Since men aren't natural, expecially the prehistoric type, we have to undo anything they've done.
I know you're kidding, but there's a serious point to be made here: we're every bit as vile and brutal as our stone age cousins, and we've just got much better tools.
Ha! It's mostly better! I used to read my Dad's.EXE mags and pretty much the only bits I got were the STOB columns. Them were the days, with a 20MB hard disk and a 10 meg hard card, that rattled like a prop plane... it all came back when I got this book.
I wonder why they escaped the attentions of the early reviewers. Perhaps because the shortcomings weren't included on the press release the early reviewers regurgitated.
I second this, but with the following proviso: make sure your homemade battery kit is very obviously a battery, and could not be mistaken by those earnest folk at airport security. I've had hairy moments getting on a plane with a couple of large cells crudely soldered together:(
No, you're wrong. For one thing, "frigging" refers to digital sexual stimulation (most frequently of the clitoris, although masturbation in either sex counts) and in any case, words do not have intrinsic meanings, rather their meanings are supplied by the person receiving the utterance. Thus "fucking" is less acceptable than "effing" or "f*cking" because it is deemed more offensive by those who hear or read it. It is as simple as that: words mean what you think they mean.
> Please think it through, Dilbert is right. How can you not support the BSA's actions ?>/tt>
Easily. I support its basic principles - protecting its memebers' copyrights - but its actions are indefensible. Take some of the following examples. In 2003 they sent a letter to a German university demanding they take down infringing software from their site. The software? OpenOffice. Also in 2003 it attacked Massachusetts, the only state holding out against the DoJ's settlement, for adopting an open source policy when no such policy existed. In 2000 when I was working for a small company in London, we received a letter threatening to make us "the focus of a BSA investigation" if we didn't get licenses for all the pirated software in use at our offices. We had licenses for all our proprietary software - namely Informix and Solaris. In 2002 they attempted to raid kickme.to's offices in order to find information about their customers, when kickme.to is just a redirection service with no hosted content of its own. Only last month they published a whitepaper calling for the enforced cooperation of 3rd parties (i.e. ISPs) with rights holders. In other words they want the existing, much abused, DMCA subpoena and takedown notice fortified. In 2001 they said the cost of piracy was $3 billion. In 2003 they said it was $29 billion. I guess $3 billion is not enough money to make the headlines, so they had to re-engineer their spurious mechanisms to produce a better figure.
In short the BSA is a bully, a liar and its actions are, as the grandparent poster argued, indefensible.
I got a Windows Mobile phone recently, in the UK it's called the SPV C500, but I think it's unbranded name is HTC Typhoon. it is an absolute dog. Shockingly poor phone. Maybe it's just because I spent a few years in the land of the mobile phone where design is so superior it's not even funny. Leave out that they sent emails not SMS or MMS, even the texting software I used to have, which wasn't predictive, was better than the turd that some developer crouched down and dropped into my phone. Here's why it sucks so hard. You'll see there are some software problems and some industrial design problems. The moral of this rant is that it's all got to be good to be a good phone.
Hard to use joystick
Menus and options are selected and navigated using a flat four-way joystick, with a centre-click for select. Centre-clicking isn't difficult, but when my hands are cold (and it is December, which means cold in London) it's easy to hit slightly in the wrong place and go up before clicking. With a phone as slow as this one, this can be incredibly frustrating. It leads to putting the wrong word in when writing texts, it leads to choosing the wrong program to start, and it leads to a whole world of related pain. Stylus! Please!
Inconsistent UI
The phone has two pointless buttons: Home and Back. They probably thought it was a really good idea to have one click to go home, but it's not. You can press the Back button a few times, or if they had been clever tie it holding down the back button in order to do that. Or at least you could have done that if the UI was consistent. In fact it seems that it's up to the apps what they do with the buttons on the phone. The camera application will only quit if you press the Hangup button! You can't even cancel though the menu!
