Old mathematics joke: Prof is writing a complicated proof on the chalkboard. Turns to the students and say, "Now, it's obvious..." He pauses. "At least I think it's obvious..." He scribbles frantically for about 15 minutes and finally turns back them and say, "I was right! I was right! It is obvious!"
Maybe that was offtopic, since mathematicians have a strange notion of "obvious". Thing is, you can't just say something is "obvious" because it's something we take for granted now. Nowadays, anybody who's studied elementary math takes as "obvious" that there's no largest possible integer. Perhaps if Cantor's proof to the contrary had been a little harder to understand...
The fact is, it's easy to say "Oh, anybody could have thought of that" after somebody has actually thought of it. But you don't actually know that. To have an intelligent opinion on the originality of an invention, you have to stop and compare it with other inventions, ones that got accepted as truely original. And ones that haven't.
I don't have an opinion on the patentability of online auctions. To have an educated opinion on this issue, I'd have to compare it with other similar ideas that other people have tried to patent. Of course, this is a free country, and you're entitled to have an opinion about anything you choose, whether you know what you're talking about or not. But until you take the trouble to have an educated opinion, you're the one who should screw off.
This would be interesting if EBay had any real competition. But attempts to set up competing auction sites have consistently failed (buyers go to EBay because the sellers are, sellers go to Ebay because that's where the buyers are), so the only real question is who gets to share in EBay's profits.
If these patents continue to hold up, then either EBay will buy them for some stupendous price, or somebody else will buy them and charge EBay studpendous fees. Either way, EBay will continue to do business much as before -- the profits will just get divided slightly different. Big deal!
Sorry, not the Enterprise. Tiny thing, no nuclear plant.
I've actually been on the flight deck of another carrier from that same era. Boggles the mind that anybody would even try to land a plane on such a tiny place.
You mean we should all go around harassing people who use technology we don't approve of to let us tweak their systems for them? Oh yeah, nothing bad can result from that!
To be absolutely fair, MS didn't drop out of W3C, they just withdrew from the Web Services standardization effort. Not that it matters whether they belong to any standards group -- as soon as a standard drifts away from their pet notions of kewl tech, they back away from it.
Ever work on a development team where there was one person who had to do everything a certain way, and never mind how it affected the project as a whole? That's Microsoft. They're not so much the evil corporate monopolists as the arrogant geeks that think their understanding of how technology works is the only one that matters. Something we should all reflect on, next time we go into technoreligiousity mode.
Safari for the Mac is one of the fastest and innovative browsers on the market. The Mozilla browsers continue to spawn lots of innovations and now seem focused on ease of use and performance. Things are just starting to get interesting again.
You talk as if the browser wars were entirely about technology. That's not even close to true. It's about how many people use each browser. And IE, for all its faults, is what people use.
Mind you, I consider this a Very Bad Thing. I don't like seeing any company, much less Microsoft, control such an important technology so thoroughly. And MS's sloppy attitude towards W3C standards (especially CSS) drives me up the wall. But simply creating superior browser technology is not going to win back all those desktops. It doesn't matter if kHTML or gecko are more innovative or standard-compliant. Nor does it matter who has the coolist features.
And least of all does it matter that MS used dishonest and monopolistic tactics to gain 90% of the browser market.
What matters is that IE has that browser dominance, that people are not going to switch back just because some geek tells them their browser is technically inferior. Nor do they crave standards compliance: that just means that other browsers don't render all their IE-specific web apps "correctly".
Don't put your hope in AOL switching to Gecko, either. First of all they won't do it -- they can afford a few license fees in order to avoid making life even more difficult for their subscribers. Second of all, AOL doesn't have that much of a future -- web users are getting more sophisticated, and realizing they don't need that bloated and obsolete client to access the Internet.
Flame on! I know you guys don't want to hear it. But yeah, MS has won the browser wars.
On the other hand, I'm very afraid some/.-ers will quickly point out that today's SCSI drives are as much crap as the IDE ones:-(.
