When IBM invented DES, the NSA asked to review it before IBM started selling it. DES is an encryption algorithm that involves repeatedly permuting and shifting bits. The bit shifting phase is handled by sending the permuted bits through what are called s-boxes which basically say 'move this bit over there'. NSA "requested" two revisions to DES - shorten the key to 56 bits and re-arrange some of the s-box operations. NSA didn't say why that would be "better" but made it clear to IBM that if IBM didn't comply, IBM would run into difficulties selling DES. The kind of difficulties that governments are very adept at raising. So IBM complied and implemented NSA's "requests." The presumption has always been that NSA knew how to crack the revised version of DES.
I'm curious if NSA made similar "requests" to Microsoft.
The spinach contamination a few months ago was traced to a field about 30 miles from where I live. The speculation is that some wild pigs (boars) were snacking on some spinach in the field and and an infected pig took a dump. It's probably not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last. Shit happens.
I think a bigger problem is how so much clean spinach was destroyed as a result. The pig probably ruined a few heads of spinach. Those few heads got mixed in with a bunch of clean spinach as the spinach was pre-packaged. So that one pig's dump killed more people than would have died a few years ago if they had eaten head spinach. We could irradiate the packaged produce to clean the spinach further than its current 3 wash cycle but some people won't eat irradiated food. Even still, there's probably a variety of bug out there that would survive x-raying. If you eat spinach from a head of spinach, you run the risk of not cleaning it sufficiently as well as dealing with the multiple number of hands that have touched it between the field and your mouth. Never mind intentional contamination like the Tylenol killer came up with or the zealots in Oregon who contaminated a salad bar so voter turnout would be low.
In short, there's no way to guarantee that every piece of food that goes into your mouth is benign. With techniques such as the one described in the article, we'll hear of more people dying from contaminated food than we otherwise would have. People will panic, food will be destroyed, lawyers will sue and we'll plod along eating slightly more expensive food as a result. Will we be any better off? Probably not.
In fact, we may be worse off. As people demand more safety, government power will grow. We won't be safer, but the government will be larger which means we'll all be the poorer.
I was in Best Buy a couple of days ago and saw Microsoft's 360 HD-DVD player for $150. Anandtech had given it a favorable review and noted that the player could just as easily be hooked up to PC as an xbox. If you already have a hi def screen with an xbox it seems to be a slam dunk purchase. If you don't have the xbox but you have a sufficiently robust pc, you can either watch hi def on your computer monitor or, if your setup allows it, on your HD screen via your PC.
Lots of folks are hedging as to which format will win out but my impression is that if you can buy a player for $150 that gives you an image that's equivalent to a solution that costs 4 times as much and is unavailable, that gives a huge boost to HD-DVD. I say "equivalent" because the initial side by side reviews don't give either format an edge. Another factor is Netflix - you can rent either format from them so your exposure to risking committing to a dead end format is substantially reduced. When the first players came out at $1,000 not many people bit. Now that you can get one player at $150, it strikes me a lot more people will make the jump and it isn't going to be to Blu-Ray.
* There is no evidence that a change in human industrial behaviour will have any impact on global warming, especially if it's an entirely natural phenomenon. (This is also largely bullshit because you can't test it. It also flies against basic logic that less human contribution will at the very least, not make the problem worse)
How about turning that sentence around? Changing human industrial behaviour will impact global warming.
Now tack on your parenthetical This is also largely bullshit because you can't test it.
The difference between the two positions is the burden of proof falls on the global warming proponents. The anthropogenic global warming proponents haven't proved their point and yet they're calling for massive changes in human behavior to fit their world view.
The second half of your parenthetical is meaningless if humans don't bear the responsibility for global warming. In your quest to fix one problem, you may well create another. If we completely eliminate human carbon emissions on the theory that we shouldn't "pollute" the planet with co2 and people start dying from famine (tractors spew co2) have you accomplished anything worthwhile?
In case you're possibly interested in some contrary evidence, drop a ruler on NOAA's interglacial peak sea levels over the last 800,000 years. Notice the upward trend? If you accept sea level as a proxy for global temperature, then something's been going on for the past 800,000 years that's been warming the earth without human intervention.
