I think it's only after someone's witty, well-thought posting get's moderated redundant that people get the bug up their nether region about redundancies of the "editors".
It also goads future postings into becoming poorly-edited, formulaic, nonsense as long as it can be posted quickly.
People do want devices that perform one task, but it has to be a task they can comprehend completely and without complication. Evidence: go into an office supply store and see that there are still basic touch-tone telephones, P-touch label writers, dictation machines, handheld calculators, electronic typewriters, adding machines, and all sorts of little electronic devices that by all accounts should have been made obsolete by the debut of the computer technology of ten to twenty years ago.
The cutting edge device today is one that still performs a basic, understandable task alone, but will perform more advanced tasks when coupled with other simple devices. Evidence: the digital camera, the iPod, the camcorder.
This is not a good business model for a for-profit company. It's almost become a necessity to graft useless features on to many devices even when not needed just to create an upgrade demand. GPS units are being upgraded with flashier displays and functionality of PalmPilots just because the basic GPS features aren't really improving much. The printer market seems divided into the "cheap" disposable variety that will probably not survive more than 6 months and the other variety that tries to add features of photocopiers, fax machines, and so forth. These days even devices that have little R&D in them like hard drives tout upgradability and compatibility ("Best used with Windows XP" etc).
If there are any companies in these markets that don't compete in the constant upgrade cycle, they're probably looking for ways to get their customers on this treadmill or are getting very worried because making a good product is no longer sufficient.
Imagine enough of these peripheral device makers getting together with RedHat, SUSE, or just making their own standards for a "Mill"
The "brain" is a Linux box that's has a small cheap 24x80 LCD display for diagnostics and errors. It serves as the connectivity and upgradability box that allows these manufacturers to compete with upgrade treadmill devices.
Buying a good quality electronic typewriter gives your system a great keyboard and line printer, but if you ever need to use the device strictly as a typewriter (e.g. your "brain" has been cracked and owned) you can.
Adding a midi keyboard and passing information through the brain lets you print your music as you play.
You no longer need to buy a label writer for your computer and a separate hand held device. Your
Transfer your answering machine messages to your MP3 player.
Adding something like a Palm Pilot or a simplified operating system would allow enhancement to many devices.
When some other technology takes off in the future (small looms that allow you to print your digital images as cloth? an inkjet printer that uses a flavorless frosting to ice your food with?) The concept of using the "mill" and "brain" to provide the upgrade features would add functionality to all of the devices one already has and knows how to use. If one already knows how to download and print photos, they could make a spectacular, pornographic birthday cake. Or if someone wants to wear a jacket with the latest financial reports on the outside, they can.
Right now, Georgia is recovering from a bad, ice storm and my power is being knocked out at random (I'm saving about every 10 seconds and have had about 27 power losses trying to write this). Since my computer takes 15 seconds to boot, a lot of devices I have wouldn't work well in the "mill" in this situation, but I could easily fall back on my electronic typewriter and not have to worry about power restarts if I just needed a physical piece of paper printed (or with a couple of AA batteries, and some Flash storage, I'd have a document I could save and export to the "mill" later).
Of course, what MS wants is a situation where they control the upgrade treadmill. They drive the technology. They enslave the manufacturers of devices they don't even make.
Personally, I see such an alternative market as something that only technology geeks without a for-profit interest could drive in a way that wouldn't constantly be raping my pocketbook. In other words, the perfect market for a Linux / BSD / or other open source system.
I think the business model of item and service (aka razors and blades) isn't a good fit for the music biz. There are actually three markets that interact. The big music labels make the majority of their money in the control of the physical CD sales markets. While anyone with $100 can get a musical instrument, they control the distinction of who is a "hobbyist" and who is a "musician" by deciding who they give contracts to.
Now Apple sells:
music consumption tools (AirTunes, iPod)
music creation tools (Mac, iLife, Logic)
a music distribution service (iTunes)
Apple doesn't seem to be making much money with their distribution service. Most of the money goes to the traditional labels because they have the content people will pay for.
But if iTunes can be established as a music distribution service, Apple is in a very nice position to create a "Do-It-Yourself" label service whereby dedicated hobbyists can put their works into a real distribution channel. Apple takes less money than the traditional big labels but they get more money than being dealers of the big labels copyrights.
Of course, the big labels will abandon iTunes if they get a hint that Apple is becoming a content provider. But in two years time, who knows, iTunes may be a service that a big company couldn't back out from.
There might be hints of Apple doing the same thing with other content. They already have a wonderful set of video creation and consumption tools; once badnwidth grows they might compete with the video/movie distribution channels. And then move in toward being a content distributor/provider in the same manner as they might do with the music market.
As a fellow who remembers what a Steve Jobs Apple can do with absurd pricing models (e.g. late eighties mac and laser printer markets), I do still find it very exciting about the creative possibilities this could open up in music and video. I really hope Apple kind of succeeds in their challenge. What would be even better would be for a Libertarian/Open Source/Linux company to come in and do something similar.
The Infocom text-adventure of the Hitchhiker's Guide should be a requirement for every high school student considering a career in computer science. Unfortunately the plot of the movie may simplify some of the rougher puzzles in the game.
***Possible minor spoilers***
It's been a long time since I've played the game, but I still recall the way one acquires tea is a nice way to approach the concept of double negation and the final puzzle reminds me of the frustration of hunting for bugs in a program with a poor debugger and finding the bug to be inadequate tools rather than the concept of what one is solving.
*** End spoilers ***
As an eighth grader playing this game, I thought this was an incredibly frustrating and ultimately quite enlightening and satisfying game to play.
I'm sure there will be computer games based on the HHGTTG movie, but whether they are rehashes of Frogger with different character maps and models or whether they actually pay homage to the brilliance of the Infocom game remains to be seen.
While I'm uncertain of the applicability of this as a technical form of expression, an XML syntax would seem to be a welcome way to approach legal forms of expression.
Software patents are fluid and vague in their expression by design. Unlike copyright protection of the actual code, the patent is protecting the idea and you want to cast as wide and vague a net as possible. It seems to me that an XML expression of the idea (though independent of a particular language) would force an explicit interpretation of what was meant that would be interpretable by a judge (or someone not as fluent in technical syntax).
I dislike the idea of software patents altogether, but if they are going to exist it seems like an XML expression of the idea should be a requirement for any sort of patent submission.
It's funny, but In the seventies when The Six Million Dollar Man was popular, I thought one of the neatest special effects were the inadvertant lens flares. There's a scene in particular I remember on one show with a non-bionic man jogging; I got into a heated argument about that "special effect" with someone I was watching the show with. They didn't see any bionic special effect so they thought I was crazy when I insisted that something special was going to happen to that character. And of course on a show with only three to five characters per episode (three of which were recurring) something special did happen to the character.
