OSS is a choice, you are free to reject it without penalty. VS Communism is enforced by the barrel of a gun, dissidents get killed.
More specifically, I think, communism is typically enforced by police and/or an army accountable to a long term centralised authority that cannot easily be replaced by the people it governs, and is therefore open to be rife with corruption over time.
Open source has no central leaders or police force, and relies on the legal system and enforcement agencies of the regions in which it is used. Usually, at least so far, this means some form of democracy.
The article appears to be speaking about diameter.
If you're keen to find out about stars with the largest mass, you could start with Eta Carinae. It's extremely massive and unstable, and came to everyone's attention when it was noticed to be rapidly fluctuating in brightness over the past hundred or so years. It's also close enough that there's arguably a theoretical possibility that we could be in danger if it decides to go any time soon, although it's probably not worth worrying about. Not from any explosion, of course, but if it were to fire gamma rays in our direction then we might have problems, for instance.
I'm not sure what the word is now, but at one point in recent history the mass of Eta Carinae had been empirically measured to be more than what had been considered theoretically possible. In any case, it's very close to the boundary of the most massive that a star could possibly be without collapsing in some way.
As a somehow related side note, eta-carinae also happens to be what I decided to name my Dell Inspiron when I set it up a few months ago.
The non-specialized robot worker will usher new era upon mankind. The think is, in couple of decades we are running out of work for people without college decree. The robots will remove manufacturing jobs and ever expanding self-service industry will cut out jobs from the service sector.
Don't forget that there's an entirely different category of qualified work that (usually) doesn't involve or require a degree, but is still more complex than unqualified. I can't speak for the USA, but in New Zealand we currently have a serious shortage of tradespeople, who generally have non-university qualifications or have simply learned through apprenticeships. (College is mostly referred to as university in NZ.)
It's not unqualified work that we have a shortage of, but it's certainly all the sorts of practical skill types of work that universities don't teach. For instance, builders, plumbers, electricians, general home maintenance, and so on, are all very understaffed. It'll be a long time before robots could hope to fill any of those roles. The existing tradespeople can't find enough apprentices to fill the gaps, and hiring them is becoming more and more expensive because there aren't enough to go around.
This is almost certainly a direct result of the local government and others in society, in the last couple of decades, having encouraged everyone to get a degree. School children were brain-fed that if they didn't go to university and get a degree after school, it'd be very difficult to find a decent job. Local universities have been flooded with students who would probably do better somewhere else. My local university in particular seems to have turned its commerce faculty into a revolving door graduate production line, and it's as hard as ever to get most degree-qualified jobs because there are so many applicants.
It's probably always going to be difficult these days for anyone with no expertise in anything to find decent work in an industrial or information age society. This doesn't necessarily imply the need for university qualification, or for any formal training, though.
That is pretty much the entire fallacy of their argument. They are claiming that piracy has cost them millions/billions in potential profits, which is something that they never actually "had" to lose in the first place.
I don't exactly think the world of the recording industry, and it's a good point that there's a huge fallacy in their argument. I don't think it's a very serious one because most people in the financial world probably consider it a loss if they were expecting money and it doesn't come, and it's getting very picky to start complaining otherwise. Whether or not that was because of piracy is much more contentious.
If we're going to talk about fallacies, however, it should also be acknowledged that pointing out a fallacy doesn't exactly disprove the recording industry's claim that it's making less money than it should be in a fair market. (Trying to prove it isn't easy, either, and the recording industry isn't better than anyone else.)
A profit doesn't automatically mean increased sales. It could as easily mean that costs have been cut, possibly even as a reaction to forward thinking about whatever effect piracy is having. Realistically, most businesses simply have to aim for a profit whether they think it matches their ideals or not. It may also mean that money has been gained some other way such as through partnerships or creative accounting.
It's a fallacy in itself, however, to start suggesting that just because a profit has still been made, piracy isn't having an unfair effect on the industry... which is what the grandparent and a variety of other people seem to be claiming.
I despise the way that the bulk of the recording industry works, and the amount of FUD that they tend to spread in attempts to get themselves noticed. But there's so much FUD going on in both directions that it's often even hard to tell if there's credible evidence either way. Wherever that evidence is, though, this isn't it.
Exactly, people complain about XP's startup time as it is, now they want to host all their apps and the OS on a network drive at the ISP's head end? Why does this make more sense? Users can simply still run a virus that will just fsck their files over the network drive.
I agree strongly with some points of this article, such as that not everyone wants to be an administrator. I think the author missed some important ideas, though, and seems to've merely jumped on the lightweight applications bandwagon thta's been around for the last several years. The article suggests that many applications will be able to move to the server side. That's already happening, of course particularly with ideas such as webmail... the interfaces for which are becoming quite advanced.
This may be possible and it may be feasible, but I think it's at least as likely that a strong market could develop for remote administration for home PC's.
It's common to see departments within companies and universities with lots of PC's that are administered remotely, both Windows and unix-like systems... Unix systems, in particular, have been remotely administerable for decades. At the university where I'm a student, the NetBSD workstations that we have are largely locked down. We can install software under certain limitations, such as in home directories, but the core of each workstation and the backup procedures are locked, centralised, and run by other administrators.
With high bandwidth, there's not a lot of reason why the administrators have to be nearby. It should be quite easy to provide a home user with a locked down workstation that they can use for web access, email, perhaps word processing and so on... and all of these applications can be locally installed, but locked down to the user. As long as they leave their network cable plugged in, it can be administered, updated and backed up remotely by people who are competant. (It'd be prudent to throw in a physical security clause, requiring that the user doesn't whack their PC with a sledge hammer, and so on.)
