How do you know that they haven't already been in contact with Intel or Asus?
We don't know that there has not been any contact about the topic, but we do no that if there has been contact, it is of no consequence so far, otherwise we'd see "Netbook used under license from Psion LLC" or similar text on documentation and announcements from Intel or Asus.
Interestingly, you've picked the once part of that paper which could be represented in reality.
FedEx et al. are DACs with respect to changing the discreet values presented at Amazon.com and other on-line vendors (a form of distributed hash table, storing product characteristics in the object-oriented subsets of English and other human languages) into tangible products with continuous values reflected as utility for each user. It would be possible to analyse the different implementations with respect to the degree to which the presentation and interpolation of the digital data corresponds with the anticipated analog outputs (I suspect marketing already does this in the form of satisfaction surveys, etc.). Lancaster, Schmookler, Lane, Bourdieu, Latour and many others in the social sciences have worked for decades in this problem space, using a different set of vocabulary. Given that most humans have an L1 cache of approximately 7-10 attributes (phone number lengths, fingers), it would be plausible to simulate the purchasing behaviour of consumers based on presenting different assortments of information bits (Google Analytics allows webmasters to perform this type of experiment with page layout and such details on approximately 2 bits at a time).
The anthropologist in me could probably write that paper and the simulation in about a week, but: a) it wouldn't be new (see affinity cards, supermarket shelf design); b) a competent pair of second-year CS or statistics or marketing students could write a much better paper on the same topic in a month or so; and c) it would not be a paper in the generally accepted fields of engineering.
It's easy to blame Microsoft or the ISO for the host of things that could be perceived to be wrong here. Recall that in the course of voting in favour of this or any specification, each voting country or organization *represents in good faith* that this proposed standard will enhance their ability to interoperate in some way.
If we assume that Microsoft did not buy *every* affirmative indication of support through money or lobbying (and it has not been alleged or demonstrated that that is the case), there remains the potentially annoying facts: that at least one voting member legitimately wants OOXML as one of their standards for electronic editable rich document interoperability; and that some of these voting national standards bodies may not be fulfilling their mandate to meet the best needs of the technical and industrial stakeholders they represent.
I will repeat what I've previously stated for emphasis: Nothing has changed here in the nature of the ISO.
To the extent that the ISO may have appeared virtuous by the actions of its members in the past, it may now appear to be vicious by the actions of its present members. The responsibility for any poor decision-making should rest squarely on the members, which requires the fairly obvious, but posturing-deficient solution of fixing national corruption.
At a more abstract level, I'm not convinced that I want a technical standards body to make moral determinations of goodness or badness of an idea for standardizing something beyond the judgment that on the balance of probabilities, a particular proposal is or is not technically sound for implementation and potentially useful. If a sufficiently large mass of technically adept professionals will not or cannot compel a superior standard, they: are not presenting a superior standard; unwilling to sacrifice career and dollars for the sake of the superior standard (same position as anyone accused of corruption with OOXML); or they are poor at lobbying or communicating (not a fault of the ISO, Microsoft, or really anyone else).
By this, I make my peace with this matter, and will not stop anyone who feels the need to continue to carelessly assume things about standards to do so at their own expense.
ISO may have lost credibility in the vast part of the pseudo-technical community who doesn't know what standards-setting organizations do.
A standards organization doesn't force any individual or organization to adopt or follow any standard. It offers one (or more) standards that individuals or organizations can adopt in its processes/products, such that other individuals or organizations can rely on a basic level of documentation, interoperability or performance being present in the standards-marked processes/products, should they choose to follow the standard.
The existence of a particular standard for gravel-based personal flotation device doesn't mean that such things are a good business or technical idea, just that a significant number of different stakeholders claim to want to interoperate in the space of gravel-based flotation devices. The existence of that standard does not preempt the proposal of other standards for gravel-based personal flotation devices, nor does it compel any entity to make things described by that standard.
In this regard, nothing which has happened with OOXML has changed the fundamental nature of standards bodies in their lack of prescriptive abilities.
This standard is just like all others when used as intended ("we can make these standards-based assumptions about this vendor/product"), and when abused ("these standards are a substitute for professional or business judgment and management skills").
Right idea, wrong container. Attempt to register a trademark or patent with USPTO, and provide encoded photos as exhibits. USPTO is obligated by law to receive and attach all submissions relating to an application to the publicly searchable and widely archived application itself, even if when application fails. Engrave the application number on some safe locations, including on an item in this sealed box.