It's strange but to people who know nothing about photography, a lens flare can look like an out of this world addition instead of the photographic damage that most photographers (properly) consider it.
Apple's legal bungling of their Look and Feel lawsuit made a common eighties "lawsuit threat" to be shown to be completely without legal merit. If that hadn't happened I shudder to think of other applications of this "threat" (web standards compliance? no license a look and feel from Netscape or Microsoft)
Apple has become very shy about giving out developer pre-releases. The free developer level no longer gets seeds. The big paying developers get them, but because people in these groups are willing to violate NDA these have become more and more infrequent. Back in 1998, Apple distributed Quicktime CD's of their WorldWide Developer Conference for free to all developers. But they got a lot of bad press about this stuff. Pre-release demos to developers were being reviewed for bugginess of the code, flair of the presentation, ease of use of the interface, and then the rumor monger would usually make up a wild rumor about "what to expect next that wasn't mentioned." Apple has stopped distributing WWDC presentations except for big money and with a NDA agreement. Apple is getting very picky about its release schedule of seeds to paying developers.
Apple learned a lot of lessons early in its life about pre-release expectations. The Apple/// and Lisa each had pre-release expectations which no product of their era could meet. Whereas products with no pre-release buzz like the LaserWriter or the Mac seemed to do extremely well. You and I can speculate on other factors such as price and quality of manufacture that doomed the other products, but I think that's really where the Apple corporate goals of secrecy became ingrained.
My gut reaction to the announcement was that the lack of live webcast was due to political reasons. Jobs (and Apple) are rightly pissed at the mac rumor sites releasing trade secrets, preliminary specs and prices, and stealing their thunder. As big as this expo was, coverage provided like the original Apple blueberry flavored iMac would have been huge. Instead they get pundits saying Apple "barely kept their head above level of expetations today" and crap like that. The rumor sites get a lot of their revenue from the ad hits. When people flood their site looking for confirmation or live transcript they get mucho money. My guess is that publicity that no webcast would be available was Apple's attempt to kill these leeches revenue streams.
After seeing the traffic reports though, I reach two conclusions. First is that the amount of traffic for a webcast would probably have been huge. Second is that even the post webcast feed has been very laggy and spotty; I imagine that their live broadcast would have been worse. People are saying the huge traffic hits that brought down the Apple store are negatives for WebObjects and the Oracle backend (which, after a certain point of traffic levels, is a crap way to pinpoint failure).
I've found that some websites have posted outlines of what was covered in the Keynote and at what times each "section" started. So I got my news of events from Macintouch (a reputable mac news blog that doesn't traffic rumors), subtracted the time of the keynote start from their list, and then had a nice index to watch the key points of the weblog I was really interested in seeing (the Mac mini launch, the Garage Band demo, and a few others).
Who knows I still may try to stream the whole webcast next week when traffic has died down, just to get the "color" of Jobs slick presentation style. But for now traffic is still a big problem for me at least.
The Anonymous Coward said:"But for Microsoft to be doing this comes across as a little odd, because rather than releasing products to help deal with holes in their software - why don't they just fix the holes in their software itself?"
I think that's a question that will be overlooked by a lot of Microsoft fans. You'll see Paul Thurrott's Windows Felchers praise the widespread release of this wonderful tool (acquired from a third party) rather than answer the harder questions of why not make the OS more secure.
This probably just scratches the surface but fundamental security fixes seem to me to come at an expense of:
Incompatabilities with software
Inability to share data from one application with another (or gather data for MS in general).
More difficulties in programming for beginners and custom app writers. (Real security standards are challenging).
Greater liability if the problem is perceived as an add-on rather than a flaw in the original code.
Please start the trend of abbreviating the reference to this tool as the Microsoft Software Removal Tool.
That way when we can offer a GPL'd, Linux-based, Microsoft Software Removal Tool for free there may be more people looking at the correct way to secure their Personal Computing systems.
The two components of iWork (Pages and Keynote) look great. I expect that these will set new UI standards for other word processors and presentation packages to swipe from.
What was mildly disappointing was what iWork elminated from the market.
Besides the word processor and presentation modules, AppleWorks 6 had:
A two-dimensional, charting spreadsheet
A flat file database
A very basic bitmap paint program
A very basic vector drawing program
An architecture to plug in other editors
Tons of cheesy clip-art, fonts, and templates
Mac OS 9 compatability via its Carbon roots
In some ways these were completely crap features. The shell that these editors plugged into was very non-Aqua. The editors were bare basic items that looked to specifically not compete with even the most basic shareware on the market. And although Apple had seemingly dropped support for AppleWorks files createed on the Apple ][, it was a model of backwards compatability in terms of it's file formats.
This always seemed to me to be more of a checklist feature (Why, Yes, we do have a free Works package bundled with every Mac.) than something they were very proud of. So I can see why they'd want to sweep it under the rug. I do hope that they are working on updating the other modules at least to make working with them in an Aqua-esque environment to be a pleasure. I think the shareware crowd could use a bit of encouragement to get their apps up to a level that could compete with iWorks.
As an aside, I had expected Apple to name this suite with a name that had just a bit more subversion or punch... something like iHo (iHo, it's off to work we go).
the article seemed to me to be mostly about one small point: you'll be far better off if you keep yourself healthy. It's not a matter of being accepted per se. It's noting that 1. being accepted is a great big part of rising in whatever area you work in and 2. being (and looking) healthy go a great way towards being accepted. Hence 3. Being healthy is rather fine start towards whatever other aim you might have.
That message I read was much more about appearance of health and normality. Cultivate the quick stride, fresh appearance, and tone of superb physical health. were just one of the many bits of Oprah-esque advice that's more about making an impression than making a difference in your life or health.
He uses Russel's philosophy to support his arguments. I'm not as familiar with Russel but "meeting your physical needs" is also the first level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and he presents a very convincing theory that you'll never reach self-fulfillment without sating your physical needs first. If you google on this topic you'll find a lot of people who write that Maslow is full of it in much more well developed ways than you'll find arguments against this article.
But here are a couple of ideas...
Sating your own physical needs doesn't always mean meeting them. Ghandi's hunger strikes would have been somewhat less fulfilling if he'd visited some all-you-can-eat buffets. Religious fasting for spiritual fulfillment is common in many cultures and contrary to the idea that you must be physically fulfilled before you can seek fulfillment in other ways.
The article encourages stopping annoying but non-harmful habits such as nail biting but doesn't mention something like hand washing after going to the toilet. I work for myself and though I have to deal with other people, I don't find nail-biting or having a quick stride to have an effect on me. I do find that much of the other conformist advice to be good when meeting with the loan manager or clients, but those are secondary goals to the ones in my life. Things like hand washing would be much more universally applicable even to more isolated folk like myself.