Perhaps the user wants a spreadsheet application installed on their home computer. If so, they can phone up the admin company and request it, possibly paying a nominal fee for the service.
The applications are still installed and run locally, but they're locked down in ways that prevent the users from breaking things. I know several people who'd absolutely love to have this sort of service. They'd be able to concentrate on just using their PC for what they want, without having to deal with or care about the frustrating administration problems like viruses, worms, spyware, and so on.
Sure, a user can't install local software easily. If it's reasonable, though, a good administration service provider might provide it anyway. Children might want to install other software themselves, but lots of people don't have children and lots of other people would simply prefer that their children weren't able to install certain things that they currently do.
Anyway, I think this is one of the huge benefits of high bandwidth connections that is being overlooked, including by this article. It makes it feasible for people not to have to install and look after their own software on the PC in their home, because somebody else can. It also makes the operating system even more of a commodity, because somebody else has to deal with installing the applications rather than the user, and somebody else can deal with all the complexities of making the applications understandable and usable by a user.
The news has several stories about a fairly new comet named Comet Machholz discovered by Don Machholz.
It's been quite bright (for a comet) in southern hemisphere skies for about a month now, and it's certainly worth going out to look at. I went out to look at it (from where I live in New Zealand) on December 11th. It was very easy to find in binoculars then (although I'm an amateur astronomer)... that was about mag 5.5. I haven't had a chance to see it since then because of bad weather.
If it's approaching mag 3.5 as the article suggests, it's getting very bright for a comet. If you're in reasonably unpolluted skies and know where to look, you might see it with an unaided eye. If you can't, though, you could probably see it in binoculars at least from low-lit suburban areas if you keep away from glare. Look with binoculars anyway, if you can, and you'll see a lot more. Frequently a reasonable pair of binoculars will reveal a lot more than a toy department store telescope.
If you're not sure where to look, keep in mind that you may also be able to contact a local observatory or astronomical society, and ask if they're having any open nights where you can have a look at it.
Don't expect anything really spectacular, of course. Most comets are a smudge on the background of the sky. Give your eyes time to adjust to what you're seeing, too. Like most thinks in amateur astronomy, you see more for the longer that you look at them. If you watch the comet over several nights, you may also see the appearence change quite a lot.
The linked yahoo article is quite misleading when it mentions brightness. It states that it's possible to see down to mag 6.5 in the most unpolluted skies. I think the author is confusing the difference between point sources of light, such as stars, and other sources. Comets are diffuse objects, and the comet magnitude describes the total amount of light that the surface emits. For this reason, a comet will appear significantly fainter than a star of the same magnitude. The exact difference depends on just how diffuse the comet is. Keep in mind, though, that even though it's bright, it's unlikely to leap out at you.
Donating money is the BEST thing that Europeans/North Americans can do at this point. There are numerous, experienced aid agencies on the scene who can evaluate and deploy resources as needed.
I was listening to a charity worker (Red Cross, I think) on the local radio recently. She was stressing that apart from the headache that non-monetary donations cause, one of the major reasons that they prefer money is that they can then use it to help the long term economy in the affected areas.
If a company or person donates lots of blankets, for instance, it may help in the immediate future if the blankets can be transported and so on. If money is donated, it can be used to purchase blankets locally to the disaster, whenever it's possible to do so. Beyond the immediate term, buying locally also helps to revive the economy after a disaster. It helps businesses to get re-established, but even after that the money often stays local, near the disaster, and is recycled again and again. If the agency brings in goods and services from overseas, whatever money is involved goes to an economy that doesn't need it as urgently. Unlike local purchases, the money is also gone as soon as it's spent.
As long as they can rake in more cash than they pay out, fines are useless.
I'm sure this is a problem, but it may also depend on the case and the specifics of how it was prosecuted. There doesn't seem to be enough information here to be sure.
Many countries' legal systems are designed so that money made from illegal activities is... well... illegal. The spammers might have been required to pay back any money that was made from spamming in addition to the fines, or it might have been included in the fine. (Or alternatively they might have ended up keeping it.)
Of course, if the prosecution was only able to specify a particular instance of spamming among many to prosecute on, the fine probably wouldn't have made a difference.
I think that Opera people should care most about fixing things in it's browser instead of adding features that nobody (95%) will use.
I think Opera Software should care about staying in business before it thinks about what most people will or won't use. In all fairness, Opera doesn't have 95% of the browser market to begin with. It never has, and it's extremely unlikely that it ever will.
Opera (the desktop browser, at least), has primarily been a browser of choice for niche groups of users. 5% is a niche market, and much less than 5% can easily be a niche market. If Opera happens to be the only browser that satisfactorily offers what those 5% or less happen to require, it'll be succesful enough to keep the business going.
Opera is now competing with Firefox, Konqueror (although not in Windows), and a host of others. Many of these new alternatives provide the satisfactory alternative to MSIE that Opera used to dominate in providing. Consequently, that market is diminishing, and it's probably not as viable any more because so many potential users can use something besides Opera. If Opera is to compete and survive, it's a sensible business decision to look for more points of difference to open new niche markets that aren't yet well catered for.
You might not personally like the way Opera's going, but chances are that you have plenty of alternative options anyway. Meanwhile, if you have a need for effective voice operation of a web browser as a particular group of people do, Opera might well be your first choice if they can pull it off.
Following up some of the links, I came across this post (scroll to the 7th post on that page, by 'madadmin'.)
The administrator of that forum is claiming that, based on their server logs, they have reason to believe that the person responsible for the attacks may be the same person who's recently posted a message to comp.lang.php that's titled 'eScrew OWNS YO!!!'. (See the posting for more details.)
