To all the people out there who say "it's the message that's important, not the medium", I say 2 things:
Remember that next time someone gives you a really crappy gift, and tells you "it's the thought that counts";-)
Consider it as a comms link. If the receiver is getting errors, it either requests resends or exerts extra effort reconstructing the data by error-correction.
And to expand on the second point - if your comms link is running errors all the time, and you have alternate access to an error-free link, would you stick with the first link even if the errors were completely recoverable?
When you see somethng choc-full-o-spelling-errors, it is probably because there's no built-in spelling checker.
Not in my workplace...
Take a look at the next Powerpoint or Word document that crosses your desk from higher up the management food chain, and note all the spelling mistakes. Or, more exactly, not mistakes as much as "the grammar & spellchecker is having trouble finding its own arse again, so keeps suggesting "there" for their/they're".
It's a weird cross between Pavlovian behaviour and intellectual surrender - people see the little red squiggle underneath something they've typed, and just assume that the computer must be right. So they right-click, let the checker do its thing, and continue on believing that Computer Knows Best.
Meanwhile, they're creating documents that sometimes verge on the unreadable, and are certainly well into the domain of the incomprehensible...
I'd like to go on record as saying I hate the x86 architecture.
Oh, the 8086/8088 was fantastic - in a "look at what can be done with a box of leftover commodity bits" way. An absolutely magnificent testimony to Rube Goldberg engineering. The problem is, the x86 world has been paying for that ever since...
Just look at all the kludges, workarounds, and add-ons that have been made to get around the design limitations of that first hardware, many of which are still with us today. LIMS/EMS. Bank switching. Extended mode switching. Too few DMA channels. Too few hardware IRQs. An insane memory map. The list goes on.
The IBM-PC architecture should have been dumped years ago, when the 386 came out. Forget the legacy 8086 design, start from scratch and take advantage of the new chip that did things properly. Instead, the PC world has been stuck in a rut for 20 years, building machines & OSs which resemble a giant game of Mousetrap more than a logical and sane evolution of design.
Subnet, maybe. Or maybe non-USian subnets, if your of the paranoid ilk. I'm a subscriber, but not a frequent poster - if I posted frequently, I'd have to start worrying about karma, mod points, and trivial willy-waving shit like that...
No screenshot, but it's the standard "image containing a string with background noise to defeat OCR" that you have to type in a textarea to confirm you're not a bot. There's a name for it, which I've never bothered to remember.
Slashdot seems to have started using it recently, possibly because there's precious few other ways of distinguishing the average/. poster from the current level of machine AI...
So, why do you ask about whats this anti-bot string stuff you have been seeing?;-)
It seems many of us are simply predisposed to attack anyone whose ideology is different from ours. Without thought.
And you're still wondering why the parent was modded "Insightful"?
To an outsider, it looks like your country is rapidly approaching the time when *everybodys* ideology differs from that of the administration. Or, at least, the time when the administration can claim it of anybody they like.
You're dead right, though, about "shrill responses". It makes for nice, simple, easy-to-win arguments that fit nicely into a 30-second soundbite or doorstop interview.
As an amusing aside, the anti-bot string I had to type to post this contains WMD...
In Australia, however, it is universally assumed that advertised prices include all taxes.
Not just assumed - if you're selling retail, it's the law. The advertised price must be the final selling price, inclusive of tax.
The simple solution is to require any sales that are subject to GST to have a note alongside the price sayng "plus 10% GST to Australian shipping addresses" or something.
No, the simple solution is to do exactly as the law requires, and always has since GST was introduced. If you're selling retail, your advertised price is your selling price.
This "policy" is nothing more than eBay enforcing the rules it always should have. All because some unscrupulous cretins were defrauding people by saying "oh, by the way, that's plus GST" *after the sale* in order to skim an extra 10% for themselves...
BTW, I own an '05 Mazda 3 - a car whose earlier models were well known to have a few electronic oddities. Like the "check engine" light coming on and, if ignored, the car eventually stopping - because the fuel cap was loose...
Farmers used to be able to fix most mechanical beasts often with the use of bailing wire.... One of the sensors went bad and wouldn't allow the engine to start.
As a person with some experience on older car electronics, and a passing familiarity with both old and new farm machinery, I disagree. There's not a lot of difference; just a matter of percieved complexity.