Just be sure that the encoding can survive DAC/ADC through a dead tree phase.
Since there are public, private, and government interests in having USPTO applications available for a very long time, they will all have an active interest in keeping the data around and readable.
Tips for dealing with Telus (after 6 months of trying to cancel a basic landline resulted in them sending a monthly bill for a $0.01 credit):
1) To bypass much of the queue, navigate to the part of the phone tree that new customers use. These CSRs, unlike the SE Asia ones, can do things other than take notes on your account. The following applies to the useful, non-outsourced CSRs.
2) Say "no" if the CSR asks to put you on hold, thereby reducing the chance of "accidental" disconnection when you point out flaws in their logic.
3) Conversely, feel free to liberally drop the connection if you are not getting the terms you want. CSRs are very inconsistent in what they can offer or enforce (about 0.5 orders of magnitude in pricing concessions, etc.). Be sure to get each CSR's name so that you can refer to better offers that previous CSRs have made if you roll something worse than before.
4) Since you're on/., the retention department will often bend over backwards if you (legitimately) point out that you blog about your CSR experiences, and your investigation of competitors' rates (especially Shaw). Wait two weeks for the deeply discounted service to activate and be retroactive (ask for retroactive to the last month or three if it's not offered automatically) before canceling (get a CSR to quote your balance owing). If they ask about the bribe you need to stay, reply with "you're a creative company, impress me."
4a) Both Telus and Shaw offer signup promos if you claim that you are switching voice or Internet from another provider. Their only verification is your ability to recite an arbitrary string having the form [plausible user name]@[competitor].ca.
5) If you're spending too much time in their phone tree or on hold, point out that you're calling from a cell phone or other toll line, and that you will be billing Telus $0.x0 per minute of the call not spent in active conversation. Their outsourced CSRs almost universally agree to this. Include an invoice with CSR's name and time of call with payment.
6) Point out that you are logging their service availability, and will be pro-rating your payment.
7) When offered or promised any action, ask for a specific deadline by which it will happen. Always ask "Can you do it sooner?" NOT "_Will_ you do it sooner". The answer will almost always be yes, but that it's inconvenient for the CSR to find that menu in their interface.
7a) Recall that their offshore CSRs (support queue, or after hours customer service) are not empowered to really promise or do anything meaningful for you, so promises from them are meaningless. See 1), above.
8) You can do all of the above without being abusive.
GP said something about "turn it [steamroller] off or hit the brakes", which sounds generically like reversing the state of the steamroller (from moving, back to non-moving). I'm trying to point out that in a system with as many interconnected parts as the earth, nothing is only as it appears in terms of non-obvious interdependencies.
Compare: Spinning up or down an MRI by applying force to the visible moving parts without understanding the control systems or the device's mechanisms of action. The safetys last for just long enough to produce a sense of accomplishment before many things break badly almost simultaneously unless the rest of the process is managed.
Yes, but what else is the steamroller doing, and what else is it connected to?
As a system, the earth is at least as complicated as a human body, and instantaneously reversing the state of any component of the system results in interesting and often unpredictable effects throughout the entire body (see cold turkey, flu virus, temporary organ failure, allergies, seizures). The earth undoubtedly includes much more complicated interactions.
Returning to your almost car analogy, a single human with good shoes and gloves can stop an unaccelerated steamroller moving at maximum speed in at least two ways: As a dead speed bump under the vehicle over a very small distance, or as a sore but alive bookend in front of the vehicle over a longer distance. In either case, it might be a bad idea to stop the steamroller over the air intake vent for the building, and preventing the steamroller's fissile engine from effectively discharging its heat may or may not kill you in a different way.
Also, according to the roster, the majority of the new (pre-slashdot) non-posting users appear to be registered in a pattern consistent with automatic account generation using approximately 2.5 username formats, with no indications of the standard network effects that would show up if people registered and attracted their friends to this resource. I would guess that there are fewer than 10 accounts tied to humans in total (given profile content and posting history), and that BlackHawk0's "bullying" contributes the highest volume and quality of content in the forums other than the administrator.
Clicking through the forums, there appear to be a total of 31 posts in the entirety of the forums (unless registered can see more forums or some such).