Slow boot
This is simply wrong: it takes over a minute between me pressing the power button and my phone being usable as a sort of rubbish PDA, and then an arbitrarily long time to recognise the network it's on and be actually ready to use as a phone. A minute never seemed so long before I spent one staring at Windows Mobile.
Crashes
Another one that's simply wrong: it's a phone. It crashes. I'm pretty sure that my parents' phone doesn't crash, possibly because it's made of bakelite and fixed to the wall with rusty iron screws, but the idea is there. Make a phone which doesn't crash. If it crashes, fix it and then sell it. A phone that periodically requires me to take the battery out and wait that painful minute before I can use it again doesn't deserve an owner.
Slow software
Actually, I don't know if this is the software's fault or the phone's, but the experience is slow. My friend has a Palm Treo 600 (he loves it) and his mapping software flies around. He uses his stylus and just drags the map around. I have to click up, down, left or right on the stupid little joystick in order to move around the map. And whereas the mapping software he uses is an image of a streetmap, mine is a bloody vector image, with only the major roads on it, and only some of them labelled with names. It's basically fucking useless. I tried to use it to find somewhere in Soho, in the cold December rain. In less than the time it takes to boot I called my friend with an A-Z and he told me where to go.
Button placement
This is another simple, simple, simple cock-up. There are two buttons for adjusting the earpiece volume. Never mind that they don't work very well and that the earpiece volume goes up in about 4 steps and so could be easily managed with one button, the problem here is that you have to press them hard, which means bracing against the opposite side of the phone, where the camera is. So, while you are in a noisy call, you adjust the earpiece volume and nine times out of ten start the camera. If you recall, you can't stop the camera app in order to check your calendar or contacts without pressing the hangup button, with the predictable effect of hanging up.
Almost right. It means "carried in the hand" and is accepted at all levels of everyday politeness to mean mobile phone. It's pronounced K-tie: K as in the letter K and tie as in the thing that you do with your shoelaces. Intonation is high on K and low on tie.
Yeah, they split them because Japanese books are historically a smaller form factor than Western ones. Lord of the Rings, for example, is sold as an 11 book box set. Smaller books fit in handbags better, and given than nearly everyone in Tokyo has a painfully long commute, making books small enough to hold in one hand while standing is a good idea. I used to reverse commute from my place in central Tokyo out to the National Cancer Center East, about 2 hours in all, and standing most of the way. Little books would have been nice.
The HTC Typhoon/Orange SPV C500 and other 'smart' phones come with MSN messenger, but it sucks; it's in no way 'instant' and it drops the connection for many reasons, requiring a tedious and length re-auth - when there's an incoming call, when you hit the camera button, when you hit the Home button, when you step off a kerb without looking left and right etc.
In short, MSN IM on smartphones has a long way to go.
I think the article greatly exagerates both the audience and the importance of this website.
I think you greatly overestimate the overlap between your geek circles and otaku (geek) circles. I also live in Japan, but don't move in geeky circles, rather creative ones. Everyone knows ni-channeru because it's one of the central hubs of creativity.
As anyone who has lived here knows, the scenes in Japan are greatly splintered, and every scene has its own subcultures. In London, someone would say she's a goth. In Japan, the same person might be 'between cyber and lolita.' In the USA, you might be a geek. In Japan, you might be otaku, but you might be a food otaku, a PC otaku, a music otaku, a design otaku etc etc. Ni-channeru is the one place everyone can congregate and mix with those outside their group. As people have said it's also about the only place (apart from their cars) where Japanese will freely demonstrate their true feelings.
If you think the site is a mess, it's a matter of perspective. Ignoring the fact that almost all Japanese websites are hideous throwbacks to 1998, the chaos of ni-channeru is part of the environment, and it helps the community remain unsplintered.
The european way is to try to cooperate, because we have to. The american way is "are you with us, or are you against us?". And it rubs the whole of EU the wrong way.
