I normally avoid books where some other author steps in and writes a sequel/prequel to a (no pun intended) foundational series, but the mid-1990s trilogy of Caliban, Inferno, & Utopia by Roger MacBride Allen was an interesting exploration of what effect 3-law robots have on human society, and how a different set of laws might impact the "lives" of robots and the humans they interact with.
As I read the headline, "Robotic Cannon Loses Control," I immediately thought of the droids in Robocop. I was all set to make a funny post, if someone hadn't already. Then I got to the end: "Kills 9." And suddenly it wasn't funny anymore.
It's one thing to make jokes about things going wrong. It's another thing to make jokes about people dying. I'd like to think that the people who made those comments, or modded them up, only skimmed the headline and summary. But I can't quite convince myself.
It sounds like it wasn't firing "deliberately," more like something got stuck. Like a machine gun with its trigger stuck on "fire." The question being, was it a mechanical failure, or did the software get stuck in "shoot" mode?
Once it's stuck in a loop, you're past the point where friend-or-foe recognition, or even aiming, is going to help.
Some of them get left in, like the "Do not eat iPod shuffle" one.
That has to be my favorite example of joke/filler text that made it to a release, followed by Firefox's "Cookies are delicious delicacies." That one was so popular, someone wrote an extension to put it back in.
Though I have to admit, the hundreds of website legal disclaimers including the phrase, "you actually came to this page" are hard to beat.
Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) is not a "service pack" for Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4) any more than Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1) was a service pack for Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0). Version numbering schemes don't always mean the same thing from company to company or product to product, or even make sense at all.
That said, you do have a point: I've noticed myself that when a new version is released of Mac OS, or any Linux distro that I use, my first inclination is to buy it or download it, then do the upgrade when I have the time. With Windows, my first inclination is to sit it out and wait for the first service pack. I've been trying to figure out why that is, and the best I can come up with is that while bugs tend to slip through on most OS releases (and get fixed via updates over the next few weeks), Windows often seems to have issues that aren't just bugs to fix, but design issues that need to be changed... and therefore need to wait for a service pack, rather than just a hotfix.
Of course, if you really want to see Apple fans griping about giving money to Apple, go back a couple of weeks and look at the comments on the iPhone price reduction. Apple users aren't immune to the "but I just bought it for $X!" phenomenon -- there are just some things they're willing to pay for.
2 years ago I bought the "family pack" of Tiger, which allows you to install on up to 5 machines in the same household. We only had 2 Macs, but at $199 it was still cheaper than buying 2 copies of the single-license OS. As near as I can tell, the only thing that made the 5-license box different from the 1-license box was a sticker and a 1-paragraph license addendum. Other than that, there was no reference to it being a multi-license pack anywhere, including on the DVD itself.
No special installer, no licence keys to enter, no product activation, just a piece of paper that says, "Yes, you can install this on more than one computer."
It was nice to see that they were willing to trust their users. Though I suppose since it'll only run on their hardware, they're a bit less concerned with people pirating the operating system.
Suppose your a terrorist sympathiser, having done no bad stuff yourself, just understanding why they did it, you bet your ass the FBI would be knocking.
Not to mention that understanding doesn't imply sympathising. You can understand someone's motivations without agreeing with them. Sorry for going off-topic, but that's one of those memes that really annoys me, just like the idea that explanations are nothing more than excuses.
Actually, it's fairly standard for any sort of behavioral study. People forget things, people don't notice things, people do things without thinking about them. Sometimes people even lie -- they don't want to admit they didn't notice something, or forgot to do something, or did something they weren't supposed to. (Consider any sex-related survey: some people will under-report out of embarrassment, while others will over-report in order to brag).
You'll always get more accurate data if you can track what someone is actually doing than if you rely on them to tell you after the fact what they did. My first thought when I saw the summary was usability studies, where eye-tracking and click-tracking tell you more than asking the user to report what they saw and did. As it turns out, that's what the article's talking about, too.
I don't know about others, but I certainly don't put a lot of stock in human memory past a certain point. It's like an analog signal and everytime we re-remember something, we write a new record down that may introduce random errors (perhaps associations) that shouldn't be there.
I tend to look at it in terms of fractal compression. Instead of storing exactly what happened as data, you store an algorithm that approximates it. Then when you think back and remember the event, your brain reconstructs it from those parameters. If the algorithm wasn't quite right, or if the parameters get altered (person A did something, but you reconstruct the memory with person B instead), you remember it incorrectly.
