I was wondering about that, too, here's what I found:
A MAME status report from April 2000 states that "Martin Buchholz sent in a Poly-Play driver (the only arcade machine ever produced in GDR, the former East Germany) with thanks to Jürgen Oppermann, Volker Hann and the Videogame Museum in Berlin (especially to Jan-Ole Christian) - without them, the driver would not have been reality."
This German article elaborates on that a little bit. Basically, they analyzed existing hardware and built a MAME driver for it. That's what they do for other games, too - usually, however, implementing a platform will give you more than one box to emulate... (The museum people were quite happy to have the MAME emulation, of course, because one of these days, the hardware is going to fail, and now they'll at least still have the games in working order.)
The second article also talks about four missing games: Their names are in the software and people in the comments section remember playing them, but none of the surviving machines seems to have the games.
Their names are: "Der Gaertner" (The gardener) "Im Gewaechshaus" (In the greenhouse) "Hagelnde Wolken" (Hail clouds - apparently some kind of Space Invaders clone) "Der Taucher" (The diver)
I disagree - AppleScript is extremely powerful and its scripts are easy to read, but debugging them can be a royal pain. I'm an experienced programmer, but Apple Script's inconsistencies never cease to amaze me.
I've encountered situations where "<VERB> the <OBJECT>" would not work, but "<VERB> <OBJECT>" would, etc. And the error messages usually aren't of much help - with some luck you can figure out which line the error was in, but figuring out the correct syntax is often a matter of trial and error.
So yes, AppleScript is powerful, but as a first programming language its quirks can be off-putting.
Re:Bayesian filtering is already dead.
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 1
I'm using POPfile which tries to extract words from attachments and apples other de-obfuscation techniques, as well. It's maintained by John Graham Cummings who tries to keep up with spammer's tricks. I've been using it for about a year now, and so far it's caught practically all of my spams. (Success rate > 98%)
(Man, that sounded like one of those late-night infomercials, but I swear I'm simply a happy user.)
Granted, I only get 4 or 5 spams a day, so maybe you're simply ahead of me in the spam curve and I'll be getting there soon, too...:-/
Re:The un-PC point of view in re: Google IPO
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 1
He starts out with good points, but once he gets going with his "death of the internet"-scenario it's downhill:
Far from becoming easier and quicker to use, it is becoming slower and more difficult as the tsunami of viruses, spam and pop-ups infest all interactions with it [...] "Broadband" too, touted by President George W. Bush as an essential tool of technological advance for U.S. society as a whole, is becoming exponentially more sluggish, as the detritus clogs its arteries. Thus a consumer broadband Internet user of 2004 may experience Internet usage substantially slower than did a dial-up user of 1997, before pop-ups, spam and viruses became so universal.
It's possible that a solution will be found to the virus/spam/popup problem before it gets very much worse, and the Internet will continue to be an essential information artery into the homes of America. It is also however possible that such a solution will not be found [...] Large companies will move to an Intranet, in which information sources are purchased from third parties and kept in an in-house system, safe from outside attack. Home users and small businesses [...] will stop [using the internet], relying on DVDs and CD-ROMs for the information and entertainment they need. If this begins to happen even to a small extent then the "network effect" on which the Internet depends may go into reverse, as the "early adopters" become early un-adopters, and a readily available e-mail address becomes like a telephone number in the local directory, something that the truly cool don't have.
Obviously, the author doesn't even know there's more to the net than WWW and mail, nor has he heard about pop-up blockers or alternative operating systems. He might have a point on the spam problem, however Bayesian filtering seems to hold up pretty well for the time being.
Apparently everyone who knows how to fire up Outlook and IE has enough expertise to predict future development of the internet. (Interestingly enough, he doesn't even mention the possibilty of people or companies swiching from the virus-ridden Windows to Linux or OS X, and what that might do to Microsoft's stock.)
A page containing the word "tobornottobe" is NOT a correct match for a search for "to be or not to be".
Ist *is* a site about Shakespeare, so one could argue that it's related, and since the word jammed together are in the domain name (where you can't use spaces), I'm willing to cut them some slack there.
I did try the quotes around the phrase.
I hope you did! Without them, Google will ignore everything but the word "not" (an tell you so above your results).
