I work in a college IT department and we definitely do not support Linux. You're free to run it, but when you look at the logistics of support, there are probably only one or two students in a thousand who use it on their laptops, and if they know enough to run it day to day, they should know enough to fix it. Staff on the other hand, only a few of us have experimented with it, and I don't think any of us use it anywhere approaching regularly. We'd pretty much have to have weeks of man-hour downtime to train up on it, or hire a team of specialists for the one student in five years who might come in for help with it.
The only major point of conflict with it though would be that the net admins require everyone to run the Cisco Clean Access Agent (now NAC Agent) to check their PC and virus scanners for updates before they have internet access. It's available for Mac and PC, but I know of no Linux version, so that puts a damper on that. We also do not support OS/2, BSD, Solaris (well, on student machines...), BeOS, Midori, CP/M, and so on... but if enough students used any of them, we'd train up on it.
When everyone has a camera, you tend to end up in photos you didn't intend to be in - sometimes without even noticing. More phones have GPSes now, and may be able to automatically geotag their photos. There are providers that offer online photo storage plans right off the phone.
So with those in mind, all it would take is one warrant to search a mobile photo host and run face recognition software, and you have an easily compiled database of who was where and when, and with enough data, the ability to plot your daily habits and location trends, who you know, who they know, areas you and your friends tend to frequent, and by extension what your interests and motives may be, etc.
It's not really a panic about what could happen if we let this get out of hand, as much as it is an observation of what could be done cheaply with practically off the shelf software on a common PC today.
If you only have one media, I'd suggest a USB flashdrive formatted in FAT16 or FAT32, containing TXT, MP3, MPG, and M4V formats as they're all pretty well established standards. It's hard to say if something can physically read USB in 16 years, but it was possible 10 years ago, and it's super abundant and well established now.
About a decade ago I started archiving stuff for long-term on ISO9660 CD-Rs in VCD format, and now it's hard to find anything that couldn't view them. Widespread MPEG standards seem to fare quite well - especially now that even set-top players can play them.
SD cards and the like will be obsolesced over time by smaller cards and different standards, but the basic USB flashdrive seems quite ingrained in every computer of decent power running any OS.
I'm kind of on the opposite side there. Battle Angel Alita was some of my all time favorite sci-fi, so with the Hollywood track record of destroying video game or manga adaptations, I hope it never sees the light of day - especially since Kishiro has basically said that he'd be thrilled to see it as a movie regardless of what they do to it, so it's like license to be waaaaaaay off in film. That, and it's a pretty big series too, so the movie would either have to take a little of the beginning story like the OAV, or compress it all togeher into one phantasmagorical confusion trip like Fist of the North Star.:/
I agree... I imagined this earlier today and I figure if I were in a quiet place with other people and one of these ambushed me, I'd probably punch the screen forcefully, and if it keeps making noise, rip out the page and wad it up....but hey, maybe that's what they want. If it happened in a bookstore I'd kind of have to buy the magazine!
Yeah, one one hand, I'd think that people who had a defective console and felt cheated would be more apt to respond than those who had no issues.
On the other, 54% failure rate doesn't explain all the people who are on their fifth 360 or more (though getting refurbs back from repair centers might...)
An older Ars Technica report suggested the failure rate for Wii and PS3 was closer to 3%, which is good even for a TV.
I like this response. I seldom use spell checkers myself. I have definitely noticed that many people online can't be bothered to try to spell correctly or give a second thought to grammar. If the Internet has done anything to my spelling, it's that I tend to use American spellings of words despite living in Canada. Many times it's a conscious decision based on the audience I'm writing to.
But the closing line of the parent post sums it up well. If you deliberately try to do something correctly, you will maintain or even improve your skills at it. Don't simply take it for granted that you can spell and properly use English just because it's your native tongue.
I think people are less required to understand computers now. I remember when motherboard manuals would include tables of which devices are assigned to which IRQs, and how to set the jumpers to assign different resources to different memory addresses. Some of this knowlege is arguably obsolete now, but largely it can still be set in software/BIOS setup. The thing is that no one expects it to be known now. The manuals I've seen basically say "these are the ports. Install it in a PC case and plug cards into it - have fun!"