I don't understand why optical scanning is any more trustworthy.
If the scanner is hooked up to a crooked counting algorithm, how will you know unless you actually count the paper? If you have to count the paper to ensure that the scanner is honest, why bother with the scanner at all?
Sometimes Scientific American is just like/. - dupes and all.
Back in the 70's SA ran a similar article on Damascus steel. The authors (iircc, one was from Stanford) attributed the steel's property both to the impurities which this article talks about and to the heating/cooling cycles that gave the steel its strength. The article referenced an ancient blacksmith's poem that described the various colors the steel had to take as it was heated and cooled. Since the poet didn't have a Pantone color palette available, he compared the colors to the sun and moon at various times of the day and year. Heaven help the color-blind or weak memoried blacksmith.
One last point that I remember from the article was a discussion of the quenching fluids. For the final quenching, the poem describes killing a slave by driving the steel into his chest. The authors, noting the current shortage of slaves, concluded that a saline solution held at 98 degrees Fahrenheit was the salient factor in the quenching fluid.
The Earth is habitable primarily because of its strong magnetosphere.
Showing my ignorance here but I thought the atmosphere was the key shield against radiation. The magnetic poles switch every so often and while they're switching I thought the magnetosphere pretty much collapses. Yet life appears to go on.
And what makes matters worse/better, is the receiving smtp server knows it is getting email from ip address 1.2.3.4 but has no sure way of knowing if that is joe blows windows box or some isp for a major potential client.
Doesn't that imply a need for a list of acceptable smtp senders? A recieving smtp gets an email from an ip. It looks up the ip to see whether the ip is a registered smtp sender. If it is, the receiver accepts the incoming email. If it isn't on the list, it could refuse the email.
It's an obvious solution which implies there's a reason it hasn't been done. What's the reason?
I have two isps. One provides dsl, the other is where I receive email. I can't use my receiving isp's smtp server because my ip address isn't part of his domain. If all isps limited smtp access to their own ip blocks, that would prevent the method you outline.
I must be missing a key point somewhere but why not kill spam at the source?
I get between 900-1400 spams a day. That sounds like a lot but Eudora handles 99.99% of them properly so the only cost to me is scanning the reject list looking for false positives. About once every ten days, there'll be something in the spam bin that's not spam so I have to look. Most Spam breaks down into the following categories
Include a response url
Tout a stock symbol using simple text
Tout a stock/product using a graphic
The subject lines clump, i.e, I'll have 40 spams all with the same or similar subject line.
How hard would it be for an isp to keep a copy of outgoing email and if a subscriber sends out email that
Has a response url that matches a spam url or
Touts a stock that's flagged as spam
If outgoing email falls into either category, the isp notifies the user that he's sending spam. In most cases, the user probably has an infected machine and needs to clean it. The isp could, for a fee, offer to clean the user's machine or the user could clean it on his own. Until the user's cleaned their machine, their internet access is suspended. Either way, a bot is shut down.
Granted, the method won't get 100% of the spam but it would snag more than half of it.
Especially when one branch gives deBeers a favorable ruling like the FTC's while anothe branch, Department of Justice, has standing arrest warrents out for deBeers execs. Ever since the 80's, DOJ has been trying to charge deBeers with monopolostic practices but none of the officers will cooperate by setting foot on American soil.
Just to forestall the inevitable responses, no, the federal government is not paying my salary, and no, it hasn't paid for the page charges of my most recent publications. The NSF and NASA do support a great deal of research in astronomy, of course, and grants from those agencies do pay for good fraction of the publications in this area.
Seems to me you're parsing the meaning of who is paying. If it weren't for the huge federal investment in research, you probably wouldn't be getting your $110 per page fee. Your RIT paycheck may not have a federal imprimatur on it but without federal funding, RIT wouldn't be able to pay you squat.
More to the grandparent's point - federally funded research shouldn't be locked up in a private journal. The LANL preprint server's existence illustrates the point that Science and Nature occupied a pre-Internet niche and shouldn't continue to receive indirect federal funding today.