Let's say your old JD doesn't start, and after farnarkling around you figure the rail pressure pump has died. You bypass it so you're running on the fuel pump only, close off or restrict the return line, and get it running well enough to finish off what you're doing and drive it back to the shed.
Or your new JD doesn't start, and the engine light flashing X times tells you the rail pressure sensor has died. You unplug the sensor and the thing runs in "limp home" mode well enough to finish off that paddock and drive back to the shed.
What I'm getting at is neither is complicated - just that people think the latter is complicated because of the oogy-boogy "electronics". People are used to how mechanical stuff works and behaves and haven't (yet) learnt that mostly the electronics is really no more complicated.
The steering / accelerator "drive-by-wire" stuff I've seen is not much nore complicated either. I've only seen a couple of examples of both, but they've all been set up so that there _is_ a mechanical connection there - so when the smarts fails, you can still drive it home. The steering units worked on a variable pressure pump; when the pump failed it was just like a normal power steering failure. And the electronic throttle controls had had cable backups - either a slack direct cble, or an electric clutch arrangement.
The only thing I could think of that'd be a problem is a total ignition ECU failure - something I've not seen since the old Bosch / GM Jetronic units, which were basically complicated electronic points - or the injector controller in a diesel. Which are the electronic equivalent of a coil/ distributor or timing chain failure i.e. something you can't "patch up" in the field anyway.
So "drive-by-wire", implying an electrical-only connection, is something of a misnomer - but it sounds good to the marketing people...
People complain about Star Wars episodes not being highbrow enough, or adult enough, or complex enough, etc.
No, people complain about them not being good enough. Or even good.
Star Wars is supposed to be popcorn...
Yeah - uncooked popcorn. Hard to swallow, impossible to digest, swallowing it all makes you sick, and it looks the same on the way out as it did on the way in.
How soon we forget Linksys, Belkin, et al. In fact, do a google search for <insert commodity hardware manufacturer> +"GPL violation" and see many come up...
Re:Not a cron replacement, a init replacement
on
Does launchd Beat cron?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
XML sucks for anything that humans might want to edit
However, it's pretty damned good for the times where you want a machine to parse your config files and present them in a nice GUI format.
Which is exactly what Apple - and the average user - wants. Hell, it's also exactly what you want for your X apps, and what you want for those 90% of times when you're configuring non-graphics apps and services through X, a web interface, or even a command-line configuration app.
The only time it falls down is when editing configuration files manually - and even then, it's still parsable by the human brain.
Now, I'm no XML fanboy. But honestly, when was the last time you edited anything more than the most trivial.ini or.cfg file by hand? Your MTA? Apache? Samba? BIND? Crontab? Inetd? Initd? IPFW/PF? If you're like me, you did it by hand-editing the first few times so you knew what was going on; since then you've used Webmin or Gnome/KDE's control-panel-like apps.
Except that the Digital Agenda Act was passed in Sept 200, about 4 years before the FTA was passed, or about 3 years before the FTA was mooted.
From the link: "The CADA introduces a new exception to the exclusive right of reproduction for temporary reproductions made as part of the technical process of making a communication."
Uh, all those DVB-T DVD rips of Dr Who and Bathurst in my library are part of a communication I'm sending. Yeah! To my great-great grandchildren...
And bittorrent is just my RAID (Redundant Array of Idiotic Downloaders) storage...
Please take the sentence above and insert "the web" where "podcasting" is currently placed. You could say much the same thing about the web lacking a financial strategy for content-oriented sites, especially back in 1999. But it evolved, at least somewhat. The same thing will happen to podcasts.
Oh. So you mean intrusive advertising, self-selecting cliques walling themselves off, spam, and porn. Lots of porn.
Whoopee! Can't. Wait...
If 20 million people soon do most of their "radio" listening by podcast...
Q: What if peanut butter were made out of people? A: Then it wouldn't be called peanut butter anymore...
Or, "podcasting!=radio".
A group of us used to do something very similar to "podcasting" 20+ years ago when I was at school, except back then we called it "sharing stupid mix tapes". A less catchy name, I admit. It involved making tapes of stuff off the radio, songs from our record collections, dumb comedy skits from local TV & radio, and even dumber stuff we did ourselves, and jamming it in some unsuspecting schmucks walkman. This stuff filtered through the whole school, with the best bits even making it on to other people's compilations.
