Geez, this sort of thing is as old as capitalism. Most people are inherently lazy and ideas are cheap. Thus the patent. However, implementing the ideas is where things get expensive. This is one of the reasons behind the whole.com bust, in that folks were getting VC funding for ideas and products that they had in their heads. Yet, 1) No code existed for many of these ideas and 2) The ideas had no infrastructure to support them. For an interesting documentary of this whole bit in action, see a film called humorously enough ".com".
So......wait. All those "Linux Powered" bumperstickers I've seen don't mean that the car is moving under the power of Linux? Awwww. And I thought Linux was really cool.
only two states have adopted the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, which gives software vendors all the benefits and none of the burdens of the consequences of publishing their software.
I've not followed this issue so I don't know which two states have adopted this, but I can guess one of them might be Washington state.
At any rate, one should hope that when one produces a product, they should have a sense of craftsmanship and ownership of that product and stand behind it. Now, I am not one who supports the litigiousness of our country right now, but if a software company writing software that controls the infusion rate of an insulin pump screws up and kills people, they should be held responsible. That is one of the checks against creating crappy or dangerous products. For instance, all of the recalls I had to endure for my Dodge pickup (ultimately the reason I bought a Toyota), were designed to protect the consumer against a faulty product. With all of the concepts of pervasive computing controlling aspects of our lives, we are going to have to hold software companies responsible for products they create that are going to be used in sensitive or critical applications.
but I did need to use penmanship to get into graduate school: the GRE general test requires a written statement in cursive before taking the test as some kind of proof of identity.
Weird. I don't seem to remember that and I took both the general GRE exam and the molecular biology special exam.
Looks like you've been/. as the webserver isn't responding. Maybe you should have used W2K+IIS instead of OS X.
Nope. more like the following:
ISSUE: UEN - CORE4 flap.
SCOPE: Campus traffic to/from the Internet
DATE: Monday, June 8 2003
START TIME: 3:00 PM
END TIME: Currently in progress.
DETAILS: An interface at the UEN core is causing some requests to and from the Internet to move at a reduced speed. UEN is currently performing emergency work on this interface and expect to have the problem solved shortly.
NetOps
Dude, you're gettin a dell!
Yeah, well we actually went that route several months ago by purchasing a couple of Dell boxes and I'll tell you, the OS X boxes have been far less trouble, they are more reliable and have fewer security issues than our Wintel Dell boxes.
Yeah well, the cartoon referenced in the article does not do justice to OS X. I am running a couple of websites on OS X with one running on a little old G3 iMac that now has around 80 days of uptime. I never have to touch the thing and it is solid and stable as a rock.
who cares if kids can't write in cursive? I'd far rather have a kid who can touch type and doesn't know cursive rather than the opposite.
Well, I have always been a fast typist going back to 10 years old and entertainingly, could type faster with two fingers than my junior high type teacher. Proper typing cut my wpm scores back a little, but it was beneficial to learn proper technique. However, my handwriting has always been bad and I tend to default to printing when I have to write. This could be because of my dyslexia, alternatively it could be because I was using a keyboard from the age of 9 or 10.
To address your point though. Not having good penmanship with cursive (or printing for that matter) did not significantly hurt my ability to get into college, or graduate school or obtain consulting positions so......yeah, I guess I agree with you. There are more significant things to worry about like knowledge of mathematics, science, history and literature among other things.
based upon the charge that Enron claimed that a software platform was more complete and more functional than it actually was.
Boy, this sort of behavior is rampant among companies small and large. I have known several small software companies whose sales divisions were always making promises that were not grounded in reality. Promised functionality that had simply been discussed, but was not actually in code at the time. I'd say to the sales managers, "what the hell are you doing?" to which they would reply, "making sales".
That was hugely dissapointing for me as I would much prefer a product based sales strategy where something is not announced until it is ready as opposed to a timeline driven or sales driven paradigm where products tend to be pre-announced and then released half-assed.