Four years ago, I purchased a Dell laptop for my son when he went off to college. It lasted all of a year before the hard drive died. After quite a bit of trouble with customer service reading scripts in Indiglish we finally got an RMA. The machine worked for about two weeks after it was returned and then developed some unrelated problem. Rather than waste another 4 hours on un-intelligible tech support, I bought my son another computer from a different manufacturer. It's worked flawlessly for the past 3 years.
Judging from what I read on the net while I was researching my son's second problem, I don't think my experience with poor quality product and poor quality tech support from Dell is unique.
There's a limit to cost cutting - go too far and you destroy the reason people initially bought from you. In my case, it'll be a long time before I ever buy another Dell. In the past 4 years, that's 3 computers Dell hasn't sold me.
I don't use Linux so my immediate reaction was "what's a murder investigation doing on/.?" Reading further, I realized the suspect is involved in a Linux project, the relevance of the post became clear.
So perhaps nubnub, the poster wasn't being declasse as you presume. Perhaps he was just making the post's relevance obvious to a larger segment to/.'s audience.
why can't a foreign self governing nation control its own airspace and space space.
Because Gary Francis Power's plane got shot down.
Short version of a long story is that the US and Russia agreed that knowing that the other country wasn't about to launch a nuclear attack was good information for both sides to have. The Open Skies treaty was the result.
China, however, isn't a signatory. But she's trying to orbit humans and satellites so if she wants those assets to overfly the US, she'll have to agree to leave US space assets alone or risk losing her spacecraft.
Tweaking game play is one of the hardest aspects of developing a video game. You're balancing personal preferences against what works well for the most people. I wrote the original Star Wars arcade port for the C64 for Parker Brothers. The project manager couldn't make up his mind on how the cursor should feel and so I ended up coding a roll-your-own cursor feedback tool for him so he could tweak the acceleration parameters himself. It was far more productive to write the tweak code and let him fart around than it was for me to burn a prom give it to him, have him say something like - "it should be more responsive" or "it's too responsive."
By making this patch, Valve has in essence, coded their own version of letting the players roll their own parameters. Instead of a small group's opinion on what the prices should be, it's the combined player's opinion that matters.
For the younger players, it's an introduction to price/demand responses. Of course, it's artificial in that the comodities have no production cost so from the producer's perspective, the weapons could be free. Nonetheless, it conveys the message to younger players that tho more people do or don't want something, that will affect the price of the something.
An obvious response to your post is to say "download instead of stream." So say you try to download a HD stream on a 5 Mbit link (cable speed)...25 GBytes at 5 Mbit/sec works out to a 136 hour download - almost a full week day and night. 680 hours if you're on DSL.
Run fiber instead of copper and you get 100 Mbit/sec or a tad under 7 hour downloads. So for those lucky folks who have fiber, downloading HD is feasible today if you're willing to download overnight or while you're at work. The rest of us will have to wait.
The interesting thing is that there's the killer ap for fiber. If the telcos get there first, they save their telephony business. If they keep farting around with DSL, they're toast because you'll be able to talk and download huge files simultaneously over fiber. That's one thing that's driving them to kill net neutrality. They have to invest in infrastructure or go out of business and they don't want to do either. Hence the bribes to Congress.
Another benefit of an iTV-like device that supported HD would be that the whole Blu Ray/HD-DVD issue goes away. You don't care how the bits are written on your hard drive as long as they show up on your HDTV in full 1080p goodness.
Thus, Voyager 1 is further out than the furthest positively-identified objects in the solar system and is getting close to a theorized inner Oort cloud.
The bit about restructuring society so these things don't happen made me laugh. I live in a fairly nice neighborhood where people leave their front doors unlocked and garage doors open all day. Sometimes somebody will steal something but it's so rare it's not an issue for most people around here.