Personally, I find that this fellow isn't necessarilly wrong. I have found that I really have to put effort in to maintaining my physical health (especially with high med costs being self-employed now). It's more the angle he's taking in supporting his argument that I find to be undermining his point. He just assumes that you want the same goals as he does.
Would Richard Stallman make more persuasive arguments if he presented himself in a suit and tie with a dapper, banker appearance? Yes. Would Richard Stallman be a better programmer by putting on the same airs? Not a bit. If Mr. Stallman's goal is to be a persuasive demagogue then he might be better off changing superficialities about himself. If his goal in only being a good programmer then habits such as nail biting and quick strides don't really matter as much IMHO.
Many school teachers find their reward in working with pupils rather than large salaries or advancing in administrative roles.
Directors like Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings) find their satisfaction in telling their story rather than advancing in superficial Hollywood circles or sleeping every day.
Many nurses and medical technicians are attracted more to the ability to heal and ease others physical pain than large doctor salaries or authoring articles for journals
Many same-sex couples find the loving bond of a relationship to be worth the social stigma, lack of legal recognition, and difficulty in producing off-spring.
While this fellow makes some good points as to how to "fit in" to the superficial business world, a wise person will sit down and decide whether fitting in will actually help in advancing the goals and satisfactions of their life. It's fortunate that different people have different goals and if you need the money of a tech lead or team manager to meet yours then definitely pay attention to this advice. But if your goals and life priorities are different, think about what you can do to help meet them and whether or not this advice still applies.
Money is an easily transportable way to move physical effort to places that need it; it's the most efficient way for me to help out, but it's also the easiest way for my efforts to be mis-used. There are three ways that bother me about the calls for aid...
The Debts Owed
Western banks are holding huge debts that these countries can't realisticly repay. The greedy bankers want asian relief so that they'll have a slim chance of seeing their money again. They'd probably be equally happy with telethons asking for sympathetic viewers to help out by pledging money to pay off these huge burdens but they aren't talking of writing off these debts (only of freezing interest or temporarily restructuring payment schedules).
The Massive Organizations of Relief
The best of these agencies have large administrations that need service aid. They need IT upgrades in their luxurious administrative headquarters. They need new parking decks. In the late nineties I volunteered to help a large non-profit in Atlanta for a day. I had all sorts of ideas about cost saving Linux installs, but my job was to act as upgrade boy migrating users to some Windows 98 service pack. The small organizations have trouble doing much but the larger ones are bloated and wasteful of their resources.
The elite in charge
There stories of elite hotels and expansive mansions being washed away give me the impression that much of the rebuilding and relief will be wasted on reconstructing the property of the elite rather than basic necessities for the common man.
Lack of follow through
A friend who works with a local church based charity said that they ask for money when crises like this arise. They don't say that all donations will go to help those victims. Like a sweepstakes they give out X amount of money when they've taken in 100X.
I'd almost given up on the idea of sending any money to a charity based on these misgivings. What changed my mind was, oddly enough, a plea on the blog of a amateur pornographic model that I follow. His familial ties to the area caused him sincere grief over the incident and he had selected Oxfam America as the charity he was asking people to give money to. I still have all of these reservations about donating money, but the difference was in hearing a voice I was familiar with make a recommendation of a "least bad" charity to donate to.
It's really odd when I think about it, but a personal message put out over the internet reached me far deeper than our President's cynical call for (bank) aid, or my church's call for extra donations in the collection basket, or the endless streams of impersonal pleadings that I've seen on television. I guess that's the real power of the internet to raise money... the personal touch... and if some goes astray (as I feel in my gut that it will) I feel much less disgusted with myself for my action.
What it's all about
on
CES Tidbits
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you take the worlds of television, telecom, games and music, and then remove content, you wind up with the consumer electronics show. Despite what you may be assuming, I think the inteligence level goes up quite a bit once content is removed. I envision telecom devices having fascinating conversations with my sister in Uganda rather than listening to telemarketers. I recall television products replaying some of my favorite cancelled shows rather than endless hours of mind-numbing nonsense.
I find it a bit disheartening that so much of the success of these products will depend on the success or failure of the content. Finally, when I heard Conan's lame double entendres about flacid penises (as in the Microsoft intro) that shook me out of my interest in what was presented at this convention. More and more I'm coming to the conclusion that products that allow the common man to produce content are far more interesting, revolutionary, and important than the evolutionary products shown at the Consumer Electronics Show to allow you to consume the content of others. The products at CES that catch my eye are ones that allow me to create or enojy the creations of others, unfortunately I think I'll see more of that sort of thing at NAB in April than I've seen at CES so far.
Please, tell me that I'm wrong and point out some great consumptive and productive tech that's made its debut.
It used to be that in a shop, one could negotiate the price with the owner. If you asked Sam Drucker about a $10 wrench that he thought was a $2 screwdriver, and sold it to you for that amount then that's his incompetence for not identifying his products for sale.
These people were putting a different bar code on the box; that's Walmart's fault for relying solely on the barcode for doing all of it's pricing negotiation. They had cashiers that could have seen something was out of line, so the human was not taken out of this process completely and actually seems to add to Walmart's incompetence at identifying what it was selling.
I suspect that the defendants in this case won't be able to hire a legal team capable of arguing this well in court and will probably fold to Walmart's high priced lawyers, but I still don't think the case is as open and shut as the Walmart PR people want people to believe.
This is definitely an anomolous situation, but I bet it'll only add to my problems in the future.
My addresss is almost impossible to find. Physically, it's nestled back in some woods and looks somewhat like the entrance to the (Adam West/Burt Ward) Batcave. The problem is that it's also next to an expensive club that wanted a more exclusive address and was able to get the short extension of road we sit on changed to the exact name of a more expensive road nearby. This was an insane political maneuver, but money talks and they wanted an address that sounded exclusive rather than redneck.
All of the locals and long time residents can find my address if I tell them the "wrong" address. Map readers or locals who are told the "correct" address won't find it because they go to an address on the other road that's slightly transposed numerically from my house number.
The utility men use long time residents to read my meters but if I go into an office to pay my bill and ask them to look up my address I have to be prepared to wait for 30 minutes of tellers asking managers for help in finding the information.
While I can see why a manager would want to have full control and knowledge over a delivery person, I bet this will have a detrimental effect on getting my packages delivered. I already tell people to avoid sending me things via FedEx since they repeatedly can not find any address I give them. I'll send a few packages by UPS after this policy goes into effect and see if I need to add UPS to my "DO NOT SHIP" list.
I can't speak for anyone at Apple, but it's clear that the command line isn't an alternative interface to operate a Macintosh.
You don't see any traces of a command line when the system does system checks at startup or when users log in to their accounts.
