I wrote the prior post ("Always Check" - Article#9998184) in response to this article:
I'm going to wait...believe it or not.
by Agent Green (231202) *
on Wednesday August 18, @01:04AM (#9998016)
I'm actually going to wait this one out. I can't recall how many times the trilogy was released on VHS...and am not going to get taken like a sucker on this like I was with Fellowship of the Ring ...
After a bunch of Error 503's, the submit button finally kicks in. Yet when it's posted it gets attached to "Now Wait A Second" Article #9998031 which is on a completely different subject and makes me look like I'm more insane than I actually am:-)
Something weird's up with slashdot tonight. Be on the look out.
I've noticed two types of DVD producers. Those who talk about the extended / enhanced super versions and those who do not.
My rule of thumb is that if a producer is side-stepping the question about producing an enhanced version that they are trying to get you to buy the first "sucker" version.
If they are against modifying the movie, they'll usually proclaim that they'll NEVER have an altered version available loud and clear.
If their production schedule for the enhanced version means that the two versions will be released separately, the honest producers will usually give two deadlines, but you've got to do your homework and check this out for yourself. Retail stores don't like to point out "This isn't the DVD you're probably looking for."
Fore example, I haven't seen "The Passion of the Christ" yet, may rent it, but I may buy it and if it's rubbish give it away for Christmas. But I notice it's being produced in all sorts of unenhanced versions (widescreen, normal, Church 50-packs, etc). Only rumors are circulating about a possible enhanced release. Personally, I'll wait for "The Passion of the Christ - Second Coming!" rather than sweep up the version available at the end of August.
Microsoft refutes the accusations, saying that it's only interested in selling more copies of Windows and applications for its platform, and providing movie content would promote the platform.
How does its content partnership with NBC News (aka MSNBC) help it sell more copies of Windows? The content is freely available over the television and unrelated to Windows. Sure they probably get headlines for their web portals, but it'd seem making a deal with cnn, fox, etc would be a smaller capital investment. Their intent seems to be to get into content.
The idea of a mood ring isn't too far off from the actual implementation. Heat sensitive liquid crystals would react to your body heat and change color (and sometimes pattern in some rings). They'd say various colors equated to different moods e.g. green = normal body temp = calm, yellow = hot = stressed, red = very hot = horny.
There are many ways color could be put to use.
In a computer lab situation, all students are taking a quiz. The color reflects the student's "questions per second" rate of progress through the quiz. Blue = Quick Pace, Green = Average Pace, Red = Slow Pace. (or any sort of gradients between these). Blue might be indicative of a really sharp student or one who's cheating. Red might indicate a dumb student or one held up by technical problem.
Again in a school lab, but where the students are given free research time to roam the web. The case may show green for sites on an approved "white list", some form of amber on an off-site list based on a computed content rating, a red color for black listed sites or ones with highly offensive content rating.
A boot up progress bar? As the machine starts up the colors fill the neutral body color from grey to blue from bottom to top and the whole case seems like it's being filled with water as it indicates where it is in the boot process. (Aqua?)
A mode (initiated from the server) that would turn all the machines cases to indicate 802.11 signal strength for a period of 10 seconds. Allowing you to adjust the base station's antenna or position to give good signal strength to everyone in the room.
An accessibility feature for deaf users (or an option for computers in mute) to strobe to the would-be sound strength being generated by the computer with color indicative of volume. While you won't be able to make out the content of what's being said, you could distinguish between a system beep when played over the sound of your game of risk. All without interfering with the real screen's content area.
Indeed, the trascript is quite slanted. I thought I'd made that clear.
I should have hunted around the net for a better and more balanced account about the Fed. But the conspirational aspects often lead to Illuminati speculation or really wacked out "control of all governments" theories from the "Fed is bad" group. On the other hand the "Fed is good" group often emphasize the safe & trusting aspects of the Fed and give no mention (or very dismissive mention) of some of the questionable economic and legal aspects of the Fed. This was a recent transcript I'd happened to run across from the "Fed is bad" group that didn't go overboad with UFO's and Illuminati.
I remember some of these same issues brought up in a 9th grade American history class about the pyramidical nature of the Fractional Funds rate and the questionable foundation on which the Fed was granted power. At a time when most of us thought Paul Volker played in SteppenWolf, our naive questions were not intended conspirationally. There are some seriously "unique" foundations on which the Fed operates. Good or bad in their potential, we've benefited from a good set of boards of governors to watch over it. But I think it's a very reasonable question to ask how long that will last.
Admittedly, the original version of this "phone" trasnscript was probably sent around in email or posted to usenet years ago. I don't follow the host's website and I bet the original author probably did edit things to emphasize his knowledge and the Fed's shortcomings. That wasn't really my point as much as to call to attention the possibility for abuse and the odd nature of the auditing and control which sets the Fed apart from our government (for good or for ill).
I agree that the Fed's independence is a good thing and has been well preserved. Some of the reason for its success is that it's run by the very rich and they have shown an enlightened self-interest that a healthy American economy is good for their own pocketbooks. That's not cynical; that's probably one of the best ways to manage a money system.
It is an awkward entity though. It can offer small dividends to investors which is something that other independent government authorities don't do (Supreme Court dividends?). There are some holes of law where they don't quite fit legally and the delegation of constitutional authority is only one obvious place to point out. I don't find the Fed a scary institution because of who runs it as much as it's legal definition appears to be a Model T trying to be souped up to run on the Los Angeles Freeway.
Prior to this administration, I would have thought that the Geneva covention and international treaties on human rights gave the US Government a pretty solid framework for humane treatment of prisoners of war (and it's own populace). Ashcroft and the current administration brought forth new legal doctrine in the patriot act and by slipping through holes in other legislation with terms like "enemy combatants" rather than "prisoners of war" to obfuscate laws already on the books. I always thought that the enlightened self interest learned by pledging "We won't commit horrors on your prisoners, if you won't commit them on ours" was enough to keep torture and denial of human rights as only footnotes in history. But, in light of the way this administration has exploited things, it's apparently a big deal to actually plug holes in the legal system before someone takes advantage of that.