Do not mention "but the pages linking to it contain the phrase!". That is only used for ranking of results, and not for actually finding the results.
Oops - that's wrong. Take a look at this cache of a comic strip called "To be or net to be" - up in the Google heading it says:
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: to be or not to be
Apparentl,y many people misspell the strip's name and it managed to get into the top 10 for the misspelt result with that.
Another example is a search on "AB RAIN". One of the first 10 returns is incorrect.
That looks really problematic: As long as there are results for "ab rain", I shouldn't get "abrain" or "a brain" in the tops.
Or, the vendor is going to feel compelled to deliver something that approximates the value, and bend the development schedule out of shape to force a release, usually at the cost of quality. (Been there, done that, still have the t-shirt.)
Wow, that must be a really geeky t-shirt:
"I bought a piece of software and all I got is something that approximates the value and has its development schedule bent out of shape to force a release, usually at the cost of quality."
Just look at all those people flying around in planes, re-enacting flight sims.
Baumi
Re:Check those numbers, please
on
For Sale: Lycos.com
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's right - poor wording on my part. They didn't diminsh the value - they just wasted money in the first place by buying Lycos for way too much.
I remember wondering about that amount even back then: I mean, in 2000, Lycos was on its way down already. Perhaps it was different in the US, but over here, people were using Yahoo or Altavista, nobody I knew used for searching or news. (And yes, there is a German Lycos site.)
Interesting aside: Some time ago, Lycos launched a huge media campaign to regain popularity - apparently without much success. Google OTOH managed to become the most popular search engine mainly by woord of mouth. (I know Lycos is a portal, but their ad campaign - the one with the dog - focused on the searching part of things.)
Check those numbers, please
on
For Sale: Lycos.com
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The market scorecard shows it exactly... $200 billion going in, $12.5 billion going out. They misplaced 15/16th of the value that they started with.
It's $12.5 billion going in, $200 million going out. Which means they've wasted more than 59/60th of the value.
As an aside: I don' think there ever was a $200 billion Dot-Com-Merger, was there? (How much was AOL-TimeWarner again?)
Jens
They should get their facts straight
on
Update on Playfair
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
From their statement:
The Apple iPod permits the iTunes user to make a music CD out of iTunes songs.
That's nonsense. iTunes permits the user to burn a CD, no iPod necessary.
I realize that this doesn't undermine the main part of their argument, but they should still check their public statements for this kind of factual errors, otherwise they'll just look like they don't know what they're talking about.
Baumi
Re:Linux needs more patching? Does it?
on
How does Google do it?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Not sure if it needs more patching, but at least OSS-pastches come out in a timely manner after the discovery, whereas MS patches sometimes take ages to materialize. Thus, more patches don't necessarily mean more security holes - just better housekeeping.
My suggestion is to present the user with those images containing a word [...] everytime the user needs to send a mail (before clicking Send). [...]
as long as it weeds out all the spam sent from all the freebie mail accounts we could see an improvement
That wouldn't help one bit. Spammers may forge a freemailer's address, but in reality they use either open relays which are run by admins way too lazy to implement ANY contermeasures against spam or (as it's more and more common) they're using worms to infect tons of PCs, turning them into SMTP servers without the knowledge of the owners. As for sending those mails, they donn't standard mail applications, but rather specialized bulk mail programs.
Where would your image idea fit in?
Using it in a freemailer's web interface is useless, since spammers don't hijack those interfaces. The lazy SMTP server admin won't implement it, and even those who aren't lazy wouldn't, since it would break compatibility with every single legitimate mail user. Lastly, the likelyhood of anti-spam measures popping up in hijacked computers or bulk mailing programs is extremely slim, as well.
Sure, from a technical POV you're right - it's still the same old PDA underneath and it doesn't play anthing it didn't play before. However, not only software engineers spend (or should spend) ages perfecting their part of the product, designers do the same thing. And if you asked a product designer, they probably wouldn't care whether it can play back AACs or all the other stuff: It has the same look & feel, it uses exactly the techniques and designs perfected by the people who came up with the iPod.
There's more to a device than just its functionality - the failure to understand that is exactly what has lead to a flood of software with unintuitive UIs.
Okay, and what happens whenever that suit is settled - let's say I've been calling you a killer andthere was no truth to that. Once the court decided that, what'll happen?