From further posts, it looks as if the association has been made by looking at where the worms are coneverging. Can anyone who's currently dealing with this elaborate?
Automatic 'fastest route' calculation based on traffic densities. No more guessing, you can just rely on computer algorithms using real-time information.
I find this one quite interesting, because I'm wondering what might happen if everyone's trying to calculate the fastest route at the same time. I realise that it's very network related. Does the research exist to allow this type of calculation to work reliably?
Apart from having done some courses as part of my degree, I'm not an expert on networks or AI, but one of the problems that comes to mind is that drivers are nearly always going to be greedy, aren't they? Especially when they're not close enough to see or talk to each other, as is the case when planning a route.
To my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong), a lot of networking algorithms rely on protocols that involve one side stepping back through some randomized negotiation and letting the other use a resource first. Because this typically happens in the time frame of a fraction of a second, it doesn't usually affect human users to the point where they get annoyed.
But in traffic, anyone who's looking for the fastest route is likely to want to get there without having to step aside and let others use the roads for half an hour first. (Not counting the standard road rules, at least.) People will want the best situation every time, and everyone could quite easily lose by default through some variant of the prisoner's dilemma.
Do we actually have the knowledge in place to make fastest-route algrithms work successfully, if everyone's using them at the same time? Is it even possible?
That's a fair enough comment and I certainly wouldn't rule it out. It's almost certain that most people at Microsoft wouldn't bother to lift a finger if they were aware they'd broken OpenOffice compatablity. But for me at least, it's still at least as possible that Microsoft just changed something, and it's jumping to conclusions to assume it's been done deliberately.
if the OOo-made document opens in Office 97, 2000, and 2002, but breaks in 2003, then it *IS* MS's deliberate attempt to break compatability.
Not necessarily. It's quite possible that the OpenOffice developers have reverse-engineered them incorrectly in a way that is only noticed by later versions of MS Word.
An easy comparison would be that many web browsers display malformed HTML, but that doesn't make it correct HTML and there's no guarantee that future browsers will continue to display it in the future. It's quite possible that anyone having to reverse-engineer HTML without access to the specifications might mis-interpret something and end up generating something malformed that would be displayed by some earlier browser versions but not later ones.
Undocumented formats suck, but I think it's premature to suggest that Microsoft is deliberately targetting the reverse engineers just because a later version of Word fails to open something that earlier versions will open. I'm sure that certain people running Microsoft wouldn't care in the slightest about this incompatibility, and it's most likely the effect they're after with the closed format. It's also possible that the Microsoft developers simply adjusted part of their document model that the OpenOffice team had semantically mis-interpreted.
I didn't use the XMLHTTP object to do this, but I implemented something similar a while ago. I think I originally tried to use XMLHTTP (or possibly something similar), but ran into Mozilla security issues that were blocking it from being used without requiring the user to have a heap of trust-related things set up in a friendly way. (On the other hand, I didn't go to great lengths to figure out if I was using it properly.)
The trick I used, which I borrowed from kuro5hin and it's dynamic comment fetching, was to use a hidden iframe element in the page.
Essentially you just put an iframe on the page with style=display:none (or perhaps just create one), set the location property, let it fetch the page. Then you can grab the DOM or text from it and do what you like with it. It's hacky and so obviously you have to be careful not to break things, but it's an alternative approach in some cases you might run into where XMLHTTP isn't properly supported.
It sounds high to me. Species-level extinctions occur ever hundred million years or so. So in a 100-year period, I figure a one-in-a-million shot of getting wiped out.
It's a shame that he didn't say how it was calculated, and I wonder if he's done it based on some statistic like the total number of major impacts estimated on Earth over the last X-billion years. If so, it could mean several things.
For instance, one thing that we know is that there were a lot of impacts on the Earth early on, when the Solar System was young. There was a lot more zooming around at the time, so it shouldn't have been terribly unexpected.
We also know that impacts tend to come in batches. For instance, whenever the Sun passes near enough to another star for some significant-enough gravitational influence to occur, the orbits of a lot more comets and asteroids than usual will end up being disrupted, often falling inwards. The thousands or millions of years following an event like this might yield many more impacts than usual, but there's nothing to suggest that we're going through one of these phases right now.
If past events are all spread out evenly, then perhaps there actually is a 1 in 455 chance that each individual being will be wiped out in randomly selected 100-year block. It's not exactly a representative statistic, though, because among other things we're not in a randomly selected block. More likely at any given time, it'd be much less than that or much more than that. Considering we've been around for at least the past tens of thousands of years, I'm willing to bet that we're in a much quieter phase than what he's trying to suggest.
Personally I think that before doing anything, it's at least as important to locate and document as many near-earth objects as we possibly can so that we have a much better idea of what the real likeliness of such an impact is. Maybe space travel is a good idea and it's almost certainly inevitable as long as we don't kill ourselves first. But there's no point panicing about saving civilisation if all the fears of civilisation being wiped out are based on flawed and unrepresentative information. The first colonists we send anywhere will probably be much more likely to die out than anyone on Earth, in any case. We've survived tens of thousands of years, and the extra few it will take to finish documenting the solar system isn't likely to make much difference.
Of course, if you care primarily about your own life rather civilisation, then it's probably a moot point. Chances are that you have similar chances of being killed by a big meteorite impact or something else big, no matter where in the Solar System you happen to be.
Interesting that the bug allows a malicious site to take over a popup from a "trusted" site. You'd think these places that want you to trust them wouldn't rely on popups. Go figure.
I don't think it's all that unusual for trusted sites to use popups. Popups on the web are virtually all advertising and intended to get in the way, and so on. It's no wonder that people hate them, because they don't offer anything. When a popup is actually used in a useful and predictible way, though, it's not quite as bad.