I won't speculate on what form these exploits might come from or whether it would be greed from the private-side or a lust for power from the public-side, but both are a danger. In the meantime all that I can ask is that there be as much auditing and public scrutiny as possible.
Trust in trust alone? I have severe doubts today about that.
Much has been made of the evil of monopolies on Slashdot (from Microsoft dominating the desktop to Apple regulating music formats).
The Federal Reserve is a private corporation operated and owned by private banks and given special monopoly existence by congress back on Christmas Eve in 1913. This is a very scary monopoly that has (perhaps unconstitutionally) usurped Congress's power to coin, issue, and regulate the American money supply.
While I won't attempt to proffer all of the observations (probably labeled as "tinfoil hat theories" because neither political party wants to call them into question) I will point out a very human readable web page that highlights some of these issues in a phone call to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
I realize that the Internet is a public network and that the Fed has every right to switch its internals over to using it. But it will likely cause two bits of controversy.
First, they are a private corporation so if the receive a private set of Class A IP addresses or other special treats it will expose some flaws in the public vs. private issues of control of the internet. (This is probably of more interest to slashdotters.)
Second, The Fed may be exposing tremendous auditability and accounting problems that don't exist on the private network. While their books and procedures are publicly audited, they have simply "lost" money (both physical and transactional). The paranoid would suspect that perhaps they've been inspired by the Diebold voting systems which can apparently cause votes to simply come and go in an unaccountable manner. The less paranoid should still see that this change will need a great deal more publicly auditable security to keep robber barrons from simply coming up with a new means of screwing over those of us who rely on cash & credit.
I can understand the need to migrate from old proprietary technolgies to new ones, but this migration should be watched VERY closely and where possible should be opened up for further audit and regulation.
This really does relate to the topic at hand. I'm not trying to be morally superior or anything. Just want to give you some advice about reducing your tv habits before the DRM kicks in.
I gave up television a year ago tomorrow when I moved and decided that I couldn't afford the price of cable at least for a month or so during the transition to the new location.
I've always been a television junky though and really expected that I'd get something: satellite, cable, or even go back to antenna broadcasts. I'd come in from work and HAVE to have the tv playing something in the background. I remember even driving around for several weekends evaluating different recording technologies (Tivo looked the most promising) and I probably would have even bought one in anticipation if I'd already decided whether I was getting satelite or cable service.
For housewarming, christmas, and my birthday I received some fantastic DVD series (Six Feet Under, Babylon 5, some britcoms and music documentaries) that I'd put into my computer or dvd player when I just wanted something on. Six Feet Under was so good that I actually thought of getting HBO to see the show (but I'd have missed two seasons which weren't out yet on DVD).
I was talking to an old friend who knew of my pop-culture, tv-addicted habits. He wanted me to watch the new Battlestar Galactica but I told him that I didn't have cable. Not to worry he said, it'd be rebroadcast that night and later in the week if I thought my cable would be back on then. He was in shock when I told them that I didn't have a subscription and didn't really intend to get one. They said that such a declaration from a television addict like me was akin to Bill Gates switching to Mac OS X.
With some efforts above and beyond the call of my friend, I did wind up watching the Battlestar remake and quite enjoyed it. I probably would have liked it better without the incessant commercials (on a DVD release or something). I'd forgotten just how annoying those things can be.
Now with stories like this, it appears that the DRM is only going to get worse. The advertising is only going to get longer and bolder. I wish I could say that my decision was one of moral rectitude, but it was really one of evolved practicality. I can say that giving up tv is a whole lot easier than you probably imagine (I certainly couldn't imagine it).
Give it up now while your friends can still videotape those one or two shows that you "must see". It'll only get more expensive and more difficult when DRM comes on the scene.
The article showed what looked to be a Pac-Man environment which tried to show objects (ghost, dot, pac), a boolean (why did, didn't), and a condition (move toward x). That is a cool idea to enhance debugging with holistic information about objects at a higher level.
I don't think it'll make as much of an impact in the real world (e.g. replacing "general protection fault" etc) as the article implies. First it seems more to trace a set of known possibilities that happened or not, rather than to catch really unexpected occurances. If a fence post error caused a count to trigger some action an iteration too early that would be a very hard thing to see at an object level even if you were the programmer who could interpret such things. If you were the user whose binaries had been stripped of most debugging info to reduce chances of reverse engineering then you'd have an obtuse error message that probably has no way to recover from the error.
It's a neat idea, but this doesn't sound like an end user sort of innovation (or anything close to it) as the article portrays.
Apple was in cruise control until 1998 while it was trying to deduce where to go. They didn't tell anyone about their solid plans until May 1998 when Apple introduced the iMac, the idea of the "digital hub", the roadmaps for Allegro (Mac OS 8.5) and Rhapsody (Mac OS X), and new hardware standards.
Apple continued to support the Mac clones, Hypercard, the old 68040 architecture, and other incompatible ideas during the lead up to the May revolution.
Personally, my guess is that the death of Newton was sacrificed in a backroom deal. It was a dominant PDA technology and both Palm and Microsoft would probably have been anxious to see it die, but the release of the Newton 2100 was Jobs way of saying "You've got to give me something before I knife this baby."
I knew someone would correct my figures, but I don't mind at all.
A Lewinsky joke just seemed more appealing to the slashdot audience to express the idea of DNA size being an enormous data handling problem (especially if I wasn't sure of my numbers as you've pointed out).
My sister is the real genetic statistician, but I have a mild interest in her field just because of the massive size of data sets involved in those calculations.
