You are probably right, but it is probably more complicated than that. In my experience when dealing with an older code base two things happen. First, certain things are done to increase the efficiency of the code. Some of these things merely hamper legibility and can be left alone. Others are security issues and so, when efficiency is longer the primary concern, some of these optimizations are reworked.
Second, in the old code not all the paths of execution, say for a buffer check of certain class of user input, intersect at the same place. Ideally all paths that accept such input would cross with a well known rule coded in a well known location. When this ideal is not met, a new well known location is created for the rule and all relevant code is rerouted to the that rule, Any other checks are left in place. Such a practice reduces efficiency but improves security.
There are probably also issues like moving certain function up to higher levels of abstraction. They may even have left in code that dynamically checks ranges of memory blocks. All of these are fine for the short term. SP2 is a much needed triage, and we should expect reduction in performance for the next year or so. Maybe even until they get Longhorn out.
Also remember that SP2 includes firewalls and other services for all users. For some users, the firewall is redundant, and that redundancy causes conflicts that will slow computer down significantly. SP2 also has a security monitor which likely uses a non-trivial amount of power.
Lets be fair. There are thousands of highly talented people out there. In the group that I run in, which is admittedly an artistic bunch, there are potential boy bands, folk trios, rock combos, rappers, 2D and 3D visual artists, performance artists, actors, writes, etc. All plenty talented to meet any local requirements, and possibly national requirements. Some are and have received limited success on their own merits.
But to be a national act or international act, which is what the labels want, there has to be more. The act has to compete with the cheaper local stuff. The act has to have a basis to make the large newspaper and magazines. The act has to have a hook that can be spun and promoted and manipulated. The act has to want to be that famous so that it will make the artistic compromises.
It is true that the compromises for a pop artist, to those of us that evaluate on artistic merit, are particularly gruesome. But I think all successful artists make these compromises. I often wonder if the music in a classical symphony enjoys playing the overture for Swan Lake for the millionth time in the exact same way. It probably does not matter as long as the rent gets paid.
Ultimately pop music sells, so they must be doing something right. When classical was pop the reviews predicted the end of the art form. IIRC, the composers were called uncreative and barbarians. Spears has some cool stuff. She was nowhere near as creative as Madonna, and hopefully she spells the end of that particular formula, but if we are open we see that it is not as awful as we once thought.
My sysadmin just sent a note saying sp2 will break our applications and not to upgrade
We have several application that are IE only. MS drones convinced our clueless IT department to use all the nifty bells and whistles, even though they were never needded.
A firewall only protects from unrequested outside attacks. the purpose is to seperate you from the internet, which is not always what the user wishes to do.
Due to the MS security model, windows machines are extremely easy to infect and there is little hope of protected the system files from attack. This is complicated by the fact that thousands of machines can be infected before and update, advisory, or patch is released. Not all viruses can be removed without damage.
Spyware is the least of anyones problem. This is largely an enduser problem. This is one case where any suffiently popular OS is going to be equally targeted.
There is often little choice. Until recently MS would autoload all sorts of crap. The user now generally has to manually click the file, but there is often no way to know if something is safe. The issue is the mixing and matching of data,presentation, system tasks, and userland.
So, while the user has a lot of the blame, mostly in choosing MS, it is the MS philoshophy that leads to most of the problems. On a machine that is not often used, say one every couple days, the first 10 minutes of every sesion can be spent updating. The MS only solution has not been viable for years, but MS sales is still pushing the solution on unsuspecting IT staff.
MS machines are marketed to those who do not know what they are doing. In fact the TCO calculations often depend on the fact that they can be administered by semi skilled laborors reather that qualified technicians.
On other thing. XP may be much better at security. But in the real world not everyone can use the latest thing. For instance I still have a Win98 box running.the money and time and opportunity costs are just too great to upgrade. Win98 should have had most of the security features of XP, if MS has been trying to create a customer centered product instead of enforcing a monopoly.
First, please show me a non-commerical popular page, that is not about HTML, that runs through the validator perfectly. One once popular page, which I am very familiar with and know that everyone who worked on it was well aquainted with the HTML standard from 1.0, has 449 errors. Most pages I work on has several errors, none of which are fatal. Creating an HTML page with no errors is like creating a program with no strict warning. A fun academic playtoy, but largely useless.