That algorithm is so fundamentally broken as to be practically useless for anything but as an aid in simple searches. Why anyone would use soundex in a mission critical application designed to positively identify individuals is beyond me. What, was the 'No Fly' database written by 1st year comp sci major or something? Sheesh.
Hey, wanna make a good living in these uncertain economic times? Come up with a better alternative and propose it to DARPA. There is actually some very cool research going on that is funded by DARPA in terms of biometrics and database centric comp sci.
I'm a little confused... are the airlines now prohibiting people to fly on the basis that they went "deal-hunting"?
I understand that the airline industry is a little tight right now, but that's just insane.
Yeah, the current administration wants everyone to be paying full fare here. We gotta start getting this economy back on track, so those that refuse to participate will be identified as terrorists and placed into the TIA archive.:-)
Anyone know when all the Mac trolls showed up on Slashdot?
All you have to do is look at the ID numbers after their log-in name and you will see that Mac users have been here on Slashdot from the very beginning back in 97 or 98. Remember, Slashdot is News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Not News for Wintel or Linux exclusively.
and that the vulnerability was created to allow greater integration for Outlook users.
So, Outlook is this huge pipe for virii, worms and spam leading me to wonder.....why is anyone still using Outlook?
I am not trolling here, this is a serious question based on example after example of companies that want to standardize on Outlook. For instance, my wife's company (a large multi-national conglomerate which will go un-named) decided last year that they wanted to standardize on Outlook. Their support costs have supposedly skyrocketed and yet there is no discussion of using something else. What is happening here?
If Bush is serious about this and it's just not another revenue grab for the government or a gift for big corporations, he's going to have to gut the FCC and give them serious instruction on who really should be the benefactor of any frequency allocations.
Nah. What he's a gonna do is wrangle up a posse, mosey on over to the FCC, find those pesky frequency allocations and smoke em out. Then he's a gonna appoint someone he trusts to ride herd the FCC to sweeten the pie for his buddies.
Excuse me, but ethernet for the Apple IIs were never available then. I know, because I had wanted the ethernet card they made for the//gs. Yes, they have it now, but it's not by Apple Computer Inc, and no, it does not work on the ][+
Ahem, modems were available then and all one had to do was dial into a university network. Yeah it was slow, but then there were no graphics to load either.
I don't know which was faster, the information about the iTunes store on the CDBaby site being pulled
Well, that was a surprise. I did not think that any of the information was proprietary or "secret", thus my submission of the story. I guess someone must have objected which is unfortunate because the story made Apple look like a real good guy for the smaller indie labels.
Those look like the Apple][+ specs. The ][+ was my very first computer I purchased as a ten year old in 1980 with funds from mowing lawns around our neighborhood for a year. I got it with the disc drive and that funky green Apple monitor III with a 16k language card, a modem card and that Apple dot matrix printer. It's funny but I actually used that computer as my home computer up until 1989 when I purchased my IIci making the ][+ the longest lived computer in constant use in my history of computer ownership. Nine years of hacking, programming, writing papers for college classes, and the first forays into the ethernet makes for some fond memories of a computer system that was remarkably flexible, extensible, powerful and elegant.
Thanks Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Your vision of computers transforming the lives of average citizens has indeed happened.
This one spread through my university like wildfire today!
Yep, looking at the logs, it has hit a number of systems at our university as well and two apparent copies appeared in my inbox. All I have to say is, good thing I am running mostly Macs. OS X is the desktop replacement for Windows.
Ah, so you're the guy to talk to when the next article about direct-optic-nerve implants comes up.
I'm not the only guy, but probably a pretty good resource to talk about the implications, feasibility and application of such approaches.
Also at one time a web-developer, and thus I have to ask, what's with all the spaces in the links?
The thinking is for better separation of links for 1) screen readers for the blind and 2) ease of visualization for large numbers of links in a relatively compressed format as we did not want to have folks having to scroll to see links we felt were important for a front page.
I study visual neuroscience. Neurophysiology of the retina to be exact. I am interested in retinal degenerations and what happens with retinal structure and function in those diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. Click on the URL to find out more.