Fifteen years ago, a neighbor murdered his wife during a divorce proceeding. Hard to see how you restructure rage and jealousy out of society. Around the same time there was a 5 year old kid who was uncontrollable. The kid had a sibling who was fine but this kid was trouble at any gathering. You could feel sympathy for the parents because you could see them doing what any of us would have done and nothing worked with this kid. At 20, he's in jail for invading someone's home and pistol whipping the occupant. He had a sidekick, also from this neighborhood, who isn't very bright. He's in jail as well.
I just don't see how anyone could have done anything for that pair - some genetic combinations just don't work very well. They'll spring up in both bad and good neighborhoods. No matter how you structure a society, there'll be people that are not a good fit for that society.
At the last TED conference, David Pogue said he really liked the fact that his latest voice recognition software upgrade had zero new features. Zero. Instead, they polished the ones they'd already released. I think Opera should follow a similar course.
I'd like to see a better UI. I just switched from Firefox, not because I was dissatisfied with Firefox, but because I prefer to use tools that aren't under active attack. In any event, here are my comments as to what needs work in Opera.
It took me awhile to understand Opera's peculiar caching rules. It's not clear to me how caching works since I don't know what's possible under HTTP besides GET. I had thought that a browser could quickly check with a server as to when the last time a web page was updated and if the server had a fresher page than the browser's cache, the browser would fetch from the server else it would fetch from cache. Opera's cache interface implies my simple model is wrong. You can tell Opera to check with the server everytime you load a page, or to wait 5 minutes, or to wait 30 minutes or to wait 4 hours, etc. There are 8 different options for the text alone. Why so complex? And that's just for text, you have another set of options for graphics. Why would I want to look at an older image if the image has changed on the website?
There are probable good and valid reasons for all those options. Just don't set them as default so that a new user like me is led to wonder why/. hasn't updated its main page in the past 4 hours.
Tabs are wonderful. But don't make the default behavior to double the number of tabs when I reselect "open all folder items" in a bookmark set. Smart move though to put "open all folder items" at the menu top as opposed to Firefox which has it at the bottom.
Speaking of tabs. Very nice touch to dim the inactive tabs so the active tab might stand out a bit more. Makes picking out the active tab much easier if you have 25 tabs open. However, dim the inactive tabs more so the active tab really stands out.
More on tabs. Your tab loading algorithm needs work. Firefox dusts you on this issue. I've got 25 tabs in one of my bookmark folders. The first tab is my homepage, followed in order by the pages I'm most interested in. It looks like Opera tries to talk to all 25 sites simultaneously when I "open all folder items" whereas Firefox appears to favor the sites at the top of the list. The result is Firefox is faster in loading the first few sites so I've got things to read while the remaining sites continue to load. Opera, otoh, has nothing for me once I move off my homepage - it's still trying to load all 25 sites.
Smooth scrolling. Doesn't work regardless of whether I select it or not. Firefox needs an extension to get it right so maybe we have a different idea as to what smooth scrolling ought to be. My idea is the right one...(joke)
Drop widgets. If I want to write a standalone widget, I'll write a standalone widget without Opera's help. Firefox has it right. Give us an API that lets us manipulate the main document like Firefox does. Better yet, don't invent a new API - implement Firefox's so all those Firefox extensions can move over to Opera. For example, there's a nifty smooth scroller extension over on Firefox...
Though I ran the company, I'd take tech support calls for a few hours once a week to get an idea of what problems customers were having with our products.
We had a client who was in the advanced stages of Alzheimers. He'd call, ask for help, we'd get him going and the next day, he'd call again with the same problem. This went on for several days until we ended up writing a set of instructions that were exactly tailored for him and mailed them via snail mail to his wife so she could take over.
That took care of the problem (at least from our end) until they lost the instructions. It took me a while to catch on that his wife was probably using us to keep her husband harmlessly busy. So, for about 6 months, we'd get a call from the guy, tell him we'd mail him another set of instructions, mail him another packet and then not hear from him for a week or two. Since the illness killed my grandfather and aunt I figured it was the least we could do for his wife.