I've worked on (Sony Vaio) laptops that don't even have the key to get into the BIOS setup page documented or visible on booting! I almost thought it wasn't possible!
As less knowlege is required, fewer people even want to know these things too because it's become rivia. It's kind of lamentable, but since this knowlege is still quite useful whether or not the users realize it, it does keep me steadily employed performing simple maintenance and troubleshooting to their systems...
I agree. Ever since college, I swear by Zebra brand Sarasa 0.7mm gel pens. They don't leave gaps or weaker sections of lines, don't require much force, and aren't so gushy that they bleed through the paper like most gels I've used. The black is as crisp and black as if printed on a laser printer, and so it also makes perfect photocopies.
They may smear trails if rubbed shortly after writing, but once it's dried, it holds quite fast to the page....wow... I just reviewed a disposable pen on/.
I'm not a coder, but I am trained as one, so I have experience but I'm really not up on trends. I learned QBASIC when I was around grade 4, and it was only 8 years later in high school that I even started object oriented with C++.
It was great for learning, but I have to wonder - are there any good procedural languages for beginners? Or is it even possible to lay all the basics of OO on a beginner? People sometimes ask me what a good starting point could be for learning to program, but I really learned in a different era before such abstract concepts as OO entails were in any way neccesary.
Personally I tend to recommend modern VB for an easy OO introduction in no small part due to the handiness of the IDE and how forgiving it is of little mistakes. The various ways of passing or referring to variables in C++ is something I would never even consider laying on a newbie, especially when some methods may work in some cases, but not others.
My thoughts exactly. There are plenty of other bars, and I don't mind if my name's on a guestbook that may be audited when there's a fight/robbery/etc.
It may even have a small deterrent effect on fake IDs, though not much since Canada has decided to go with the free PDF417 barcode standard that's not proprietary in the least.
I'm 27, and I know cursive, but probably have some gaps in capital letters. My handwriting has some glitches that crop up if I'm hurrying, like too many repetitions on [n, m, r, u]. This was because while I was forced to use cursive in grade school, the way we took notes was such a crazy frantic scramble to keep up, it usually amounted to little more than scrawling some bumpy lines on a page before the board was erased again.
I've since started to recover it because I actually like learning alphabets, and started to approach cursive like any foreign alphabet. While I'm still not the tidiest writer, I can easily write in Japanese, Korean, PalmOS Grafitti, non-cursive, and a few hands of English calligraphy. Cursive gave me problems though because I'd rushed it so often I was used to not paying attention to what letters I was writing, and not wasting time checking for mistakes. Now I use it deliberately, and try to accurately render each letter as if I were writing any other alphabet....though I can only imagine how hard it would be for someone in my situation who didn't give it any special effort, or wasn't into alphabets/languages... Still, I don't exactly lament its loss as long as you can write legibly with a pen somehow. I'm going to do some ranting if heavily-abbreviated misspelled txting speak becomes standard because that's too broken to be considered language...
Words of wisdom. Mere entertainment is enjoyable but not meaningful. We direct our own lives, so if you want to do more, then do it. I'm doing a bunch of stuff this year I'd put off for years because I realized the same thing, and it's really better to regret something you have done than something you haven't!
A filthy motherlode of ambergris? You know... from a hundred whales?
Re:I didn't read to book, but...
on
Hello World!
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I cut my teeth on QBASIC on DOS 6. I loved how if you used a proper keyword, it would automatically capitalize it, giving some instant feedback. Even in Visual Studio.NET's VB editor it does something similar, but I also love how IntelliSense can call up a list of all the members in a class if you're struggling to remember a name, or even curious what something can do...
Just what I was thinking. So a ridged surface doesn't do much better at grabbing a hard, perfectly smooth one... how about something with more than zero texture?
Exactly - and until this is possible, the format isn't useful, IMO. These days we have to be very careful of the fine print of any IP, making sure we aren't just renting or leasing the content. If I buy a video, I want to be able to convert and play it on anything I have that handles video, period. I'm not going to buy a copy for my TV, one for my iPod, one for my PSP, and so on.