Second, most of the complaints I hear come from a confustion between HTML as a text markup language and the desire to make it a page layout language. HTML marks up text and then the browser decides how to best display the text to give meaning to the markup. We have had lots of hacks to convert HTML to more a of a layout language, CSS being the latest, but to do anything useful you still have to hack. This gets complicated by the fact that the IE does not play well with CSS.
/. does a good job rendering in IE and Camino and Safari and Moz and Firefox. Most errors are in the page layout aspect, which, as I have said, is beyond the scope of HTML.
Other much more well funded sites, especially those that are 'IE' only, fail to render well in anything but the current version of IE, and often only work sporadically in that. For instance, something as simple as a password or tabs often fail in some of the IE only commercial pages I am forced to use.
Finally, aside from the color,/. does a good job with the UI. I seldom hit the wrong button. Or get confused on where I am.
I am not a/. fanboy. I am not an HTML expert. But there are sites that I hate to use, and sites that I use as examples of practical ways to solve problems./. is the later.
The reason this won't work is that it, like so many other laws, are designed to punish scapegoats(how apropos) and not the criminals. The criminals outsource risk. They use plausible deniability and showcased due diligence to avoid responsibility. They go in front of the courts and congress and say things like 'I don't recall' and 'I did not know' and 'No one told me', and seldom are the laws applied in such a way that it is required that these executive be held responsible for the mismanagement and malfeasance that those answers so clearly imply.
The fact is that major corporations, like the illegal drug dealers, outsource the most dangerous of their illegal activities to small time criminals. The discounts these small time criminals provide are the smallest part of the benefit. The real benefit comes from a judicial system that allows Wal*Mart to hire illegal aliens at wages that do no meet the federal standards, but not be responsible for the legal consequences. This shifting of responsibility away from corporation appears to the primary purpose of the modern executive. And therefore the livelihood of the million dollar executive depends on the fiction that he or she is not responsible for anything separated by the smallest sliver of paper. Even if it requires that the we assume the executive is the stupidest person in the planet, pride in ones job and oneself has become so irrelevant that stupidity is the preferable interpretation.
This means that the spammers we are likely to catch will be replaced tomorrow, created by the corporate dual obsession with criminal behavior and outsourcing risk. They at the same time need to protect themselves from lawsuits, but also need to sell prescription drugs to kids. There is always another person who wants to earn a buck, and the pushers are always willing to set up another patsy to take the fall.
It is said that criminals, or those intent on a life of crime, move down to florida and put thier ill gotten gain into a big house. This doesn't really work for drug crime, but for white collar crime it is a biggie. Florida has laws that makes Texas look Liberal.
Just look at Rush Limbaugh, Ken Lay, the officer that got kicked out the military for suspected preferential treatment of certain contractors..
This is likely not similiar to those things. This is probably more comparable the DVD or songs from iTMS. A DRM encumbered format that will run on many popular devices, but not all of them.
It is most like the DVD in that it tries to reduce the value lost due to the DRM with additional content. Of course the real inconvenience of a DVD is not the copy protection, one can still make the same kind of copies as with the VHS, just not perfect digital copies. The real inconvenience is the abuse of the format to push advertisement onto consumers. And of course that a DVD cannot necessarily be played anywhere in the world.
So it is too early to know who will and will not be able to play the content. It is too early to know if content will be attached to a machine. Our experience with the DVD tells us the format is potentially good enough.
I think good movies say something basically important about humans battles with each other, the planet, and the unknown, and how those battles will be won.
WotW is about how there are many things that can destroy us, but the earth or god or whatever will protect us. V is a retelling of Nazi Germany, basically saying that there is evil in the universe, and it can only be beat by humans not succumbing to thier greed. Independence Day basically is about, like the lyrics in MIB says, how we really don't need to do anything because there are people smarted and braver than we are and they will take care of it all while we consume the advertised products. The closest example to WotW might be 28 days later or Day of the Triffids, both of which survival occurs in spite of ourselves.
In all fairness, Yahoo! was not primarily a search engine. It was a man made index of sites that early participants in the great WWW experiment might find useful. There wan't much out there, and the good stuff was evident, so there was no need to crawl around the underside of vanity domains to find content.