And this is so at many levels. For example, here in Tokyo I meet new French, Germans, Americans, Swedish, Canadians, Australians etc weekly. And here is the principle difference between Americans and people of every other nationality: Americans will say, "I'm going to the cinema. Do you want to come?" while everyone else will say, "How about the cinema?"
The Americans I meet in Tokyo are, by definition, atypical: they've got passports. But they share with their politicians a sense of certainty and rectitude which most other peoples (barring, in my experience, Jewish Israelis) don't have. Personally, I find the vitality and self-centred certainty sometimes quite attractive, but it sure as hell rubs most people the wrong way.
Of course, they also built the longest suspension bridge on the planet and put an airport on water. Maybe they have fewer people saying "it'll never work." Who knows?
I do, and so do many others. They have an economy driven by needless construction, a government driven by bribery based on fixing construction projects, and a civil service who can retire into lucrative jobs provided by... construction companies.
Japan spends about 9% of GDP on public works, compared with about 1% in the US. This is why nearly every single river and stream has been straightened and concreted. With about 99% of natural waterways now artificial, a lucrative business is emerging based around returning them to a pre-concreted state.
Japan Rail is an astonishingly impressive company, especially for those who know rail services in countries like Britain, where the infrastructure is breaking, warping, rotting and crumbling, and the trains don't run on time, or often at all. But we shouldn't forget the trillions of yen poured into the service before privatisation, and the fact that the government wrote off the debt several times
In fact, I think this is probably the right course for a government to take, but you shouldn't ascribe it to a can do attitude in Japan. There is no such thing, except when it comes to politicians and public servants conspiring with construction companies to gouge the public and line their own pockets.
Don't worry if democracy fails these devices will still be hopelessly ineffective as a means of population control.
Think about it: the article mentions some 4 million cameras which presumably are recording 24 hours a day. Even the harshest police state couldn't summon the 12 million video cops required to review the material in a timely fashion.
Add to this the quality of the video being recorded. The idea that the hypothetical British police state could reduce the workload with automated face recognition is a joke - even with quality portrait images, face recognition systems can't manage to achieve a high enough accuracy to be useful. Say they can achieve a *very* generous 99.999% accuracy, that's still one in ten thousand false positives, or around 3000 a day, assuming half the population gets scanned walking under a camera every day (not counting the fact that Joe Q. Public walks past tens of camera on every high street). Where are the resources to check up on all the matches, including the 3000 false positives every day? We don't have enough police to follow decent leads, and I don't believe any police state will either.
And of course if you have long hair, wear a hood, a cap, a hat, look down, look left, look right, go out at night, have a false moustache, wear thick spectacles, wear shades, wear a bandana etc you can defeat any face recognition mounted 4 metres up on a metal pole.
If they want to automate face recognition, we need to make an effort to look at the cameras, and this will have to be legislated - the law will have to change to make us look into a camera in order for it to check us, and this is an entirely different issue.
I often take time to read the text/plain part of multipart spam. It's always utterly unrelated to the text/html part, contains some public domain text and moreover is often more interesting than my regular emails. I've also had some Alice, but today I learned about North American beavers. I had no idea they were so large.
What every geek wants for Xmas - a page full of Santa impersonators trying to fool the world into believing they're scientists.
Brain vs genetic alogrithms
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
their simulations show how a short-term backward step in survival strategies can generate innovative advances.
This isn't really a challenging assertion, and is well discusssed in evolutionary psychological circles. Consider any given genetic setback. In order for the organism suffering this set back not to be disadvantaged, it must develop a mechanism which compensates for the setback at least as much as the organism is disadvantaged. Simple statistics will show that any solution which is at least as good as another solution is probably better. Because unless it is exactly as good, it is better, and the range of better solutions is much wider than the range of exactly as good solutions. So you don't need this study to show you that, you just need your highly genetically evolved brain.
While I am sure that this is an excellent reference for PHP users, I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks there is little point in buying a book on PHP when http://www.php.net/manual/ exists.
I wonder if they paid Stockbyte (new window) or whoever for their stock photography? That would really put an interesting spin on things, if their own website was using stolen graphics.