When you launch the terminal you see this "black box" as completely subservient to the Mac GUI. It doesn't take away the menu bar and the window itself has an aqua scrollbar and traffic light close/minimize/maximize arrangement in the upper left.
I speculate that it's all a matter of perception. If the user never perceives the command line to be the foundation of their OS operating experience then there's no reason not to add it tucked away in the cobwebs with other utility applications.
A well to do doctor of my acquaintance had a boat-house up on Lake Seed in North Georgia. Runoff from Lakes Burton's hydroelectric dam feeds Lake Seed which feeds runoff from its hydroelectric dam into Lake Raburn.
Recently the aftermath from one of this year's Hurricanes hit North Georgia hard with thunderstorms and high winds. Lake Burton has historic houses and many homes of power company executives so overflow was dumped into Lake Seed to keep the water level of Lake Burton from rising. Lake Seed rose and washed away this doctor's boat house and motorboats.
Supposedly, the insurance company will not pay for the boat-house or powerboat since the accident was man made rather than natural and therefore not covered by the policy. The insurance representative suggested filing a civil suit against the power company instead.
Take this with a grain of salt of course, though insurance salespeople are very devious with misrepresenting what their policies will actually cover, my doctor friend is notoriously cheap and may have chosen insufficient coverage. Whether this tale is the truth or not is incidental; it has inspired me to review my insurance coverage which is always a good thing to do every once in a while.
A consumer organization (EFF? Consumers Union?) writes an installer that can be run on various computers.
The installer includes a set of legal principles written by the consumer advocacy organization as well as commonly demanded terms of many software license agreements. Each item has the legalese, an English interpretation of the meaning, and a color-coded, numeric rating from the consumer group as to the restriction or burden is being placed on you the consumer.
The software author's installer package comes with terms it requires the consumer to accept before installing. They can include additional terms not in the predefined set, but these will be flagged by the installer with its most undesirable rating until the consumer advocate has had a legal representative properly rate the desirability/burden of the new term.
If the installer is internet connected, it can contact the advocacy group for updates, send requests to the software author for a list of renegotiated terms which they could approve if they so desired.
Of course, this sort of legal internet negotiation of terms won't even cause the big software houses to bat an eyelid, but I think that small software authors who don't have legal teams for their software will be more inclined to participate in such a scheme. Of course the GNU and BSD licenses will look very consumer friendly under such a scheme.
Maybe this software advocacy group could even offer a comparison of licenses in certain categories. (Mac OS, Windows XP, Lindows or Gimp, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc).
Who knows, once consumers start putting their needs in the drivers seat and stop being dictated to in terms they can't understand, then perhaps even the big boys will climb aboard and start participating in the system as well (ha!)
I've actually been in a rather heated discussion with a software retailer. The box I was sold listed under "Requirements" that one must read and agree to the software license agreement enclosed (as well as having 256MB of RAM and 200MB of free disk space, etc, etc). Most don't even go this far, they just spring the legal suprise on you when you open the box.
My beef was that I wasn't being allowed to return the software after having read the agreement that was enclosed. Her argument I was that I hadn't actually paid $99 for use of the software; I had paid $99 for the box, instruction manual, paper copy of the license agreement, and aluminum and plastic disc inside.
The box of paper and plastic had a value by itself even if I never put the disc into a computer, and I couldn't put the disc in a computer unless I agreed to the software license agreement. "So I basically just bought a very expensive frisbee that I can't use or return." I asked.
"Oh yes, you can use it as a frisbee all you want, but you just can't put it into your computer unless you agree to that paper copy of the license agreement."
Well, I can return frisbees, paper, boxes, and books, why can't I return this stuff if I haven't used it on the computer? The software in question wasn't in a sealed envelope. There was no way she could tell whether the disc had been put in a computer or not. I suddenly sensed why this product was no longer requiring me to tear something to signal my agreement with the license. It was more powerful for the manufacturer that my agreement was through an act (e.g. putting the disc into the computer) that couldn't really be verified.
Of course, I didn't get my money back but I was enlightened to the way this retail chain or software manufacturer would argue "proof" of my acceptance of their license.
To think that when I was born, the idea of using DNA to identify suspects at a crime scene was unheard of, but now criminals have to be mindful of hair loss, dandruff flakes, and any sort of DNA they might accidentally leave lying around that could incriminate them.
Computers used to cost the government and corporations huge amounts of money. The desktop computer competition brought these fees down tremendously and even when governments, companies, and universities find a need for something different, they can often meet their own needs by modifying off-the-shelf technology or having their custom needs met with technologies that are signifcantly cheaper.
Now if DNA manipulation becomes the next technology to be driven down in price by mass competition, it's an idea that makes me very nervous. I'm not sure that we have in place the moral safeguards on our current, expensive DNA engineering laboratories, and we're talking about making a price pressure that will put DNA manipulation affordable to millions?
Isn't manually manipulating DNA just creating viruses on a grander scale? Admittedly there's no intent to make data that can self-replicate, but there seems to be no intent to make sure that this stuff can't do so. If our computers become an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly, we very well could come up with something amazing or something horrible.
I certainly hope that technology designers will do something to make natural exposure of this computer DNA architecture incompatible with natural DNA, but my bigger frights are on the moral front.
Technology safeguards will only make it safe for you to work on repairing your hard drive if you happen to have an open cut. I fully expect the more brilliant tech geeks to figure out ways to circumvent these limitations for their own experimentation (whether in this country or another) just as the case-modder will circumvent electrical or FCC standards to feed their own experimental lusts. That leads to some absurd possibilities:
GNU authors working on widely avaiable, open-source drugs that undermine lucrative drug markets.
Macro virus writers authoring new strains of Ebola or SARS to kill some time between classes.
Militant vegans creating a mad-pig virus to introduce into the Hormel Spam plants.
BitTorrent being sued by the NBA for supplying athletes with performance enhancing viral strains.
Every person with a Napoleon complex engineering yet another weapon or drug to further their goals.
Religious evangelicals engineering their mythological creatures and monsters into reality.
Anti-abortionists engineering a prenatal drug that makes it impossible for a mother to abort a fetus without taking her own life.
Warning: Mildly Off Topic Tin Foil Hat Theory Below:
In the early eighties, public awareness of GRID (gay related immune deficiency) began to awaken judgemental choruses of "God's punishment for sinners" and ideas of concentration camps for homosexuals. There were also people saying that the US government had engineered this new "human immunodeficiency virus" from other rare cancers or simply found a naturally occurring virus and found a way to introduce it into a population that would be extremely destructive. When "innocent" people started dying of GRID and the name changed to AIDS, the theories of it's engineering or opportunistic cultivation became theories of attack from the USSR.