So, you are saying that science does not work? I am a little sensitive here because.....why yes, I am a scientist.
It's the old damning lie about statistics... is it:
Person "B" does action "X" because of stimulus "A"
or.......
This is why you design studies so that you can make a reasonable inference about the data. Given enough data and a properly designed study, one can make pretty accurate conclusions about things. For instance, let's design a quick little study with a hypothesis: The hypothesis is that gravity does not exist. So, pick up a pen from your desk, hold it a defined distance from the surface and let it go. Repeat ad nauseum. What do we conclude? We conclude that we reject the hypothesis and in fact, gravity does exist.
Behavioral studies are a bit more complicated, but the same scientific method can be applied to reach conclusions.
I have killed probably millions of digital people in my game playing days, but when I accidentially step on a snail, I get bummed out. To me, life is sacred. But that is not to say that I don't think killing can be justified, it is just very regretable.
Well, that is encouraging and good to know. However, it is one thing to say that "yes, I played video games (I most certainly did) and there is nothing wrong with me! I don't kill people". But it is quite another thing to perform population studies and test the hypothesis that video games do not desensitize people to violence. Isolated individuals speaking up does not a scientific study make.
Video games don't breeb violence...poor parenting does.
No, but an argument could be made for desensitization. I think I have posted this here before, but in the Corps (Marine Corps), one of the most difficult things to do in training recruits is to get them to not hesitate pulling the trigger to end another human beings life. (humans tend to default towards not killing each other unless they are sociopaths which the Corps does not want). To overcome this issue, recently the Corps has been experimenting with 3D shootemups in an attempt at desensitization and teaching squad maneuvering and strategy skills, but primarily desensitization.
Slashdot Mirror
Geez, this sort of thing is as old as capitalism. Most people are inherently lazy and ideas are cheap. Thus the patent. However, implementing the ideas is where things get expensive. This is one of the reasons behind the whole .com bust, in that folks were getting VC funding for ideas and products that they had in their heads. Yet, 1) No code existed for many of these ideas and 2) The ideas had no infrastructure to support them. For an interesting documentary of this whole bit in action, see a film called humorously enough ".com".
So......wait. All those "Linux Powered" bumperstickers I've seen don't mean that the car is moving under the power of Linux? Awwww. And I thought Linux was really cool.
only two states have adopted the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, which gives software vendors all the benefits and none of the burdens of the consequences of publishing their software.
I've not followed this issue so I don't know which two states have adopted this, but I can guess one of them might be Washington state.
At any rate, one should hope that when one produces a product, they should have a sense of craftsmanship and ownership of that product and stand behind it. Now, I am not one who supports the litigiousness of our country right now, but if a software company writing software that controls the infusion rate of an insulin pump screws up and kills people, they should be held responsible. That is one of the checks against creating crappy or dangerous products. For instance, all of the recalls I had to endure for my Dodge pickup (ultimately the reason I bought a Toyota), were designed to protect the consumer against a faulty product. With all of the concepts of pervasive computing controlling aspects of our lives, we are going to have to hold software companies responsible for products they create that are going to be used in sensitive or critical applications.
but I did need to use penmanship to get into graduate school: the GRE general test requires a written statement in cursive before taking the test as some kind of proof of identity.
Weird. I don't seem to remember that and I took both the general GRE exam and the molecular biology special exam.
Looks like you've been /. as the webserver isn't responding. Maybe you should have used W2K+IIS instead of OS X.
Nope. more like the following:
ISSUE: UEN - CORE4 flap.
SCOPE: Campus traffic to/from the Internet
DATE: Monday, June 8 2003
START TIME: 3:00 PM
END TIME: Currently in progress.
DETAILS: An interface at the UEN core is causing some requests to and from the Internet to move at a reduced speed. UEN is currently performing emergency work on this interface and expect to have the problem
solved shortly.
NetOps
Dude, you're gettin a dell!