I remember seeing a Nokia demo where you could point the camera at a hotel or other attraction and get a popup with information about it - do you know if that was ever released?
I've also long been in favour of tagging things with small Semacodes or QRCodes to help even GPS-less phones quickly scan and identify things, then maybe pull additional data from the web...
Actually I keep players for most formats around, even including VCD and LaserDisk...
The big problem with DRM though is that if I have a LaserDisk and no player, I can jump on eBay, grab a used one, and it works. If I have a modern gaming console that's no longer supported online, if it dies, I grab a new one, and I'll still never see my downloaded games again, just the initial release, unpatched versions of games on disc.
I'll vouch for this. I've used it ever since it was "Ontrack Tiramisu." It's simple and straightforward, and extremely effective. I've used it over a half dozen times and it seems to pull data from any disk that doesn't outright crash the computer when it's connected (though about 10 years ago I recovered data from a disk that had to be connected after boot to prevent a freeze...)
So true. There are a lot of mindblowing things we don't even think about either. My work shirts and pants are truly cheap ($15-20) yet have nanoparticle treatments that make small spills and sprays of water bead up and roll off them, resisting stains. Drill bits and other machine parts are coated in films of titanium nitride or titanium carbon nitride, which is insanely hard and chemical and wear resistant.
With any decent modern camera you can shoot and shoot all day, come home, and offload hundreds or possibly thousands of pics from it - and they're already "developed," but if you want to, you can run off passably professional copies on a home printer....we have dirt cheap tiny wristwatches that keep time within seconds per month, and can be dunked in water or slammed around to no ill effect! I've been reading about mechanical watches lately, and a handful off seconds per day, give or take, is quite acceptable for them. In fact, with timepieces as accurate as GPS satellites, we've even proven Einstein's theory of relativity by observation!
When I was a kid, LEDs were red, green, and amber, never very bright. Now we have blue and white high intensity ones used for flashlights and even headlights!
Japanese sportbikes are typically limited by an onboard chip to restrict the maximum speed to no more than 300kph......and so on. I could keep brainstorming examples but people just tend to get used to these things quickly as they become commonplace. I'm easily impressed by things like this because I don't take them for granted. Of course technology isn't going to deliver us all to a utopia - it's made and used by mankind, so it'll see uses for great good and great evil - but I think the age we're living in has gone a long way to live up to the dreams of sci fi writers of decades past. The iPod Touch/iPhone makes Star Trek TNG/DS9's PDAs look clunky and anachronistic and those shows aren't even that old... and who here has less than a 32" TV? A lot of people now seem to buy TVs based more on what the most optimal size is for them rather than getting as much as they can afford because you could well buy one that's TOO big. Arg... high tech examples still flooding in. Gotta stop!
I wrote about this several years ago after playing a few MMOs... I don't have access to the essay right now, but a few of the addictive points I remember are: - When you pay a subscription fee to play an unlimited time per month, you get more value from the fee the more you play the game. - Other players can observe your character and items, seemingly lending credence to them psychologically. It makes them "more real" than a single player or non-persistent game. - Feeding on that, progress in the game feels more like you're actually getting something done (you're not!) - You meet friends in the game, so often to keep in touch with these friends, you must keep playing the game. - Also, you're compelled to play the game to keep your character on an equivalent level of progress to the others in your guild.
MMOs definitely have some additional tricks up their sleeve when it comes to compelling players to play them.
That's exactly the problem. It is less efficient in terms of energy per volume, never mind the resources we have to pour into making it (like food crops!!!)
I also have a motorcycle that states clearly in the manual that you absolutely must not give it more than 10% ethanol - though I live in Canada so I'll be able to dodge that bullet for a little while yet thankfully. I can only imagine how many machines it will screw up. Hopefully the pumps with mix are clearly labeled!