I did expect the first reply to my post to be one comparing Monica's data capacity for DNA to be morally and quantitatively dwarfed by the DNA tracking ideas that John Ashcroft appears to have a thirst for.
100 Megabytes per chromosome
x 23 chromosomes per gamete
x 20 million gametes per ejaculation
Therefore Ms. Lewinsky can consume roughly 46,000,000,000 megabytes
(assuming that there is no overflow to a dress)
How much can you consume?
Find the right markets...
on
By Road and Rail?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There are places that this would be a hit.
I'm in Georgia and there are a huge number of rail lines in use for moving agricultural products around. Most people don't notice or mention the trains at all anymore (except maybe at a murmur). But there are many lines still around that are in use and many that have only been out of use since the train companies started downsizing in the eighties due to better roads and cheaper truck shipping costs undercut their monopolies.
Rails stretch to the more remote parts of Georgia which are barely touched by commercial air. Though in replacement and downsizing theres still a large rail infrastructure that goes to Atlanta suburbs and so forth. The problem is that the roads have become the dominant and unasailable mode of transport here. There are many places that air, river, and rail will not get you even if they are less expensive and with less impact on the environment.
Imagine a shuttle service on these dual mode transports that can take people from Augusta to Marietta (probably for some religious or S&M convention). Rail could get you most of the way there (and at one fifth of the fuel cost of bus traffic) while the final legs would have to be taken on road.
Athens has a van shuttle service that goes to the Hartsfield airport in Atlanta on a regular basis. Many people take it because it will get them to Atlanta without a car and they can ride the MARTA train system around Atlanta. The dual mode vehicle, variable destinations of certain passengers, and fairly regular schedule would be a purpose for these vehicles.
Heck, even Atlanta's Metro transit system (MARTA) could strongly benefit from these vehicles. Right now they have a limited fleet of busses and an electric heavy rail system with a very limited set of destinations. While it would take major restructuring and expense, a hybrid rail/bus system would be very beneficial. Being able to offer. It might be a scheduling nightmare, but having recently gone to San Francisco and seen what a well run mass transit system can do I fully believe they need to start over on MARTA anyway.
Roads are the only growing, funded, maintained transportation system in Georgia. A hybrid vehicle that allowed use of the extensive rail infrastructure in this state could be a major boost for mass transit.
Re:Finally something to address this....
on
Are You Annoying?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Two teams that I have worked in now seem to hold
the belief the the size of one's penis is proportional to the amount of stuff you know - technical or otherwise. Yes, even if it's never going to be relevant to the job at hand, and certainly if it can be used to make someone else feel inferior.
I realize that this quote could (and probably will) generate a huge number of double entendres from the slashdot crowd, but I've seen this behavior too. Of course any irrelevant metric is just as bad (type of car, size of DVD collection, etc) but I have been situations where penile length really is the subject of the "pissing match."
Don't get discouraged though. First, you can pretend to come out as bisexual to the gang (if you think that it won't get you fired). Whether you really are or not, straight guys get very unsettled talking about anything below the waist with a non-heterosexual in their midst.
Second, point out to your manager or HR-droid that such metrics are highly discriminatory because it immediately insinates that females are the stupidist, lowest, pooerest employees. The fewer numbers of females in your group will mean a higher justification for the charges of "discrimination". Be sure to tell them that you aren't considering any sort of legal action, but you're just describing what could happen the next time a female is passed over for a position or promotion.
Interestingly, when I was in a situation where I worked with guys and saw them naked (in the company lockerroom) the "attitude" that guys projected often did NOT correlate in any way with their actual length. My guess is that in the places where penile length was a metric of intelligence (which it wasn't at the company with the lockerroom) that it's only that way because no one can confirm the metrics. Even if you see your coworker at the next urinal there's always the excuse "Oh, that's just flacid. I'd have to step back a foot or so otherwise."
This is a stupid metric. I think that with some creative talk of discrimination that it can be discarded. But it's just the social nature of humans that "something" will take over to justify an arbitrary social pecking order rather than one based on relevant metrics.
Quoting the trendiest fads from weekly industry publications to coworkers.
Taking out of context quotes and framing them to justify everything from "going to the bathroom more frequently" to "whoring stories about your coworkers as fodder for books".
Enthroning oneself with the role of analyst / expert / trendsetter just because one read a capsule summary of an article of someone else's assemblage of diverse opinions.
A few people have mentioned the metric of the number of operations a doctor has performed as indicator of quality. I realize that there are very few metrics to come up with any comparative opinion on different doctors, but...
When I was working as a database consultant, one of my fellow designers received lasik surgery as payment for some database changes. The doc paid money to the company, but arranged for the several thousand dollars to be paid in "blue laser lasik surgery operation" for the programmer.
Long story short. He went through with it and had only minor problems (which had to be corrected by another doctor since he was based on the opposite coast most of the time) which cost money out of the designer's pocket. Later, he learned that the doctor in question used this barter method to get all sorts of stuff while cranking up his "number of operations".
The article mentions that the filter will be on every pack of the chicken/rice ration. This seems like a waste of weight and supply. If the filter can be reused, carry a filter. If it can't, carry just five or so to use when in dire need, that would be a simple way to limit the use and prevent urea poisoning (and misuse due to pranks, torture, or mistraining).
To me when I put on my "market speak earphones" I interpret this to be a "dirty water flavor packet" that is attempting to seek a wider market than just its emergency uses in zero water situations.
Troops will already drink their own urine in dire life or death situations. Making a "Urine Kool Aid Flavor Packet" is an ideal way to add calories and conserve water while making the situation not have to be quite so dire. Of course since urine will come out at 98.6 degrees it makes more sense to have a chicken soup flavor rather than grape or cherry (easily stronger flavors). The materials in this packet sound so heavily processed that it could have started as anything (pork, vegan kudzu, SCO brain).