I can certainly see some internet banking software using popups for some things, for instance... such sites are likely to be trusted sites. Lots of web applications that are used in-house and often on intranets also make use of popups for various things. They'll also be running in a trusted state for much of the time.
Woah, control yourself. I actually found it amusing (albeit misleading), despite your comment.
Why is it so accepted to call someone an idiot just because they make a mistake? There's such a thing as constructive criticism, and it's possible to comment on something without acting like a jerk while doing it.
If the earlier poster was deliberately provoking it or if you were a regular troll then I could understand it and ignore it, but you've gone out of your way to also correct what was said. Slashdot's great for conversation with tech-minded people and that's what keeps me here, but all that fostering this attitude does is to make potentially interesting slashdot conversation appear even more childish and immature to anyone who reads it.
It's quite convenient for MS to sit and see what works, then create their own, and with their dominance in desktop OS, they can easily claim a huge chunk of the desktop-suite market share overnight.
I actually have mixed feelings about this one. Microsoft have included some kind of Find tool in Windows almost since Windows was first created -- or at least since Windows 95.
Sure, this is desktop search rather than file search. It has a few more features, it looks a bit different, and it's a bit more intelligent. But Microsoft have been trying to do this with their find tool and make it more natural for a long time... at least back to the time when they changed from their standard dialog box to a more web-like look and feel. Someone else may have got there first, but I don't think that's a clear and definite reason to prevent Microsoft from bundling their own effort.
I can understand it for something like a web browser, for which Microsoft only embedded in their operating system to lock out Netscape and gain control. But a desktop find tool? That belongs as part of a decent desktop. I'd expect some kind of find tool to be included in KDE and Gnome, and I'd expect it in Windows. Perhaps it's not part of a raw operating system, but Windows has always been an OS plus desktop manager. (Love it or hate it that way.) The competitors knew what they were competing against, and decided to go ahead anyway.
You have to draw a line somewhere, and I don't think it's enough just to say that any other business might be damaged no matter where, when or how it formed. Should Microsoft stop bundling its own menu widgets if someone else builds a third party business out of it? What about all the virus protection companies whose businesses would collapse if Microsoft successfully tighened its security? Surely it's silly to claim that Microsoft should be legally required to continue releasing a shoddy OS so that others don't go out of business.
I'm not sure exactly where to draw the line, but to me it seems that a desktop search tool would be borderline at best. It seems like a logical component to bundle with any desktop environment, which Windows is.
I'm not an office software developer, but I read somewhere that interpreting file formats is a relatively easy part of such applications. A much more difficult part is the adaption of somebody else's document model to your own document model.
This is why, for instance (I think), the AbiWord team weren't able to easily take the OpenOffice Word Document filter and apply it to Abiword ages ago. Much of the reverse engineering for the file format had been done in OpenOffice, but simply translating an MS Word or OpenOffice document model to an AbiWord document model is a lot of work. I'm not sure what stage they're all at now -- probably much further than they were a year or two ago.
Of course, rather than try to translate the model internally, it may be possible to write an external XSL translation between OpenOffice and AbiWord formats. Not being intensely familiar with either format, I wouldn't know how complicated this might be.
it's nice to see competition in this market... but how many do we really need?
Personally I'm convinced that it's just a military decision. We'll probably have just enough so that every major military power is satisfied that it has suitable control over at least one. China would probably have its own system if it possibly could.
European countries and the USA are hardly about to declare war on one another, but they've had enough disagreement lately. It's entirely possible that they will disagree about who to attack, and either side might feel threatened if the other holds control over its ability to effectively wage war on someone else. Plus, now the EU has another barganing chip for dealing with others. Third party countries (eg. India/Pakistan) can barter with someone other the USA if and when they want to launch their missiles at each other.
I think you're on to a very good point with this, and my feeling is that it applies to more people than just children. I've suspected for a while, at least for myself, that my productivity was a lot more focussed some time ago when I was a DOS user and it was only possible to do one thing at a time.
Windows did away with this somewhat, and now that I use mostly Linux and NetBSD, I frequently have lots of windows open on lots of desktops. Switching to a particular task is easy, but so is switching away from it. It makes it much easier to become distracted. You could be running a terminal application to access a BBS or chat with people, or you could be editing a text file, but not doing both at the same time. If you wanted to run a game, you'd need to save and shut down whatever else you were doing.
In my case, it's probably more a matter of me trying to just train or force myself to work on what I'm supposed to be working on. Still, if I had to stop everything I was doing to check my email, I don't think I'd waste as much time flipping back to my mail client and answering things. If I were a parent, I'd perhaps be wondering if there was a tool out there that might restrict how much another user (such as a child) was allowed to do at any one time.
It might be difficult to develop such a tool in the modern environment, unfortunately. In single user days, many applications were designed with the idea that users might need to stop them and re-start them at short notice. These days, however, more applications are intended to be run in-tandem with other applications, and often to not be stopped very often. eg. Mail programs often invoke web browsers for various types of content, and office suites often require switching between applications.
It'll be easier to parse, but it won't be any more accurate.
I think it depends on your definition of accuracy. For me at least, I don't usually bother with the specific predictions for anything more than this afternoon, and then usually only having checked what that forecast is based on. I think specific predictions are only provided to satisfy the people who demand definite and specific information without detail and regardless of accuracy, anyway. If you don't judge weather reports by the exact timing of events, and instead utilise the information they can provide about what's actually going on in the weather system, you might find them to be much more trustworthy and useful.