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I work in a college IT department and we definitely do not support Linux. You're free to run it, but when you look at the logistics of support, there are probably only one or two students in a thousand who use it on their laptops, and if they know enough to run it day to day, they should know enough to fix it. Staff on the other hand, only a few of us have experimented with it, and I don't think any of us use it anywhere approaching regularly. We'd pretty much have to have weeks of man-hour downtime to train up on it, or hire a team of specialists for the one student in five years who might come in for help with it.
The only major point of conflict with it though would be that the net admins require everyone to run the Cisco Clean Access Agent (now NAC Agent) to check their PC and virus scanners for updates before they have internet access. It's available for Mac and PC, but I know of no Linux version, so that puts a damper on that. We also do not support OS/2, BSD, Solaris (well, on student machines...), BeOS, Midori, CP/M, and so on... but if enough students used any of them, we'd train up on it.
When everyone has a camera, you tend to end up in photos you didn't intend to be in - sometimes without even noticing.
More phones have GPSes now, and may be able to automatically geotag their photos.
There are providers that offer online photo storage plans right off the phone.
So with those in mind, all it would take is one warrant to search a mobile photo host and run face recognition software, and you have an easily compiled database of who was where and when, and with enough data, the ability to plot your daily habits and location trends, who you know, who they know, areas you and your friends tend to frequent, and by extension what your interests and motives may be, etc.
It's not really a panic about what could happen if we let this get out of hand, as much as it is an observation of what could be done cheaply with practically off the shelf software on a common PC today.
If you only have one media, I'd suggest a USB flashdrive formatted in FAT16 or FAT32, containing TXT, MP3, MPG, and M4V formats as they're all pretty well established standards.
It's hard to say if something can physically read USB in 16 years, but it was possible 10 years ago, and it's super abundant and well established now.
About a decade ago I started archiving stuff for long-term on ISO9660 CD-Rs in VCD format, and now it's hard to find anything that couldn't view them. Widespread MPEG standards seem to fare quite well - especially now that even set-top players can play them.
SD cards and the like will be obsolesced over time by smaller cards and different standards, but the basic USB flashdrive seems quite ingrained in every computer of decent power running any OS.
I'm kind of on the opposite side there. Battle Angel Alita was some of my all time favorite sci-fi, so with the Hollywood track record of destroying video game or manga adaptations, I hope it never sees the light of day - especially since Kishiro has basically said that he'd be thrilled to see it as a movie regardless of what they do to it, so it's like license to be waaaaaaay off in film. That, and it's a pretty big series too, so the movie would either have to take a little of the beginning story like the OAV, or compress it all togeher into one phantasmagorical confusion trip like Fist of the North Star. :/
I agree... I imagined this earlier today and I figure if I were in a quiet place with other people and one of these ambushed me, I'd probably punch the screen forcefully, and if it keeps making noise, rip out the page and wad it up. ...but hey, maybe that's what they want. If it happened in a bookstore I'd kind of have to buy the magazine!
Yeah, one one hand, I'd think that people who had a defective console and felt cheated would be more apt to respond than those who had no issues.
On the other, 54% failure rate doesn't explain all the people who are on their fifth 360 or more (though getting refurbs back from repair centers might...)
An older Ars Technica report suggested the failure rate for Wii and PS3 was closer to 3%, which is good even for a TV.
I like this response. I seldom use spell checkers myself. I have definitely noticed that many people online can't be bothered to try to spell correctly or give a second thought to grammar. If the Internet has done anything to my spelling, it's that I tend to use American spellings of words despite living in Canada. Many times it's a conscious decision based on the audience I'm writing to.
But the closing line of the parent post sums it up well. If you deliberately try to do something correctly, you will maintain or even improve your skills at it. Don't simply take it for granted that you can spell and properly use English just because it's your native tongue.
I think people are less required to understand computers now.
I remember when motherboard manuals would include tables of which devices are assigned to which IRQs, and how to set the jumpers to assign different resources to different memory addresses. Some of this knowlege is arguably obsolete now, but largely it can still be set in software/BIOS setup. The thing is that no one expects it to be known now. The manuals I've seen basically say "these are the ports. Install it in a PC case and plug cards into it - have fun!"