Well, I don't have any numbers or even anecdotes. But if all these drives are failing because of defective platters, then what interface standard the drive uses wouldn't make much difference.
On the other hand, if it's just a matter of quality control, then it's not suprising if SCSI is more reliable. Except for a few hardware snobs that refuse to run IDE, SCSI is purchased by people who need sustained throughput: servers, developers who do a lot of builds, render farms, that sort of thing. These customers are going to pay more attention to failure rates than IDE customers, who tend to be end users. Once something becomes a consumer technology, manufacturers assume that bad units will just get returned, and don't worry about failure unless and until the failure rate gets too expensive.
Customer satisifaction? Get real. Most people assume that when their computer breaks, its because they did something wrong.
And hey, why do people buy IDE drives? Because they're cheaper than SCSI. And here's one reason why!
How many crowds are there?
on
Neuros Review
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh come on. They're both hard-disk-based music players. The first question everybody will ask is, "should I get this instead of some existing jukebox?" It only makes sense to compare it to an existing model. If the Neuros fare badly in the comparison, it's because it's got a lot of problems, not because the comparison was unfair.
I find it rather interesting that MP3Newswire gushed on and on about all the cool features, but said very little about how well they worked. Whereas USA Today reported various problems in detail. Is somebody sucking up to the manufacturer in order to get a freebie?
Even after that, it can take one or two minutes just to navigate the windows network to get to the other computer (why is this so slow anyway?).
On Windows 2K, you always want to used mapped drives to access shared folders. For whatever reason (buffering? haven't the foggiest), this speeds things up drastically. Seems to be less of an issue with XP.
In fact what we have here is a first cut at a secure distributed network presence system, something that would allow you to run an icq-like network between people you trust without being spied on by a central server. There are many reasons why one would want this: maybe *you* just want to trade copyrighted files, but *I* want to communicate securely and efficiently with my associates.
Besides which, this software isn't particularly useful for illicit file sharing. For that you need a way to get into contact with strangers who happen to have a copy of the file you want to download. The encryption features would actually seem to work against that.
Also, this is technology that might be very useful to AOL. AIM's big drawback is that it's not very secure, and really shouldn't be used for sensitive corporate communication. (Though the engineers at my last employer used it anyway.) AOL could persuade people that are already using AIM for free to upgrade to WASTE in order to secure their communications. Not to mention the other features.
Not fair to blame the corporations. They adopted their addressing schemes back when people still believed in a completely open Internet, where everybody could open anybody's sockets. If they'd know what was coming, they would have used private networks from the very beginning -- and Class B networks probably wouldn't even exist.
Please, I know what an embedded system is, and I understand that an embedded system user can't reconfigure the system. Problem is, Win98 assumes the user might want to reconfigure, and needs a lot of hand-holding to get it done. Which is why you sometimes see billboards like this one.
Well, OK, if the aim of the class is get the kids started with using a programming language, I guess you could teach a lot of logo in a week. But this guy wants to teach kids to make arcade games. You can do that in logo, but not in a week.
I agree with your assessment of what kids can do. If anything, their minds are better suited to learn this stuff than adults. Though I suspect most 13-year-olds would not have the patience for a serious attack on C++! But there are simpler languages, some of which are specifically designed for introducing kids to computers.
Thing is, this class is only one week long. Not enough time to teach anybody anything really complicated. So forget anything that goes beyond drag-and-drop visual programming. Otherwise, I'd suggest something like MSWLogo. Or if you have a big budget, MicroWorlds.
You might want to look at The Games Factory. If that doesn't suit you, check out this site which has various abandonware games for free download, including the Pinball Construction set.
OK, this is all very interesting. But what sane person uses Win98 for embedded applications? I seem to recall a slashback (some time in mid 2000, I think) that linked to a photo of one of those roadside displays that was displaying nothing but part of a "please insert driver disk" dialog!