I think the most useful part of weather reports is the contextual information provided with satellite pictures and diagrams about where all of the fronts, high and low pressure zones, and so on, happen to be. It's not always possible to predict when a particular front will roll over causing a thunderstorm, but it's often possible to predict that it'll happen at about the time a high pressure zone has moved out of the way to let it through, which might be quite likely to happen "within a day", for instance.
Changeability of weather varies in different parts of the world, and perhaps we get a lot more of this information here than is handed out in other parts of the world. (New Zealand is apparently one of the more volatile areas in terms of changing weather.) Unfortunately the only overseas weather reports I'm familiar with are global reports on international TV channels like CNN, and they give virtually no contextual information besides current weather and temperature.
Are local reports in other places much more detailed about the actual weather system, or do they just dish out specifics without context day after day?
Slashdot Mirror
More specifically, I think, communism is typically enforced by police and/or an army accountable to a long term centralised authority that cannot easily be replaced by the people it governs, and is therefore open to be rife with corruption over time.
Open source has no central leaders or police force, and relies on the legal system and enforcement agencies of the regions in which it is used. Usually, at least so far, this means some form of democracy.
I very much liked the episodes of Reboot that I saw --- dumbing down for a children's program aside, what I saw of it had some very good writers.
I think my favourite segment was the satire of Gilbert & Sullivan's I am the very model of a modern major general . The revised lyrics are brilliant.
The article appears to be speaking about diameter.
If you're keen to find out about stars with the largest mass, you could start with Eta Carinae. It's extremely massive and unstable, and came to everyone's attention when it was noticed to be rapidly fluctuating in brightness over the past hundred or so years. It's also close enough that there's arguably a theoretical possibility that we could be in danger if it decides to go any time soon, although it's probably not worth worrying about. Not from any explosion, of course, but if it were to fire gamma rays in our direction then we might have problems, for instance.
I'm not sure what the word is now, but at one point in recent history the mass of Eta Carinae had been empirically measured to be more than what had been considered theoretically possible. In any case, it's very close to the boundary of the most massive that a star could possibly be without collapsing in some way.
As a somehow related side note, eta-carinae also happens to be what I decided to name my Dell Inspiron when I set it up a few months ago.
Don't forget that there's an entirely different category of qualified work that (usually) doesn't involve or require a degree, but is still more complex than unqualified. I can't speak for the USA, but in New Zealand we currently have a serious shortage of tradespeople, who generally have non-university qualifications or have simply learned through apprenticeships. (College is mostly referred to as university in NZ.)
It's not unqualified work that we have a shortage of, but it's certainly all the sorts of practical skill types of work that universities don't teach. For instance, builders, plumbers, electricians, general home maintenance, and so on, are all very understaffed. It'll be a long time before robots could hope to fill any of those roles. The existing tradespeople can't find enough apprentices to fill the gaps, and hiring them is becoming more and more expensive because there aren't enough to go around.
This is almost certainly a direct result of the local government and others in society, in the last couple of decades, having encouraged everyone to get a degree. School children were brain-fed that if they didn't go to university and get a degree after school, it'd be very difficult to find a decent job. Local universities have been flooded with students who would probably do better somewhere else. My local university in particular seems to have turned its commerce faculty into a revolving door graduate production line, and it's as hard as ever to get most degree-qualified jobs because there are so many applicants.
It's probably always going to be difficult these days for anyone with no expertise in anything to find decent work in an industrial or information age society. This doesn't necessarily imply the need for university qualification, or for any formal training, though.
I don't exactly think the world of the recording industry, and it's a good point that there's a huge fallacy in their argument. I don't think it's a very serious one because most people in the financial world probably consider it a loss if they were expecting money and it doesn't come, and it's getting very picky to start complaining otherwise. Whether or not that was because of piracy is much more contentious.
If we're going to talk about fallacies, however, it should also be acknowledged that pointing out a fallacy doesn't exactly disprove the recording industry's claim that it's making less money than it should be in a fair market. (Trying to prove it isn't easy, either, and the recording industry isn't better than anyone else.)
A profit doesn't automatically mean increased sales. It could as easily mean that costs have been cut, possibly even as a reaction to forward thinking about whatever effect piracy is having. Realistically, most businesses simply have to aim for a profit whether they think it matches their ideals or not. It may also mean that money has been gained some other way such as through partnerships or creative accounting.
It's a fallacy in itself, however, to start suggesting that just because a profit has still been made, piracy isn't having an unfair effect on the industry... which is what the grandparent and a variety of other people seem to be claiming.
I despise the way that the bulk of the recording industry works, and the amount of FUD that they tend to spread in attempts to get themselves noticed. But there's so much FUD going on in both directions that it's often even hard to tell if there's credible evidence either way. Wherever that evidence is, though, this isn't it.
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I hope they update it in time.
I agree strongly with some points of this article, such as that not everyone wants to be an administrator. I think the author missed some important ideas, though, and seems to've merely jumped on the lightweight applications bandwagon thta's been around for the last several years. The article suggests that many applications will be able to move to the server side. That's already happening, of course particularly with ideas such as webmail... the interfaces for which are becoming quite advanced.
This may be possible and it may be feasible, but I think it's at least as likely that a strong market could develop for remote administration for home PC's.
It's common to see departments within companies and universities with lots of PC's that are administered remotely, both Windows and unix-like systems... Unix systems, in particular, have been remotely administerable for decades. At the university where I'm a student, the NetBSD workstations that we have are largely locked down. We can install software under certain limitations, such as in home directories, but the core of each workstation and the backup procedures are locked, centralised, and run by other administrators.