It was the first at what it did, and still provides a good service. When I am looking for something in a specific catagory, Yahoo! is always a good place to start. The shopping interface is very good. I don't use it as a search engine because it never really was.
Automated search engines fall prey to the ease of stacking the results. Indexes such as Yahoo cannot keep up with all the relevent content. Google will either survive or die depending on if it can defeat the forces of spam. Yahoo will still provide a good service.
lawyer's Mercedes pickup truck rattles down offroad trails
The funny thing is that I never in a million years thought mercedes would stoop so low as to sully thier product line of fine taxis with a vehicle meant to haul meat and produce. And the day I saw that they did was the day I knew what the dialmer-chrysler meant to the world. The propogation of truly ugly vehicles.
I mean anyone who needs an offroad vehicle has then sense to buy a landrover. And anyone with sense has the sense not to use one on a perfectly good road.
I will unwisely get into this. An effect, the noun, is something that is cause of something else, typically called a phenomenum, which I am unable to spell at the moment. Effects can either be a plural of the noun of a verb. One wonders when we have to verbize everything, but we do.
Affect is the manisfectation on an effect typically on some tangible object, such as a spacecraft. We say that there is an effect, or more commonly a force, that is causing an affect on our toy.
The point is that this is not an argument between effect and affect, it is between effects and affect, which though not traditional, and maybe not exact, is kind of ok within the context of our evolving language. The point was correct, but irrelevent as ain't is clearly nonstandard english, with effects is not.
As far as ain't is concerned, it is a variation on am not. Therefore it is correct kind of correct when used with 'I', but not with he/she/it.
As far as the editors not being able to work at common media, I suspect you either do not watch common media or are blinded to thier ignorance by the shiny teeth and expensive suits. In particular out major city newpaper is more useful for as a forum for the abuse of the english language than as an informational source.
The ultimate problem is reliability. Last time I had cable it was out a couple days every month, and I was always quoted 2-5 days for repair. The thought of being without a phone for 2 days is not an option. I wonder how much cable companies would have to add to their subscription fees to cover 99.9% reliability and 1 or less day repair schedules.
So to me the switch would be to cell phones, which, in my experience is much more reliable than an internet connection. Not only that, but I have to manage one device to make a call on my cell phone. For VOIP I have to manage at least two.
BTW, how many of us actually have a phone that does not require external power?
Is this funny, or sarcastic or merely ignorant? There are selected historical facts that match with the bible. The big problem with literal interpretation is the self contradictions in the stories, the multiple political directives, the politically motivated translations, and the clear allegorical nature.
There are a great many lessons for those who wish to live a harmonous life with others. There is a great deal of ammunition for those who wish to perform selective literal extraction, usually for the purpose of justifing some horrific action.
Just because something is open does not mean there are no strings attached. If this new layer detects malware, there is some process to do this. Even if this process is freely licensed, whoever owns the process will be at a great advantage. If this process is encapsulated in some for profit form, even something that can be added into OSS, then whoever owns the product is going to make a lof of money
If we are talking about mandatory authentication, then there needs to be some way to securely authenticate. We have optional authentication now, which is good, but too easy to circumvent. Secure authentication requires a protocol and secure hardware and software. Both are right up the Wintel alley, with thier embedded ID chips and closed OS. Again, the protocol could be open and free, but only certified machines are allowed ont he network. Will certification be anything other than a $50 bill slipped to Intel. Maybe not.
I think all fiction is about relationships. Science Fiction is about our relationships with the technology we create. Fantasy is about how our relationships with each other would change if certain fanciful things were different. The emphasis on sex aside, fantasy has a lot in common with the romance novel. Of course a good novel will include a number of relationship, including those between sentient, living, and created thing.
In fact what we may be seeing is a maturing of science fiction. The great master melded all the relationship together, even sometimes focusing on sex, into a good story that was set in the future to allow the freedom created by unfamiliarity, in the same way that novel might be set in the past. Now authors like KS Robinson and the like are creating tales that rival the greatest literature, with the aspect of future or past being a critical part of the story.
Simplicity is everywhere in literature. We can only keep tract of some many variables, like 3-7, encapsulated, so the relationships in literature are simplified. I also believe that readers will further simplify a situation to meet their mental capacity, so even if a character or story is complex, the reader will simplify it down to their needs.