So you see, "podcasting" is just another waffle iron with a 'phone attached. Now get off'f the danged grass, you kids!
Remember kids, cap 'em & burn 'em when you see 'em - before Lucas releases the "enhanced" edition on DVD, and you're all crying because he refuses to release the originals...
As others have pointed out, it not about the quality - it's about freeing up spectrum.
But I've really got to question how people could watch TV in the US. I mean, I've seen good quality off-the-wire NTSC, and compared to PAL it's shit! Forget the lower resolution of NTSC - the colour & phasing problems are enough to put me off it.
Luckily I'm in Australia, where we have (a) PAL 720x576 SD digital TV, with (b) much higher bandwidth - up to 7Mbps - than most of the rest of the PAL world. Given that some stuff still looks shit at 6 or 7Mbps, I pity our cousins in great Britain with their 3 or 4 Mbps "service".
(Interestingly enough, people in Australia have to pay to watch such low-bitrate 3 or 4Mbps digital transmissions. It's called "Foxtel"...)
It's 2008. I have a DTV set top box, and I love it. But yeah, I think the government will extend the cut off line, unfortunately. It's really worth having. I get a second ABC channel, a dedicated SBS world news channel, on screen TV guide, channel operated TV guide channels, digital radio, and a whole host of strange channels offered by Channel 44. In addition, as soon as we free up the spectrum by getting rid of analogue tv, the sooner we can use it for terrestrial digital radio. A half decent set top box here costs about $AUD150 (about $US220), but a good one is about $AUD250.
It's 2004. I have a DTV set top box, and I love it. I think the government should mandate that all new TVs sold should have DVB-T tuners, except for a few last analogue areas - but they don't. I get a second ABC channel; mostly repeats of the main ABC channel and lately, "Bounty Hamster" on the hour every hour (not that I'm complaining about that;-). I also get a dedicated SBS news channel in various languages I can't understand (but those chinese & taiwanese newsreaders are hot!) - but I'd give both those extras away for a full 7-day EIT program guide. Hell, I'd give SBS World News away if I could just have timely and accurate Now & Next information, rather than the "programmed by a drooling cretin two weeks ago, never updated, and now we're going to run 20 minutes over time then show a completely different program to the one advertised" one we have now.
Oh, a half-decent set-top box costs ~AU$150, and a good twin-tuner standard def DVB-T HDD recorder with PC connectivity costs ~AU$800. The tools to download programs to the PC, demux / edit, and burn to DVD are generally free;-)
Meanwhile, some users think that there should be NO ads on the internet. They think that it's their right to access their favorite sites for free and they shouldn't be bothered with the ads that actually pay for the site to exist.
You want me to visit your site? To learn about your product, service, opinion, hobby, fetish, whatever?
Then you pay for it.
There are very few exceptions to this rule, mainly extremely specific service-oriented sites e.g. Lexis-Nexis, Britannica, Mercks. These are the sort of things you'd be paying a subscription or per-use fee for anyway, if you accessed them in paper form.
And no,/. doesn't provide a service, unless you consider biased, misleading, incorrect, non-edited aggregation of several-day-old news a "service".
The TV networks might get shows unedited - but it doesn't mean they show them unedited!
In case you didn't notice, the last series of "Stargate" shown here was... ah, a little short. They dropped a few episodes, and edited others, to remove references to "Stargate: Atlantis" - so Ch 7 could run it after series 8 finished, rather than concurrently.
Mind you, that's actually fairly thoughtful for Ch 4:3. It's the only thing they've done in living memory that could even be remotely construed as "viewer-friendly"...
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just call OSS "French Software", and let the fries-and-toast-eating masses sort it out for themselves?
To all the people out there who say "it's the message that's important, not the medium", I say 2 things:
- Remember that next time someone gives you a really crappy gift, and tells you "it's the thought that counts"
;-)
- Consider it as a comms link. If the receiver is getting errors, it either requests resends or exerts extra effort reconstructing the data by error-correction.
And to expand on the second point - if your comms link is running errors all the time, and you have alternate access to an error-free link, would you stick with the first link even if the errors were completely recoverable?Take a look at the next Powerpoint or Word document that crosses your desk from higher up the management food chain, and note all the spelling mistakes. Or, more exactly, not mistakes as much as "the grammar & spellchecker is having trouble finding its own arse again, so keeps suggesting "there" for their/they're".