With high bandwidth, there's not a lot of reason why the administrators have to be nearby. It should be quite easy to provide a home user with a locked down workstation that they can use for web access, email, perhaps word processing and so on... and all of these applications can be locally installed, but locked down to the user. As long as they leave their network cable plugged in, it can be administered, updated and backed up remotely by people who are competant. (It'd be prudent to throw in a physical security clause, requiring that the user doesn't whack their PC with a sledge hammer, and so on.)
Perhaps the user wants a spreadsheet application installed on their home computer. If so, they can phone up the admin company and request it, possibly paying a nominal fee for the service.
The applications are still installed and run locally, but they're locked down in ways that prevent the users from breaking things. I know several people who'd absolutely love to have this sort of service. They'd be able to concentrate on just using their PC for what they want, without having to deal with or care about the frustrating administration problems like viruses, worms, spyware, and so on.
Sure, a user can't install local software easily. If it's reasonable, though, a good administration service provider might provide it anyway. Children might want to install other software themselves, but lots of people don't have children and lots of other people would simply prefer that their children weren't able to install certain things that they currently do.
Anyway, I think this is one of the huge benefits of high bandwidth connections that is being overlooked, including by this article. It makes it feasible for people not to have to install and look after their own software on the PC in their home, because somebody else can. It also makes the operating system even more of a commodity, because somebody else has to deal with installing the applications rather than the user, and somebody else can deal with all the complexities of making the applications understandable and usable by a user.
It's been quite bright (for a comet) in southern hemisphere skies for about a month now, and it's certainly worth going out to look at. I went out to look at it (from where I live in New Zealand) on December 11th. It was very easy to find in binoculars then (although I'm an amateur astronomer)... that was about mag 5.5. I haven't had a chance to see it since then because of bad weather.
If it's approaching mag 3.5 as the article suggests, it's getting very bright for a comet. If you're in reasonably unpolluted skies and know where to look, you might see it with an unaided eye. If you can't, though, you could probably see it in binoculars at least from low-lit suburban areas if you keep away from glare. Look with binoculars anyway, if you can, and you'll see a lot more. Frequently a reasonable pair of binoculars will reveal a lot more than a toy department store telescope.
If you're not sure where to look, keep in mind that you may also be able to contact a local observatory or astronomical society, and ask if they're having any open nights where you can have a look at it.
Don't expect anything really spectacular, of course. Most comets are a smudge on the background of the sky. Give your eyes time to adjust to what you're seeing, too. Like most thinks in amateur astronomy, you see more for the longer that you look at them. If you watch the comet over several nights, you may also see the appearence change quite a lot.
The linked yahoo article is quite misleading when it mentions brightness. It states that it's possible to see down to mag 6.5 in the most unpolluted skies. I think the author is confusing the difference between point sources of light, such as stars, and other sources. Comets are diffuse objects, and the comet magnitude describes the total amount of light that the surface emits. For this reason, a comet will appear significantly fainter than a star of the same magnitude. The exact difference depends on just how diffuse the comet is. Keep in mind, though, that even though it's bright, it's unlikely to leap out at you.
I was listening to a charity worker (Red Cross, I think) on the local radio recently. She was stressing that apart from the headache that non-monetary donations cause, one of the major reasons that they prefer money is that they can then use it to help the long term economy in the affected areas.
If a company or person donates lots of blankets, for instance, it may help in the immediate future if the blankets can be transported and so on. If money is donated, it can be used to purchase blankets locally to the disaster, whenever it's possible to do so. Beyond the immediate term, buying locally also helps to revive the economy after a disaster. It helps businesses to get re-established, but even after that the money often stays local, near the disaster, and is recycled again and again. If the agency brings in goods and services from overseas, whatever money is involved goes to an economy that doesn't need it as urgently. Unlike local purchases, the money is also gone as soon as it's spent.
I'm sure this is a problem, but it may also depend on the case and the specifics of how it was prosecuted. There doesn't seem to be enough information here to be sure.
Many countries' legal systems are designed so that money made from illegal activities is... well... illegal. The spammers might have been required to pay back any money that was made from spamming in addition to the fines, or it might have been included in the fine. (Or alternatively they might have ended up keeping it.)
Of course, if the prosecution was only able to specify a particular instance of spamming among many to prosecute on, the fine probably wouldn't have made a difference.
I think Opera Software should care about staying in business before it thinks about what most people will or won't use. In all fairness, Opera doesn't have 95% of the browser market to begin with. It never has, and it's extremely unlikely that it ever will.
Opera (the desktop browser, at least), has primarily been a browser of choice for niche groups of users. 5% is a niche market, and much less than 5% can easily be a niche market. If Opera happens to be the only browser that satisfactorily offers what those 5% or less happen to require, it'll be succesful enough to keep the business going.
Opera is now competing with Firefox, Konqueror (although not in Windows), and a host of others. Many of these new alternatives provide the satisfactory alternative to MSIE that Opera used to dominate in providing. Consequently, that market is diminishing, and it's probably not as viable any more because so many potential users can use something besides Opera. If Opera is to compete and survive, it's a sensible business decision to look for more points of difference to open new niche markets that aren't yet well catered for.
You might not personally like the way Opera's going, but chances are that you have plenty of alternative options anyway. Meanwhile, if you have a need for effective voice operation of a web browser as a particular group of people do, Opera might well be your first choice if they can pull it off.
Following up some of the links, I came across this post (scroll to the 7th post on that page, by 'madadmin'.)
The administrator of that forum is claiming that, based on their server logs, they have reason to believe that the person responsible for the attacks may be the same person who's recently posted a message to comp.lang.php that's titled 'eScrew OWNS YO!!!'. (See the posting for more details.)
From further posts, it looks as if the association has been made by looking at where the worms are coneverging. Can anyone who's currently dealing with this elaborate?