PR clout? Federal appeals court judges serve for life. Once appointed by the Prez and confirmed by the Senate, they can't be removed short of impeachment, which is pretty rare. Makes it hard to apply political pressure to them.
This has nothing to do with military independence. There are lots of civilian applications for high-precision GPS.
There is a rebuttal to what I said that nobody seems to have thought of. Might as well raise it myself: American GPS developers will also develop civilian high-precision apps. Presumably any future U.S. administration would be reluctant to piss them off just to pressure foreign powers. But I suspect nobody in Europe is willing to count on that.
That's like saying a bomb isn't a bad thing, as long as you don't set it off. High resolution GPS is now available, but could be withdrawn at any time. Indeed, I wonder how many security wonks are still pissed at Bill Clinton for disabling Selective Availability, and are agitating to have it restored.
Your logic escapes me. It's perfectly true that people build useless things just for the prestige. But you can't just assume that's what the Europeans are doing, at least not addressing the issues I raised in my previous post.
Suppose the existing GPS system were controlled by France. Do you think anybody in the U.S. would say "The French won't turn on selective availability! We're dependent on each other's goodwill! We can trust them!"
So everybody should just trust the US not to selective availability back on? That means high-precision civilian GPS only works as long as the U.S. government says it works.
A lot of companies are going to be developing applications that require high-precision GPS. Suppose, say, 10 years from now, the U.S. threatens to turn SA back on unless everybody toes the line on the some issue. All these people with high-precision GPS apps will then pressure their governments to back down. A European political or economic leader is not going to happy about such a scenario, and can hardly be blamed for spending a few bucks to prevent it.
And if the situation were reversed, an American president who said, "Oh, we can just use the European GPS network" -- well, how would you feel if were dependent on the goodwill of a foreign country for a basic resource?
Despite reaching an average audience of more than 10,000 during peak times, we netted *0* sales.
Not that hard to explain. How many of those 10,000 even own a computer? How many of them just tuned out your ads along with dozens of other ads? How many are going to stop what they're doing and write down URL (especially if they're behind the wheel of a car!)? How catchy was your ad? And finally, how many of them even liked your music?
Big record companies spend millions on advertising and promotion, all done by experienced professionals. And they still sometimes lay an egg. Spending a few thousand dollars is no guarantee of anything.
If you want to make a place for your music, there's no substitute for the simple hard work of developing your art, finding your audience, and gradually making a place for yourself. This doesn't always work out, and it takes time and effort in any case. But there's no magic shortcuts.
I've been to many poor countries where lots of people seemed to be using cell phones. Maybe it's because the GSM market is very competitive that the services can be so cheap.
That's probably a factor. There are others:
In many developing countries, the landline network is hopeless: lack of capital to expand it, can't afford to serve rural areas, corrupt government owners don't bother maintaining it, etc. A cell network leapfrogs over these difficulties.
In some countries, providers find it profitable to sell service without a monthly minimum. That's because they can make big bucks on SMS text messages. But perhaps this falls under "GSM is more competitive". Plus the fact that GSM/SMS does a better job of supporting text messages than CDMA, especially between different providers.
Even where people can't afford individual cell phones, shared access can be a profitable business.
I have to wonder what they were thinking of, starting a CDMA network in India. Supposedly CDMA squeezes more calls into a given tower than GSM. But does that give any incentive for GSM users to switch?
Indeed I think/hope that GSM will eventually take over in the US. Its advantages weren't so obvious when cells were just for voice calls. But now that wireless connectivity is all the rage, the shortcomings of CDMA and TDMA, where you have to stop and establish a connection every time you want to go online, will be unavoidable.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that was offtopic, since mathematicians have a strange notion of "obvious". Thing is, you can't just say something is "obvious" because it's something we take for granted now. Nowadays, anybody who's studied elementary math takes as "obvious" that there's no largest possible integer. Perhaps if Cantor's proof to the contrary had been a little harder to understand...