Slashdot Mirror
Affect/effect
Yeah I heard it turned out to be a natural log.
I'll tell you exactly what it wants. Human genome data wants to be anthropormorphised.
Ha! It's mostly better! I used to read my Dad's .EXE mags and pretty much the only bits I got were the STOB columns. Them were the days, with a 20MB hard disk and a 10 meg hard card, that rattled like a prop plane... it all came back when I got this book.
...sigh...
I wonder why they escaped the attentions of the early reviewers. Perhaps because the shortcomings weren't included on the press release the early reviewers regurgitated.
I second this, but with the following proviso: make sure your homemade battery kit is very obviously a battery, and could not be mistaken by those earnest folk at airport security. I've had hairy moments getting on a plane with a couple of large cells crudely soldered together :(
Yeah, once is enough ....
No, you're wrong. For one thing, "frigging" refers to digital sexual stimulation (most frequently of the clitoris, although masturbation in either sex counts) and in any case, words do not have intrinsic meanings, rather their meanings are supplied by the person receiving the utterance. Thus "fucking" is less acceptable than "effing" or "f*cking" because it is deemed more offensive by those who hear or read it. It is as simple as that: words mean what you think they mean.
> Please think it through, Dilbert is right. How can you not support the BSA's actions ?>/tt>
Easily. I support its basic principles - protecting its memebers' copyrights - but its actions are indefensible. Take some of the following examples. In 2003 they sent a letter to a German university demanding they take down infringing software from their site. The software? OpenOffice. Also in 2003 it attacked Massachusetts, the only state holding out against the DoJ's settlement, for adopting an open source policy when no such policy existed. In 2000 when I was working for a small company in London, we received a letter threatening to make us "the focus of a BSA investigation" if we didn't get licenses for all the pirated software in use at our offices. We had licenses for all our proprietary software - namely Informix and Solaris. In 2002 they attempted to raid kickme.to's offices in order to find information about their customers, when kickme.to is just a redirection service with no hosted content of its own. Only last month they published a whitepaper calling for the enforced cooperation of 3rd parties (i.e. ISPs) with rights holders. In other words they want the existing, much abused, DMCA subpoena and takedown notice fortified. In 2001 they said the cost of piracy was $3 billion. In 2003 they said it was $29 billion. I guess $3 billion is not enough money to make the headlines, so they had to re-engineer their spurious mechanisms to produce a better figure.
In short the BSA is a bully, a liar and its actions are, as the grandparent poster argued, indefensible.
I got a Windows Mobile phone recently, in the UK it's called the SPV C500, but I think it's unbranded name is HTC Typhoon. it is an absolute dog. Shockingly poor phone. Maybe it's just because I spent a few years in the land of the mobile phone where design is so superior it's not even funny. Leave out that they sent emails not SMS or MMS, even the texting software I used to have, which wasn't predictive, was better than the turd that some developer crouched down and dropped into my phone. Here's why it sucks so hard. You'll see there are some software problems and some industrial design problems. The moral of this rant is that it's all got to be good to be a good phone.
Hard to use joystick
Menus and options are selected and navigated using a flat four-way joystick, with a centre-click for select. Centre-clicking isn't difficult, but when my hands are cold (and it is December, which means cold in London) it's easy to hit slightly in the wrong place and go up before clicking. With a phone as slow as this one, this can be incredibly frustrating. It leads to putting the wrong word in when writing texts, it leads to choosing the wrong program to start, and it leads to a whole world of related pain. Stylus! Please!
Inconsistent UI
The phone has two pointless buttons: Home and Back. They probably thought it was a really good idea to have one click to go home, but it's not. You can press the Back button a few times, or if they had been clever tie it holding down the back button in order to do that. Or at least you could have done that if the UI was consistent. In fact it seems that it's up to the apps what they do with the buttons on the phone. The camera application will only quit if you press the Hangup button! You can't even cancel though the menu!