The money to be made isn't on the food, but on the packet and filter. A military supplier will want to increase sales by making sure everyone has these rations even if their utility will only be for a select few in dire circumstances when trading off poison water becomes a positve thing.
The innovation is the urine filter packet that increases water conservation. The horror and waste seems to be in making sure that these "urine kool-aid packs" become widely used in non-emergency circumstances.
While the released numbers could be a good thing for Linux, it's more likely to be representative of "size of capital market for Gartner services" than to truly represent a completely impartial measure.
Like seeing a positive reference to OS/2 in a Windows magazine or reading how there are many qualities Microsoft should copy from Mac OS X in PC err eWeek, it really isn't a major or even minor coup when a firm that has completely been lodged in the cleft of Windowlingus for years starts including references to things people on the fringe may recognize or relate to. From the sound of the "interpretations", it seems that Linux still will be painted as diminishing and losing ground even with measureable sales.
Gartner's numbers benefit Gartner's paying clients, and its doubtful that the funds will be enough to get them to a 12 step program and off their capital addiction. Don't let these "facts", "statistics", and "analyses" get you too up or down. They know which side their bread is buttered on.
Interesting technique and quite clever in its circumention of the gif color limit by using multiple frames, but...
On Safari 1.2.2, it starts as a red splotch in the top right corner of a black field. Then the color surges down and to the right creating a smooth image much larger than 256 colors until the complete frame is covered. But this takes about 5+ seconds to complete and is plainly visible to the user.
When the finished picture is dragged to the desktop, it makes a.gif file set to open with the standard Mac OS X Preview app. If done so, it makes a massive 173 frame document. One cane scroll down to the last frame to see the "finished" document and export the frame to the clipboard or another format (e.g. TIFF).
A technique like this is neat, but unless you are simply adamant at using the.gif format there seems to be little advantage. The browsers that break the animation will annoy many viewers. Using it as a form of download protection (e.g. on a porn site) is easily circumvented. And the visible five+ second display time as the browser tries to "animate" the picture to the screen would become as annoying as the < flash > tag if used in anything but a trivial page decoration.
Saying that true-color _can_ be done in a.gif is not the same as saying that such a thing _should_ be done.
It's been almost two decades, but I there was a menuing update software that was in use in a school's Apple II computer lab near me back in the 1987-88 timeframe when I was just moving on to college.
The machines were networked with twisted pair cable and used an AppleTalk protocol to communicate with an AppleShare server. When booted from a (slightly customized) floppy the machines ran a startup program that pulled a list of software from the server and compared to what was on the floppy. This wasn't commercial software, these were programs and docs the teachers had written and were capable of being downloaded to the boot disk. The idea was that since this wasn't copyrighted software, the students could take home their floppy if they had access to a home computer. Because floppy disks couldn't hold much information, the system only downloaded or updated the particular files the user chose from a menu (it was too small to mirror everything from the Mac II hard disk). The ability to update already downloaded programs and docs was absolutely a necessity since teacher written code would often have bugs and need to be re-distributed multiple times per week. (These were teachers NOT programmers.)
Was this a commercial utility? Was this a facility of AppleShare? Was this something that one of the smarter teachers just cooked up on his own? I have absolutely no idea. It was just a very simple, obvious, menu-driven, networkable, software-update system that was in use in the eighties.
Would this pre-date the claim made in this patent? If more information could be tracked down about this, it sounds like it might destroy the patentability of a 1990 claim to the idea. But I'm not a lawyer so this may very well not meet the legal standards to call into question the patent.
Every
tanned face will be pulled aside, strip searched, his financial / public and private records scoured and reviewed by people who could very well abuse that power.
As a "slightly" out of shape man with nerdy glasses and a skin color that has the same pigmentation as a snowball, I think that myself and much of slashdot should have no problems with these "stereotypical terrorist" regulations.
I've heard about the slow and invasive processes (e.g. drinking your own breast milk as in Fahrenheit 9/11) but I've gone through a dozen airline security checks in the past two weeks and I generally make it through them in under 10 minutes without incident of any sort. People open additional lines and tell me to come over. I've actually had to remind guards to look at my boarding pass and id. I don't ever have people ask me to remove my shoes (be it sneakers, boots, dress shoes, or whatever I may be wearing). I'm often allowed to go through without showing that my computer is a computer instead of a bomb. Heck, for two trips I even had two of those "expansion batteries" that you hook up between your AC adapter and any brand of computer to get 8x power time. It's an unusual item; it had no easy way for me to demonstrate it's purpose; it looked like an easy way to hide gobs of explosive; and I wasn't actually taking my computer on the plane with me. I thought for certain I'd be pulled aside and have to explain these "bomb-like" boxes. "Uh they're computer batteries." "Where's the computer, son?" "I didn't bring it" "A likely story. Here try on these handcuffs." Nope. Waved right on through. No problems.
But it is seriously insulting to realize that people I admire for their technical prowess and generousity to the community will probably get harassed and cavity searched at these checkpoints just for their non-American features.
If Novell's products (Netware, WordPerfect, etc) were to be judged strictly on technical merits, how would they fare? Would an OpenSource Netware unburdened by ip restrictions and large implementation costs be widely adopted?
If these would be greatly beneficial and widely adopted, it seems odd that they haven't been more aggressively developed by Novell.
If their exit from the marketplace is a blessing in disguise, then it seems almost inevitable that Novell had to find a different product line or revenue stream.
Novell hasn't really been one of the vendors that I followed (due to their poor mac compatabilities) back in the dark ages of proprietary software so I'm very open to opinions of others on these matters.
With the DVD's copy protection / region monopoly features so thoroughly cracked, the makers are anxiously looking for a replacement.
The replacement may have the exact same physical characteristics but be incompatible with exiting DVD standards. Once something catches on there's no benefit to maintaining DVD as as standard (even a backwards compatible one).