We had another customer who was an absolute pita. He was unique in that he was the only customer whom I explicitly told the tech support staff to hang up on. The guy was out and out abusive. From the moment you picked up the call, he was yelling. I offered to refund his money and he refused - for whatever reason he seemed to derive pleasure from being a complete jerk. You've heard of firing a customer - he was definitely one who deserved it.
Slashdot Mirror
When IBM invented DES, the NSA asked to review it before IBM started selling it. DES is an encryption algorithm that involves repeatedly permuting and shifting bits. The bit shifting phase is handled by sending the permuted bits through what are called s-boxes which basically say 'move this bit over there'. NSA "requested" two revisions to DES - shorten the key to 56 bits and re-arrange some of the s-box operations. NSA didn't say why that would be "better" but made it clear to IBM that if IBM didn't comply, IBM would run into difficulties selling DES. The kind of difficulties that governments are very adept at raising. So IBM complied and implemented NSA's "requests." The presumption has always been that NSA knew how to crack the revised version of DES.
I'm curious if NSA made similar "requests" to Microsoft.
The spinach contamination a few months ago was traced to a field about 30 miles from where I live. The speculation is that some wild pigs (boars) were snacking on some spinach in the field and and an infected pig took a dump. It's probably not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last. Shit happens.
I think a bigger problem is how so much clean spinach was destroyed as a result. The pig probably ruined a few heads of spinach. Those few heads got mixed in with a bunch of clean spinach as the spinach was pre-packaged. So that one pig's dump killed more people than would have died a few years ago if they had eaten head spinach. We could irradiate the packaged produce to clean the spinach further than its current 3 wash cycle but some people won't eat irradiated food. Even still, there's probably a variety of bug out there that would survive x-raying. If you eat spinach from a head of spinach, you run the risk of not cleaning it sufficiently as well as dealing with the multiple number of hands that have touched it between the field and your mouth. Never mind intentional contamination like the Tylenol killer came up with or the zealots in Oregon who contaminated a salad bar so voter turnout would be low.
In short, there's no way to guarantee that every piece of food that goes into your mouth is benign. With techniques such as the one described in the article, we'll hear of more people dying from contaminated food than we otherwise would have. People will panic, food will be destroyed, lawyers will sue and we'll plod along eating slightly more expensive food as a result. Will we be any better off? Probably not.
In fact, we may be worse off. As people demand more safety, government power will grow. We won't be safer, but the government will be larger which means we'll all be the poorer.
Dude, you don't need a 360. The player works with your PC.
I was in Best Buy a couple of days ago and saw Microsoft's 360 HD-DVD player for $150. Anandtech had given it a favorable review and noted that the player could just as easily be hooked up to PC as an xbox. If you already have a hi def screen with an xbox it seems to be a slam dunk purchase. If you don't have the xbox but you have a sufficiently robust pc, you can either watch hi def on your computer monitor or, if your setup allows it, on your HD screen via your PC.
Lots of folks are hedging as to which format will win out but my impression is that if you can buy a player for $150 that gives you an image that's equivalent to a solution that costs 4 times as much and is unavailable, that gives a huge boost to HD-DVD. I say "equivalent" because the initial side by side reviews don't give either format an edge. Another factor is Netflix - you can rent either format from them so your exposure to risking committing to a dead end format is substantially reduced. When the first players came out at $1,000 not many people bit. Now that you can get one player at $150, it strikes me a lot more people will make the jump and it isn't going to be to Blu-Ray.
How about turning that sentence around? Changing human industrial behaviour will impact global warming.
Now tack on your parenthetical This is also largely bullshit because you can't test it.
The difference between the two positions is the burden of proof falls on the global warming proponents. The anthropogenic global warming proponents haven't proved their point and yet they're calling for massive changes in human behavior to fit their world view.
The second half of your parenthetical is meaningless if humans don't bear the responsibility for global warming. In your quest to fix one problem, you may well create another. If we completely eliminate human carbon emissions on the theory that we shouldn't "pollute" the planet with co2 and people start dying from famine (tractors spew co2) have you accomplished anything worthwhile?
