There can be good and bad to this. My personal example.
After a weekend working on the cottage, cutting grass, doing construction, and such, I noticed I had lost the feeling my baby toe on one of my feet.
Extensive internet hunting, had me convinced I either had a brain tumour, or West Nile disease. D'oh.
Several trips to my Doctor later, nothing was resolved at all, a few basic blood and neurological tests revealed nothing.
So I went back to the web. And did a lot of hunting. And came across the fact that pinched nerves in the back can lead to this. I thought I'd give chiropractic a try. While I think practicers of chiropractic oversell it (loose up your spine, and cure all the disease of your body, kind of thing), it was useful for releasing the pressure on my nerve, and restoring the feeling in my toes. Several trips to my Doctor failed to bring this relief.
Regular stretches for my back, and I'm fine.
While at first I did have some hypochondria, in the end, it helped me solve a problem that my Doctor failed to.
As a long term, and formerly avid fan of SlashDot, I agree the dups are getting way out of hand, for such a simple problem to solve.
I think/. runs the risk of a competing site, carring the same stories more or less (even with "as posted on/." stories:)), but with a shade more editorial care (that is, "some"). It would take much to use Slashcode, get a competing site up, reference it from/. (since people are free to post here), and draw a lot of traffic away from/.
Come on editors, read the f'ing stories on your own site; that's all it would take to avoid dups, wouldn't it???
Imagine if such a planet were habitable (that is, a planet with three suns). Think about how much of our human existence is dictated by the cycles of our single sun. I wonder how different things would be with three suns.
While it undoubtedly has effects, whether or not our particular solar cycle is key to our particular existence is hard to say. Consider life did/does exist and evolve closer to the poles, as well, where days and nights last months (half the year, at the extreme), so a daily light/dark warm/cold cycle may not indeed be crucial to life on earth.
Younger readers might not remember much (or anything) about OS/2 and the history behind it.
This is my understanding, anyone correct me if I'm wrong on some points, please:
Microsoft developed OS/2 for IBM, as a sort of next generation operating system. And it was; it was fast, efficient, good looking, responsive, easy to develop under, with a much cleaner API than Win32.
I'm not sure if Microsoft sold OS/2 itself, but I seem to vaguely remember that there was a Microsoft version of it, as well as an IBM version of it, with only minor differences. It's my recollection that all indications were that Microsoft was going to put its weight behind OS/2.
After getting IBM heavily committed to it, they turned around and worked on their own, incompatible, equivalent (NT). It really was quite a screw job on the part of Microsoft to intentionally lead IBM astray, in my view. A faily anti-competitive way to weild their growing clout.
Genuine question: why do they need to lift off in daylight? Exactly. In Armageddon, they launched at night; in fact, they launched *two* shuttles at the same time at night. Trivial stuff...
I agree the security around the release of a children's book is inane. It seems solely designed to create hype about the security itself.
And doesn't anyone think that the small "leak" might itself be a publicity stunt, to get another few front page articles on CNN? That is far more valuable monetarily than the cost of any supposed leak. And showing the publishers doing good by offering signed copies, also adds to the PR.
The hardware speed has finally caught up to the software, and all those "cool features" like handwriting recognition finally actually work well enough to be useful. Palms have gotten larger, and PocketPCs have gotten smaller, so size is no longer an issue for me. For the first time, I've found that I can be as productive with my iPAQ as I can with a similar Palm device.
I think this comment really captures my feelings about it. I've always had both, and used both at different times, but the greater functionality (or at least the *potential* of greater functionality) from the iPaq/HP stuff, always enchanted me more.
Since my toddler flushed my wonderfully small Clie (yes, flushed; after querying where it went, he pointed to the toilet and made a big gesture with his arms, and said "fwushed awwaayyy!"), I went back to my iPaq full time, and have never looked back, after upgrading to a new model.
The one main difference seesm to be serious tie in to the windows platform (I wish more app developers distributed the installable.CAB file separately from the Windows installer.EXE), and the fact you really do need to charge it every day, instead of every couple of weeks.
The battery life of the palms is very impressive as compared to the iPaq's, but with the discipline of plugging it in each night (with your cell phone, and other goodies), it's not that big a difference.