The key difference between today and 50 or so years ago is that we are literally paying for our unhealthy relationship with technology. We have massively polluted areas of the world, obese children with adult diseases, an irrational fear of drinking tap water, among other ailments. Each of these cost us untold amounts of resources, and raises the question of whether we can develop the technology to save or get us off this planter before we use it all up.
This is all very US centric. Godzilla clearly predicted the price we pay for the misuse of technology. But even in American writers, like Pohl, have focused on the devastating effects of unhealthy relationships.
The USB was likely included to allow the use of low speed devices, like keyborads, printers etc. It make little sense that they did not use USB 2.0, but with the confusion over what 2.0 means, I realy don't think it makes a lot of difference.
About the only thing I found surprising is that it did not include a firewire port. One application that I think tablet might be useful for is offloading pictures and video from a camera in the field. A firewire port would allow this to happen rapidly.
From the point of view of a person tht does not know much of the technical differences between tablets, but does know computers and hope to own a tablet in a couple years, I think the pepper pad fills a need.
First, it is light. Most other tablets wieght as much as my laptop, around 4 pounds, give or take a pound. This only wieghs 2 pounds.
Second, it realized that it is not a desktop. The ports are minimial and focus on wireless connectivity. I can use a keyboard and mouse, but do not have to worry about plugging them in.
Third, the keyboard seems to admit the fact that handwriting recognition has a long way to go. As far as I know, specially formed single letters is still the most reliable. I had keyboards for my newton and palm for the times where it was neccesary to enter more than a few lines of text.
In the end, I thik this is a tablet that does not pretend to be a laptop, and accepts the limits of technolgy. So, although I am sure the Window XP things are better, they seem to be more concerned with competing with laptops rather than providing a new unique solution.
For a true novice, sitting in front of any machine not knowing what to do is hell. The GUI is not a silver bullet. The GUI can merely provide a way to explore or for a graphic learner to remember.
I remember sitting in front of a DEC or UNIX machine when I was younger a not knowing at all what to do. I had teachers to help me, and books to learn, so I am not so afraid anymore. I remember sitting in front of the first mac confused. I looked stuff up, and used prior experience, and figured it out.
My mom OTHOH gets confused when the GUI rules change slightly. She has no basis on which to explore such machines. Frankly the complexity of Windows is just overwhenliming. It might be better to give her a list of command line instructions. The things done would be much less fancy, but at least she would get them done.
A lot got done with training in the linear-text-mode-driven world. I do think GUI let more poeple use computer, as well as justifing faster more expensive machines. I mostly work on a GUI. I do think, however, that one of the great fallacies of our time is that a GUI is all that is needed to get a user computerized. Just look at how much money is quoted for training when switching a user from one GUI to another, even if both are renditions of MS Windows.
This is interesting on so many levels. First, cookie cutter radio stations did the same thing when they depreciated the value of local content by creating chains run controlled by national entities. In the process they destroyed many good local stations. MS is just taking this one step further by depreciating the need for expensive dedicated support staff whose main purpose is to recieve kickbacks from major labels in exchange for airplay. What would be interesting is if the playlist could be customized to reflect local taste. If so, this is just beating the players at thier own game.
An interesting question is how does this work with MS DRM and MS hopes to sell music. Anyone can rip the stream and get free music this way, and be quite safe from detection. I did not RTFA, but is there some DRM in the MS player that prevents this? Is this going to be linked to the music store and used to generate sales? How are the labels going to react to MS streaming thier music?
It sounds fishy but if it is for real it would be one of the few arguable innovative things that MS has done.
Actually, 5.25 disks could be had for $1 a disk 20 years ago. If you wanted to you could spend $50- for a box of dysans, but that were only for the posers. 3.5" disks could be had for $1 a disk 10 years ago. I remember spending $2 or so for a single sony, but that was in emergencies.
I didn't do rock bottom prices then, and I don't do rock bottom prices now. Most of the price adjustments come from maturing technology, and there is no reason for quality to suffer. I am sure that there are just as many crappy disks now as there ever were. It is just that now they are 10 cents instead of 50. To your point, imation, IMHO, were never the quality leader.
from the perspective of a moving picture, the DVD will be supersceded by some higher density, better DRM device as soon as the studios can manage to get consumers to replace thier current DVD player with the other format. We already see the limitation of the DVD format as one often buys 2 and 3 disk sets.