In case you're possibly interested in some contrary evidence, drop a ruler on NOAA's interglacial peak sea levels over the last 800,000 years. Notice the upward trend? If you accept sea level as a proxy for global temperature, then something's been going on for the past 800,000 years that's been warming the earth without human intervention.
I don't understand why optical scanning is any more trustworthy.
If the scanner is hooked up to a crooked counting algorithm, how will you know unless you actually count the paper? If you have to count the paper to ensure that the scanner is honest, why bother with the scanner at all?
Sometimes Scientific American is just like /. - dupes and all.
Back in the 70's SA ran a similar article on Damascus steel. The authors (iircc, one was from Stanford) attributed the steel's property both to the impurities which this article talks about and to the heating/cooling cycles that gave the steel its strength. The article referenced an ancient blacksmith's poem that described the various colors the steel had to take as it was heated and cooled. Since the poet didn't have a Pantone color palette available, he compared the colors to the sun and moon at various times of the day and year. Heaven help the color-blind or weak memoried blacksmith.
One last point that I remember from the article was a discussion of the quenching fluids. For the final quenching, the poem describes killing a slave by driving the steel into his chest. The authors, noting the current shortage of slaves, concluded that a saline solution held at 98 degrees Fahrenheit was the salient factor in the quenching fluid.
Showing my ignorance here but I thought the atmosphere was the key shield against radiation. The magnetic poles switch every so often and while they're switching I thought the magnetosphere pretty much collapses. Yet life appears to go on.
Doesn't that imply a need for a list of acceptable smtp senders? A recieving smtp gets an email from an ip. It looks up the ip to see whether the ip is a registered smtp sender. If it is, the receiver accepts the incoming email. If it isn't on the list, it could refuse the email.
It's an obvious solution which implies there's a reason it hasn't been done. What's the reason?
I have two isps. One provides dsl, the other is where I receive email. I can't use my receiving isp's smtp server because my ip address isn't part of his domain. If all isps limited smtp access to their own ip blocks, that would prevent the method you outline.
I get between 900-1400 spams a day. That sounds like a lot but Eudora handles 99.99% of them properly so the only cost to me is scanning the reject list looking for false positives. About once every ten days, there'll be something in the spam bin that's not spam so I have to look. Most Spam breaks down into the following categories
- Include a response url
- Tout a stock symbol using simple text
- Tout a stock/product using a graphic
- The subject lines clump, i.e, I'll have 40 spams all with the same or similar subject line.
How hard would it be for an isp to keep a copy of outgoing email and if a subscriber sends out email that- Has a response url that matches a spam url or
- Touts a stock that's flagged as spam
If outgoing email falls into either category, the isp notifies the user that he's sending spam. In most cases, the user probably has an infected machine and needs to clean it. The isp could, for a fee, offer to clean the user's machine or the user could clean it on his own. Until the user's cleaned their machine, their internet access is suspended. Either way, a bot is shut down.Granted, the method won't get 100% of the spam but it would snag more than half of it.
Especially when one branch gives deBeers a favorable ruling like the FTC's while anothe branch, Department of Justice, has standing arrest warrents out for deBeers execs. Ever since the 80's, DOJ has been trying to charge deBeers with monopolostic practices but none of the officers will cooperate by setting foot on American soil.
Seems to me you're parsing the meaning of who is paying. If it weren't for the huge federal investment in research, you probably wouldn't be getting your $110 per page fee. Your RIT paycheck may not have a federal imprimatur on it but without federal funding, RIT wouldn't be able to pay you squat.
More to the grandparent's point - federally funded research shouldn't be locked up in a private journal. The LANL preprint server's existence illustrates the point that Science and Nature occupied a pre-Internet niche and shouldn't continue to receive indirect federal funding today.
Four years ago, I purchased a Dell laptop for my son when he went off to college. It lasted all of a year before the hard drive died. After quite a bit of trouble with customer service reading scripts in Indiglish we finally got an RMA. The machine worked for about two weeks after it was returned and then developed some unrelated problem. Rather than waste another 4 hours on un-intelligible tech support, I bought my son another computer from a different manufacturer. It's worked flawlessly for the past 3 years.