Today, the origin of HIV is irrelevant whether it was natural, cultivated, or engineered. My thought at the time was that these were crackpot theories. These are governments that had trouble feeding their own people, tallying census figures, and managing money. They certainly weren't smart enough to engineer a virus. Without going into a big debate of communist versus capitalist or democrat versus republican, I have to say that the possibility of such theories is more realistic today in my mind. We're talking about governments (US and USSR) that engineered and used nucl
I returned home this evening and found a sign on the front door of the building that said 'WET PANT'. Incorrect spelling, but I got the message
Another example of English idioms is that yellow warning sign many janitors use after mopping up a spill. It has an icon of a fellow with arms in the air and his leg cocked to the side like a dog. The imperative label "WET FLOOR" could easily be confused as a command to a non-English speaker.
Just today I was trying to prototype some ideas on a dictionary idea I had.
My idea was to create a tutorial for learning AMSLAN (American Sign Language) and to use texts from Project Gutenburg or other public domain works. One (of several) problems though is that English is rife with homographs... words that are spelled alike but have different meanings. In the case of sign language, a sign for a bow in a little girl's hair might appear extremely odd if the sign for bow of a ship popped up in automatic substitution.
Dealing with the homographs is a problem, but I see that this site's plan already takes a stab at dealing with such things (in their cat example). I'd love it if they went to the trouble of also including a bit of AMSLAN (either in animations or static pictures) as that might inspire me with some help in the solution.
Ideally, my desire is to get an automated library that could read a text (possibly read by the human sorting the homographs). And allow a user to listen to the reading and watch the text (while learning English), listen to the reading only (if hearing impaired), watch a silent sign language presentation with subtitles (to learn sign language), or watch a silent presentation through signing (if reading in silence is preferable).
Just kind of bizarre that the idea struck the same day as this article appeared, I thought.:-)
I was running Safari 1.2.3 (v125.9) which isn't quite the current version, but pretty close.
I can confirm this works when the "Block Pop-up Windows" in the Safari menu is disabled, but not when the Blocking option is enabled. Rather than just a "me too", I went through the demonstration in reverse order of the previous poster (and was careful to refresh and follow the appropriate links) so I don't think this behavior is due to caching issues.
While I do hope there will be a fix for this soon, IMHO, the more appropos fix is that secure sites should not EVER rely on popups.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's only after someone's witty, well-thought posting get's moderated redundant that people get the bug up their nether region about redundancies of the "editors".
;-)
It also goads future postings into becoming poorly-edited, formulaic, nonsense as long as it can be posted quickly.
Quod erat demonstrandum
People do want devices that perform one task, but it has to be a task they can comprehend completely and without complication. Evidence: go into an office supply store and see that there are still basic touch-tone telephones, P-touch label writers, dictation machines, handheld calculators, electronic typewriters, adding machines, and all sorts of little electronic devices that by all accounts should have been made obsolete by the debut of the computer technology of ten to twenty years ago.
The cutting edge device today is one that still performs a basic, understandable task alone, but will perform more advanced tasks when coupled with other simple devices. Evidence: the digital camera, the iPod, the camcorder.
This is not a good business model for a for-profit company. It's almost become a necessity to graft useless features on to many devices even when not needed just to create an upgrade demand. GPS units are being upgraded with flashier displays and functionality of PalmPilots just because the basic GPS features aren't really improving much. The printer market seems divided into the "cheap" disposable variety that will probably not survive more than 6 months and the other variety that tries to add features of photocopiers, fax machines, and so forth. These days even devices that have little R&D in them like hard drives tout upgradability and compatibility ("Best used with Windows XP" etc).
If there are any companies in these markets that don't compete in the constant upgrade cycle, they're probably looking for ways to get their customers on this treadmill or are getting very worried because making a good product is no longer sufficient.
Imagine enough of these peripheral device makers getting together with RedHat, SUSE, or just making their own standards for a "Mill"
The "brain" is a Linux box that's has a small cheap 24x80 LCD display for diagnostics and errors. It serves as the connectivity and upgradability box that allows these manufacturers to compete with upgrade treadmill devices.
Buying a good quality electronic typewriter gives your system a great keyboard and line printer, but if you ever need to use the device strictly as a typewriter (e.g. your "brain" has been cracked and owned) you can.
Adding a midi keyboard and passing information through the brain lets you print your music as you play.
You no longer need to buy a label writer for your computer and a separate hand held device. Your
Transfer your answering machine messages to your MP3 player.
Adding something like a Palm Pilot or a simplified operating system would allow enhancement to many devices.
When some other technology takes off in the future (small looms that allow you to print your digital images as cloth? an inkjet printer that uses a flavorless frosting to ice your food with?) The concept of using the "mill" and "brain" to provide the upgrade features would add functionality to all of the devices one already has and knows how to use. If one already knows how to download and print photos, they could make a spectacular, pornographic birthday cake. Or if someone wants to wear a jacket with the latest financial reports on the outside, they can.
Right now, Georgia is recovering from a bad, ice storm and my power is being knocked out at random (I'm saving about every 10 seconds and have had about 27 power losses trying to write this). Since my computer takes 15 seconds to boot, a lot of devices I have wouldn't work well in the "mill" in this situation, but I could easily fall back on my electronic typewriter and not have to worry about power restarts if I just needed a physical piece of paper printed (or with a couple of AA batteries, and some Flash storage, I'd have a document I could save and export to the "mill" later).
Of course, what MS wants is a situation where they control the upgrade treadmill. They drive the technology. They enslave the manufacturers of devices they don't even make.
Personally, I see such an alternative market as something that only technology geeks without a for-profit interest could drive in a way that wouldn't constantly be raping my pocketbook. In other words, the perfect market for a Linux / BSD / or other open source system.
Now Apple sells:
- music consumption tools (AirTunes, iPod)
- music creation tools (Mac, iLife, Logic)
- a music distribution service (iTunes)
Apple doesn't seem to be making much money with their distribution service. Most of the money goes to the traditional labels because they have the content people will pay for.But if iTunes can be established as a music distribution service, Apple is in a very nice position to create a "Do-It-Yourself" label service whereby dedicated hobbyists can put their works into a real distribution channel. Apple takes less money than the traditional big labels but they get more money than being dealers of the big labels copyrights.
Of course, the big labels will abandon iTunes if they get a hint that Apple is becoming a content provider. But in two years time, who knows, iTunes may be a service that a big company couldn't back out from.
There might be hints of Apple doing the same thing with other content. They already have a wonderful set of video creation and consumption tools; once badnwidth grows they might compete with the video/movie distribution channels. And then move in toward being a content distributor/provider in the same manner as they might do with the music market.