It appears that the subject of the thread that is linked to in the story is an unstructured series of bug reports and technical commentary about cases not considered by the software, and suggestions for improvement. The instances where the alleged bully deviates from the topic at hand, the comments regard the forum software in use, and after the first response, the alleged bully withdraws his complaint to return to a discussion about the technical merits of the software.
As a scientist (but not an aviation engineer), the comments, questions, and responses between the allegedly bully and the software author appear to be about technical aspects of the software, and there appears to be a mutual understanding and agreement about issues that got fixed.
The discussion appears to be professional, with the occasional attempt at absurd humour thrown in.
Am I missing something here? Is this story an attempt to generate hits for an otherwise non-notable website for a niche app?
The main difference I've found between commercially developing for Linux and commercially for OS X is that suggestions for improvement generally get the response "that's a problem with [other part of the stack]", where the [other part of the stack] gives the same form of response, and the pointers rarely dereference to anyone who takes responsibility or ownership of the issue.
A fine example currently is asking for modal dialogs to be dismissable on 400 px tall screens of UMPCs ("Please let me scroll the dialog, or locate the OK/Cancel/Apply/Help buttons on screen where I can see and click them"). The echo chamber of "talk to (app | xorg | GTK | Intel | Java | Nvidia | distribution | libc | vendor | etc.)" really turns me off of wanting to help any of them resolve the issue. As a developer on Linux (but with OSI Layer 2/3 stuff, rather than GUI things), I could probably spend a week or two to figure out how all of those pieces interact (without deeply understanding the design philosophy or project plans) and make patches that would work on my current setup, but that would generate significantly more regression testing and QA load than would be required if the patches came from in-house where the developers are already intimately familiar with their own code. Also, as one of the advantages of a package management system is supposed to be that it all gets taken care of for me, I have no interest in maintaining my own versions of app, X, GTK, etc, nor do I want to spend a day each understanding the 32 to 200 KB spec files that build those packages, nor am I interested in waiting 3 months to year before the fix makes it into the non-beta parts of the distributions I might use.
Now, ask grandma to change the screen resolution back to 800x400 (using a dialog the entirety of which she can't see or access) after she experiments with plugging a regular monitor into her new eeePC (or whatever UMPC the banks are giving away these days) and it stays mirrored at the new resolution after the experiment. It's unreasonable to expect that random non-technical user would want or need to understand that the entire stack around the problem even exists, let alone attempt to fix it.
By contrast, if I encounter an issue manifesting in CoreFoo, Cocoa, some kext or library or wherever else on OS X, Apple will offer to take ownership of it even if it isn't directly their problem (and then work on it in the background), other vendors/developers in the stack will at least acknowledge if not fully investigate the problem in the test case(s) submitted, and random other developers in the same space will be thankful for the new knowledge instead of responding with RTFM or its analogues. Granted, fixes in OS X still take weeks to a couple of months to widely roll out, but that's still faster than many distributions update their stable packages.
And then there are (the comparatively few) great OSS people like Tim Waugh, who knows the (printing) stack up and down, and responds with a reasonable fix or workaround within 48 hours, even though the problem is not in his part of the stack, regardless of who's customer you are. Plus, you'll usually get some insights by responding to his "I'm curious about what you're doing with this" follow-up.
the best protection is to wear condoms developed by the world's leading authorities on disease, prevention, etc
I'd trust CDC and WHO to *recommend* particular models of condoms developed by *some entity* that knows more about industrial manufacturing and process engineering with latex than do CDC or WHO. Similarly, the company with the largest army of malware researchers does not necessarily write the best anti-virus code, or implement the best anti-virus hardware. Using Symantec hardware is as appealing as using Logitech software.
There are enough filters between trials and news consumers that it's unlikely you're experiencing a representative sample of any legal system. Of all the cases adjudicated, only a very small portion involve circumstances or individuals warranting media attention. Of all those, a fraction deserve more than local interest. Of those, news outlets and packagers pick up yet a smaller fraction.
It may be that cases involving judges who also sanction lawyers are simply more exciting for some reason, and are therefore their proportion of visible stories is increasing, but that says more about the news media than it does about the judicial system.
Are you implying that SCSI was *ever* anything other than "upmarket"?! It was *never* a cheap, mass-market computer technology, not even in a relative way when PC-type computers were neither as cheap nor mass-market as they are today. Yes. HP, UMAX and others used to sell rock solid SCSI flatbed scanners for It's more that competing technologies became cheaper, and far closer to SCSI in performance. True, but I prefer to call them complementary technologies.