Judging from what I read on the net while I was researching my son's second problem, I don't think my experience with poor quality product and poor quality tech support from Dell is unique.
There's a limit to cost cutting - go too far and you destroy the reason people initially bought from you. In my case, it'll be a long time before I ever buy another Dell. In the past 4 years, that's 3 computers Dell hasn't sold me.
This is where the Haviland Crater is. The crater is only .01 Km across so not much to see except circles. The circles are anthropogenic unfortunately.
I don't use Linux so my immediate reaction was "what's a murder investigation doing on /.?" Reading further, I realized the suspect is involved in a Linux project, the relevance of the post became clear.
/.'s audience.
So perhaps nubnub, the poster wasn't being declasse as you presume. Perhaps he was just making the post's relevance obvious to a larger segment to
Ahem.
That would be me.
Well it would be me if I could remember what WoW was.
Because Gary Francis Power's plane got shot down.
Short version of a long story is that the US and Russia agreed that knowing that the other country wasn't about to launch a nuclear attack was good information for both sides to have. The Open Skies treaty was the result.
China, however, isn't a signatory. But she's trying to orbit humans and satellites so if she wants those assets to overfly the US, she'll have to agree to leave US space assets alone or risk losing her spacecraft.
Tweaking game play is one of the hardest aspects of developing a video game. You're balancing personal preferences against what works well for the most people. I wrote the original Star Wars arcade port for the C64 for Parker Brothers. The project manager couldn't make up his mind on how the cursor should feel and so I ended up coding a roll-your-own cursor feedback tool for him so he could tweak the acceleration parameters himself. It was far more productive to write the tweak code and let him fart around than it was for me to burn a prom give it to him, have him say something like - "it should be more responsive" or "it's too responsive."
By making this patch, Valve has in essence, coded their own version of letting the players roll their own parameters. Instead of a small group's opinion on what the prices should be, it's the combined player's opinion that matters.
For the younger players, it's an introduction to price/demand responses. Of course, it's artificial in that the comodities have no production cost so from the producer's perspective, the weapons could be free. Nonetheless, it conveys the message to younger players that tho more people do or don't want something, that will affect the price of the something.
An obvious response to your post is to say "download instead of stream." So say you try to download a HD stream on a 5 Mbit link (cable speed)...25 GBytes at 5 Mbit/sec works out to a 136 hour download - almost a full week day and night. 680 hours if you're on DSL.
Run fiber instead of copper and you get 100 Mbit/sec or a tad under 7 hour downloads. So for those lucky folks who have fiber, downloading HD is feasible today if you're willing to download overnight or while you're at work. The rest of us will have to wait.
The interesting thing is that there's the killer ap for fiber. If the telcos get there first, they save their telephony business. If they keep farting around with DSL, they're toast because you'll be able to talk and download huge files simultaneously over fiber. That's one thing that's driving them to kill net neutrality. They have to invest in infrastructure or go out of business and they don't want to do either. Hence the bribes to Congress.
Another benefit of an iTV-like device that supported HD would be that the whole Blu Ray/HD-DVD issue goes away. You don't care how the bits are written on your hard drive as long as they show up on your HDTV in full 1080p goodness.
The video reminded me of Mark Twain's essay, Political Economy.
100 AU is nowhere near the Oort cloud. Sedna's orbit is highly eccentric ranging from around 92 au out to around 850 au. The Oort cloud is even further out at 50,000 au.
The bit about restructuring society so these things don't happen made me laugh. I live in a fairly nice neighborhood where people leave their front doors unlocked and garage doors open all day. Sometimes somebody will steal something but it's so rare it's not an issue for most people around here.
Fifteen years ago, a neighbor murdered his wife during a divorce proceeding. Hard to see how you restructure rage and jealousy out of society. Around the same time there was a 5 year old kid who was uncontrollable. The kid had a sibling who was fine but this kid was trouble at any gathering. You could feel sympathy for the parents because you could see them doing what any of us would have done and nothing worked with this kid. At 20, he's in jail for invading someone's home and pistol whipping the occupant. He had a sidekick, also from this neighborhood, who isn't very bright. He's in jail as well.