From the persepective of the computer users, the future of the DVD is blurry. DVD writers are common higher end computer, like almost all Macs, but are at best anoption in commodity machines, and they have a format issue. I feel DVD might be like MO. A very good format to archive stuff in, but never all that popular. It is a very open question whether DVD will achieve the success of CDs on the desktop.
First, 2,4,6,8,10,11,15,16,18,19,20, and 24 are more or less centrist. Right or left does not mean you trust the government to behave without proper supervision. Left or right does not mean that you don't care if gas becomes too expensive. There are people on all sides that are willing to let the government do whatever. And there are people who believe Ashcroft will never spy on me. That is not party affiliation, that is delusion. Even the stacking of courts by religious radical fundementalists should be a concern for anyone who believes in the Constituion of the United States.
Second, I think the list tries to be centrist. For instance, it doesn't report that bush wants to cut funding for vetarans next year. This is largely useful to the left, and the most current option to deal with the deficiet he has built by transferring wealth to the top through tax cuts and the Iraq debacle.
Overall, I think we should all be concerned with the fact that Walmart is destroying the merchant class, but the rich like the profits, the poor like the fact they can buy stuff, and the middle likes to treat it's depression with the acquisition of lots of stuff so the big SUV and houses do not seem so empty.
I can't believe that it took so many replies for someone to post the probable hack. This is a classic case of Schneier 100 foot pole. It is not neccesary to be an uberhacker and break into walmarts database. It is not even neccesary to work in the data center. All that one needs to do is hang out at a store, write down or memerize the series of numbers on the walmart card, and wait for someone to buy one. Then pick up that technological marval called the telephone, give the numbers to an accomplice, who gasp, could be thousands of miles away, the information is transferred nearly instananously, and, viola, the crime is set.
If you want to get more complex, one of the working drones could be paid $100 to scan or copy all the cards in the store. Or a checker could be in on the deal. Still, the tech neccesary would be so 1950's, not 2000.
Probably the primary reason that your teachers would not let you use an encyclopedia is that they are supposed to teaching you to use primary references. Which means that you go to the library and find the original articles summarized in the encyclopedia. Hopefully you also find some more recent materials, as what generally happens is that the student still does not find current research. By just using the encyclopedia, no meaningful objectives have been met.
On the issue of Wikpedia, i seriously doubt it is any worse than the sub-Britanica volumes, like worlbook or encarta. To me the purpose of encyclopedia, like a reliable newspaper, is to be a point of record and opportunity for education. Not so much what is true, but what is was currently acceptable and important. For the general populous such a record is very useful as it provides a convenient way to educate oneself, even if the details are occasionally wrong. In this regard wikpedea strongly follows this tradition, by making a basic education even more accessible to the average person who wants it.
Really I take such controversies as an anti-education platform put forth by the oppressors of the masses. The same people who are more concerned about making publishers rich by enforcing excessive testing than educating our children. As a person becomes educated, they can ferret out errors in fact and logic for themselves. We do not have be a draconian gaurdian of truth. Something that scares the hell out of most of the elite.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, in the old code not all the paths of execution, say for a buffer check of certain class of user input, intersect at the same place. Ideally all paths that accept such input would cross with a well known rule coded in a well known location. When this ideal is not met, a new well known location is created for the rule and all relevant code is rerouted to the that rule, Any other checks are left in place. Such a practice reduces efficiency but improves security.
There are probably also issues like moving certain function up to higher levels of abstraction. They may even have left in code that dynamically checks ranges of memory blocks. All of these are fine for the short term. SP2 is a much needed triage, and we should expect reduction in performance for the next year or so. Maybe even until they get Longhorn out.
Also remember that SP2 includes firewalls and other services for all users. For some users, the firewall is redundant, and that redundancy causes conflicts that will slow computer down significantly. SP2 also has a security monitor which likely uses a non-trivial amount of power.
But to be a national act or international act, which is what the labels want, there has to be more. The act has to compete with the cheaper local stuff. The act has to have a basis to make the large newspaper and magazines. The act has to have a hook that can be spun and promoted and manipulated. The act has to want to be that famous so that it will make the artistic compromises.