Seriously, does anyone else here think firewire's going to disappear after "tape-based camcorders die out"? I've still got the receipt for my new 828MkIII. Firewire will not disappear from anything other than toys, if at all, even if most people using $300 junk-in-a-box machines do not understand why Firewire is needed in some particularly profitable fields. Firewire may some day be forced upmarket like SCSI and other protocols that are both fast and reliable, but that provides the advantage of moving the technology out of view from the inexperienced FUDers and noobs such as those emerging elsewhere in this discussion.
They are different in that USB specifies that nodes on the bus are either hosts like PCs, or devices like mice or USB storage. 1394 assumes that nodes that see each other are peers and does not enforce any particular logical directionality among devices. A particular USB device such as a printer or MP3 player might be implemented such that it presents a host interface and a device interface, but those interfaces do not simultaneously on the same logical or physical bus. For your observation to indicate that the 1394 and USB topologies are analogous in the way that you assume, most/all USB printers would be able to print from any other USB storage/image device connected to the same side of a USB hub as the printer, which is not the case.
You'll note that *standard* physical USB connectors, cables, ports, etc. are designed such that you can't plug a USB storage drive into a digital camera's USB interface via a standard USB cable, nor two PCs together via a standard USB cable (whereas both of those combinations are possible and supported using standard 1394 cables). The USB ports on printers into which you are supposed to connect a USB storage device has the same physical configuration as the one on the back of the PC precisely because both are attached to USB host controllers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike#Vehicle_design
Most large commercial jet engines include design features that ensure they can shut-down after "ingesting" a bird weighing up to 1.8 kg (4 lb). The engine does not have to survive the ingestion, just be safely shut down. This is a 'stand alone' requirement, i.e., the engine must pass the test, not the aircraft. Multiple strikes on twin engine jet aircraft are very serious events, they can disable multiple aircraft systems, requiring emergency action to land the aircraft... At first, bird strike testing by manufacturers involved firing a bird carcass from a gas cannon and sabot system into the tested unit. The carcass was soon replaced with suitable density blocks, often gelatin, to ease testing. I'd imagine that getting 1000 lb of finishing nails or other flack into the flight path of the target vehicle would achieve a similar effect with minimal damage to the contents.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know that they haven't already been in contact with Intel or Asus?
We don't know that there has not been any contact about the topic, but we do no that if there has been contact, it is of no consequence so far, otherwise we'd see "Netbook used under license from Psion LLC" or similar text on documentation and announcements from Intel or Asus.
Interestingly, you've picked the once part of that paper which could be represented in reality.
FedEx et al. are DACs with respect to changing the discreet values presented at Amazon.com and other on-line vendors (a form of distributed hash table, storing product characteristics in the object-oriented subsets of English and other human languages) into tangible products with continuous values reflected as utility for each user. It would be possible to analyse the different implementations with respect to the degree to which the presentation and interpolation of the digital data corresponds with the anticipated analog outputs (I suspect marketing already does this in the form of satisfaction surveys, etc.). Lancaster, Schmookler, Lane, Bourdieu, Latour and many others in the social sciences have worked for decades in this problem space, using a different set of vocabulary. Given that most humans have an L1 cache of approximately 7-10 attributes (phone number lengths, fingers), it would be plausible to simulate the purchasing behaviour of consumers based on presenting different assortments of information bits (Google Analytics allows webmasters to perform this type of experiment with page layout and such details on approximately 2 bits at a time).
The anthropologist in me could probably write that paper and the simulation in about a week, but: a) it wouldn't be new (see affinity cards, supermarket shelf design); b) a competent pair of second-year CS or statistics or marketing students could write a much better paper on the same topic in a month or so; and c) it would not be a paper in the generally accepted fields of engineering.
-M5B
It's easy to blame Microsoft or the ISO for the host of things that could be perceived to be wrong here. Recall that in the course of voting in favour of this or any specification, each voting country or organization *represents in good faith* that this proposed standard will enhance their ability to interoperate in some way.