Hmmmm, I had a minimal Fedora 3 installation on a wonderful coLinux installation, which seldom gets updated packages, but I noticed zlib was updated the other day (via freshrpms, apt-get). Kinda surprised me that something as mundane as a compression library would need updating. But I'm guessing this is why, and several days before the news hits slashdot, awesome.
Not everyone has a computer (only 50%-75% do, say); but those that don't have other means to file their taxes.
Not everyone with a computer has windows (but 99% do); those that don't have other means to file their taxes.
While I still don't approve of this practice, and I believe that cross browser portability isn't *that* hard to achieve, especially for an important product like this, they are playing the numbers, and playing them reasonably..
It's the same deal with the online application for Canadian passports; I got a fair bit of the way through it with Opera, before I had to start over with IE. (And sure enough, at the start, there was an indication of IE required.)
But what happens when the good will runs out? New batteries are pretty expensive.
I worry about this, as well; for cars that yuppies will flip after two years, I guess it's not a problem (for the original buyer), but since these batteries will undoubtedly be very expensive to replace after any warrantees are up, I could see Prius and other hybrids being junked *far* earlier than a typical car, which could in the end be *worse* for the environment. (Rather like how many otherwise perfectly servicable laptops would still be around, but the cost of replacing a useless battery outweights the value of the laptop.)
For those who are interested, commercial fishing licenses are similar (at least here on the east cost of Canada, probably elsewhere). They cost hundreds of thousands, people get mortgages to buy them so they can start the trade; they leave them to their hiers or sell them just as property, and there are a limited number given out.
It really was eye opening to see the equity committment required by the fishing trade, on top of the sizable cost of the boat and equipment; it surprised me that taxi licenses in New York are similar.
It's also a bit like the anti-virus world; anti-virus software isn't big on the Mac (is there even any?), because the system was designed right, and coded in a more solid fashion, than Windows.
With proper OS design/implementation/configuration, anti-virus software should be irrelevant; with proper TCP/IP design/implementation/configuration, firewalls should be irrelevant.
I've argued for ages, often on deaf ears, that firewalls should be unnecessary; they really are just hacks to dodge around buggy TCP/IP implementations or configurations. Get the stack solid, and allow it to be configured properly and easily, and a firewall is moot. I'd love for these to be some ancient mythology that I tell my grandchildren about...
DecNet sounds wonderful and all; without doing a lot of hunting, can someone summarize the technical aspects of the protocol/implementation that makes it so?
"Washing machine sized", they say. I'm lost, help me out here. That must be a tecchie unit of measurement that is only used internally by NASA or something. Can someone put that in terms of "Volkswagens" or "Libraries of Congress" for me?
Maybe the Unix "units" program will do it for me.
Let's see: $ units 1989 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: washingmachine You want: volkswagen
* 0.25
/ 4
You have: washingmachine You want: librariesofcongress
* 0.0001
/ 10000
It totally blows away any geographical user interface ESRI or Autodesk or anyone else has. They should be embarrassed with their current ArcIMS and MapGuide products - such rudimentary interfaces and poor performance.
I don't know MapGuide, but as far as ESRI and others go, they're different kettles of fish. Google Earth is all about sizzle, flash, sexiness, and a degree of usefulness in that it can be a bit more intuitive way of looking at things.
ESRI and friends are all about precision, accuracy, more formal stuff. Google Earth isn't going to let you do accurate measurements and survey plans and stuff that the traditional GIS stuff will. It's the difference between a Cad-like precision, and drawing sexy real world texturemaps in a 3D engine.
For most people, the latter is cooler; for professionals, the former is more useful, and the latter is just a toy.
At least, I think that's a fair assessment.
Also, Google Earth and the like have the freedom of taking new-ish raster satellite photos and texture mapping them with 3D gaming technology.
Traditional GIS databases are typically historical dBase format vector data. Rendering that in real time 3D isn't terribly feasible today.
In the early 90's, I talked with RIM about potential employment. They had a low speed external modem using Mobitex (I think) that would hook to your serial port.
They didn't have the "killer app" for it at the time, but were very much in the mode of "let's be smart and figure out a good application for this technology." While that approach can often be puttnig the cart before the horse, they persisted, and it obviously paid off, hitting the sweet spot of using the lower speed bandwidth for the two-way pager-like always-on-but-not-quite-fully-online BlackBerry.
It really is a rare and excellent example of finding the right killer app for a given (and flexible, but seeming limited) technology. Having the technical wherewithal to put that in a small pager-like device (several years ago), obviously shows some real technical talents in their company, too.