Slow boot
This is simply wrong: it takes over a minute between me pressing the power button and my phone being usable as a sort of rubbish PDA, and then an arbitrarily long time to recognise the network it's on and be actually ready to use as a phone. A minute never seemed so long before I spent one staring at Windows Mobile.
Crashes
Another one that's simply wrong: it's a phone. It crashes. I'm pretty sure that my parents' phone doesn't crash, possibly because it's made of bakelite and fixed to the wall with rusty iron screws, but the idea is there. Make a phone which doesn't crash. If it crashes, fix it and then sell it. A phone that periodically requires me to take the battery out and wait that painful minute before I can use it again doesn't deserve an owner.
Slow software
Actually, I don't know if this is the software's fault or the phone's, but the experience is slow. My friend has a Palm Treo 600 (he loves it) and his mapping software flies around. He uses his stylus and just drags the map around. I have to click up, down, left or right on the stupid little joystick in order to move around the map. And whereas the mapping software he uses is an image of a streetmap, mine is a bloody vector image, with only the major roads on it, and only some of them labelled with names. It's basically fucking useless. I tried to use it to find somewhere in Soho, in the cold December rain. In less than the time it takes to boot I called my friend with an A-Z and he told me where to go.
Button placement
This is another simple, simple, simple cock-up. There are two buttons for adjusting the earpiece volume. Never mind that they don't work very well and that the earpiece volume goes up in about 4 steps and so could be easily managed with one button, the problem here is that you have to press them hard, which means bracing against the opposite side of the phone, where the camera is. So, while you are in a noisy call, you adjust the earpiece volume and nine times out of ten start the camera. If you recall, you can't stop the camera app in order to check your calendar or contacts without pressing the hangup button, with the predictable effect of hanging up.
Texting s
There are? Tell me where;I live here and haven't seen these. Are you sure you didn't mistype "Seoul" or "Tokyo"?
Almost right. It means "carried in the hand" and is accepted at all levels of everyday politeness to mean mobile phone. It's pronounced K-tie: K as in the letter K and tie as in the thing that you do with your shoelaces. Intonation is high on K and low on tie.
Yeah, they split them because Japanese books are historically a smaller form factor than Western ones. Lord of the Rings, for example, is sold as an 11 book box set. Smaller books fit in handbags better, and given than nearly everyone in Tokyo has a painfully long commute, making books small enough to hold in one hand while standing is a good idea. I used to reverse commute from my place in central Tokyo out to the National Cancer Center East, about 2 hours in all, and standing most of the way. Little books would have been nice.
The HTC Typhoon/Orange SPV C500 and other 'smart' phones come with MSN messenger, but it sucks; it's in no way 'instant' and it drops the connection for many reasons, requiring a tedious and length re-auth - when there's an incoming call, when you hit the camera button, when you hit the Home button, when you step off a kerb without looking left and right etc.
In short, MSN IM on smartphones has a long way to go.
I think you greatly overestimate the overlap between your geek circles and otaku (geek) circles. I also live in Japan, but don't move in geeky circles, rather creative ones. Everyone knows ni-channeru because it's one of the central hubs of creativity.
As anyone who has lived here knows, the scenes in Japan are greatly splintered, and every scene has its own subcultures. In London, someone would say she's a goth. In Japan, the same person might be 'between cyber and lolita.' In the USA, you might be a geek. In Japan, you might be otaku, but you might be a food otaku, a PC otaku, a music otaku, a design otaku etc etc. Ni-channeru is the one place everyone can congregate and mix with those outside their group. As people have said it's also about the only place (apart from their cars) where Japanese will freely demonstrate their true feelings.
If you think the site is a mess, it's a matter of perspective. Ignoring the fact that almost all Japanese websites are hideous throwbacks to 1998, the chaos of ni-channeru is part of the environment, and it helps the community remain unsplintered.