If we assume that Microsoft did not buy *every* affirmative indication of support through money or lobbying (and it has not been alleged or demonstrated that that is the case), there remains the potentially annoying facts: that at least one voting member legitimately wants OOXML as one of their standards for electronic editable rich document interoperability; and that some of these voting national standards bodies may not be fulfilling their mandate to meet the best needs of the technical and industrial stakeholders they represent.
I will repeat what I've previously stated for emphasis: Nothing has changed here in the nature of the ISO.
To the extent that the ISO may have appeared virtuous by the actions of its members in the past, it may now appear to be vicious by the actions of its present members. The responsibility for any poor decision-making should rest squarely on the members, which requires the fairly obvious, but posturing-deficient solution of fixing national corruption.
At a more abstract level, I'm not convinced that I want a technical standards body to make moral determinations of goodness or badness of an idea for standardizing something beyond the judgment that on the balance of probabilities, a particular proposal is or is not technically sound for implementation and potentially useful. If a sufficiently large mass of technically adept professionals will not or cannot compel a superior standard, they: are not presenting a superior standard; unwilling to sacrifice career and dollars for the sake of the superior standard (same position as anyone accused of corruption with OOXML); or they are poor at lobbying or communicating (not a fault of the ISO, Microsoft, or really anyone else).
By this, I make my peace with this matter, and will not stop anyone who feels the need to continue to carelessly assume things about standards to do so at their own expense.
ISO may have lost credibility in the vast part of the pseudo-technical community who doesn't know what standards-setting organizations do.
A standards organization doesn't force any individual or organization to adopt or follow any standard. It offers one (or more) standards that individuals or organizations can adopt in its processes/products, such that other individuals or organizations can rely on a basic level of documentation, interoperability or performance being present in the standards-marked processes/products, should they choose to follow the standard.
The existence of a particular standard for gravel-based personal flotation device doesn't mean that such things are a good business or technical idea, just that a significant number of different stakeholders claim to want to interoperate in the space of gravel-based flotation devices. The existence of that standard does not preempt the proposal of other standards for gravel-based personal flotation devices, nor does it compel any entity to make things described by that standard.
In this regard, nothing which has happened with OOXML has changed the fundamental nature of standards bodies in their lack of prescriptive abilities.
This standard is just like all others when used as intended ("we can make these standards-based assumptions about this vendor/product"), and when abused ("these standards are a substitute for professional or business judgment and management skills").
It is an issue in the case of <img src="http://af9ad.example.com/whatever"> and related things that can load without active user intervention...
Right idea, wrong container. Attempt to register a trademark or patent with USPTO, and provide encoded photos as exhibits. USPTO is obligated by law to receive and attach all submissions relating to an application to the publicly searchable and widely archived application itself, even if when application fails. Engrave the application number on some safe locations, including on an item in this sealed box.
Just be sure that the encoding can survive DAC/ADC through a dead tree phase.
Since there are public, private, and government interests in having USPTO applications available for a very long time, they will all have an active interest in keeping the data around and readable.
Maybe you should ask on expertSexchange!
Tips for dealing with Telus (after 6 months of trying to cancel a basic landline resulted in them sending a monthly bill for a $0.01 credit):
1) To bypass much of the queue, navigate to the part of the phone tree that new customers use. These CSRs, unlike the SE Asia ones, can do things other than take notes on your account. The following applies to the useful, non-outsourced CSRs.
2) Say "no" if the CSR asks to put you on hold, thereby reducing the chance of "accidental" disconnection when you point out flaws in their logic.
3) Conversely, feel free to liberally drop the connection if you are not getting the terms you want. CSRs are very inconsistent in what they can offer or enforce (about 0.5 orders of magnitude in pricing concessions, etc.). Be sure to get each CSR's name so that you can refer to better offers that previous CSRs have made if you roll something worse than before.
4) Since you're on /., the retention department will often bend over backwards if you (legitimately) point out that you blog about your CSR experiences, and your investigation of competitors' rates (especially Shaw). Wait two weeks for the deeply discounted service to activate and be retroactive (ask for retroactive to the last month or three if it's not offered automatically) before canceling (get a CSR to quote your balance owing). If they ask about the bribe you need to stay, reply with "you're a creative company, impress me."
4a) Both Telus and Shaw offer signup promos if you claim that you are switching voice or Internet from another provider. Their only verification is your ability to recite an arbitrary string having the form [plausible user name]@[competitor].ca.