I splurged on a Motorola V710 cell phone; blue tooth, MP3 player, camera, ringtones, etc..
However, Telus followed Verizon's lead, and offered a crippled version of the phone. Even something as simple as sending an sound file or contacts via bluetooth wasn't possible.
The cell phone providers want you to send data to the phone over *their* charging network, not over a free network (bluetooth). It is really hampering convergence, in my opinion.
There are hacks for a lot of crippled platforms, but having to find a bootleg foreign ROM and reflash your phone is a bit extreme just to get a feature that was designed in by the manufacturer, but disabled by the provider.
This is actually a great argument for an *open* Cell/PDA platform. No silly crippling possible. I'd buy one, and choose a provider based upon the lack of such crippling ability.
While it's cool to grab dirt cheap drives, I would think that if this is running 24/7, the impact on power costs and heat added to the room, would make this less cost effective long term. Also, I bet it's a lot noisier than just grabbing a few 300g drives and RAID-5'ing them for.6T storage. Also, with that many drives (and older ones), there's a lot more points of failure.
For example, we think mirrors flip you around left to right. Well...it's just as correct to think they've flipped you around up to down. Actually the reason we see mirrors as flipping left and right, but not up and down is an interesting one. It's more to do with our symantics of "left" and "right" being more variable than "up" and "down."
"Up" and "Down" are relative to the earth and gravity, which doesn't typipcally change much:)
"Left" and "Right" are with reference to the viewer. Our left is still "that same direction over there" to the person we see in the mirror, but because we imagine that person in the mirror as having a "left" and "right" of his own, relative to his own virtual body, things do seem "reversed." Again, mainly symantics than anything too heavily perceptual.
Slashdot Mirror
There have *got* to be some cool easter eggs hidden in there somewhere. Come on people, let's find them :)
There can be good and bad to this. My personal example.
After a weekend working on the cottage, cutting grass, doing construction, and such, I noticed I had lost the feeling my baby toe on one of my feet.
Extensive internet hunting, had me convinced I either had a brain tumour, or West Nile disease. D'oh.
Several trips to my Doctor later, nothing was resolved at all, a few basic blood and neurological tests revealed nothing.
So I went back to the web. And did a lot of hunting. And came across the fact that pinched nerves in the back can lead to this. I thought I'd give chiropractic a try. While I think practicers of chiropractic oversell it (loose up your spine, and cure all the disease of your body, kind of thing), it was useful for releasing the pressure on my nerve, and restoring the feeling in my toes. Several trips to my Doctor failed to bring this relief.
Regular stretches for my back, and I'm fine.
While at first I did have some hypochondria, in the end, it helped me solve a problem that my Doctor failed to.
As a long term, and formerly avid fan of SlashDot, I agree the dups are getting way out of hand, for such a simple problem to solve.
/. runs the risk of a competing site, carring the same stories more or less (even with "as posted on /." stories :)), but with a shade more editorial care (that is, "some"). It would take much to use Slashcode, get a competing site up, reference it from /. (since people are free to post here), and draw a lot of traffic away from /.
I think
Come on editors, read the f'ing stories on your own site; that's all it would take to avoid dups, wouldn't it???
Imagine if such a planet were habitable (that is, a planet with three suns). Think about how much of our human existence is dictated by the cycles of our single sun. I wonder how different things would be with three suns.
While it undoubtedly has effects, whether or not our particular solar cycle is key to our particular existence is hard to say. Consider life did/does exist and evolve closer to the poles, as well, where days and nights last months (half the year, at the extreme), so a daily light/dark warm/cold cycle may not indeed be crucial to life on earth.
Younger readers might not remember much (or anything) about OS/2 and the history behind it.
This is my understanding, anyone correct me if I'm wrong on some points, please:
Microsoft developed OS/2 for IBM, as a sort of next generation operating system. And it was; it was fast, efficient, good looking, responsive, easy to develop under, with a much cleaner API than Win32.
I'm not sure if Microsoft sold OS/2 itself, but I seem to vaguely remember that there was a Microsoft version of it, as well as an IBM version of it, with only minor differences. It's my recollection that all indications were that Microsoft was going to put its weight behind OS/2.