The fact is, it's easy to say "Oh, anybody could have thought of that" after somebody has actually thought of it. But you don't actually know that. To have an intelligent opinion on the originality of an invention, you have to stop and compare it with other inventions, ones that got accepted as truely original. And ones that haven't.
I don't have an opinion on the patentability of online auctions. To have an educated opinion on this issue, I'd have to compare it with other similar ideas that other people have tried to patent. Of course, this is a free country, and you're entitled to have an opinion about anything you choose, whether you know what you're talking about or not. But until you take the trouble to have an educated opinion, you're the one who should screw off.
If these patents continue to hold up, then either EBay will buy them for some stupendous price, or somebody else will buy them and charge EBay studpendous fees. Either way, EBay will continue to do business much as before -- the profits will just get divided slightly different. Big deal!
I've actually been on the flight deck of another carrier from that same era. Boggles the mind that anybody would even try to land a plane on such a tiny place.
You mean we should all go around harassing people who use technology we don't approve of to let us tweak their systems for them? Oh yeah, nothing bad can result from that!
Ever work on a development team where there was one person who had to do everything a certain way, and never mind how it affected the project as a whole? That's Microsoft. They're not so much the evil corporate monopolists as the arrogant geeks that think their understanding of how technology works is the only one that matters. Something we should all reflect on, next time we go into technoreligiousity mode.
Mind you, I consider this a Very Bad Thing. I don't like seeing any company, much less Microsoft, control such an important technology so thoroughly. And MS's sloppy attitude towards W3C standards (especially CSS) drives me up the wall. But simply creating superior browser technology is not going to win back all those desktops. It doesn't matter if kHTML or gecko are more innovative or standard-compliant. Nor does it matter who has the coolist features. And least of all does it matter that MS used dishonest and monopolistic tactics to gain 90% of the browser market.
What matters is that IE has that browser dominance, that people are not going to switch back just because some geek tells them their browser is technically inferior. Nor do they crave standards compliance: that just means that other browsers don't render all their IE-specific web apps "correctly".
Don't put your hope in AOL switching to Gecko, either. First of all they won't do it -- they can afford a few license fees in order to avoid making life even more difficult for their subscribers. Second of all, AOL doesn't have that much of a future -- web users are getting more sophisticated, and realizing they don't need that bloated and obsolete client to access the Internet.
Flame on! I know you guys don't want to hear it. But yeah, MS has won the browser wars.
On the other hand, if it's just a matter of quality control, then it's not suprising if SCSI is more reliable. Except for a few hardware snobs that refuse to run IDE, SCSI is purchased by people who need sustained throughput: servers, developers who do a lot of builds, render farms, that sort of thing. These customers are going to pay more attention to failure rates than IDE customers, who tend to be end users. Once something becomes a consumer technology, manufacturers assume that bad units will just get returned, and don't worry about failure unless and until the failure rate gets too expensive.
Customer satisifaction? Get real. Most people assume that when their computer breaks, its because they did something wrong.
And hey, why do people buy IDE drives? Because they're cheaper than SCSI. And here's one reason why!
I find it rather interesting that MP3Newswire gushed on and on about all the cool features, but said very little about how well they worked. Whereas USA Today reported various problems in detail. Is somebody sucking up to the manufacturer in order to get a freebie?
Don't you know that more features makes a better product, even if the features aren't usable?!
Also, this is technology that might be very useful to AOL. AIM's big drawback is that it's not very secure, and really shouldn't be used for sensitive corporate communication. (Though the engineers at my last employer used it anyway.) AOL could persuade people that are already using AIM for free to upgrade to WASTE in order to secure their communications. Not to mention the other features.
We Await Silent Trystero's Empire!
Not fair to blame the corporations. They adopted their addressing schemes back when people still believed in a completely open Internet, where everybody could open anybody's sockets. If they'd know what was coming, they would have used private networks from the very beginning -- and Class B networks probably wouldn't even exist.