I find this one quite interesting, because I'm wondering what might happen if everyone's trying to calculate the fastest route at the same time. I realise that it's very network related. Does the research exist to allow this type of calculation to work reliably?
Apart from having done some courses as part of my degree, I'm not an expert on networks or AI, but one of the problems that comes to mind is that drivers are nearly always going to be greedy, aren't they? Especially when they're not close enough to see or talk to each other, as is the case when planning a route.
To my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong), a lot of networking algorithms rely on protocols that involve one side stepping back through some randomized negotiation and letting the other use a resource first. Because this typically happens in the time frame of a fraction of a second, it doesn't usually affect human users to the point where they get annoyed.
But in traffic, anyone who's looking for the fastest route is likely to want to get there without having to step aside and let others use the roads for half an hour first. (Not counting the standard road rules, at least.) People will want the best situation every time, and everyone could quite easily lose by default through some variant of the prisoner's dilemma.
Do we actually have the knowledge in place to make fastest-route algrithms work successfully, if everyone's using them at the same time? Is it even possible?
Especially considering that even the world that adopted most of the metric system still hasn't adopted Metric Time.
That's a fair enough comment and I certainly wouldn't rule it out. It's almost certain that most people at Microsoft wouldn't bother to lift a finger if they were aware they'd broken OpenOffice compatablity. But for me at least, it's still at least as possible that Microsoft just changed something, and it's jumping to conclusions to assume it's been done deliberately.
But yeah. It's all hypothetical, as you say.
Not necessarily. It's quite possible that the OpenOffice developers have reverse-engineered them incorrectly in a way that is only noticed by later versions of MS Word.
An easy comparison would be that many web browsers display malformed HTML, but that doesn't make it correct HTML and there's no guarantee that future browsers will continue to display it in the future. It's quite possible that anyone having to reverse-engineer HTML without access to the specifications might mis-interpret something and end up generating something malformed that would be displayed by some earlier browser versions but not later ones.
Undocumented formats suck, but I think it's premature to suggest that Microsoft is deliberately targetting the reverse engineers just because a later version of Word fails to open something that earlier versions will open. I'm sure that certain people running Microsoft wouldn't care in the slightest about this incompatibility, and it's most likely the effect they're after with the closed format. It's also possible that the Microsoft developers simply adjusted part of their document model that the OpenOffice team had semantically mis-interpreted.
I didn't use the XMLHTTP object to do this, but I implemented something similar a while ago. I think I originally tried to use XMLHTTP (or possibly something similar), but ran into Mozilla security issues that were blocking it from being used without requiring the user to have a heap of trust-related things set up in a friendly way. (On the other hand, I didn't go to great lengths to figure out if I was using it properly.)
The trick I used, which I borrowed from kuro5hin and it's dynamic comment fetching, was to use a hidden iframe element in the page.
Essentially you just put an iframe on the page with style=display:none (or perhaps just create one), set the location property, let it fetch the page. Then you can grab the DOM or text from it and do what you like with it. It's hacky and so obviously you have to be careful not to break things, but it's an alternative approach in some cases you might run into where XMLHTTP isn't properly supported.
It's a shame that he didn't say how it was calculated, and I wonder if he's done it based on some statistic like the total number of major impacts estimated on Earth over the last X-billion years. If so, it could mean several things.
For instance, one thing that we know is that there were a lot of impacts on the Earth early on, when the Solar System was young. There was a lot more zooming around at the time, so it shouldn't have been terribly unexpected.
We also know that impacts tend to come in batches. For instance, whenever the Sun passes near enough to another star for some significant-enough gravitational influence to occur, the orbits of a lot more comets and asteroids than usual will end up being disrupted, often falling inwards. The thousands or millions of years following an event like this might yield many more impacts than usual, but there's nothing to suggest that we're going through one of these phases right now.
If past events are all spread out evenly, then perhaps there actually is a 1 in 455 chance that each individual being will be wiped out in randomly selected 100-year block. It's not exactly a representative statistic, though, because among other things we're not in a randomly selected block. More likely at any given time, it'd be much less than that or much more than that. Considering we've been around for at least the past tens of thousands of years, I'm willing to bet that we're in a much quieter phase than what he's trying to suggest.
Personally I think that before doing anything, it's at least as important to locate and document as many near-earth objects as we possibly can so that we have a much better idea of what the real likeliness of such an impact is. Maybe space travel is a good idea and it's almost certainly inevitable as long as we don't kill ourselves first. But there's no point panicing about saving civilisation if all the fears of civilisation being wiped out are based on flawed and unrepresentative information. The first colonists we send anywhere will probably be much more likely to die out than anyone on Earth, in any case. We've survived tens of thousands of years, and the extra few it will take to finish documenting the solar system isn't likely to make much difference.
Of course, if you care primarily about your own life rather civilisation, then it's probably a moot point. Chances are that you have similar chances of being killed by a big meteorite impact or something else big, no matter where in the Solar System you happen to be.
I don't think it's all that unusual for trusted sites to use popups. Popups on the web are virtually all advertising and intended to get in the way, and so on. It's no wonder that people hate them, because they don't offer anything. When a popup is actually used in a useful and predictible way, though, it's not quite as bad.
I can certainly see some internet banking software using popups for some things, for instance... such sites are likely to be trusted sites. Lots of web applications that are used in-house and often on intranets also make use of popups for various things. They'll also be running in a trusted state for much of the time.
Woah, control yourself. I actually found it amusing (albeit misleading), despite your comment.
Why is it so accepted to call someone an idiot just because they make a mistake? There's such a thing as constructive criticism, and it's possible to comment on something without acting like a jerk while doing it.