Will I be allowed to say that again without facing any backlash like fines?
If not, then this is exactly what it's like in that German suit: The court - which was called upon by a competitor - has found SCO's claims baseless and SCO is not allowed to repeat them unless they present proof.
And that's not censorship, IMHO. At least not as long as the trial itself is conducted in an open and fair manner which will let independent parties assess the correctness of the judgement. It would be a different thing if this were done in some secret court with no transcripts being accessible and all traces of SCO's former claims being erased from the archives. That's not the case, however - actually, the claims even are repeated in articles about that court order - together with the fact that the court didn't find them to be substantial enough to be upheld.
I believe AppleScript has fallen out of favor for MacOS X
I don't think so. While the original intentions of haveing different AppleScript dialects for different (human) languages are gone, AppleScript is still undergoing active development - with 10.2 (I think) it even gained the capability to script the GUI, which makes it possible to control even otherwise non-scriptable applications. Plus you can mix and match AppleScript code with that of any other scripting language (using the CLI AppleScript interpreter).
So, to sum it up: AppleScript did get some competition on OS X, but I don't see it being phased out any time soon.
It can cause the same on a more abstract level: By badmouthing competion without any facts to back it, you can seriously damage their business. By badmouthing persons, you can damage their reputations.
I don't know about US law, but if you don't have the option to sue somone who's spreading lies about you, you most certainly should have.
Funny how so many of the tech savvy alphageeks on slashdot don't have basic researching skills to find out facts on their but rather follow others like sheep and just assume what the other guy is saying is true
This one goes right back to you: Had you read the linked article (the Taco Bell one), you would have noticed that it's relating an anecdote about a clueless Taco Bell employee who didn't know there was a $2 bill. It does not claim that there isn't one, quite to the contrary.
Slashdot Mirror
I was wondering about that, too, here's what I found:
A MAME status report from April 2000 states that "Martin Buchholz sent in a Poly-Play driver (the only arcade machine ever produced in GDR, the former East Germany) with thanks to Jürgen Oppermann, Volker Hann and the Videogame Museum in Berlin (especially to Jan-Ole Christian) - without them, the driver would not have been reality."
This German article elaborates on that a little bit. Basically, they analyzed existing hardware and built a MAME driver for it. That's what they do for other games, too - usually, however, implementing a platform will give you more than one box to emulate...
(The museum people were quite happy to have the MAME emulation, of course, because one of these days, the hardware is going to fail, and now they'll at least still have the games in working order.)
The second article also talks about four missing games: Their names are in the software and people in the comments section remember playing them, but none of the surviving machines seems to have the games.
Their names are:
"Der Gaertner" (The gardener)
"Im Gewaechshaus" (In the greenhouse)
"Hagelnde Wolken" (Hail clouds - apparently some kind of Space Invaders clone)
"Der Taucher" (The diver)
Jens
The page linked above also has a link to a MAME file.
I disagree - AppleScript is extremely powerful and its scripts are easy to read, but debugging them can be a royal pain. I'm an experienced programmer, but Apple Script's inconsistencies never cease to amaze me.
I've encountered situations where "<VERB> the <OBJECT>" would not work, but "<VERB> <OBJECT>" would, etc. And the error messages usually aren't of much help - with some luck you can figure out which line the error was in, but figuring out the correct syntax is often a matter of trial and error.
So yes, AppleScript is powerful, but as a first programming language its quirks can be off-putting.
I'm using POPfile which tries to extract words from attachments and apples other de-obfuscation techniques, as well. It's maintained by John Graham Cummings who tries to keep up with spammer's tricks. I've been using it for about a year now, and so far it's caught practically all of my spams. (Success rate > 98%)
:-/
(Man, that sounded like one of those late-night infomercials, but I swear I'm simply a happy user.)
Granted, I only get 4 or 5 spams a day, so maybe you're simply ahead of me in the spam curve and I'll be getting there soon, too...
He starts out with good points, but once he gets going with his "death of the internet"-scenario it's downhill:
Far from becoming easier and quicker to use, it is becoming slower and more difficult as the tsunami of viruses, spam and pop-ups infest all interactions with it
[...]