This movement says that blogging is an end in itself; that writing about some injustice on the Internet will somehow magically make the injustice go away. If they were calling for bloggers to organize some kind of protest movement (much like the Committees of Correspondence organized protest against the British) that'd be different.
Not exactly. They have 3 ways to participate:
Post on your blog relating to the environment on Blog Action Day
Donate your days earnings to an environmental charity
Promote Blog Action Day around the web
#1 and #3 are about mobilizing people through the web. Not just to spew words into the ether, but to trigger discussion. #2 is about getting stuff done.
They don't claim that writing will magically solve the problems, they claim that writing will get people talking about the problems, which (one hopes) will eventually lead to more action.
In a way, it's a lot like the Star Count that's been running for the last 2 weeks. The idea isn't to make changes directly, it's to get people interested and get them thinking about the issue.
Re:Flaming *in* the post?
on
Blog Action Day
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The irony is that it effectively makes this article a blog post by Taco about the submitter's statement.
The environment does effect everyone. That doesn't change, however, the fact that it is of minimal consequence when compared to things like war. War effects people more directly.
Considering how many wars are fought over resources like arable land, water, oil, etc., that availability of said resources is an aspect of the environment, and that use of those resources impacts the environment (desertification, pollution, etc.)... maybe the topics aren't as unrelated as you think?
How is any of that relevant to the trope that regular characters are all-but guaranteed to make it through the episode, but extras have a good chance of dying horribly?
The problem with making a Star Trek Babies movie is that there is absolutely NO THREAT to any of the characters.
And this is different from a typical episodic series how?
You don't watch a show like Star Trek to see how things change from the beginning of the season to the end, and worry about who's going to survive. That's for arc-driven shows like Lost, Heroes, etc. You don't watch it to see whether the heroes are going to succeed, you watch it to see how they succeed.
This is the show that gave us the term, "red shirt," after all.
Yeah, and they cast a human as Spock! Given how underrepresented Vulcans are in the entertainment industry (I challenge you to name one, just one Oscar winner), it's only logical that they should cast a full Vulcan in that role!
You're thinking of either the desktop version of Opera, or Opera Mini, both of which are free. The GP was talking about Opera Mobile, which does indeed cost US $24.
If your phone has Java support, you could also try Opera Mini. It's a different approach that uses a thin client and a proxy (so it even works on low-end phones, as long as they have Java and a data plan that allows Internet access)...and it's free, so there's no risk of a trial running out.
No - for every recepient that they reject, they are, in effect, blocking those recipient from receiving the intended message.
The proper reaction of a sending server to a temporary error is to try again. Per that same RFC, the server should be treating '552 too many recipients' as a temporary error.
Yahoo does the same thing at 30 recipients, though they issue the more proper 452 error code. The first 30 recipients at Yahoo get the message, then the sending server retransmits to the remaining addresses.
Let's look at that phrasing: "Rejection of messages (for excessive recipients) with fewer than 100 RCPT commands is a violation of this specification." (emphasis added).
Are they rejecting messages, or are they rejecting recipients?
According to this, they're rejecting recipients with an obvious "try this again" code. Really that should be 452, not 552, but that same RFC 2821 says that senders should treat a 552 as temporary:
RFC 821 [30] incorrectly listed the error where an SMTP server
exhausts its implementation limit on the number of RCPT commands
("too many recipients") as having reply code 552. The correct reply
code for this condition is 452. Clients SHOULD treat a 552 code in
this case as a temporary, rather than permanent
So whatever sending server runs into these limits should retransmit the message to the remaining recipients on the next queue run. Okay, it'll only reach 10 recipients at a time, which is annoying. It shouldn't be kicking back the error to the client.
Really, assuming Microsoft has actually put this limit in place, the only thing I can see that's wrong, from a practical standpoint, is using the outdated 552 code instead of the more specific 452 -- but that same RFC people are waving around says that their servers should treat it as temporary anyway.
The more fully-capable mobile browsers are out there, the less we need to worry about a return to the bad old days when people designed one version of a site for Netscape and another version for Internet Explorer, then let one version bitrot. We've already seen the first rumblings of iPhone-only sites.
A mobile web with Opera, Firefox and Safari? It'll be a lot harder to justify picking one and locking out the rest.
Anyone else think that "Compare prices on Mozilla" is an odd choice to appear in the list of Related Links?
"Let's see, you can get it from this site for $0. But this one is offering it for $0. Or you could go over here and get it for $0, but they charge $0 for shipping. Hmm, I think I'll go with the place selling it for $29.95."
I'll bet that at the sluggish rate Gecko development proceeds, by the time the mobile version appears, mobile devices will have almost the power of today's stationary hardware.