After getting IBM heavily committed to it, they turned around and worked on their own, incompatible, equivalent (NT). It really was quite a screw job on the part of Microsoft to intentionally lead IBM astray, in my view. A faily anti-competitive way to weild their growing clout.
Wikipedia has some interesting history on it.
Genuine question: why do they need to lift off in daylight?
Exactly. In Armageddon, they launched at night; in fact, they launched *two* shuttles at the same time at night. Trivial stuff...
I agree the security around the release of a children's book is inane. It seems solely designed to create hype about the security itself.
And doesn't anyone think that the small "leak" might itself be a publicity stunt, to get another few front page articles on CNN? That is far more valuable monetarily than the cost of any supposed leak. And showing the publishers doing good by offering signed copies, also adds to the PR.
I agree the secrit around a children's book is inane.
But doesn't this just smell of an intentional publicity stunt? Great way to get another couple of front page stories on CNN.
The hardware speed has finally caught up to the software, and all those "cool features" like handwriting recognition finally actually work well enough to be useful. Palms have gotten larger, and PocketPCs have gotten smaller, so size is no longer an issue for me. For the first time, I've found that I can be as productive with my iPAQ as I can with a similar Palm device.
.CAB file separately from the Windows installer .EXE), and the fact you really do need to charge it every day, instead of every couple of weeks.
I think this comment really captures my feelings about it. I've always had both, and used both at different times, but the greater functionality (or at least the *potential* of greater functionality) from the iPaq/HP stuff, always enchanted me more.
Since my toddler flushed my wonderfully small Clie (yes, flushed; after querying where it went, he pointed to the toilet and made a big gesture with his arms, and said "fwushed awwaayyy!"), I went back to my iPaq full time, and have never looked back, after upgrading to a new model.
The one main difference seesm to be serious tie in to the windows platform (I wish more app developers distributed the installable
The battery life of the palms is very impressive as compared to the iPaq's, but with the discipline of plugging it in each night (with your cell phone, and other goodies), it's not that big a difference.
Hmmmm, I had a minimal Fedora 3 installation on a wonderful coLinux installation, which seldom gets updated packages, but I noticed zlib was updated the other day (via freshrpms, apt-get). Kinda surprised me that something as mundane as a compression library would need updating. But I'm guessing this is why, and several days before the news hits slashdot, awesome.
Right after I finish squishing the Wonder bread, my good man. Right after.
But we can't let ourselves be afraid, and deterred from shopping by these grocery vandals. If we do, then they will have won.
Not everyone has a computer (only 50%-75% do, say); but those that don't have other means to file their taxes.
Not everyone with a computer has windows (but 99% do); those that don't have other means to file their taxes.
While I still don't approve of this practice, and I believe that cross browser portability isn't *that* hard to achieve, especially for an important product like this, they are playing the numbers, and playing them reasonably..
It's the same deal with the online application for Canadian passports; I got a fair bit of the way through it with Opera, before I had to start over with IE. (And sure enough, at the start, there was an indication of IE required.)
But what happens when the good will runs out? New batteries are pretty expensive.
I worry about this, as well; for cars that yuppies will flip after two years, I guess it's not a problem (for the original buyer), but since these batteries will undoubtedly be very expensive to replace after any warrantees are up, I could see Prius and other hybrids being junked *far* earlier than a typical car, which could in the end be *worse* for the environment. (Rather like how many otherwise perfectly servicable laptops would still be around, but the cost of replacing a useless battery outweights the value of the laptop.)
Thoughts on this, anyone?
Very interesting parent post.
For those who are interested, commercial fishing licenses are similar (at least here on the east cost of Canada, probably elsewhere). They cost hundreds of thousands, people get mortgages to buy them so they can start the trade; they leave them to their hiers or sell them just as property, and there are a limited number given out.
It really was eye opening to see the equity committment required by the fishing trade, on top of the sizable cost of the boat and equipment; it surprised me that taxi licenses in New York are similar.
It's also a bit like the anti-virus world; anti-virus software isn't big on the Mac (is there even any?), because the system was designed right, and coded in a more solid fashion, than Windows.
With proper OS design/implementation/configuration, anti-virus software should be irrelevant; with proper TCP/IP design/implementation/configuration, firewalls should be irrelevant.
I've argued for ages, often on deaf ears, that firewalls should be unnecessary; they really are just hacks to dodge around buggy TCP/IP implementations or configurations. Get the stack solid, and allow it to be configured properly and easily, and a firewall is moot. I'd love for these to be some ancient mythology that I tell my grandchildren about...