5) If you're spending too much time in their phone tree or on hold, point out that you're calling from a cell phone or other toll line, and that you will be billing Telus $0.x0 per minute of the call not spent in active conversation. Their outsourced CSRs almost universally agree to this. Include an invoice with CSR's name and time of call with payment.
6) Point out that you are logging their service availability, and will be pro-rating your payment.
7) When offered or promised any action, ask for a specific deadline by which it will happen. Always ask "Can you do it sooner?" NOT "_Will_ you do it sooner". The answer will almost always be yes, but that it's inconvenient for the CSR to find that menu in their interface.
7a) Recall that their offshore CSRs (support queue, or after hours customer service) are not empowered to really promise or do anything meaningful for you, so promises from them are meaningless. See 1), above.
8) You can do all of the above without being abusive.
Sure it is:
http://www.apple.com/safari/
I am building with nothing but GPL/BSD/Apache license code
That must be a log of Open Source silicon. Oh, wait...
GP said something about "turn it [steamroller] off or hit the brakes", which sounds generically like reversing the state of the steamroller (from moving, back to non-moving). I'm trying to point out that in a system with as many interconnected parts as the earth, nothing is only as it appears in terms of non-obvious interdependencies.
Compare: Spinning up or down an MRI by applying force to the visible moving parts without understanding the control systems or the device's mechanisms of action. The safetys last for just long enough to produce a sense of accomplishment before many things break badly almost simultaneously unless the rest of the process is managed.
Yes, but what else is the steamroller doing, and what else is it connected to?
As a system, the earth is at least as complicated as a human body, and instantaneously reversing the state of any component of the system results in interesting and often unpredictable effects throughout the entire body (see cold turkey, flu virus, temporary organ failure, allergies, seizures). The earth undoubtedly includes much more complicated interactions.
Returning to your almost car analogy, a single human with good shoes and gloves can stop an unaccelerated steamroller moving at maximum speed in at least two ways: As a dead speed bump under the vehicle over a very small distance, or as a sore but alive bookend in front of the vehicle over a longer distance. In either case, it might be a bad idea to stop the steamroller over the air intake vent for the building, and preventing the steamroller's fissile engine from effectively discharging its heat may or may not kill you in a different way.
Also, according to the roster, the majority of the new (pre-slashdot) non-posting users appear to be registered in a pattern consistent with automatic account generation using approximately 2.5 username formats, with no indications of the standard network effects that would show up if people registered and attracted their friends to this resource. I would guess that there are fewer than 10 accounts tied to humans in total (given profile content and posting history), and that BlackHawk0's "bullying" contributes the highest volume and quality of content in the forums other than the administrator.
Clicking through the forums, there appear to be a total of 31 posts in the entirety of the forums (unless registered can see more forums or some such).
It appears that the subject of the thread that is linked to in the story is an unstructured series of bug reports and technical commentary about cases not considered by the software, and suggestions for improvement. The instances where the alleged bully deviates from the topic at hand, the comments regard the forum software in use, and after the first response, the alleged bully withdraws his complaint to return to a discussion about the technical merits of the software.
As a scientist (but not an aviation engineer), the comments, questions, and responses between the allegedly bully and the software author appear to be about technical aspects of the software, and there appears to be a mutual understanding and agreement about issues that got fixed.
The discussion appears to be professional, with the occasional attempt at absurd humour thrown in.
Am I missing something here? Is this story an attempt to generate hits for an otherwise non-notable website for a niche app?
The main difference I've found between commercially developing for Linux and commercially for OS X is that suggestions for improvement generally get the response "that's a problem with [other part of the stack]", where the [other part of the stack] gives the same form of response, and the pointers rarely dereference to anyone who takes responsibility or ownership of the issue.
A fine example currently is asking for modal dialogs to be dismissable on 400 px tall screens of UMPCs ("Please let me scroll the dialog, or locate the OK/Cancel/Apply/Help buttons on screen where I can see and click them"). The echo chamber of "talk to (app | xorg | GTK | Intel | Java | Nvidia | distribution | libc | vendor | etc.)" really turns me off of wanting to help any of them resolve the issue. As a developer on Linux (but with OSI Layer 2/3 stuff, rather than GUI things), I could probably spend a week or two to figure out how all of those pieces interact (without deeply understanding the design philosophy or project plans) and make patches that would work on my current setup, but that would generate significantly more regression testing and QA load than would be required if the patches came from in-house where the developers are already intimately familiar with their own code. Also, as one of the advantages of a package management system is supposed to be that it all gets taken care of for me, I have no interest in maintaining my own versions of app, X, GTK, etc, nor do I want to spend a day each understanding the 32 to 200 KB spec files that build those packages, nor am I interested in waiting 3 months to year before the fix makes it into the non-beta parts of the distributions I might use.