I'd be suprised if it in fact takes 10 years for this to happen with as much consolidation as there has been among the media companies.
The current goal is one reduction of school bueracracy and truency rather than stopping crime and abduction. Why not do this more simply with Bluetooth enabled key cards instead? Maybe the goal of taking this the more invasive aims like those is on the horizon, but must be introduced one step to hell at a time.
Get the RFID tags implanted to help locate children in earthquakes and major disasters. Get long lasting bio-driven versions that will survive between school sessions and vacations to protect against abductors. Widely deploy readers to track school kids who might choose to vandalize a school. Will the tags be removed at the end of one's education? No, they're harmless. Within a few generations you have a populace with high percentages of people already RFID tagged and having no problems. Require it of everyone.
If the current uses are "just" to reduce bueracracy, I'd definitely side with technologies that would not be easily expandable to a more trecherous slope.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote the prior post ("Always Check" - Article#9998184) in response to this article:
After a bunch of Error 503's, the submit button finally kicks in. Yet when it's posted it gets attached to "Now Wait A Second" Article #9998031 which is on a completely different subject and makes me look like I'm more insane than I actually amSomething weird's up with slashdot tonight. Be on the look out.
I've noticed two types of DVD producers. Those who talk about the extended / enhanced super versions and those who do not.
My rule of thumb is that if a producer is side-stepping the question about producing an enhanced version that they are trying to get you to buy the first "sucker" version.
If they are against modifying the movie, they'll usually proclaim that they'll NEVER have an altered version available loud and clear.
If their production schedule for the enhanced version means that the two versions will be released separately, the honest producers will usually give two deadlines, but you've got to do your homework and check this out for yourself. Retail stores don't like to point out "This isn't the DVD you're probably looking for."
Fore example, I haven't seen "The Passion of the Christ" yet, may rent it, but I may buy it and if it's rubbish give it away for Christmas. But I notice it's being produced in all sorts of unenhanced versions (widescreen, normal, Church 50-packs, etc). Only rumors are circulating about a possible enhanced release. Personally, I'll wait for "The Passion of the Christ - Second Coming!" rather than sweep up the version available at the end of August.
The idea of a mood ring isn't too far off from the actual implementation. Heat sensitive liquid crystals would react to your body heat and change color (and sometimes pattern in some rings). They'd say various colors equated to different moods e.g. green = normal body temp = calm, yellow = hot = stressed, red = very hot = horny.
There are many ways color could be put to use.
In a computer lab situation, all students are taking a quiz. The color reflects the student's "questions per second" rate of progress through the quiz. Blue = Quick Pace, Green = Average Pace, Red = Slow Pace. (or any sort of gradients between these). Blue might be indicative of a really sharp student or one who's cheating. Red might indicate a dumb student or one held up by technical problem.
Again in a school lab, but where the students are given free research time to roam the web. The case may show green for sites on an approved "white list", some form of amber on an off-site list based on a computed content rating, a red color for black listed sites or ones with highly offensive content rating.
A boot up progress bar? As the machine starts up the colors fill the neutral body color from grey to blue from bottom to top and the whole case seems like it's being filled with water as it indicates where it is in the boot process. (Aqua?)
A mode (initiated from the server) that would turn all the machines cases to indicate 802.11 signal strength for a period of 10 seconds. Allowing you to adjust the base station's antenna or position to give good signal strength to everyone in the room.
An accessibility feature for deaf users (or an option for computers in mute) to strobe to the would-be sound strength being generated by the computer with color indicative of volume. While you won't be able to make out the content of what's being said, you could distinguish between a system beep when played over the sound of your game of risk. All without interfering with the real screen's content area.
Any other thoughts?
Indeed, the trascript is quite slanted. I thought I'd made that clear.
I should have hunted around the net for a better and more balanced account about the Fed. But the conspirational aspects often lead to Illuminati speculation or really wacked out "control of all governments" theories from the "Fed is bad" group. On the other hand the "Fed is good" group often emphasize the safe & trusting aspects of the Fed and give no mention (or very dismissive mention) of some of the questionable economic and legal aspects of the Fed. This was a recent transcript I'd happened to run across from the "Fed is bad" group that didn't go overboad with UFO's and Illuminati.
I remember some of these same issues brought up in a 9th grade American history class about the pyramidical nature of the Fractional Funds rate and the questionable foundation on which the Fed was granted power. At a time when most of us thought Paul Volker played in SteppenWolf, our naive questions were not intended conspirationally. There are some seriously "unique" foundations on which the Fed operates. Good or bad in their potential, we've benefited from a good set of boards of governors to watch over it. But I think it's a very reasonable question to ask how long that will last.
Admittedly, the original version of this "phone" trasnscript was probably sent around in email or posted to usenet years ago. I don't follow the host's website and I bet the original author probably did edit things to emphasize his knowledge and the Fed's shortcomings. That wasn't really my point as much as to call to attention the possibility for abuse and the odd nature of the auditing and control which sets the Fed apart from our government (for good or for ill).
I agree that the Fed's independence is a good thing and has been well preserved. Some of the reason for its success is that it's run by the very rich and they have shown an enlightened self-interest that a healthy American economy is good for their own pocketbooks. That's not cynical; that's probably one of the best ways to manage a money system.
It is an awkward entity though. It can offer small dividends to investors which is something that other independent government authorities don't do (Supreme Court dividends?). There are some holes of law where they don't quite fit legally and the delegation of constitutional authority is only one obvious place to point out. I don't find the Fed a scary institution because of who runs it as much as it's legal definition appears to be a Model T trying to be souped up to run on the Los Angeles Freeway.