As a fellow who remembers what a Steve Jobs Apple can do with absurd pricing models (e.g. late eighties mac and laser printer markets), I do still find it very exciting about the creative possibilities this could open up in music and video. I really hope Apple kind of succeeds in their challenge. What would be even better would be for a Libertarian/Open Source/Linux company to come in and do something similar.
The Infocom text-adventure of the Hitchhiker's Guide should be a requirement for every high school student considering a career in computer science. Unfortunately the plot of the movie may simplify some of the rougher puzzles in the game.
***Possible minor spoilers***
It's been a long time since I've played the game, but I still recall the way one acquires tea is a nice way to approach the concept of double negation and the final puzzle reminds me of the frustration of hunting for bugs in a program with a poor debugger and finding the bug to be inadequate tools rather than the concept of what one is solving.
*** End spoilers ***
As an eighth grader playing this game, I thought this was an incredibly frustrating and ultimately quite enlightening and satisfying game to play.
I'm sure there will be computer games based on the HHGTTG movie, but whether they are rehashes of Frogger with different character maps and models or whether they actually pay homage to the brilliance of the Infocom game remains to be seen.
While I'm uncertain of the applicability of this as a technical form of expression, an XML syntax would seem to be a welcome way to approach legal forms of expression.
Software patents are fluid and vague in their expression by design. Unlike copyright protection of the actual code, the patent is protecting the idea and you want to cast as wide and vague a net as possible. It seems to me that an XML expression of the idea (though independent of a particular language) would force an explicit interpretation of what was meant that would be interpretable by a judge (or someone not as fluent in technical syntax).
I dislike the idea of software patents altogether, but if they are going to exist it seems like an XML expression of the idea should be a requirement for any sort of patent submission.
It's funny, but In the seventies when The Six Million Dollar Man was popular, I thought one of the neatest special effects were the inadvertant lens flares. There's a scene in particular I remember on one show with a non-bionic man jogging; I got into a heated argument about that "special effect" with someone I was watching the show with. They didn't see any bionic special effect so they thought I was crazy when I insisted that something special was going to happen to that character. And of course on a show with only three to five characters per episode (three of which were recurring) something special did happen to the character.
It's strange but to people who know nothing about photography, a lens flare can look like an out of this world addition instead of the photographic damage that most photographers (properly) consider it.
Apple's legal bungling of their Look and Feel lawsuit made a common eighties "lawsuit threat" to be shown to be completely without legal merit. If that hadn't happened I shudder to think of other applications of this "threat" (web standards compliance? no license a look and feel from Netscape or Microsoft)
/// and Lisa each had pre-release expectations which no product of their era could meet. Whereas products with no pre-release buzz like the LaserWriter or the Mac seemed to do extremely well. You and I can speculate on other factors such as price and quality of manufacture that doomed the other products, but I think that's really where the Apple corporate goals of secrecy became ingrained.
Apple has become very shy about giving out developer pre-releases. The free developer level no longer gets seeds. The big paying developers get them, but because people in these groups are willing to violate NDA these have become more and more infrequent. Back in 1998, Apple distributed Quicktime CD's of their WorldWide Developer Conference for free to all developers. But they got a lot of bad press about this stuff. Pre-release demos to developers were being reviewed for bugginess of the code, flair of the presentation, ease of use of the interface, and then the rumor monger would usually make up a wild rumor about "what to expect next that wasn't mentioned." Apple has stopped distributing WWDC presentations except for big money and with a NDA agreement. Apple is getting very picky about its release schedule of seeds to paying developers.
Apple learned a lot of lessons early in its life about pre-release expectations. The Apple
My gut reaction to the announcement was that the lack of live webcast was due to political reasons. Jobs (and Apple) are rightly pissed at the mac rumor sites releasing trade secrets, preliminary specs and prices, and stealing their thunder. As big as this expo was, coverage provided like the original Apple blueberry flavored iMac would have been huge. Instead they get pundits saying Apple "barely kept their head above level of expetations today" and crap like that. The rumor sites get a lot of their revenue from the ad hits. When people flood their site looking for confirmation or live transcript they get mucho money. My guess is that publicity that no webcast would be available was Apple's attempt to kill these leeches revenue streams.
After seeing the traffic reports though, I reach two conclusions. First is that the amount of traffic for a webcast would probably have been huge. Second is that even the post webcast feed has been very laggy and spotty; I imagine that their live broadcast would have been worse. People are saying the huge traffic hits that brought down the Apple store are negatives for WebObjects and the Oracle backend (which, after a certain point of traffic levels, is a crap way to pinpoint failure).
I've found that some websites have posted outlines of what was covered in the Keynote and at what times each "section" started. So I got my news of events from Macintouch (a reputable mac news blog that doesn't traffic rumors), subtracted the time of the keynote start from their list, and then had a nice index to watch the key points of the weblog I was really interested in seeing (the Mac mini launch, the Garage Band demo, and a few others).
Who knows I still may try to stream the whole webcast next week when traffic has died down, just to get the "color" of Jobs slick presentation style. But for now traffic is still a big problem for me at least.
I think that's a question that will be overlooked by a lot of Microsoft fans. You'll see Paul Thurrott's Windows Felchers praise the widespread release of this wonderful tool (acquired from a third party) rather than answer the harder questions of why not make the OS more secure.
This probably just scratches the surface but fundamental security fixes seem to me to come at an expense of:
That way when we can offer a GPL'd, Linux-based, Microsoft Software Removal Tool for free there may be more people looking at the correct way to secure their Personal Computing systems.
- A two-dimensional, charting spreadsheet
- A flat file database
- A very basic bitmap paint program
- A very basic vector drawing program
- An architecture to plug in other editors
- Tons of cheesy clip-art, fonts, and templates
- Mac OS 9 compatability via its Carbon roots
In some ways these were completely crap features. The shell that these editors plugged into was very non-Aqua. The editors were bare basic items that looked to specifically not compete with even the most basic shareware on the market. And although Apple had seemingly dropped support for AppleWorks files createed on the Apple ][, it was a model of backwards compatability in terms of it's file formats.This always seemed to me to be more of a checklist feature (Why, Yes, we do have a free Works package bundled with every Mac.) than something they were very proud of. So I can see why they'd want to sweep it under the rug. I do hope that they are working on updating the other modules at least to make working with them in an Aqua-esque environment to be a pleasure. I think the shareware crowd could use a bit of encouragement to get their apps up to a level that could compete with iWorks.
As an aside, I had expected Apple to name this suite with a name that had just a bit more subversion or punch... something like iHo (iHo, it's off to work we go).
He uses Russel's philosophy to support his arguments. I'm not as familiar with Russel but "meeting your physical needs" is also the first level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and he presents a very convincing theory that you'll never reach self-fulfillment without sating your physical needs first. If you google on this topic you'll find a lot of people who write that Maslow is full of it in much more well developed ways than you'll find arguments against this article.