Now, ask grandma to change the screen resolution back to 800x400 (using a dialog the entirety of which she can't see or access) after she experiments with plugging a regular monitor into her new eeePC (or whatever UMPC the banks are giving away these days) and it stays mirrored at the new resolution after the experiment. It's unreasonable to expect that random non-technical user would want or need to understand that the entire stack around the problem even exists, let alone attempt to fix it.
By contrast, if I encounter an issue manifesting in CoreFoo, Cocoa, some kext or library or wherever else on OS X, Apple will offer to take ownership of it even if it isn't directly their problem (and then work on it in the background), other vendors/developers in the stack will at least acknowledge if not fully investigate the problem in the test case(s) submitted, and random other developers in the same space will be thankful for the new knowledge instead of responding with RTFM or its analogues. Granted, fixes in OS X still take weeks to a couple of months to widely roll out, but that's still faster than many distributions update their stable packages.
And then there are (the comparatively few) great OSS people like Tim Waugh, who knows the (printing) stack up and down, and responds with a reasonable fix or workaround within 48 hours, even though the problem is not in his part of the stack, regardless of who's customer you are. Plus, you'll usually get some insights by responding to his "I'm curious about what you're doing with this" follow-up.
For inspiration about remote links, see:
http://www.albertasupernet.ca/the+project/news/IEEE_Spectrum-SuperNet.pdf
I don't recall if that article in particular mentions bouncing radio off the sides of geological features to deliver broadband to certain remote POPs.
the best protection is to wear condoms developed by the world's leading authorities on disease, prevention, etc
I'd trust CDC and WHO to *recommend* particular models of condoms developed by *some entity* that knows more about industrial manufacturing and process engineering with latex than do CDC or WHO. Similarly, the company with the largest army of malware researchers does not necessarily write the best anti-virus code, or implement the best anti-virus hardware. Using Symantec hardware is as appealing as using Logitech software.
This was recently discussed at the Outages list:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:gjmRbu02vRUJ:isotf.org/pipermail/outages/2008-June/000754.html+%22Outages+have+an+Outage%3F%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=ca&client=firefox-a
They're in the middle of migrating servers or something, so outages.org seems to be down at the moment:
https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2008-July/000084.html
If it's any consolation, the energy-minimized version of that map looks like it would put the System column next to the Human Interface column...
Sssshhhh! NANOG already gets enough noise. We don't need another September that never ended.
There are enough filters between trials and news consumers that it's unlikely you're experiencing a representative sample of any legal system. Of all the cases adjudicated, only a very small portion involve circumstances or individuals warranting media attention. Of all those, a fraction deserve more than local interest. Of those, news outlets and packagers pick up yet a smaller fraction.
It may be that cases involving judges who also sanction lawyers are simply more exciting for some reason, and are therefore their proportion of visible stories is increasing, but that says more about the news media than it does about the judicial system.
It's more that competing technologies became cheaper, and far closer to SCSI in performance. True, but I prefer to call them complementary technologies.
They are different in that USB specifies that nodes on the bus are either hosts like PCs, or devices like mice or USB storage. 1394 assumes that nodes that see each other are peers and does not enforce any particular logical directionality among devices. A particular USB device such as a printer or MP3 player might be implemented such that it presents a host interface and a device interface, but those interfaces do not simultaneously on the same logical or physical bus. For your observation to indicate that the 1394 and USB topologies are analogous in the way that you assume, most/all USB printers would be able to print from any other USB storage/image device connected to the same side of a USB hub as the printer, which is not the case.
You'll note that *standard* physical USB connectors, cables, ports, etc. are designed such that you can't plug a USB storage drive into a digital camera's USB interface via a standard USB cable, nor two PCs together via a standard USB cable (whereas both of those combinations are possible and supported using standard 1394 cables). The USB ports on printers into which you are supposed to connect a USB storage device has the same physical configuration as the one on the back of the PC precisely because both are attached to USB host controllers.