It is true that the compromises for a pop artist, to those of us that evaluate on artistic merit, are particularly gruesome. But I think all successful artists make these compromises. I often wonder if the music in a classical symphony enjoys playing the overture for Swan Lake for the millionth time in the exact same way. It probably does not matter as long as the rent gets paid.
Ultimately pop music sells, so they must be doing something right. When classical was pop the reviews predicted the end of the art form. IIRC, the composers were called uncreative and barbarians. Spears has some cool stuff. She was nowhere near as creative as Madonna, and hopefully she spells the end of that particular formula, but if we are open we see that it is not as awful as we once thought.
- My sysadmin just sent a note saying sp2 will break our applications and not to upgrade
- We have several application that are IE only. MS drones convinced our clueless IT department to use all the nifty bells and whistles, even though they were never needded.
- A firewall only protects from unrequested outside attacks. the purpose is to seperate you from the internet, which is not always what the user wishes to do.
- Due to the MS security model, windows machines are extremely easy to infect and there is little hope of protected the system files from attack. This is complicated by the fact that thousands of machines can be infected before and update, advisory, or patch is released. Not all viruses can be removed without damage.
- Spyware is the least of anyones problem. This is largely an enduser problem. This is one case where any suffiently popular OS is going to be equally targeted.
- There is often little choice. Until recently MS would autoload all sorts of crap. The user now generally has to manually click the file, but there is often no way to know if something is safe. The issue is the mixing and matching of data,presentation, system tasks, and userland.
So, while the user has a lot of the blame, mostly in choosing MS, it is the MS philoshophy that leads to most of the problems. On a machine that is not often used, say one every couple days, the first 10 minutes of every sesion can be spent updating. The MS only solution has not been viable for years, but MS sales is still pushing the solution on unsuspecting IT staff.MS machines are marketed to those who do not know what they are doing. In fact the TCO calculations often depend on the fact that they can be administered by semi skilled laborors reather that qualified technicians.
On other thing. XP may be much better at security. But in the real world not everyone can use the latest thing. For instance I still have a Win98 box running.the money and time and opportunity costs are just too great to upgrade. Win98 should have had most of the security features of XP, if MS has been trying to create a customer centered product instead of enforcing a monopoly.
Second, most of the complaints I hear come from a confustion between HTML as a text markup language and the desire to make it a page layout language. HTML marks up text and then the browser decides how to best display the text to give meaning to the markup. We have had lots of hacks to convert HTML to more a of a layout language, CSS being the latest, but to do anything useful you still have to hack. This gets complicated by the fact that the IE does not play well with CSS.
Other much more well funded sites, especially those that are 'IE' only, fail to render well in anything but the current version of IE, and often only work sporadically in that. For instance, something as simple as a password or tabs often fail in some of the IE only commercial pages I am forced to use.
Finally, aside from the color, /. does a good job with the UI. I seldom hit the wrong button. Or get confused on where I am.
I am not a /. fanboy. I am not an HTML expert. But there are sites that I hate to use, and sites that I use as examples of practical ways to solve problems. /. is the later.
The fact is that major corporations, like the illegal drug dealers, outsource the most dangerous of their illegal activities to small time criminals. The discounts these small time criminals provide are the smallest part of the benefit. The real benefit comes from a judicial system that allows Wal*Mart to hire illegal aliens at wages that do no meet the federal standards, but not be responsible for the legal consequences. This shifting of responsibility away from corporation appears to the primary purpose of the modern executive. And therefore the livelihood of the million dollar executive depends on the fiction that he or she is not responsible for anything separated by the smallest sliver of paper. Even if it requires that the we assume the executive is the stupidest person in the planet, pride in ones job and oneself has become so irrelevant that stupidity is the preferable interpretation.
This means that the spammers we are likely to catch will be replaced tomorrow, created by the corporate dual obsession with criminal behavior and outsourcing risk. They at the same time need to protect themselves from lawsuits, but also need to sell prescription drugs to kids. There is always another person who wants to earn a buck, and the pushers are always willing to set up another patsy to take the fall.
Just look at Rush Limbaugh, Ken Lay, the officer that got kicked out the military for suspected preferential treatment of certain contractors..