It's a weird cross between Pavlovian behaviour and intellectual surrender - people see the little red squiggle underneath something they've typed, and just assume that the computer must be right. So they right-click, let the checker do its thing, and continue on believing that Computer Knows Best.
Meanwhile, they're creating documents that sometimes verge on the unreadable, and are certainly well into the domain of the incomprehensible...
They probably meant "RFID chips"...
Thank you. I've been using exactly the same method to explain most corporate lobbying and government propaganda for years now.
;-)
The older I get, the more I realise the truth in those old saws and sayings used by one generation against the next...
(You should hear me explain the Iraq war in terms of "If you keep picking at it, it'll never heal!"
I'd like to go on record as saying I hate the x86 architecture.
Oh, the 8086/8088 was fantastic - in a "look at what can be done with a box of leftover commodity bits" way. An absolutely magnificent testimony to Rube Goldberg engineering. The problem is, the x86 world has been paying for that ever since...
Just look at all the kludges, workarounds, and add-ons that have been made to get around the design limitations of that first hardware, many of which are still with us today. LIMS/EMS. Bank switching. Extended mode switching. Too few DMA channels. Too few hardware IRQs. An insane memory map. The list goes on.
The IBM-PC architecture should have been dumped years ago, when the 386 came out. Forget the legacy 8086 design, start from scratch and take advantage of the new chip that did things properly. Instead, the PC world has been stuck in a rut for 20 years, building machines & OSs which resemble a giant game of Mousetrap more than a logical and sane evolution of design.
Subnet, maybe. Or maybe non-USian subnets, if your of the paranoid ilk. I'm a subscriber, but not a frequent poster - if I posted frequently, I'd have to start worrying about karma, mod points, and trivial willy-waving shit like that...
/. poster from the current level of machine AI...
;-)
No screenshot, but it's the standard "image containing a string with background noise to defeat OCR" that you have to type in a textarea to confirm you're not a bot. There's a name for it, which I've never bothered to remember.
Slashdot seems to have started using it recently, possibly because there's precious few other ways of distinguishing the average
So, why do you ask about whats this anti-bot string stuff you have been seeing?
To an outsider, it looks like your country is rapidly approaching the time when *everybodys* ideology differs from that of the administration. Or, at least, the time when the administration can claim it of anybody they like.
You're dead right, though, about "shrill responses". It makes for nice, simple, easy-to-win arguments that fit nicely into a 30-second soundbite or doorstop interview.
As an amusing aside, the anti-bot string I had to type to post this contains WMD...
No, the simple solution is to do exactly as the law requires, and always has since GST was introduced. If you're selling retail, your advertised price is your selling price.
This "policy" is nothing more than eBay enforcing the rules it always should have. All because some unscrupulous cretins were defrauding people by saying "oh, by the way, that's plus GST" *after the sale* in order to skim an extra 10% for themselves...
BTW, I own an '05 Mazda 3 - a car whose earlier models were well known to have a few electronic oddities. Like the "check engine" light coming on and, if ignored, the car eventually stopping - because the fuel cap was loose...
Let's say your old JD doesn't start, and after farnarkling around you figure the rail pressure pump has died. You bypass it so you're running on the fuel pump only, close off or restrict the return line, and get it running well enough to finish off what you're doing and drive it back to the shed.
Or your new JD doesn't start, and the engine light flashing X times tells you the rail pressure sensor has died. You unplug the sensor and the thing runs in "limp home" mode well enough to finish off that paddock and drive back to the shed.
What I'm getting at is neither is complicated - just that people think the latter is complicated because of the oogy-boogy "electronics". People are used to how mechanical stuff works and behaves and haven't (yet) learnt that mostly the electronics is really no more complicated.
The steering / accelerator "drive-by-wire" stuff I've seen is not much nore complicated either. I've only seen a couple of examples of both, but they've all been set up so that there _is_ a mechanical connection there - so when the smarts fails, you can still drive it home. The steering units worked on a variable pressure pump; when the pump failed it was just like a normal power steering failure. And the electronic throttle controls had had cable backups - either a slack direct cble, or an electric clutch arrangement.
The only thing I could think of that'd be a problem is a total ignition ECU failure - something I've not seen since the old Bosch / GM Jetronic units, which were basically complicated electronic points - or the injector controller in a diesel. Which are the electronic equivalent of a coil/ distributor or timing chain failure i.e. something you can't "patch up" in the field anyway.