Please, I know what an embedded system is, and I understand that an embedded system user can't reconfigure the system. Problem is, Win98 assumes the user might want to reconfigure, and needs a lot of hand-holding to get it done. Which is why you sometimes see billboards like this one.
Well, OK, if the aim of the class is get the kids started with using a programming language, I guess you could teach a lot of logo in a week. But this guy wants to teach kids to make arcade games. You can do that in logo, but not in a week.
Thing is, this class is only one week long. Not enough time to teach anybody anything really complicated. So forget anything that goes beyond drag-and-drop visual programming. Otherwise, I'd suggest something like MSWLogo. Or if you have a big budget, MicroWorlds.
You might want to look at The Games Factory. If that doesn't suit you, check out this site which has various abandonware games for free download, including the Pinball Construction set.
OK, this is all very interesting. But what sane person uses Win98 for embedded applications? I seem to recall a slashback (some time in mid 2000, I think) that linked to a photo of one of those roadside displays that was displaying nothing but part of a "please insert driver disk" dialog!
PR clout? Federal appeals court judges serve for life. Once appointed by the Prez and confirmed by the Senate, they can't be removed short of impeachment, which is pretty rare. Makes it hard to apply political pressure to them.
There is a rebuttal to what I said that nobody seems to have thought of. Might as well raise it myself: American GPS developers will also develop civilian high-precision apps. Presumably any future U.S. administration would be reluctant to piss them off just to pressure foreign powers. But I suspect nobody in Europe is willing to count on that.
That's like saying a bomb isn't a bad thing, as long as you don't set it off. High resolution GPS is now available, but could be withdrawn at any time. Indeed, I wonder how many security wonks are still pissed at Bill Clinton for disabling Selective Availability, and are agitating to have it restored.
Suppose the existing GPS system were controlled by France. Do you think anybody in the U.S. would say "The French won't turn on selective availability! We're dependent on each other's goodwill! We can trust them!"
A lot of companies are going to be developing applications that require high-precision GPS. Suppose, say, 10 years from now, the U.S. threatens to turn SA back on unless everybody toes the line on the some issue. All these people with high-precision GPS apps will then pressure their governments to back down. A European political or economic leader is not going to happy about such a scenario, and can hardly be blamed for spending a few bucks to prevent it.
And if the situation were reversed, an American president who said, "Oh, we can just use the European GPS network" -- well, how would you feel if were dependent on the goodwill of a foreign country for a basic resource?
Oh, wait a sec. Strike that last question!
Big record companies spend millions on advertising and promotion, all done by experienced professionals. And they still sometimes lay an egg. Spending a few thousand dollars is no guarantee of anything.
If you want to make a place for your music, there's no substitute for the simple hard work of developing your art, finding your audience, and gradually making a place for yourself. This doesn't always work out, and it takes time and effort in any case. But there's no magic shortcuts.
- In many developing countries, the landline network is hopeless: lack of capital to expand it, can't afford to serve rural areas, corrupt government owners don't bother maintaining it, etc. A cell network leapfrogs over these difficulties.
- In some countries, providers find it profitable to sell service without a monthly minimum. That's because they can make big bucks on SMS text messages. But perhaps this falls under "GSM is more competitive". Plus the fact that GSM/SMS does a better job of supporting text messages than CDMA, especially between different providers.
- Even where people can't afford individual cell phones, shared access can be a profitable business.
I have to wonder what they were thinking of, starting a CDMA network in India. Supposedly CDMA squeezes more calls into a given tower than GSM. But does that give any incentive for GSM users to switch?Indeed I think/hope that GSM will eventually take over in the US. Its advantages weren't so obvious when cells were just for voice calls. But now that wireless connectivity is all the rage, the shortcomings of CDMA and TDMA, where you have to stop and establish a connection every time you want to go online, will be unavoidable.
What's the brightness knob on my TV for? I turned it up all the way, but the shows are still stupid.