It is most like the DVD in that it tries to reduce the value lost due to the DRM with additional content. Of course the real inconvenience of a DVD is not the copy protection, one can still make the same kind of copies as with the VHS, just not perfect digital copies. The real inconvenience is the abuse of the format to push advertisement onto consumers. And of course that a DVD cannot necessarily be played anywhere in the world.
So it is too early to know who will and will not be able to play the content. It is too early to know if content will be attached to a machine. Our experience with the DVD tells us the format is potentially good enough.
And by that time they will be lame and lack creativity. There will always be other garage bands to choose.
WotW is about how there are many things that can destroy us, but the earth or god or whatever will protect us. V is a retelling of Nazi Germany, basically saying that there is evil in the universe, and it can only be beat by humans not succumbing to thier greed. Independence Day basically is about, like the lyrics in MIB says, how we really don't need to do anything because there are people smarted and braver than we are and they will take care of it all while we consume the advertised products. The closest example to WotW might be 28 days later or Day of the Triffids, both of which survival occurs in spite of ourselves.
It was the first at what it did, and still provides a good service. When I am looking for something in a specific catagory, Yahoo! is always a good place to start. The shopping interface is very good. I don't use it as a search engine because it never really was.
Automated search engines fall prey to the ease of stacking the results. Indexes such as Yahoo cannot keep up with all the relevent content. Google will either survive or die depending on if it can defeat the forces of spam. Yahoo will still provide a good service.
The funny thing is that I never in a million years thought mercedes would stoop so low as to sully thier product line of fine taxis with a vehicle meant to haul meat and produce. And the day I saw that they did was the day I knew what the dialmer-chrysler meant to the world. The propogation of truly ugly vehicles.
I mean anyone who needs an offroad vehicle has then sense to buy a landrover. And anyone with sense has the sense not to use one on a perfectly good road.
Affect is the manisfectation on an effect typically on some tangible object, such as a spacecraft. We say that there is an effect, or more commonly a force, that is causing an affect on our toy.
The point is that this is not an argument between effect and affect, it is between effects and affect, which though not traditional, and maybe not exact, is kind of ok within the context of our evolving language. The point was correct, but irrelevent as ain't is clearly nonstandard english, with effects is not.
As far as ain't is concerned, it is a variation on am not. Therefore it is correct kind of correct when used with 'I', but not with he/she/it.
As far as the editors not being able to work at common media, I suspect you either do not watch common media or are blinded to thier ignorance by the shiny teeth and expensive suits. In particular out major city newpaper is more useful for as a forum for the abuse of the english language than as an informational source.
So to me the switch would be to cell phones, which, in my experience is much more reliable than an internet connection. Not only that, but I have to manage one device to make a call on my cell phone. For VOIP I have to manage at least two.
BTW, how many of us actually have a phone that does not require external power?
There are a great many lessons for those who wish to live a harmonous life with others. There is a great deal of ammunition for those who wish to perform selective literal extraction, usually for the purpose of justifing some horrific action.
If we are talking about mandatory authentication, then there needs to be some way to securely authenticate. We have optional authentication now, which is good, but too easy to circumvent. Secure authentication requires a protocol and secure hardware and software. Both are right up the Wintel alley, with thier embedded ID chips and closed OS. Again, the protocol could be open and free, but only certified machines are allowed ont he network. Will certification be anything other than a $50 bill slipped to Intel. Maybe not.
In fact what we may be seeing is a maturing of science fiction. The great master melded all the relationship together, even sometimes focusing on sex, into a good story that was set in the future to allow the freedom created by unfamiliarity, in the same way that novel might be set in the past. Now authors like KS Robinson and the like are creating tales that rival the greatest literature, with the aspect of future or past being a critical part of the story.
Simplicity is everywhere in literature. We can only keep tract of some many variables, like 3-7, encapsulated, so the relationships in literature are simplified. I also believe that readers will further simplify a situation to meet their mental capacity, so even if a character or story is complex, the reader will simplify it down to their needs.
The key difference between today and 50 or so years ago is that we are literally paying for our unhealthy relationship with technology. We have massively polluted areas of the world, obese children with adult diseases, an irrational fear of drinking tap water, among other ailments. Each of these cost us untold amounts of resources, and raises the question of whether we can develop the technology to save or get us off this planter before we use it all up.
This is all very US centric. Godzilla clearly predicted the price we pay for the misuse of technology. But even in American writers, like Pohl, have focused on the devastating effects of unhealthy relationships.