A couple of years ago, I tried googling my name and a co-worker's name. For both, there was a sponsored link to eBay with the caption 'buy {name}! Get {name} on eBay!'
I had that same experience once, looking for the phrase, "nigerian scam". It brought up this convenient advertisement:
Nigerian Scam
Looking for Nigerian Scam?
Find exactly what you want today.
www.eBay.com
I found that "419 scam" also displayed one of the ads, but "advance fee fraud" did not. And when I searched for "random stuff," eBay claimed they had that too!
Just having alpha PNG without hacks is a huge win for IE7. And generally, I find I have to tweak less for IE7 than I do for IE6. That said, I've had sites which worked perfectly in Firefox, Opera and Safari, but broke horribly in both IE6 and IE7 -- in different ways.
Slashdot Mirror
I normally avoid books where some other author steps in and writes a sequel/prequel to a (no pun intended) foundational series, but the mid-1990s trilogy of Caliban, Inferno, & Utopia by Roger MacBride Allen was an interesting exploration of what effect 3-law robots have on human society, and how a different set of laws might impact the "lives" of robots and the humans they interact with.
As I read the headline, "Robotic Cannon Loses Control," I immediately thought of the droids in Robocop. I was all set to make a funny post, if someone hadn't already. Then I got to the end: "Kills 9." And suddenly it wasn't funny anymore.
It's one thing to make jokes about things going wrong. It's another thing to make jokes about people dying. I'd like to think that the people who made those comments, or modded them up, only skimmed the headline and summary. But I can't quite convince myself.
It sounds like it wasn't firing "deliberately," more like something got stuck. Like a machine gun with its trigger stuck on "fire." The question being, was it a mechanical failure, or did the software get stuck in "shoot" mode?
Once it's stuck in a loop, you're past the point where friend-or-foe recognition, or even aiming, is going to help.
That has to be my favorite example of joke/filler text that made it to a release, followed by Firefox's "Cookies are delicious delicacies." That one was so popular, someone wrote an extension to put it back in.
Though I have to admit, the hundreds of website legal disclaimers including the phrase, "you actually came to this page" are hard to beat.
Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) is not a "service pack" for Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4) any more than Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1) was a service pack for Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0). Version numbering schemes don't always mean the same thing from company to company or product to product, or even make sense at all.
That said, you do have a point: I've noticed myself that when a new version is released of Mac OS, or any Linux distro that I use, my first inclination is to buy it or download it, then do the upgrade when I have the time. With Windows, my first inclination is to sit it out and wait for the first service pack. I've been trying to figure out why that is, and the best I can come up with is that while bugs tend to slip through on most OS releases (and get fixed via updates over the next few weeks), Windows often seems to have issues that aren't just bugs to fix, but design issues that need to be changed... and therefore need to wait for a service pack, rather than just a hotfix.
Of course, if you really want to see Apple fans griping about giving money to Apple, go back a couple of weeks and look at the comments on the iPhone price reduction. Apple users aren't immune to the "but I just bought it for $X!" phenomenon -- there are just some things they're willing to pay for.
2 years ago I bought the "family pack" of Tiger, which allows you to install on up to 5 machines in the same household. We only had 2 Macs, but at $199 it was still cheaper than buying 2 copies of the single-license OS. As near as I can tell, the only thing that made the 5-license box different from the 1-license box was a sticker and a 1-paragraph license addendum. Other than that, there was no reference to it being a multi-license pack anywhere, including on the DVD itself.
No special installer, no licence keys to enter, no product activation, just a piece of paper that says, "Yes, you can install this on more than one computer."
It was nice to see that they were willing to trust their users. Though I suppose since it'll only run on their hardware, they're a bit less concerned with people pirating the operating system.
Not to mention that understanding doesn't imply sympathising. You can understand someone's motivations without agreeing with them. Sorry for going off-topic, but that's one of those memes that really annoys me, just like the idea that explanations are nothing more than excuses.
Or one of the classics:
Brain A is not a system brain. Abort, Retry, Sleep?
Actually, it's fairly standard for any sort of behavioral study. People forget things, people don't notice things, people do things without thinking about them. Sometimes people even lie -- they don't want to admit they didn't notice something, or forgot to do something, or did something they weren't supposed to. (Consider any sex-related survey: some people will under-report out of embarrassment, while others will over-report in order to brag).
You'll always get more accurate data if you can track what someone is actually doing than if you rely on them to tell you after the fact what they did. My first thought when I saw the summary was usability studies, where eye-tracking and click-tracking tell you more than asking the user to report what they saw and did. As it turns out, that's what the article's talking about, too.