I've worked on (Sony Vaio) laptops that don't even have the key to get into the BIOS setup page documented or visible on booting! I almost thought it wasn't possible!
As less knowlege is required, fewer people even want to know these things too because it's become rivia. It's kind of lamentable, but since this knowlege is still quite useful whether or not the users realize it, it does keep me steadily employed performing simple maintenance and troubleshooting to their systems...
I agree. Ever since college, I swear by Zebra brand Sarasa 0.7mm gel pens. They don't leave gaps or weaker sections of lines, don't require much force, and aren't so gushy that they bleed through the paper like most gels I've used. The black is as crisp and black as if printed on a laser printer, and so it also makes perfect photocopies.
They may smear trails if rubbed shortly after writing, but once it's dried, it holds quite fast to the page. ...wow... I just reviewed a disposable pen on /.
I'm not a coder, but I am trained as one, so I have experience but I'm really not up on trends.
I learned QBASIC when I was around grade 4, and it was only 8 years later in high school that I even started object oriented with C++.
It was great for learning, but I have to wonder - are there any good procedural languages for beginners? Or is it even possible to lay all the basics of OO on a beginner? People sometimes ask me what a good starting point could be for learning to program, but I really learned in a different era before such abstract concepts as OO entails were in any way neccesary.
Personally I tend to recommend modern VB for an easy OO introduction in no small part due to the handiness of the IDE and how forgiving it is of little mistakes. The various ways of passing or referring to variables in C++ is something I would never even consider laying on a newbie, especially when some methods may work in some cases, but not others.
My thoughts exactly. There are plenty of other bars, and I don't mind if my name's on a guestbook that may be audited when there's a fight/robbery/etc.
It may even have a small deterrent effect on fake IDs, though not much since Canada has decided to go with the free PDF417 barcode standard that's not proprietary in the least.
I'm 27, and I know cursive, but probably have some gaps in capital letters. My handwriting has some glitches that crop up if I'm hurrying, like too many repetitions on [n, m, r, u]. This was because while I was forced to use cursive in grade school, the way we took notes was such a crazy frantic scramble to keep up, it usually amounted to little more than scrawling some bumpy lines on a page before the board was erased again.
I've since started to recover it because I actually like learning alphabets, and started to approach cursive like any foreign alphabet. While I'm still not the tidiest writer, I can easily write in Japanese, Korean, PalmOS Grafitti, non-cursive, and a few hands of English calligraphy. Cursive gave me problems though because I'd rushed it so often I was used to not paying attention to what letters I was writing, and not wasting time checking for mistakes. Now I use it deliberately, and try to accurately render each letter as if I were writing any other alphabet. ...though I can only imagine how hard it would be for someone in my situation who didn't give it any special effort, or wasn't into alphabets/languages... Still, I don't exactly lament its loss as long as you can write legibly with a pen somehow. I'm going to do some ranting if heavily-abbreviated misspelled txting speak becomes standard because that's too broken to be considered language...
Words of wisdom. Mere entertainment is enjoyable but not meaningful. We direct our own lives, so if you want to do more, then do it. I'm doing a bunch of stuff this year I'd put off for years because I realized the same thing, and it's really better to regret something you have done than something you haven't!
Hard to say... most demos by Farbrausch will trigger virus scanners due to some of the algorithms they use, but they're actually safe.
A filthy motherlode of ambergris? You know... from a hundred whales?
I cut my teeth on QBASIC on DOS 6. I loved how if you used a proper keyword, it would automatically capitalize it, giving some instant feedback. Even in Visual Studio .NET's VB editor it does something similar, but I also love how IntelliSense can call up a list of all the members in a class if you're struggling to remember a name, or even curious what something can do...
Have you heard of Euphoria? So far, it's the most realistic system I've seen for "ragdoll" - it's actually more ragdoll + AI.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi5adyccoKI
It works to great effect in GTA4. What do you think of it?
Just what I was thinking. So a ridged surface doesn't do much better at grabbing a hard, perfectly smooth one... how about something with more than zero texture?