"Broadband" too, touted by President George W. Bush as an essential tool of technological advance for U.S. society as a whole, is becoming exponentially more sluggish, as the detritus clogs its arteries. Thus a consumer broadband Internet user of 2004 may experience Internet usage substantially slower than did a dial-up user of 1997, before pop-ups, spam and viruses became so universal.
It's possible that a solution will be found to the virus/spam/popup problem before it gets very much worse, and the Internet will continue to be an essential information artery into the homes of America. It is also however possible that such a solution will not be found
[...]
Large companies will move to an Intranet, in which information sources are purchased from third parties and kept in an in-house system, safe from outside attack. Home users and small businesses [...] will stop [using the internet], relying on DVDs and CD-ROMs for the information and entertainment they need. If this begins to happen even to a small extent then the "network effect" on which the Internet depends may go into reverse, as the "early adopters" become early un-adopters, and a readily available e-mail address becomes like a telephone number in the local directory, something that the truly cool don't have.
Obviously, the author doesn't even know there's more to the net than WWW and mail, nor has he heard about pop-up blockers or alternative operating systems. He might have a point on the spam problem, however Bayesian filtering seems to hold up pretty well for the time being.
Apparently everyone who knows how to fire up Outlook and IE has enough expertise to predict future development of the internet. (Interestingly enough, he doesn't even mention the possibilty of people or companies swiching from the virus-ridden Windows to Linux or OS X, and what that might do to Microsoft's stock.)
He even has a HOWTO on what to do when you're being slashdotted on his other site.
A page containing the word "tobornottobe" is NOT a correct match for a search for "to be or not to be".
Ist *is* a site about Shakespeare, so one could argue that it's related, and since the word jammed together are in the domain name (where you can't use spaces), I'm willing to cut them some slack there.
I did try the quotes around the phrase.
I hope you did! Without them, Google will ignore everything but the word "not" (an tell you so above your results).
Do not mention "but the pages linking to it contain the phrase!". That is only used for ranking of results, and not for actually finding the results.
Oops - that's wrong. Take a look at this cache of a comic strip called "To be or net to be" - up in the Google heading it says:
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: to be or not to be
Apparentl,y many people misspell the strip's name and it managed to get into the top 10 for the misspelt result with that.
Another example is a search on "AB RAIN". One of the first 10 returns is incorrect.
That looks really problematic: As long as there are results for "ab rain", I shouldn't get "abrain" or "a brain" in the tops.
Baumi
Or, the vendor is going to feel compelled to deliver something that approximates the value, and bend the development schedule out of shape to force a release, usually at the cost of quality. (Been there, done that, still have the t-shirt.)
Wow, that must be a really geeky t-shirt:
"I bought a piece of software and all I got is something that approximates the value and has its development schedule bent out of shape to force a release, usually at the cost of quality."
"Hey, babe, wanna help me do a live-action replay of Strip Poker?"
Just look at all those people flying around in planes, re-enacting flight sims.
Baumi
That's right - poor wording on my part. They didn't diminsh the value - they just wasted money in the first place by buying Lycos for way too much.
I remember wondering about that amount even back then: I mean, in 2000, Lycos was on its way down already. Perhaps it was different in the US, but over here, people were using Yahoo or Altavista, nobody I knew used for searching or news. (And yes, there is a German Lycos site.)
Interesting aside: Some time ago, Lycos launched a huge media campaign to regain popularity - apparently without much success. Google OTOH managed to become the most popular search engine mainly by woord of mouth. (I know Lycos is a portal, but their ad campaign - the one with the dog - focused on the searching part of things.)
The market scorecard shows it exactly... $200 billion going in, $12.5 billion going out. They misplaced 15/16th of the value that they started with.
It's $12.5 billion going in, $200 million going out. Which means they've wasted more than 59/60th of the value.
As an aside: I don' think there ever was a $200 billion Dot-Com-Merger, was there? (How much was AOL-TimeWarner again?)
Jens
From their statement:
The Apple iPod permits the iTunes user to make a music CD out of iTunes songs.
That's nonsense. iTunes permits the user to burn a CD, no iPod necessary.
I realize that this doesn't undermine the main part of their argument, but they should still check their public statements for this kind of factual errors, otherwise they'll just look like they don't know what they're talking about.