So "drive-by-wire", implying an electrical-only connection, is something of a misnomer - but it sounds good to the marketing people...
Yeah - uncooked popcorn. Hard to swallow, impossible to digest, swallowing it all makes you sick, and it looks the same on the way out as it did on the way in.
"+5 Insightful"? More like "-5, Unsightful"!
How soon we forget Linksys, Belkin, et al. In fact, do a google search for <insert commodity hardware manufacturer> +"GPL violation" and see many come up...
Which is exactly what Apple - and the average user - wants. Hell, it's also exactly what you want for your X apps, and what you want for those 90% of times when you're configuring non-graphics apps and services through X, a web interface, or even a command-line configuration app.
The only time it falls down is when editing configuration files manually - and even then, it's still parsable by the human brain.
Now, I'm no XML fanboy. But honestly, when was the last time you edited anything more than the most trivial
Except that the Digital Agenda Act was passed in Sept 200, about 4 years before the FTA was passed, or about 3 years before the FTA was mooted.
:
From the link
"The CADA introduces a new exception to the exclusive right of reproduction for temporary reproductions made as part of the technical process of making a communication."
Uh, all those DVB-T DVD rips of Dr Who and Bathurst in my library are part of a communication I'm sending. Yeah! To my great-great grandchildren...
And bittorrent is just my RAID (Redundant Array of Idiotic Downloaders) storage...
Whoopee! Can't. Wait...
Q: What if peanut butter were made out of people?
A: Then it wouldn't be called peanut butter anymore...
Or, "podcasting!=radio".
A group of us used to do something very similar to "podcasting" 20+ years ago when I was at school, except back then we called it "sharing stupid mix tapes". A less catchy name, I admit. It involved making tapes of stuff off the radio, songs from our record collections, dumb comedy skits from local TV & radio, and even dumber stuff we did ourselves, and jamming it in some unsuspecting schmucks walkman. This stuff filtered through the whole school, with the best bits even making it on to other people's compilations.
So you see, "podcasting" is just another waffle iron with a 'phone attached. Now get off'f the danged grass, you kids!
Remember kids, cap 'em & burn 'em when you see 'em - before Lucas releases the "enhanced" edition on DVD, and you're all crying because he refuses to release the originals...
As others have pointed out, it not about the quality - it's about freeing up spectrum.
But I've really got to question how people could watch TV in the US. I mean, I've seen good quality off-the-wire NTSC, and compared to PAL it's shit! Forget the lower resolution of NTSC - the colour & phasing problems are enough to put me off it.
Luckily I'm in Australia, where we have (a) PAL 720x576 SD digital TV, with (b) much higher bandwidth - up to 7Mbps - than most of the rest of the PAL world. Given that some stuff still looks shit at 6 or 7Mbps, I pity our cousins in great Britain with their 3 or 4 Mbps "service".
(Interestingly enough, people in Australia have to pay to watch such low-bitrate 3 or 4Mbps digital transmissions. It's called "Foxtel"...)
Oh, a half-decent set-top box costs ~AU$150, and a good twin-tuner standard def DVB-T HDD recorder with PC connectivity costs ~AU$800. The tools to download programs to the PC, demux / edit, and burn to DVD are generally free
Then you pay for it.
There are very few exceptions to this rule, mainly extremely specific service-oriented sites e.g. Lexis-Nexis, Britannica, Mercks. These are the sort of things you'd be paying a subscription or per-use fee for anyway, if you accessed them in paper form.
And no,
I dunno? Are you breaking a social contract if I tell you to fuck off, and you don't?
The TV networks might get shows unedited - but it doesn't mean they show them unedited!
... ah, a little short. They dropped a few episodes, and edited others, to remove references to "Stargate: Atlantis" - so Ch 7 could run it after series 8 finished, rather than concurrently.
In case you didn't notice, the last series of "Stargate" shown here was
Mind you, that's actually fairly thoughtful for Ch 4:3. It's the only thing they've done in living memory that could even be remotely construed as "viewer-friendly"...
Pay-TV / Foxtel - it's been on at least twice that I know of.
Not that I subscribe to that over-compressed, advertising-fscked, overpriced, half-DVD-quality P.O.S....