But here are a couple of ideas...
- Sating your own physical needs doesn't always mean meeting them. Ghandi's hunger strikes would have been somewhat less fulfilling if he'd visited some all-you-can-eat buffets. Religious fasting for spiritual fulfillment is common in many cultures and contrary to the idea that you must be physically fulfilled before you can seek fulfillment in other ways.
- The article encourages stopping annoying but non-harmful habits such as nail biting but doesn't mention something like hand washing after going to the toilet. I work for myself and though I have to deal with other people, I don't find nail-biting or having a quick stride to have an effect on me. I do find that much of the other conformist advice to be good when meeting with the loan manager or clients, but those are secondary goals to the ones in my life. Things like hand washing would be much more universally applicable even to more isolated folk like myself.
Personally, I find that this fellow isn't necessarilly wrong. I have found that I really have to put effort in to maintaining my physical health (especially with high med costs being self-employed now). It's more the angle he's taking in supporting his argument that I find to be undermining his point. He just assumes that you want the same goals as he does.Would Richard Stallman make more persuasive arguments if he presented himself in a suit and tie with a dapper, banker appearance? Yes. Would Richard Stallman be a better programmer by putting on the same airs? Not a bit. If Mr. Stallman's goal is to be a persuasive demagogue then he might be better off changing superficialities about himself. If his goal in only being a good programmer then habits such as nail biting and quick strides don't really matter as much IMHO.
- Many school teachers find their reward in working with pupils rather than large salaries or advancing in administrative roles.
- Directors like Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings) find their satisfaction in telling their story rather than advancing in superficial Hollywood circles or sleeping every day.
- Many nurses and medical technicians are attracted more to the ability to heal and ease others physical pain than large doctor salaries or authoring articles for journals
- Many same-sex couples find the loving bond of a relationship to be worth the social stigma, lack of legal recognition, and difficulty in producing off-spring.
While this fellow makes some good points as to how to "fit in" to the superficial business world, a wise person will sit down and decide whether fitting in will actually help in advancing the goals and satisfactions of their life. It's fortunate that different people have different goals and if you need the money of a tech lead or team manager to meet yours then definitely pay attention to this advice. But if your goals and life priorities are different, think about what you can do to help meet them and whether or not this advice still applies.It's really odd when I think about it, but a personal message put out over the internet reached me far deeper than our President's cynical call for (bank) aid, or my church's call for extra donations in the collection basket, or the endless streams of impersonal pleadings that I've seen on television. I guess that's the real power of the internet to raise money... the personal touch... and if some goes astray (as I feel in my gut that it will) I feel much less disgusted with myself for my action.
I find it a bit disheartening that so much of the success of these products will depend on the success or failure of the content. Finally, when I heard Conan's lame double entendres about flacid penises (as in the Microsoft intro) that shook me out of my interest in what was presented at this convention. More and more I'm coming to the conclusion that products that allow the common man to produce content are far more interesting, revolutionary, and important than the evolutionary products shown at the Consumer Electronics Show to allow you to consume the content of others. The products at CES that catch my eye are ones that allow me to create or enojy the creations of others, unfortunately I think I'll see more of that sort of thing at NAB in April than I've seen at CES so far.
Please, tell me that I'm wrong and point out some great consumptive and productive tech that's made its debut.
It used to be that in a shop, one could negotiate the price with the owner. If you asked Sam Drucker about a $10 wrench that he thought was a $2 screwdriver, and sold it to you for that amount then that's his incompetence for not identifying his products for sale.
These people were putting a different bar code on the box; that's Walmart's fault for relying solely on the barcode for doing all of it's pricing negotiation. They had cashiers that could have seen something was out of line, so the human was not taken out of this process completely and actually seems to add to Walmart's incompetence at identifying what it was selling.
I suspect that the defendants in this case won't be able to hire a legal team capable of arguing this well in court and will probably fold to Walmart's high priced lawyers, but I still don't think the case is as open and shut as the Walmart PR people want people to believe.
This is definitely an anomolous situation, but I bet it'll only add to my problems in the future.
My addresss is almost impossible to find. Physically, it's nestled back in some woods and looks somewhat like the entrance to the (Adam West/Burt Ward) Batcave. The problem is that it's also next to an expensive club that wanted a more exclusive address and was able to get the short extension of road we sit on changed to the exact name of a more expensive road nearby. This was an insane political maneuver, but money talks and they wanted an address that sounded exclusive rather than redneck.
All of the locals and long time residents can find my address if I tell them the "wrong" address. Map readers or locals who are told the "correct" address won't find it because they go to an address on the other road that's slightly transposed numerically from my house number.
The utility men use long time residents to read my meters but if I go into an office to pay my bill and ask them to look up my address I have to be prepared to wait for 30 minutes of tellers asking managers for help in finding the information.
While I can see why a manager would want to have full control and knowledge over a delivery person, I bet this will have a detrimental effect on getting my packages delivered. I already tell people to avoid sending me things via FedEx since they repeatedly can not find any address I give them. I'll send a few packages by UPS after this policy goes into effect and see if I need to add UPS to my "DO NOT SHIP" list.
I can't speak for anyone at Apple, but it's clear that the command line isn't an alternative interface to operate a Macintosh.
You don't see any traces of a command line when the system does system checks at startup or when users log in to their accounts.
When you launch the terminal you see this "black box" as completely subservient to the Mac GUI. It doesn't take away the menu bar and the window itself has an aqua scrollbar and traffic light close/minimize/maximize arrangement in the upper left.
I speculate that it's all a matter of perception. If the user never perceives the command line to be the foundation of their OS operating experience then there's no reason not to add it tucked away in the cobwebs with other utility applications.
A well to do doctor of my acquaintance had a boat-house up on Lake Seed in North Georgia. Runoff from Lakes Burton's hydroelectric dam feeds Lake Seed which feeds runoff from its hydroelectric dam into Lake Raburn.
Recently the aftermath from one of this year's Hurricanes hit North Georgia hard with thunderstorms and high winds. Lake Burton has historic houses and many homes of power company executives so overflow was dumped into Lake Seed to keep the water level of Lake Burton from rising. Lake Seed rose and washed away this doctor's boat house and motorboats.
Supposedly, the insurance company will not pay for the boat-house or powerboat since the accident was man made rather than natural and therefore not covered by the policy. The insurance representative suggested filing a civil suit against the power company instead.
Take this with a grain of salt of course, though insurance salespeople are very devious with misrepresenting what their policies will actually cover, my doctor friend is notoriously cheap and may have chosen insufficient coverage. Whether this tale is the truth or not is incidental; it has inspired me to review my insurance coverage which is always a good thing to do every once in a while.