Baumi
Not sure if it needs more patching, but at least OSS-pastches come out in a timely manner after the discovery, whereas MS patches sometimes take ages to materialize. Thus, more patches don't necessarily mean more security holes - just better housekeeping.
Baumi
Someone should spend the time to develop an RFC for a desperatly needed protocol: Lawsuit-over-IP
Baumi
Good site - thanks for the work!
:-)
However, my nitpicking disorder prevents me from overlooking your frequent use of "asterix" whenever you supposedly mean "asterisk".
Or are spammers really putting comic book characters bewteen the letters now?
Baumi
My suggestion is to present the user with those images containing a word [...] everytime the user needs to send a mail (before clicking Send).
[...]
as long as it weeds out all the spam sent from all the freebie mail accounts we could see an improvement
That wouldn't help one bit. Spammers may forge a freemailer's address, but in reality they use either open relays which are run by admins way too lazy to implement ANY contermeasures against spam or (as it's more and more common) they're using worms to infect tons of PCs, turning them into SMTP servers without the knowledge of the owners. As for sending those mails, they donn't standard mail applications, but rather specialized bulk mail programs.
Where would your image idea fit in?
Using it in a freemailer's web interface is useless, since spammers don't hijack those interfaces. The lazy SMTP server admin won't implement it, and even those who aren't lazy wouldn't, since it would break compatibility with every single legitimate mail user. Lastly, the likelyhood of anti-spam measures popping up in hijacked computers or bulk mailing programs is extremely slim, as well.
So, sorry, but that one simply doesn't work.
Baumi
Just wait until the BBB finds out that using a G5 will not blow you right through the wall onto your lawn.
Sure, from a technical POV you're right - it's still the same old PDA underneath and it doesn't play anthing it didn't play before. However, not only software engineers spend (or should spend) ages perfecting their part of the product, designers do the same thing.
And if you asked a product designer, they probably wouldn't care whether it can play back AACs or all the other stuff: It has the same look & feel, it uses exactly the techniques and designs perfected by the people who came up with the iPod.
There's more to a device than just its functionality - the failure to understand that is exactly what has lead to a flood of software with unintuitive UIs.
Say it with me: OpenFirmware
Better yet: Sing it with Mitch Bradley : Firmware, Open Firmware...
Every electric and electronic appliance should go for that goal.
I don't know - my matchbox-sized fridge isn't selling too well...
Jens
Okay, and what happens whenever that suit is settled - let's say I've been calling you a killer andthere was no truth to that. Once the court decided that, what'll happen?
Will I be allowed to say that again without facing any backlash like fines?
If not, then this is exactly what it's like in that German suit: The court - which was called upon by a competitor - has found SCO's claims baseless and SCO is not allowed to repeat them unless they present proof.
And that's not censorship, IMHO. At least not as long as the trial itself is conducted in an open and fair manner which will let independent parties assess the correctness of the judgement. It would be a different thing if this were done in some secret court with no transcripts being accessible and all traces of SCO's former claims being erased from the archives.
That's not the case, however - actually, the claims even are repeated in articles about that court order - together with the fact that the court didn't find them to be substantial enough to be upheld.
I believe AppleScript has fallen out of favor for MacOS X
I don't think so. While the original intentions of haveing different AppleScript dialects for different (human) languages are gone, AppleScript is still undergoing active development - with 10.2 (I think) it even gained the capability to script the GUI, which makes it possible to control even otherwise non-scriptable applications. Plus you can mix and match AppleScript code with that of any other scripting language (using the CLI AppleScript interpreter).
So, to sum it up: AppleScript did get some competition on OS X, but I don't see it being phased out any time soon.
Baumi
It can cause the same on a more abstract level: By badmouthing competion without any facts to back it, you can seriously damage their business. By badmouthing persons, you can damage their reputations.
I don't know about US law, but if you don't have the option to sue somone who's spreading lies about you, you most certainly should have.
Funny how so many of the tech savvy alphageeks on slashdot don't have basic researching skills to find out facts on their but rather follow others like sheep and just assume what the other guy is saying is true
This one goes right back to you: Had you read the linked article (the Taco Bell one), you would have noticed that it's relating an anecdote about a clueless Taco Bell employee who didn't know there was a $2 bill. It does not claim that there isn't one, quite to the contrary.
Baumi