Prior to this administration, I would have thought that the Geneva covention and international treaties on human rights gave the US Government a pretty solid framework for humane treatment of prisoners of war (and it's own populace). Ashcroft and the current administration brought forth new legal doctrine in the patriot act and by slipping through holes in other legislation with terms like "enemy combatants" rather than "prisoners of war" to obfuscate laws already on the books. I always thought that the enlightened self interest learned by pledging "We won't commit horrors on your prisoners, if you won't commit them on ours" was enough to keep torture and denial of human rights as only footnotes in history. But, in light of the way this administration has exploited things, it's apparently a big deal to actually plug holes in the legal system before someone takes advantage of that.
I won't speculate on what form these exploits might come from or whether it would be greed from the private-side or a lust for power from the public-side, but both are a danger. In the meantime all that I can ask is that there be as much auditing and public scrutiny as possible.
Trust in trust alone? I have severe doubts today about that.
Much has been made of the evil of monopolies on Slashdot (from Microsoft dominating the desktop to Apple regulating music formats).
The Federal Reserve is a private corporation operated and owned by private banks and given special monopoly existence by congress back on Christmas Eve in 1913. This is a very scary monopoly that has (perhaps unconstitutionally) usurped Congress's power to coin, issue, and regulate the American money supply.
While I won't attempt to proffer all of the observations (probably labeled as "tinfoil hat theories" because neither political party wants to call them into question) I will point out a very human readable web page that highlights some of these issues in a phone call to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
I realize that the Internet is a public network and that the Fed has every right to switch its internals over to using it. But it will likely cause two bits of controversy.
First, they are a private corporation so if the receive a private set of Class A IP addresses or other special treats it will expose some flaws in the public vs. private issues of control of the internet. (This is probably of more interest to slashdotters.)
Second, The Fed may be exposing tremendous auditability and accounting problems that don't exist on the private network. While their books and procedures are publicly audited, they have simply "lost" money (both physical and transactional). The paranoid would suspect that perhaps they've been inspired by the Diebold voting systems which can apparently cause votes to simply come and go in an unaccountable manner. The less paranoid should still see that this change will need a great deal more publicly auditable security to keep robber barrons from simply coming up with a new means of screwing over those of us who rely on cash & credit.
I can understand the need to migrate from old proprietary technolgies to new ones, but this migration should be watched VERY closely and where possible should be opened up for further audit and regulation.
This really does relate to the topic at hand. I'm not trying to be morally superior or anything. Just want to give you some advice about reducing your tv habits before the DRM kicks in.
I gave up television a year ago tomorrow when I moved and decided that I couldn't afford the price of cable at least for a month or so during the transition to the new location.
I've always been a television junky though and really expected that I'd get something: satellite, cable, or even go back to antenna broadcasts. I'd come in from work and HAVE to have the tv playing something in the background. I remember even driving around for several weekends evaluating different recording technologies (Tivo looked the most promising) and I probably would have even bought one in anticipation if I'd already decided whether I was getting satelite or cable service.
For housewarming, christmas, and my birthday I received some fantastic DVD series (Six Feet Under, Babylon 5, some britcoms and music documentaries) that I'd put into my computer or dvd player when I just wanted something on. Six Feet Under was so good that I actually thought of getting HBO to see the show (but I'd have missed two seasons which weren't out yet on DVD).
I was talking to an old friend who knew of my pop-culture, tv-addicted habits. He wanted me to watch the new Battlestar Galactica but I told him that I didn't have cable. Not to worry he said, it'd be rebroadcast that night and later in the week if I thought my cable would be back on then. He was in shock when I told them that I didn't have a subscription and didn't really intend to get one. They said that such a declaration from a television addict like me was akin to Bill Gates switching to Mac OS X.
With some efforts above and beyond the call of my friend, I did wind up watching the Battlestar remake and quite enjoyed it. I probably would have liked it better without the incessant commercials (on a DVD release or something). I'd forgotten just how annoying those things can be.
Now with stories like this, it appears that the DRM is only going to get worse. The advertising is only going to get longer and bolder. I wish I could say that my decision was one of moral rectitude, but it was really one of evolved practicality. I can say that giving up tv is a whole lot easier than you probably imagine (I certainly couldn't imagine it).
Give it up now while your friends can still videotape those one or two shows that you "must see". It'll only get more expensive and more difficult when DRM comes on the scene.
I don't think it'll make as much of an impact in the real world (e.g. replacing "general protection fault" etc) as the article implies. First it seems more to trace a set of known possibilities that happened or not, rather than to catch really unexpected occurances. If a fence post error caused a count to trigger some action an iteration too early that would be a very hard thing to see at an object level even if you were the programmer who could interpret such things. If you were the user whose binaries had been stripped of most debugging info to reduce chances of reverse engineering then you'd have an obtuse error message that probably has no way to recover from the error.
It's a neat idea, but this doesn't sound like an end user sort of innovation (or anything close to it) as the article portrays.
Even after Jobs got rid of Gil Amelio, replaced the board of directors (Aug 6, 1997), and was appointed as "interim CEO" (Sep 16, 1997) he was still willing to continue the unveiling of the Newton MessagePad 2100 (Oct 20, 1997).
It was only after another four months when Apple inexplicablydiscontinued development of the Newton (Feb 16, 1998).
Why'd it take so long?
Apple was in cruise control until 1998 while it was trying to deduce where to go. They didn't tell anyone about their solid plans until May 1998 when Apple introduced the iMac, the idea of the "digital hub", the roadmaps for Allegro (Mac OS 8.5) and Rhapsody (Mac OS X), and new hardware standards.
Apple continued to support the Mac clones, Hypercard, the old 68040 architecture, and other incompatible ideas during the lead up to the May revolution.
Personally, my guess is that the death of Newton was sacrificed in a backroom deal. It was a dominant PDA technology and both Palm and Microsoft would probably have been anxious to see it die, but the release of the Newton 2100 was Jobs way of saying "You've got to give me something before I knife this baby."
I knew someone would correct my figures, but I don't mind at all.