About the only thing I found surprising is that it did not include a firewire port. One application that I think tablet might be useful for is offloading pictures and video from a camera in the field. A firewire port would allow this to happen rapidly.
First, it is light. Most other tablets wieght as much as my laptop, around 4 pounds, give or take a pound. This only wieghs 2 pounds.
Second, it realized that it is not a desktop. The ports are minimial and focus on wireless connectivity. I can use a keyboard and mouse, but do not have to worry about plugging them in.
Third, the keyboard seems to admit the fact that handwriting recognition has a long way to go. As far as I know, specially formed single letters is still the most reliable. I had keyboards for my newton and palm for the times where it was neccesary to enter more than a few lines of text.
In the end, I thik this is a tablet that does not pretend to be a laptop, and accepts the limits of technolgy. So, although I am sure the Window XP things are better, they seem to be more concerned with competing with laptops rather than providing a new unique solution.
I remember sitting in front of a DEC or UNIX machine when I was younger a not knowing at all what to do. I had teachers to help me, and books to learn, so I am not so afraid anymore. I remember sitting in front of the first mac confused. I looked stuff up, and used prior experience, and figured it out.
My mom OTHOH gets confused when the GUI rules change slightly. She has no basis on which to explore such machines. Frankly the complexity of Windows is just overwhenliming. It might be better to give her a list of command line instructions. The things done would be much less fancy, but at least she would get them done.
A lot got done with training in the linear-text-mode-driven world. I do think GUI let more poeple use computer, as well as justifing faster more expensive machines. I mostly work on a GUI. I do think, however, that one of the great fallacies of our time is that a GUI is all that is needed to get a user computerized. Just look at how much money is quoted for training when switching a user from one GUI to another, even if both are renditions of MS Windows.
An interesting question is how does this work with MS DRM and MS hopes to sell music. Anyone can rip the stream and get free music this way, and be quite safe from detection. I did not RTFA, but is there some DRM in the MS player that prevents this? Is this going to be linked to the music store and used to generate sales? How are the labels going to react to MS streaming thier music?
It sounds fishy but if it is for real it would be one of the few arguable innovative things that MS has done.
I didn't do rock bottom prices then, and I don't do rock bottom prices now. Most of the price adjustments come from maturing technology, and there is no reason for quality to suffer. I am sure that there are just as many crappy disks now as there ever were. It is just that now they are 10 cents instead of 50. To your point, imation, IMHO, were never the quality leader.
From the persepective of the computer users, the future of the DVD is blurry. DVD writers are common higher end computer, like almost all Macs, but are at best anoption in commodity machines, and they have a format issue. I feel DVD might be like MO. A very good format to archive stuff in, but never all that popular. It is a very open question whether DVD will achieve the success of CDs on the desktop.
Second, I think the list tries to be centrist. For instance, it doesn't report that bush wants to cut funding for vetarans next year. This is largely useful to the left, and the most current option to deal with the deficiet he has built by transferring wealth to the top through tax cuts and the Iraq debacle.
Overall, I think we should all be concerned with the fact that Walmart is destroying the merchant class, but the rich like the profits, the poor like the fact they can buy stuff, and the middle likes to treat it's depression with the acquisition of lots of stuff so the big SUV and houses do not seem so empty.
If you want to get more complex, one of the working drones could be paid $100 to scan or copy all the cards in the store. Or a checker could be in on the deal. Still, the tech neccesary would be so 1950's, not 2000.
On the issue of Wikpedia, i seriously doubt it is any worse than the sub-Britanica volumes, like worlbook or encarta. To me the purpose of encyclopedia, like a reliable newspaper, is to be a point of record and opportunity for education. Not so much what is true, but what is was currently acceptable and important. For the general populous such a record is very useful as it provides a convenient way to educate oneself, even if the details are occasionally wrong. In this regard wikpedea strongly follows this tradition, by making a basic education even more accessible to the average person who wants it.
Really I take such controversies as an anti-education platform put forth by the oppressors of the masses. The same people who are more concerned about making publishers rich by enforcing excessive testing than educating our children. As a person becomes educated, they can ferret out errors in fact and logic for themselves. We do not have be a draconian gaurdian of truth. Something that scares the hell out of most of the elite.