Exactly - and until this is possible, the format isn't useful, IMO. These days we have to be very careful of the fine print of any IP, making sure we aren't just renting or leasing the content. If I buy a video, I want to be able to convert and play it on anything I have that handles video, period. I'm not going to buy a copy for my TV, one for my iPod, one for my PSP, and so on.
I remember seeing a Nokia demo where you could point the camera at a hotel or other attraction and get a popup with information about it - do you know if that was ever released?
I've also long been in favour of tagging things with small Semacodes or QRCodes to help even GPS-less phones quickly scan and identify things, then maybe pull additional data from the web...
Actually I keep players for most formats around, even including VCD and LaserDisk...
The big problem with DRM though is that if I have a LaserDisk and no player, I can jump on eBay, grab a used one, and it works.
If I have a modern gaming console that's no longer supported online, if it dies, I grab a new one, and I'll still never see my downloaded games again, just the initial release, unpatched versions of games on disc.
I'll vouch for this. I've used it ever since it was "Ontrack Tiramisu." It's simple and straightforward, and extremely effective. I've used it over a half dozen times and it seems to pull data from any disk that doesn't outright crash the computer when it's connected (though about 10 years ago I recovered data from a disk that had to be connected after boot to prevent a freeze...)
So true. There are a lot of mindblowing things we don't even think about either. My work shirts and pants are truly cheap ($15-20) yet have nanoparticle treatments that make small spills and sprays of water bead up and roll off them, resisting stains. Drill bits and other machine parts are coated in films of titanium nitride or titanium carbon nitride, which is insanely hard and chemical and wear resistant.
With any decent modern camera you can shoot and shoot all day, come home, and offload hundreds or possibly thousands of pics from it - and they're already "developed," but if you want to, you can run off passably professional copies on a home printer. ...we have dirt cheap tiny wristwatches that keep time within seconds per month, and can be dunked in water or slammed around to no ill effect! I've been reading about mechanical watches lately, and a handful off seconds per day, give or take, is quite acceptable for them. In fact, with timepieces as accurate as GPS satellites, we've even proven Einstein's theory of relativity by observation!
When I was a kid, LEDs were red, green, and amber, never very bright. Now we have blue and white high intensity ones used for flashlights and even headlights!
Japanese sportbikes are typically limited by an onboard chip to restrict the maximum speed to no more than 300kph... ...and so on. I could keep brainstorming examples but people just tend to get used to these things quickly as they become commonplace. I'm easily impressed by things like this because I don't take them for granted. Of course technology isn't going to deliver us all to a utopia - it's made and used by mankind, so it'll see uses for great good and great evil - but I think the age we're living in has gone a long way to live up to the dreams of sci fi writers of decades past. The iPod Touch/iPhone makes Star Trek TNG/DS9's PDAs look clunky and anachronistic and those shows aren't even that old... and who here has less than a 32" TV? A lot of people now seem to buy TVs based more on what the most optimal size is for them rather than getting as much as they can afford because you could well buy one that's TOO big. Arg... high tech examples still flooding in. Gotta stop!
I wrote about this several years ago after playing a few MMOs... I don't have access to the essay right now, but a few of the addictive points I remember are:
- When you pay a subscription fee to play an unlimited time per month, you get more value from the fee the more you play the game.
- Other players can observe your character and items, seemingly lending credence to them psychologically. It makes them "more real" than a single player or non-persistent game.
- Feeding on that, progress in the game feels more like you're actually getting something done (you're not!)
- You meet friends in the game, so often to keep in touch with these friends, you must keep playing the game.
- Also, you're compelled to play the game to keep your character on an equivalent level of progress to the others in your guild.
MMOs definitely have some additional tricks up their sleeve when it comes to compelling players to play them.
That's exactly the problem. It is less efficient in terms of energy per volume, never mind the resources we have to pour into making it (like food crops!!!)
I also have a motorcycle that states clearly in the manual that you absolutely must not give it more than 10% ethanol - though I live in Canada so I'll be able to dodge that bullet for a little while yet thankfully. I can only imagine how many machines it will screw up. Hopefully the pumps with mix are clearly labeled!