A Lewinsky joke just seemed more appealing to the slashdot audience to express the idea of DNA size being an enormous data handling problem (especially if I wasn't sure of my numbers as you've pointed out).
My sister is the real genetic statistician, but I have a mild interest in her field just because of the massive size of data sets involved in those calculations.
I did expect the first reply to my post to be one comparing Monica's data capacity for DNA to be morally and quantitatively dwarfed by the DNA tracking ideas that John Ashcroft appears to have a thirst for.
100 Megabytes per chromosome
x 23 chromosomes per gamete
x 20 million gametes per ejaculation
Therefore Ms. Lewinsky can consume roughly 46,000,000,000 megabytes
(assuming that there is no overflow to a dress)
How much can you consume?
There are places that this would be a hit.
I'm in Georgia and there are a huge number of rail lines in use for moving agricultural products around. Most people don't notice or mention the trains at all anymore (except maybe at a murmur). But there are many lines still around that are in use and many that have only been out of use since the train companies started downsizing in the eighties due to better roads and cheaper truck shipping costs undercut their monopolies.
Rails stretch to the more remote parts of Georgia which are barely touched by commercial air. Though in replacement and downsizing theres still a large rail infrastructure that goes to Atlanta suburbs and so forth. The problem is that the roads have become the dominant and unasailable mode of transport here. There are many places that air, river, and rail will not get you even if they are less expensive and with less impact on the environment.
Imagine a shuttle service on these dual mode transports that can take people from Augusta to Marietta (probably for some religious or S&M convention). Rail could get you most of the way there (and at one fifth of the fuel cost of bus traffic) while the final legs would have to be taken on road.
Athens has a van shuttle service that goes to the Hartsfield airport in Atlanta on a regular basis. Many people take it because it will get them to Atlanta without a car and they can ride the MARTA train system around Atlanta. The dual mode vehicle, variable destinations of certain passengers, and fairly regular schedule would be a purpose for these vehicles.
Heck, even Atlanta's Metro transit system (MARTA) could strongly benefit from these vehicles. Right now they have a limited fleet of busses and an electric heavy rail system with a very limited set of destinations. While it would take major restructuring and expense, a hybrid rail/bus system would be very beneficial. Being able to offer. It might be a scheduling nightmare, but having recently gone to San Francisco and seen what a well run mass transit system can do I fully believe they need to start over on MARTA anyway.
Roads are the only growing, funded, maintained transportation system in Georgia. A hybrid vehicle that allowed use of the extensive rail infrastructure in this state could be a major boost for mass transit.
Don't get discouraged though. First, you can pretend to come out as bisexual to the gang (if you think that it won't get you fired). Whether you really are or not, straight guys get very unsettled talking about anything below the waist with a non-heterosexual in their midst.
Second, point out to your manager or HR-droid that such metrics are highly discriminatory because it immediately insinates that females are the stupidist, lowest, pooerest employees. The fewer numbers of females in your group will mean a higher justification for the charges of "discrimination". Be sure to tell them that you aren't considering any sort of legal action, but you're just describing what could happen the next time a female is passed over for a position or promotion.
Interestingly, when I was in a situation where I worked with guys and saw them naked (in the company lockerroom) the "attitude" that guys projected often did NOT correlate in any way with their actual length. My guess is that in the places where penile length was a metric of intelligence (which it wasn't at the company with the lockerroom) that it's only that way because no one can confirm the metrics. Even if you see your coworker at the next urinal there's always the excuse "Oh, that's just flacid. I'd have to step back a foot or so otherwise."
This is a stupid metric. I think that with some creative talk of discrimination that it can be discarded. But it's just the social nature of humans that "something" will take over to justify an arbitrary social pecking order rather than one based on relevant metrics.
A few people have mentioned the metric of the number of operations a doctor has performed as indicator of quality. I realize that there are very few metrics to come up with any comparative opinion on different doctors, but...
When I was working as a database consultant, one of my fellow designers received lasik surgery as payment for some database changes. The doc paid money to the company, but arranged for the several thousand dollars to be paid in "blue laser lasik surgery operation" for the programmer.
Long story short. He went through with it and had only minor problems (which had to be corrected by another doctor since he was based on the opposite coast most of the time) which cost money out of the designer's pocket. Later, he learned that the doctor in question used this barter method to get all sorts of stuff while cranking up his "number of operations".
The article mentions that the filter will be on every pack of the chicken/rice ration. This seems like a waste of weight and supply. If the filter can be reused, carry a filter. If it can't, carry just five or so to use when in dire need, that would be a simple way to limit the use and prevent urea poisoning (and misuse due to pranks, torture, or mistraining).
To me when I put on my "market speak earphones" I interpret this to be a "dirty water flavor packet" that is attempting to seek a wider market than just its emergency uses in zero water situations.
Troops will already drink their own urine in dire life or death situations. Making a "Urine Kool Aid Flavor Packet" is an ideal way to add calories and conserve water while making the situation not have to be quite so dire. Of course since urine will come out at 98.6 degrees it makes more sense to have a chicken soup flavor rather than grape or cherry (easily stronger flavors). The materials in this packet sound so heavily processed that it could have started as anything (pork, vegan kudzu, SCO brain).
The money to be made isn't on the food, but on the packet and filter. A military supplier will want to increase sales by making sure everyone has these rations even if their utility will only be for a select few in dire circumstances when trading off poison water becomes a positve thing.
The innovation is the urine filter packet that increases water conservation. The horror and waste seems to be in making sure that these "urine kool-aid packs" become widely used in non-emergency circumstances.
While the released numbers could be a good thing for Linux, it's more likely to be representative of "size of capital market for Gartner services" than to truly represent a completely impartial measure.