DecNet sounds wonderful and all; without doing a lot of hunting, can someone summarize the technical aspects of the protocol/implementation that makes it so?
"Washing machine sized", they say. I'm lost, help me out here. That must be a tecchie unit of measurement that is only used internally by NASA or something. Can someone put that in terms of "Volkswagens" or "Libraries of Congress" for me?
Maybe the Unix "units" program will do it for me.
Let's see:
$ units
1989 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: washingmachine
You want: volkswagen
* 0.25
/ 4
You have: washingmachine
You want: librariesofcongress
* 0.0001
/ 10000
Ah, now I can visual it.
I think it's because Greenpeace, just like every other extremist organization (See also PETA), is full of complete whackos.
Yes, thank God for groups like SlashDot.
It totally blows away any geographical user interface ESRI or Autodesk or anyone else has. They should be embarrassed with their current ArcIMS and MapGuide products - such rudimentary interfaces and poor performance.
I don't know MapGuide, but as far as ESRI and others go, they're different kettles of fish. Google Earth is all about sizzle, flash, sexiness, and a degree of usefulness in that it can be a bit more intuitive way of looking at things.
ESRI and friends are all about precision, accuracy, more formal stuff. Google Earth isn't going to let you do accurate measurements and survey plans and stuff that the traditional GIS stuff will. It's the difference between a Cad-like precision, and drawing sexy real world texturemaps in a 3D engine.
For most people, the latter is cooler; for professionals, the former is more useful, and the latter is just a toy.
At least, I think that's a fair assessment.
Also, Google Earth and the like have the freedom of taking new-ish raster satellite photos and texture mapping them with 3D gaming technology.
Traditional GIS databases are typically historical dBase format vector data. Rendering that in real time 3D isn't terribly feasible today.
In the early 90's, I talked with RIM about potential employment. They had a low speed external modem using Mobitex (I think) that would hook to your serial port.
They didn't have the "killer app" for it at the time, but were very much in the mode of "let's be smart and figure out a good application for this technology." While that approach can often be puttnig the cart before the horse, they persisted, and it obviously paid off, hitting the sweet spot of using the lower speed bandwidth for the two-way pager-like always-on-but-not-quite-fully-online BlackBerry.
It really is a rare and excellent example of finding the right killer app for a given (and flexible, but seeming limited) technology. Having the technical wherewithal to put that in a small pager-like device (several years ago), obviously shows some real technical talents in their company, too.
I splurged on a Motorola V710 cell phone; blue tooth, MP3 player, camera, ringtones, etc..
However, Telus followed Verizon's lead, and offered a crippled version of the phone. Even something as simple as sending an sound file or contacts via bluetooth wasn't possible.
The cell phone providers want you to send data to the phone over *their* charging network, not over a free network (bluetooth). It is really hampering convergence, in my opinion.
There are hacks for a lot of crippled platforms, but having to find a bootleg foreign ROM and reflash your phone is a bit extreme just to get a feature that was designed in by the manufacturer, but disabled by the provider.
This is actually a great argument for an *open* Cell/PDA platform. No silly crippling possible. I'd buy one, and choose a provider based upon the lack of such crippling ability.
While it's cool to grab dirt cheap drives, I would think that if this is running 24/7, the impact on power costs and heat added to the room, would make this less cost effective long term. Also, I bet it's a lot noisier than just grabbing a few 300g drives and RAID-5'ing them for .6T storage. Also, with that many drives (and older ones), there's a lot more points of failure.
For example, we think mirrors flip you around left to right. Well...it's just as correct to think they've flipped you around up to down.
:)
Actually the reason we see mirrors as flipping left and right, but not up and down is an interesting one. It's more to do with our symantics of "left" and "right" being more variable than "up" and "down."
"Up" and "Down" are relative to the earth and gravity, which doesn't typipcally change much
"Left" and "Right" are with reference to the viewer. Our left is still "that same direction over there" to the person we see in the mirror, but because we imagine that person in the mirror as having a "left" and "right" of his own, relative to his own virtual body, things do seem "reversed." Again, mainly symantics than anything too heavily perceptual.
Hoag's Object [hubblesite.org]. So unusual they call it an object!
Okay, admit it, you hesitated before following that mysterious link about a ring-related object...