And this is so at many levels. For example, here in Tokyo I meet new French, Germans, Americans, Swedish, Canadians, Australians etc weekly. And here is the principle difference between Americans and people of every other nationality: Americans will say, "I'm going to the cinema. Do you want to come?" while everyone else will say, "How about the cinema?"
The Americans I meet in Tokyo are, by definition, atypical: they've got passports. But they share with their politicians a sense of certainty and rectitude which most other peoples (barring, in my experience, Jewish Israelis) don't have. Personally, I find the vitality and self-centred certainty sometimes quite attractive, but it sure as hell rubs most people the wrong way.
I do, and so do many others. They have an economy driven by needless construction, a government driven by bribery based on fixing construction projects, and a civil service who can retire into lucrative jobs provided by ... construction companies.
Japan spends about 9% of GDP on public works, compared with about 1% in the US. This is why nearly every single river and stream has been straightened and concreted. With about 99% of natural waterways now artificial, a lucrative business is emerging based around returning them to a pre-concreted state.
Japan Rail is an astonishingly impressive company, especially for those who know rail services in countries like Britain, where the infrastructure is breaking, warping, rotting and crumbling, and the trains don't run on time, or often at all. But we shouldn't forget the trillions of yen poured into the service before privatisation, and the fact that the government wrote off the debt several times
In fact, I think this is probably the right course for a government to take, but you shouldn't ascribe it to a can do attitude in Japan. There is no such thing, except when it comes to politicians and public servants conspiring with construction companies to gouge the public and line their own pockets.
What? 'Old' Europe, as populated by cheese eating surrender monkeys[audio], and headed by an Italian? hardly seems credible, does it Mr Rumsfeld?
Don't worry if democracy fails these devices will still be hopelessly ineffective as a means of population control.
Think about it: the article mentions some 4 million cameras which presumably are recording 24 hours a day. Even the harshest police state couldn't summon the 12 million video cops required to review the material in a timely fashion.
Add to this the quality of the video being recorded. The idea that the hypothetical British police state could reduce the workload with automated face recognition is a joke - even with quality portrait images, face recognition systems can't manage to achieve a high enough accuracy to be useful. Say they can achieve a *very* generous 99.999% accuracy, that's still one in ten thousand false positives, or around 3000 a day, assuming half the population gets scanned walking under a camera every day (not counting the fact that Joe Q. Public walks past tens of camera on every high street). Where are the resources to check up on all the matches, including the 3000 false positives every day? We don't have enough police to follow decent leads, and I don't believe any police state will either.
And of course if you have long hair, wear a hood, a cap, a hat, look down, look left, look right, go out at night, have a false moustache, wear thick spectacles, wear shades, wear a bandana etc you can defeat any face recognition mounted 4 metres up on a metal pole.
If they want to automate face recognition, we need to make an effort to look at the cameras, and this will have to be legislated - the law will have to change to make us look into a camera in order for it to check us, and this is an entirely different issue.
I, for one, welcome our new CCTV overlords.
I often take time to read the text/plain part of multipart spam. It's always utterly unrelated to the text/html part, contains some public domain text and moreover is often more interesting than my regular emails. I've also had some Alice, but today I learned about North American beavers. I had no idea they were so large.
What every geek wants for Xmas - a page full of Santa impersonators trying to fool the world into believing they're scientists.
This isn't really a challenging assertion, and is well discusssed in evolutionary psychological circles. Consider any given genetic setback. In order for the organism suffering this set back not to be disadvantaged, it must develop a mechanism which compensates for the setback at least as much as the organism is disadvantaged. Simple statistics will show that any solution which is at least as good as another solution is probably better. Because unless it is exactly as good, it is better, and the range of better solutions is much wider than the range of exactly as good solutions. So you don't need this study to show you that, you just need your highly genetically evolved brain.
While I am sure that this is an excellent reference for PHP users, I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks there is little point in buying a book on PHP when http://www.php.net/manual/ exists.
I wonder if they paid Stockbyte (new window) or whoever for their stock photography? That would really put an interesting spin on things, if their own website was using stolen graphics.