Like seeing a positive reference to OS/2 in a Windows magazine or reading how there are many qualities Microsoft should copy from Mac OS X in PC err eWeek, it really isn't a major or even minor coup when a firm that has completely been lodged in the cleft of Windowlingus for years starts including references to things people on the fringe may recognize or relate to. From the sound of the "interpretations", it seems that Linux still will be painted as diminishing and losing ground even with measureable sales.
Gartner's numbers benefit Gartner's paying clients, and its doubtful that the funds will be enough to get them to a 12 step program and off their capital addiction. Don't let these "facts", "statistics", and "analyses" get you too up or down. They know which side their bread is buttered on.
On Safari 1.2.2, it starts as a red splotch in the top right corner of a black field. Then the color surges down and to the right creating a smooth image much larger than 256 colors until the complete frame is covered. But this takes about 5+ seconds to complete and is plainly visible to the user.
When the finished picture is dragged to the desktop, it makes a .gif file set to open with the standard Mac OS X Preview app. If done so, it makes a massive 173 frame document. One cane scroll down to the last frame to see the "finished" document and export the frame to the clipboard or another format (e.g. TIFF).
A technique like this is neat, but unless you are simply adamant at using the .gif format there seems to be little advantage. The browsers that break the animation will annoy many viewers. Using it as a form of download protection (e.g. on a porn site) is easily circumvented. And the visible five+ second display time as the browser tries to "animate" the picture to the screen would become as annoying as the < flash > tag if used in anything but a trivial page decoration.
Saying that true-color _can_ be done in a .gif is not the same as saying that such a thing _should_ be done.
It's been almost two decades, but I there was a menuing update software that was in use in a school's Apple II computer lab near me back in the 1987-88 timeframe when I was just moving on to college.
The machines were networked with twisted pair cable and used an AppleTalk protocol to communicate with an AppleShare server. When booted from a (slightly customized) floppy the machines ran a startup program that pulled a list of software from the server and compared to what was on the floppy. This wasn't commercial software, these were programs and docs the teachers had written and were capable of being downloaded to the boot disk. The idea was that since this wasn't copyrighted software, the students could take home their floppy if they had access to a home computer. Because floppy disks couldn't hold much information, the system only downloaded or updated the particular files the user chose from a menu (it was too small to mirror everything from the Mac II hard disk). The ability to update already downloaded programs and docs was absolutely a necessity since teacher written code would often have bugs and need to be re-distributed multiple times per week. (These were teachers NOT programmers.)
Was this a commercial utility? Was this a facility of AppleShare? Was this something that one of the smarter teachers just cooked up on his own? I have absolutely no idea. It was just a very simple, obvious, menu-driven, networkable, software-update system that was in use in the eighties.
Would this pre-date the claim made in this patent? If more information could be tracked down about this, it sounds like it might destroy the patentability of a 1990 claim to the idea. But I'm not a lawyer so this may very well not meet the legal standards to call into question the patent.
As a "slightly" out of shape man with nerdy glasses and a skin color that has the same pigmentation as a snowball, I think that myself and much of slashdot should have no problems with these "stereotypical terrorist" regulations.
I've heard about the slow and invasive processes (e.g. drinking your own breast milk as in Fahrenheit 9/11) but I've gone through a dozen airline security checks in the past two weeks and I generally make it through them in under 10 minutes without incident of any sort. People open additional lines and tell me to come over. I've actually had to remind guards to look at my boarding pass and id. I don't ever have people ask me to remove my shoes (be it sneakers, boots, dress shoes, or whatever I may be wearing). I'm often allowed to go through without showing that my computer is a computer instead of a bomb. Heck, for two trips I even had two of those "expansion batteries" that you hook up between your AC adapter and any brand of computer to get 8x power time. It's an unusual item; it had no easy way for me to demonstrate it's purpose; it looked like an easy way to hide gobs of explosive; and I wasn't actually taking my computer on the plane with me. I thought for certain I'd be pulled aside and have to explain these "bomb-like" boxes. "Uh they're computer batteries." "Where's the computer, son?" "I didn't bring it" "A likely story. Here try on these handcuffs." Nope. Waved right on through. No problems.
But it is seriously insulting to realize that people I admire for their technical prowess and generousity to the community will probably get harassed and cavity searched at these checkpoints just for their non-American features.
If Novell's products (Netware, WordPerfect, etc) were to be judged strictly on technical merits, how would they fare? Would an OpenSource Netware unburdened by ip restrictions and large implementation costs be widely adopted?
If these would be greatly beneficial and widely adopted, it seems odd that they haven't been more aggressively developed by Novell.
If their exit from the marketplace is a blessing in disguise, then it seems almost inevitable that Novell had to find a different product line or revenue stream.
Novell hasn't really been one of the vendors that I followed (due to their poor mac compatabilities) back in the dark ages of proprietary software so I'm very open to opinions of others on these matters.
With the DVD's copy protection / region monopoly features so thoroughly cracked, the makers are anxiously looking for a replacement.
The replacement may have the exact same physical characteristics but be incompatible with exiting DVD standards. Once something catches on there's no benefit to maintaining DVD as as standard (even a backwards compatible one).
I'd be suprised if it in fact takes 10 years for this to happen with as much consolidation as there has been among the media companies.
The current goal is one reduction of school bueracracy and truency rather than stopping crime and abduction. Why not do this more simply with Bluetooth enabled key cards instead? Maybe the goal of taking this the more invasive aims like those is on the horizon, but must be introduced one step to hell at a time.
Get the RFID tags implanted to help locate children in earthquakes and major disasters. Get long lasting bio-driven versions that will survive between school sessions and vacations to protect against abductors. Widely deploy readers to track school kids who might choose to vandalize a school. Will the tags be removed at the end of one's education? No, they're harmless. Within a few generations you have a populace with high percentages of people already RFID tagged and having no problems. Require it of everyone.
If the current uses are "just" to reduce bueracracy, I'd definitely side with technologies that would not be easily expandable to a more trecherous slope.