Yeah, well we actually went that route several months ago by purchasing a couple of Dell boxes and I'll tell you, the OS X boxes have been far less trouble, they are more reliable and have fewer security issues than our Wintel Dell boxes.
Yeah well, the cartoon referenced in the article does not do justice to OS X. I am running a couple of websites on OS X with one running on a little old G3 iMac that now has around 80 days of uptime. I never have to touch the thing and it is solid and stable as a rock.
who cares if kids can't write in cursive? I'd far rather have a kid who can touch type and doesn't know cursive rather than the opposite.
Well, I have always been a fast typist going back to 10 years old and entertainingly, could type faster with two fingers than my junior high type teacher. Proper typing cut my wpm scores back a little, but it was beneficial to learn proper technique. However, my handwriting has always been bad and I tend to default to printing when I have to write. This could be because of my dyslexia, alternatively it could be because I was using a keyboard from the age of 9 or 10.
To address your point though. Not having good penmanship with cursive (or printing for that matter) did not significantly hurt my ability to get into college, or graduate school or obtain consulting positions so......yeah, I guess I agree with you. There are more significant things to worry about like knowledge of mathematics, science, history and literature among other things.
based upon the charge that Enron claimed that a software platform was more complete and more functional than it actually was.
Boy, this sort of behavior is rampant among companies small and large. I have known several small software companies whose sales divisions were always making promises that were not grounded in reality. Promised functionality that had simply been discussed, but was not actually in code at the time. I'd say to the sales managers, "what the hell are you doing?" to which they would reply, "making sales".
That was hugely dissapointing for me as I would much prefer a product based sales strategy where something is not announced until it is ready as opposed to a timeline driven or sales driven paradigm where products tend to be pre-announced and then released half-assed.
That algorithm is so fundamentally broken as to be practically useless for anything but as an aid in simple searches. Why anyone would use soundex in a mission critical application designed to positively identify individuals is beyond me. What, was the 'No Fly' database written by 1st year comp sci major or something? Sheesh.
Hey, wanna make a good living in these uncertain economic times? Come up with a better alternative and propose it to DARPA. There is actually some very cool research going on that is funded by DARPA in terms of biometrics and database centric comp sci.
I'm a little confused... are the airlines now prohibiting people to fly on the basis that they went "deal-hunting"?
:-)
I understand that the airline industry is a little tight right now, but that's just insane.
Yeah, the current administration wants everyone to be paying full fare here. We gotta start getting this economy back on track, so those that refuse to participate will be identified as terrorists and placed into the TIA archive.
Anyone know when all the Mac trolls showed up on Slashdot?
All you have to do is look at the ID numbers after their log-in name and you will see that Mac users have been here on Slashdot from the very beginning back in 97 or 98. Remember, Slashdot is News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Not News for Wintel or Linux exclusively.
and that the vulnerability was created to allow greater integration for Outlook users.
So, Outlook is this huge pipe for virii, worms and spam leading me to wonder.....why is anyone still using Outlook?
I am not trolling here, this is a serious question based on example after example of companies that want to standardize on Outlook. For instance, my wife's company (a large multi-national conglomerate which will go un-named) decided last year that they wanted to standardize on Outlook. Their support costs have supposedly skyrocketed and yet there is no discussion of using something else. What is happening here?
If Bush is serious about this and it's just not another revenue grab for the government or a gift for big corporations, he's going to have to gut the FCC and give them serious instruction on who really should be the benefactor of any frequency allocations.
Nah. What he's a gonna do is wrangle up a posse, mosey on over to the FCC, find those pesky frequency allocations and smoke em out. Then he's a gonna appoint someone he trusts to ride herd the FCC to sweeten the pie for his buddies.
You mean something a little like this?
Wow. Thanks. I guess that's what I get for focusing so much on science and neglecting my game play.
Hey, how about a Marathon remake using a the new UT engine? Man, I wasted many an hour in the genetics building playing that game...