I tend to look at it in terms of fractal compression. Instead of storing exactly what happened as data, you store an algorithm that approximates it. Then when you think back and remember the event, your brain reconstructs it from those parameters. If the algorithm wasn't quite right, or if the parameters get altered (person A did something, but you reconstruct the memory with person B instead), you remember it incorrectly.
Not exactly. They have 3 ways to participate:
#1 and #3 are about mobilizing people through the web. Not just to spew words into the ether, but to trigger discussion. #2 is about getting stuff done.
They don't claim that writing will magically solve the problems, they claim that writing will get people talking about the problems, which (one hopes) will eventually lead to more action.
In a way, it's a lot like the Star Count that's been running for the last 2 weeks. The idea isn't to make changes directly, it's to get people interested and get them thinking about the issue.
The irony is that it effectively makes this article a blog post by Taco about the submitter's statement.
Considering how many wars are fought over resources like arable land, water, oil, etc., that availability of said resources is an aspect of the environment, and that use of those resources impacts the environment (desertification, pollution, etc.)... maybe the topics aren't as unrelated as you think?
How is any of that relevant to the trope that regular characters are all-but guaranteed to make it through the episode, but extras have a good chance of dying horribly?
And this is different from a typical episodic series how?
You don't watch a show like Star Trek to see how things change from the beginning of the season to the end, and worry about who's going to survive. That's for arc-driven shows like Lost, Heroes, etc. You don't watch it to see whether the heroes are going to succeed, you watch it to see how they succeed.
This is the show that gave us the term, "red shirt," after all.
Yeah, and they cast a human as Spock! Given how underrepresented Vulcans are in the entertainment industry (I challenge you to name one, just one Oscar winner), it's only logical that they should cast a full Vulcan in that role!
You're thinking of either the desktop version of Opera, or Opera Mini, both of which are free. The GP was talking about Opera Mobile, which does indeed cost US $24.
If your phone has Java support, you could also try Opera Mini. It's a different approach that uses a thin client and a proxy (so it even works on low-end phones, as long as they have Java and a data plan that allows Internet access)...and it's free, so there's no risk of a trial running out.
The proper reaction of a sending server to a temporary error is to try again. Per that same RFC, the server should be treating '552 too many recipients' as a temporary error.
Yahoo does the same thing at 30 recipients, though they issue the more proper 452 error code. The first 30 recipients at Yahoo get the message, then the sending server retransmits to the remaining addresses.
Let's look at that phrasing: "Rejection of messages (for excessive recipients) with fewer than 100 RCPT commands is a violation of this specification." (emphasis added).
Are they rejecting messages, or are they rejecting recipients?
According to this, they're rejecting recipients with an obvious "try this again" code. Really that should be 452, not 552, but that same RFC 2821 says that senders should treat a 552 as temporary:
So whatever sending server runs into these limits should retransmit the message to the remaining recipients on the next queue run. Okay, it'll only reach 10 recipients at a time, which is annoying. It shouldn't be kicking back the error to the client.
Really, assuming Microsoft has actually put this limit in place, the only thing I can see that's wrong, from a practical standpoint, is using the outdated 552 code instead of the more specific 452 -- but that same RFC people are waving around says that their servers should treat it as temporary anyway.
Am I missing something?
The more fully-capable mobile browsers are out there, the less we need to worry about a return to the bad old days when people designed one version of a site for Netscape and another version for Internet Explorer, then let one version bitrot. We've already seen the first rumblings of iPhone-only sites.
A mobile web with Opera, Firefox and Safari? It'll be a lot harder to justify picking one and locking out the rest.
Anyone else think that "Compare prices on Mozilla" is an odd choice to appear in the list of Related Links?
"Let's see, you can get it from this site for $0. But this one is offering it for $0. Or you could go over here and get it for $0, but they charge $0 for shipping. Hmm, I think I'll go with the place selling it for $29.95."
Wow! Someone who actually read the article!
I had that same experience once, looking for the phrase, "nigerian scam". It brought up this convenient advertisement:
I found that "419 scam" also displayed one of the ads, but "advance fee fraud" did not. And when I searched for "random stuff," eBay claimed they had that too!
Just having alpha PNG without hacks is a huge win for IE7. And generally, I find I have to tweak less for IE7 than I do for IE6. That said, I've had sites which worked perfectly in Firefox, Opera and Safari, but broke horribly in both IE6 and IE7 -- in different ways.