If the earlier poster was deliberately provoking it or if you were a regular troll then I could understand it and ignore it, but you've gone out of your way to also correct what was said. Slashdot's great for conversation with tech-minded people and that's what keeps me here, but all that fostering this attitude does is to make potentially interesting slashdot conversation appear even more childish and immature to anyone who reads it.
Yeah I know. This is slashdot. Whatever.
I actually have mixed feelings about this one. Microsoft have included some kind of Find tool in Windows almost since Windows was first created -- or at least since Windows 95.
Sure, this is desktop search rather than file search. It has a few more features, it looks a bit different, and it's a bit more intelligent. But Microsoft have been trying to do this with their find tool and make it more natural for a long time... at least back to the time when they changed from their standard dialog box to a more web-like look and feel. Someone else may have got there first, but I don't think that's a clear and definite reason to prevent Microsoft from bundling their own effort.
I can understand it for something like a web browser, for which Microsoft only embedded in their operating system to lock out Netscape and gain control. But a desktop find tool? That belongs as part of a decent desktop. I'd expect some kind of find tool to be included in KDE and Gnome, and I'd expect it in Windows. Perhaps it's not part of a raw operating system, but Windows has always been an OS plus desktop manager. (Love it or hate it that way.) The competitors knew what they were competing against, and decided to go ahead anyway.
You have to draw a line somewhere, and I don't think it's enough just to say that any other business might be damaged no matter where, when or how it formed. Should Microsoft stop bundling its own menu widgets if someone else builds a third party business out of it? What about all the virus protection companies whose businesses would collapse if Microsoft successfully tighened its security? Surely it's silly to claim that Microsoft should be legally required to continue releasing a shoddy OS so that others don't go out of business.
I'm not sure exactly where to draw the line, but to me it seems that a desktop search tool would be borderline at best. It seems like a logical component to bundle with any desktop environment, which Windows is.
I'm not an office software developer, but I read somewhere that interpreting file formats is a relatively easy part of such applications. A much more difficult part is the adaption of somebody else's document model to your own document model.
This is why, for instance (I think), the AbiWord team weren't able to easily take the OpenOffice Word Document filter and apply it to Abiword ages ago. Much of the reverse engineering for the file format had been done in OpenOffice, but simply translating an MS Word or OpenOffice document model to an AbiWord document model is a lot of work. I'm not sure what stage they're all at now -- probably much further than they were a year or two ago.
Of course, rather than try to translate the model internally, it may be possible to write an external XSL translation between OpenOffice and AbiWord formats. Not being intensely familiar with either format, I wouldn't know how complicated this might be.
Personally I'm convinced that it's just a military decision. We'll probably have just enough so that every major military power is satisfied that it has suitable control over at least one. China would probably have its own system if it possibly could.
European countries and the USA are hardly about to declare war on one another, but they've had enough disagreement lately. It's entirely possible that they will disagree about who to attack, and either side might feel threatened if the other holds control over its ability to effectively wage war on someone else. Plus, now the EU has another barganing chip for dealing with others. Third party countries (eg. India/Pakistan) can barter with someone other the USA if and when they want to launch their missiles at each other.
I think you're on to a very good point with this, and my feeling is that it applies to more people than just children. I've suspected for a while, at least for myself, that my productivity was a lot more focussed some time ago when I was a DOS user and it was only possible to do one thing at a time.
Windows did away with this somewhat, and now that I use mostly Linux and NetBSD, I frequently have lots of windows open on lots of desktops. Switching to a particular task is easy, but so is switching away from it. It makes it much easier to become distracted. You could be running a terminal application to access a BBS or chat with people, or you could be editing a text file, but not doing both at the same time. If you wanted to run a game, you'd need to save and shut down whatever else you were doing.
In my case, it's probably more a matter of me trying to just train or force myself to work on what I'm supposed to be working on. Still, if I had to stop everything I was doing to check my email, I don't think I'd waste as much time flipping back to my mail client and answering things. If I were a parent, I'd perhaps be wondering if there was a tool out there that might restrict how much another user (such as a child) was allowed to do at any one time.
It might be difficult to develop such a tool in the modern environment, unfortunately. In single user days, many applications were designed with the idea that users might need to stop them and re-start them at short notice. These days, however, more applications are intended to be run in-tandem with other applications, and often to not be stopped very often. eg. Mail programs often invoke web browsers for various types of content, and office suites often require switching between applications.
I think it depends on your definition of accuracy. For me at least, I don't usually bother with the specific predictions for anything more than this afternoon, and then usually only having checked what that forecast is based on. I think specific predictions are only provided to satisfy the people who demand definite and specific information without detail and regardless of accuracy, anyway. If you don't judge weather reports by the exact timing of events, and instead utilise the information they can provide about what's actually going on in the weather system, you might find them to be much more trustworthy and useful.
I think the most useful part of weather reports is the contextual information provided with satellite pictures and diagrams about where all of the fronts, high and low pressure zones, and so on, happen to be. It's not always possible to predict when a particular front will roll over causing a thunderstorm, but it's often possible to predict that it'll happen at about the time a high pressure zone has moved out of the way to let it through, which might be quite likely to happen "within a day", for instance.
Changeability of weather varies in different parts of the world, and perhaps we get a lot more of this information here than is handed out in other parts of the world. (New Zealand is apparently one of the more volatile areas in terms of changing weather.) Unfortunately the only overseas weather reports I'm familiar with are global reports on international TV channels like CNN, and they give virtually no contextual information besides current weather and temperature.
Are local reports in other places much more detailed about the actual weather system, or do they just dish out specifics without context day after day?