Excuse me, but ethernet for the Apple IIs were never available then. I know, because I had wanted the ethernet card they made for the //gs. Yes, they have it now, but it's not by Apple Computer Inc, and no, it does not work on the ][+
Ahem, modems were available then and all one had to do was dial into a university network. Yeah it was slow, but then there were no graphics to load either.
I don't know which was faster, the information about the iTunes store on the CDBaby site being pulled
Well, that was a surprise. I did not think that any of the information was proprietary or "secret", thus my submission of the story. I guess someone must have objected which is unfortunate because the story made Apple look like a real good guy for the smaller indie labels.
Ah the good old days:
CPU: MOStek 6502
CPU Speed: 1 Mhz
FPU: none
Bus Speed: 1 Mhz
Data Path: 8 bit
ROM: 12 k
Those look like the Apple][+ specs. The ][+ was my very first computer I purchased as a ten year old in 1980 with funds from mowing lawns around our neighborhood for a year. I got it with the disc drive and that funky green Apple monitor III with a 16k language card, a modem card and that Apple dot matrix printer. It's funny but I actually used that computer as my home computer up until 1989 when I purchased my IIci making the ][+ the longest lived computer in constant use in my history of computer ownership. Nine years of hacking, programming, writing papers for college classes, and the first forays into the ethernet makes for some fond memories of a computer system that was remarkably flexible, extensible, powerful and elegant.
Thanks Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Your vision of computers transforming the lives of average citizens has indeed happened.
"Did you get hit by that new worm?"
"No, I run OS X."
This one spread through my university like wildfire today!
Yep, looking at the logs, it has hit a number of systems at our university as well and two apparent copies appeared in my inbox. All I have to say is, good thing I am running mostly Macs. OS X is the desktop replacement for Windows.
Ah, so you're the guy to talk to when the next article about direct-optic-nerve implants comes up.
I'm not the only guy, but probably a pretty good resource to talk about the implications, feasibility and application of such approaches.
Also at one time a web-developer, and thus I have to ask, what's with all the spaces in the links?
The thinking is for better separation of links for 1) screen readers for the blind and 2) ease of visualization for large numbers of links in a relatively compressed format as we did not want to have folks having to scroll to see links we felt were important for a front page.
BTW, what are you a scientist of?
I study visual neuroscience. Neurophysiology of the retina to be exact. I am interested in retinal degenerations and what happens with retinal structure and function in those diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. Click on the URL to find out more.
Studies don't work
So, you are saying that science does not work? I am a little sensitive here because.....why yes, I am a scientist.
It's the old damning lie about statistics... is it:
Person "B" does action "X" because of stimulus "A"
or.......
This is why you design studies so that you can make a reasonable inference about the data. Given enough data and a properly designed study, one can make pretty accurate conclusions about things. For instance, let's design a quick little study with a hypothesis: The hypothesis is that gravity does not exist. So, pick up a pen from your desk, hold it a defined distance from the surface and let it go. Repeat ad nauseum. What do we conclude? We conclude that we reject the hypothesis and in fact, gravity does exist.
Behavioral studies are a bit more complicated, but the same scientific method can be applied to reach conclusions.
I have killed probably millions of digital people in my game playing days, but when I accidentially step on a snail, I get bummed out. To me, life is sacred. But that is not to say that I don't think killing can be justified, it is just very regretable.
Well, that is encouraging and good to know. However, it is one thing to say that "yes, I played video games (I most certainly did) and there is nothing wrong with me! I don't kill people". But it is quite another thing to perform population studies and test the hypothesis that video games do not desensitize people to violence. Isolated individuals speaking up does not a scientific study make.
Video games don't breeb violence...poor parenting does.
No, but an argument could be made for desensitization. I think I have posted this here before, but in the Corps (Marine Corps), one of the most difficult things to do in training recruits is to get them to not hesitate pulling the trigger to end another human beings life. (humans tend to default towards not killing each other unless they are sociopaths which the Corps does not want). To overcome this issue, recently the Corps has been experimenting with 3D shootemups in an attempt at desensitization and teaching squad maneuvering and strategy skills, but primarily desensitization.
So, do video games desensitize kids to violence?