I just don't see how anyone could have done anything for that pair - some genetic combinations just don't work very well. They'll spring up in both bad and good neighborhoods. No matter how you structure a society, there'll be people that are not a good fit for that society.
At the last TED conference, David Pogue said he really liked the fact that his latest voice recognition software upgrade had zero new features. Zero. Instead, they polished the ones they'd already released. I think Opera should follow a similar course.
/. hasn't updated its main page in the past 4 hours.
I'd like to see a better UI. I just switched from Firefox, not because I was dissatisfied with Firefox, but because I prefer to use tools that aren't under active attack. In any event, here are my comments as to what needs work in Opera.
It took me awhile to understand Opera's peculiar caching rules. It's not clear to me how caching works since I don't know what's possible under HTTP besides GET. I had thought that a browser could quickly check with a server as to when the last time a web page was updated and if the server had a fresher page than the browser's cache, the browser would fetch from the server else it would fetch from cache. Opera's cache interface implies my simple model is wrong. You can tell Opera to check with the server everytime you load a page, or to wait 5 minutes, or to wait 30 minutes or to wait 4 hours, etc. There are 8 different options for the text alone. Why so complex? And that's just for text, you have another set of options for graphics. Why would I want to look at an older image if the image has changed on the website?
There are probable good and valid reasons for all those options. Just don't set them as default so that a new user like me is led to wonder why
Tabs are wonderful. But don't make the default behavior to double the number of tabs when I reselect "open all folder items" in a bookmark set. Smart move though to put "open all folder items" at the menu top as opposed to Firefox which has it at the bottom.
Speaking of tabs. Very nice touch to dim the inactive tabs so the active tab might stand out a bit more. Makes picking out the active tab much easier if you have 25 tabs open. However, dim the inactive tabs more so the active tab really stands out.
More on tabs. Your tab loading algorithm needs work. Firefox dusts you on this issue. I've got 25 tabs in one of my bookmark folders. The first tab is my homepage, followed in order by the pages I'm most interested in. It looks like Opera tries to talk to all 25 sites simultaneously when I "open all folder items" whereas Firefox appears to favor the sites at the top of the list. The result is Firefox is faster in loading the first few sites so I've got things to read while the remaining sites continue to load. Opera, otoh, has nothing for me once I move off my homepage - it's still trying to load all 25 sites.
Smooth scrolling. Doesn't work regardless of whether I select it or not. Firefox needs an extension to get it right so maybe we have a different idea as to what smooth scrolling ought to be. My idea is the right one...(joke)
Drop widgets. If I want to write a standalone widget, I'll write a standalone widget without Opera's help. Firefox has it right. Give us an API that lets us manipulate the main document like Firefox does. Better yet, don't invent a new API - implement Firefox's so all those Firefox extensions can move over to Opera. For example, there's a nifty smooth scroller extension over on Firefox...
Though I ran the company, I'd take tech support calls for a few hours once a week to get an idea of what problems customers were having with our products.
We had a client who was in the advanced stages of Alzheimers. He'd call, ask for help, we'd get him going and the next day, he'd call again with the same problem. This went on for several days until we ended up writing a set of instructions that were exactly tailored for him and mailed them via snail mail to his wife so she could take over.
That took care of the problem (at least from our end) until they lost the instructions. It took me a while to catch on that his wife was probably using us to keep her husband harmlessly busy. So, for about 6 months, we'd get a call from the guy, tell him we'd mail him another set of instructions, mail him another packet and then not hear from him for a week or two. Since the illness killed my grandfather and aunt I figured it was the least we could do for his wife.
We had another customer who was an absolute pita. He was unique in that he was the only customer whom I explicitly told the tech support staff to hang up on. The guy was out and out abusive. From the moment you picked up the call, he was yelling. I offered to refund his money and he refused - for whatever reason he seemed to derive pleasure from being a complete jerk. You've heard of firing a customer - he was definitely one who deserved it.