A consumer organization (EFF? Consumers Union?) writes an installer that can be run on various computers.
The installer includes a set of legal principles written by the consumer advocacy organization as well as commonly demanded terms of many software license agreements. Each item has the legalese, an English interpretation of the meaning, and a color-coded, numeric rating from the consumer group as to the restriction or burden is being placed on you the consumer.
The software author's installer package comes with terms it requires the consumer to accept before installing. They can include additional terms not in the predefined set, but these will be flagged by the installer with its most undesirable rating until the consumer advocate has had a legal representative properly rate the desirability/burden of the new term.
If the installer is internet connected, it can contact the advocacy group for updates, send requests to the software author for a list of renegotiated terms which they could approve if they so desired.
Of course, this sort of legal internet negotiation of terms won't even cause the big software houses to bat an eyelid, but I think that small software authors who don't have legal teams for their software will be more inclined to participate in such a scheme. Of course the GNU and BSD licenses will look very consumer friendly under such a scheme.
Maybe this software advocacy group could even offer a comparison of licenses in certain categories. (Mac OS, Windows XP, Lindows or Gimp, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc).
Who knows, once consumers start putting their needs in the drivers seat and stop being dictated to in terms they can't understand, then perhaps even the big boys will climb aboard and start participating in the system as well (ha!)
Just a thought.
I've actually been in a rather heated discussion with a software retailer. The box I was sold listed under "Requirements" that one must read and agree to the software license agreement enclosed (as well as having 256MB of RAM and 200MB of free disk space, etc, etc). Most don't even go this far, they just spring the legal suprise on you when you open the box.
My beef was that I wasn't being allowed to return the software after having read the agreement that was enclosed. Her argument I was that I hadn't actually paid $99 for use of the software; I had paid $99 for the box, instruction manual, paper copy of the license agreement, and aluminum and plastic disc inside.
The box of paper and plastic had a value by itself even if I never put the disc into a computer, and I couldn't put the disc in a computer unless I agreed to the software license agreement. "So I basically just bought a very expensive frisbee that I can't use or return." I asked.
"Oh yes, you can use it as a frisbee all you want, but you just can't put it into your computer unless you agree to that paper copy of the license agreement."
Well, I can return frisbees, paper, boxes, and books, why can't I return this stuff if I haven't used it on the computer? The software in question wasn't in a sealed envelope. There was no way she could tell whether the disc had been put in a computer or not. I suddenly sensed why this product was no longer requiring me to tear something to signal my agreement with the license. It was more powerful for the manufacturer that my agreement was through an act (e.g. putting the disc into the computer) that couldn't really be verified.
Of course, I didn't get my money back but I was enlightened to the way this retail chain or software manufacturer would argue "proof" of my acceptance of their license.
Computers used to cost the government and corporations huge amounts of money. The desktop computer competition brought these fees down tremendously and even when governments, companies, and universities find a need for something different, they can often meet their own needs by modifying off-the-shelf technology or having their custom needs met with technologies that are signifcantly cheaper.
Now if DNA manipulation becomes the next technology to be driven down in price by mass competition, it's an idea that makes me very nervous. I'm not sure that we have in place the moral safeguards on our current, expensive DNA engineering laboratories, and we're talking about making a price pressure that will put DNA manipulation affordable to millions?
Isn't manually manipulating DNA just creating viruses on a grander scale? Admittedly there's no intent to make data that can self-replicate, but there seems to be no intent to make sure that this stuff can't do so. If our computers become an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly, we very well could come up with something amazing or something horrible.
I certainly hope that technology designers will do something to make natural exposure of this computer DNA architecture incompatible with natural DNA, but my bigger frights are on the moral front.
Technology safeguards will only make it safe for you to work on repairing your hard drive if you happen to have an open cut. I fully expect the more brilliant tech geeks to figure out ways to circumvent these limitations for their own experimentation (whether in this country or another) just as the case-modder will circumvent electrical or FCC standards to feed their own experimental lusts. That leads to some absurd possibilities:
Warning: Mildly Off Topic Tin Foil Hat Theory Below:
In the early eighties, public awareness of GRID (gay related immune deficiency) began to awaken judgemental choruses of "God's punishment for sinners" and ideas of concentration camps for homosexuals. There were also people saying that the US government had engineered this new "human immunodeficiency virus" from other rare cancers or simply found a naturally occurring virus and found a way to introduce it into a population that would be extremely destructive. When "innocent" people started dying of GRID and the name changed to AIDS, the theories of it's engineering or opportunistic cultivation became theories of attack from the USSR.
Today, the origin of HIV is irrelevant whether it was natural, cultivated, or engineered. My thought at the time was that these were crackpot theories. These are governments that had trouble feeding their own people, tallying census figures, and managing money. They certainly weren't smart enough to engineer a virus. Without going into a big debate of communist versus capitalist or democrat versus republican, I have to say that the possibility of such theories is more realistic today in my mind. We're talking about governments (US and USSR) that engineered and used nucl
Another example of English idioms is that yellow warning sign many janitors use after mopping up a spill. It has an icon of a fellow with arms in the air and his leg cocked to the side like a dog. The imperative label "WET FLOOR" could easily be confused as a command to a non-English speaker.
Just today I was trying to prototype some ideas on a dictionary idea I had.
:-)
My idea was to create a tutorial for learning AMSLAN (American Sign Language) and to use texts from Project Gutenburg or other public domain works. One (of several) problems though is that English is rife with homographs... words that are spelled alike but have different meanings. In the case of sign language, a sign for a bow in a little girl's hair might appear extremely odd if the sign for bow of a ship popped up in automatic substitution.
Dealing with the homographs is a problem, but I see that this site's plan already takes a stab at dealing with such things (in their cat example). I'd love it if they went to the trouble of also including a bit of AMSLAN (either in animations or static pictures) as that might inspire me with some help in the solution.
Ideally, my desire is to get an automated library that could read a text (possibly read by the human sorting the homographs). And allow a user to listen to the reading and watch the text (while learning English), listen to the reading only (if hearing impaired), watch a silent sign language presentation with subtitles (to learn sign language), or watch a silent presentation through signing (if reading in silence is preferable).
Just kind of bizarre that the idea struck the same day as this article appeared, I thought.
I was running Safari 1.2.3 (v125.9) which isn't quite the current version, but pretty close.
I can confirm this works when the "Block Pop-up Windows" in the Safari menu is disabled, but not when the Blocking option is enabled. Rather than just a "me too", I went through the demonstration in reverse order of the previous poster (and was careful to refresh and follow the appropriate links) so I don't think this behavior is due to caching issues.
While I do hope there will be a fix for this soon, IMHO, the more appropos fix is that secure sites should not EVER rely on popups.