of living in civilisation is to live as if you had the liberty while taking the security when available. To sit at the front of the bus, you have to have both an attitude and a bus.
No, it was the initial spike when slimeballs realised they could have a mail sending account which was not connected back to them.
As I say, I'm quite willing to believe things have changed, after all I'd never see it change since I just throw all that mail away.
No. For instance, unless you were very unlucky you probably had much more security as a child than you do now because you had much less freedom.
Someone else having complete control of your financial life meant you had no money troubles, Someone else deciding where you were allowed to go meant you had better physical security.
And history shows that people have a lot more to fear from their own government than from external threats.
And most child abuse happens within the family. The problem is not that people don't gain security from the reduced freedom, but that the failure mode of that security is catastrophic.
Maybe I'm showing my age, in that I remember the huge increases of spam andother net abuse which came with the introduction of these services.
I presume I have had some real mail from someone at one of these addresses sometime in the years since, but I can't remember it...
Why wait?:-)
Given where the dollar has been for the past few years, and the proportion of nerd-related goods which come from outside the US, you are paying for it right now. Not to mention what has happened to any dollar valued savings you might have.
One of the, er, nice things about markets is that when a government makes it clear they are financially incontinent, everything adjusts around them as people try and find the best place to stand to catch the money being pissed away.
What to expect when your neighbour says he's having satelite installed.
Kryton: I think we just encountered the middle of this conversation.
What is the point of verifying that an email came from a web email service? Someone who spoofs one of these addresses is just making it more likely their email will be treated as spam.
The problem is email which claims to come from somewhere which we might presume sends non-spam mail. Telling me that `this really came from gmail/yahoo/hotmail and so may really be spam is not really very useful. Someone who spoofs one of these addresses is just making it more likely their email will be treated as spam.
None of which would make refusing to use a wheelchair due to pride sane.
By this logic, any disabled person with a specially adapted car would be legally entitled to drive it through crowds of pedestrians. Maybe I give the US legal system too much credit, but I find it hard to believe they have drifted quite that far from sanity.
Weird.
Supermarkets.
You defect by walking out without paying, they defect by putting water rather than beer in the bottle.
To the extent that it works (which is probably small, the environmental affects being what they are) we end up with an army all of whose soldiers have the same weaknesses.
It's like monocultures in agricultre, except people wil be explicitly looking for ways to kill off the clone.
Except for very special circumstances, evolution is hard on groups with low gentic diversity, and the selective pressure on a battlefield is quite intense.
Perhaps he thinks the improvements are not worth the hastle for a big operation.
The cost of freash yeast may be trivial compared to whatever operation you have to perform to un-bond spent yeast.
And speed is going to be less important for a big plant which is operating more or less as a pipeline, compared to a small operation doing batches of different products.
I can't wait to include some INTERCAL modules in our applications. Sometimes perl is far to maintainable.
Maybe he's a dolphin.