Speaking of huge databases of user preferences, iTunes knows every mp3 track you have, and even knows how much you like them, if you've gone through the trouble of rating them. It's only a matter of time before Apple, the company that licensed Amazon's One Click patent, enhances iTunes to use this user data to suggest music you might like, be it indie or mainstream.
According to this page both Washington DC and Toronto have the same 4-digit code: '8C Q8'
Seriously though, a huge benefit of the Zip5 code is that it's human comprehensible. Near numbers are near, and numbers are distributed by population density, not physical distance. It makes it much easier for all items in the '914xx' zip to go to the same routing center than AB AL-AK, AD AW-C4, etc going to one place.
The proposed system ignores the human checksum, and ignoring the fact that humans ultimately correct the course of most computer systems is a path filled with hubris and big flamy death.
The/. article claims that the US abolished selective availability three years ago, but that's not the case. They abolished the 'fuzzing' of resolution, so that ordinary joes could get 10-foot accuracy instead of 70, but that's not selective availability.
Selective availability is the capability of 'turning off' GPS in specific geographic regions during times of war or for any other reason. They did it in Afghanistan last year, and they can do it whenever and wherever they want, though it's on an incident by incident basis.
What went wrong? As I said, it's simply too complex a product, with too many interdependencies, for a single team and linear build to maintain a quality QA process.
yet still someone comes in here and starts making out that Microsoft have bad QA and the open source model is vastly superior. How sad.
I suppose I didn't state it clearly enough: I think Microsoft has GOOD QA, but that even with the BEST QA, there exists a product complexity level which, when exceeded, means that a distributed, ongoing, proactive QA system, such as that afforded by open source (or even Apple's bug/enhancement submission procedure) is a much better way to ensure a more consistantly stable product.
My bad. I read a really interesting comprehensive article on Microsoft's build and QA process for Windows NT a few months ago, and I just assumed that that was what the link pointed to. Now I wish I could find the article because it's something/.ers would love (if/. isn't where I found it in the first place).
All jokes aside, the amount of testing and the build process for NT is one of the most tightly organized and comprehensive testing methodologies in existence.
Rather than take 'miller time' pot shots at Microsoft, the real takeaway is the understanding that, no matter how rigorous the testing and build process, there is a complexity limit where a unified one-organization nightly fix-build-test model simply can't provide a product of suitable quality.
Better to acknowledge the best-of-breed methodology Microsoft uses to test their OSes, and conclude that while this breed works okay for applications, a world-class operating system needs peer review and distributed open source development to create a quality, secure product.
The tone of the article talks about shoot-from-the-hip developers acting irresponsibly, on impulse. They're taking a recognized and thoughtful practice and painting it as irresponsibility.
Monday is the best time to implement changes to most sites. The irresponsible coder implements on Friday, when errors might not be caught, or fixed, until the next working day, after a full weekend of downtime, bugginess, or insecure behavior.
But that wouldn't make for an interesting story. News flash: updating code often results in bugs that need to be fixed. When do the authors suggest we roll out new versions?
Heck, give six Elizabethans quills and ink and they'll probably make a mess too. The point is that if one of the six managed to type even two characters, then an infinite number could probably write shakespeare.
More to the point, when dealing with infinities, even probabilistic modifiers like 'probably' are meaningless. If it's at all feasable, then one of an infinite number would do it, even if they had to evolve out of the trees, invent tragedy and comedy, conquer England, and live in London to do so.
"Nasa along with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency have launched a towards Saturn"
Goddamn. They're spending our letters like they grow on trees. Sure, today they're just launching 'a', but tomorrow it'll be 'x', and then 't'. I want to know when they're planning on launching'u' and 'i' in to space...
Yes they have advertised.
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
TiVo's been advertising heavily in selected demographics. Mostly sports...
I've never thought their advertising did the service justice, but I heard from a TiVo marketing person two years ago that they cut back sharply on TV ads when Microsoft started hawking the Ultimate TV.
It turned out that the UTV commercials would get people to come to Circuit City, where they found they'd have to ditch their cable or satellite and get Dish Network to get to sue the UTV. When they got turned off on that idea, the salesperson would show them TiVo, which works equally well with satellite, cable, digital cable, or rabbit ears.
Every dollar Microsoft put into TV spots helped TiVo more than Microsoft. That's one of the reasons you don't see Ultimate TV advertised anymore. (Well, that and it sucked and is basically mothballed now).
TiVo does it right. Established companies are still partnering to make new hardware. You can't say that about webTV, U-TV, or ReplayTV.
" The default settings are such that you click "buy song" and it starts downloading."
Nope. The defaults ask you to enter your password, and also bring up a confirmation dialog box, both of which have 'dnot show me this again' checkboxes, to make it truly one-click. You won't accidentally buy music until you configure it that way.
That said, it is pretty damn addictive.
The good news is, for every person who's addicted, Apple gets $$. For every person who thinks DRM is shite, Apple doesn't lose any money. They can only win.
Streaming doesn't mean copying. A streamed song can only be listened to, not saved, or passed on again. It's just like shoutcast (except there aren't tools (yet) for pirating the stream to your hard disk).
A lot of people have natural immunity to brand new diseases. That's why it's called natural immunity. If they got the immunity from having had the disease, they have what's called acquired immunity.
For many diseases there are people who, no matter how many times they're exposed, will not become ill with that disease. That's what natural immunity means.
As for 'there are already 6 mutations of SARS', can you back that up with a link? At first glance there are a few doctors who are speculating that it might be undergoing its first mutation, as some SARS patients are exhibiting intestinal problems as well as respiratory, but 6 distinctly different strains? Please cut down on the FUD, or back it up.
I've stayed out of this thread because I believe people are doing a good job of identifying the ways that SARS is a bigger threat than some would like to think, but this post is stupid.
"The flu is always going to be the flu, its not getting stronger."
The flu changes every year. Some years it's mild, and other years it's particularly deadly, killing literally millions of people. In any given year there are 2-3 different strains of flu and virologists use contagion models to distribute the vaccine for the most likely 'dominant strain'.
"SARS as it spreads becomes STRONGER. Meaning the more immune systems it kills, the better it becomes at killing"
This is sensationalistic rubbish. What kind of evidence do you have for this? SARS isn't a DnD character. It's a virus.
As for the spread factor, there's one crucial number that nobody knows, and that's what percent of the population has a natural immunity to the disease. Nobody has a guess as to that number until there are many more documented infections, and that number is vital to understanding how the virus will spread.
Also pivotal to any model is an understanding of SARS's 'superspreader' model, where some patients manage to infect dozens of people in a very short time, while others won't infect anyone. 'superspreaders' have been seen from the beginnings of this virus, and aren't more prevalent now than they were then, so this doesn't indicate any sort of 'mutation' or strengthening.
We have a strong sense of security because we haven't had a 'middle-ground' virus since smallpox. AIDS spreads too slowly to be perceived as a single-year pandemic, and Hanta and Ebola kill so fast that they burn themselves out before thy spread too far.
basically, we're going to have to learn fear the hard way.
Hydrogen is a fuel, and as such, is potential energy that can be converted to kinetic energy, and as such, is a source of (kinetic) energy.
It all depends on where you draw your boxes. For a hydrogen car owner, hydrogen is teh source of energy. For the hydrogen plant that uses tidal forces, the oceans are the source of energy. to the oceans, the gravitation of the sun and moon are sources of energy, and it goes on and on.
The/. blurb says the station is a clean source of energy, and I think that's a perfectly valid statement.
The problem is that it currently takes over 2 years for a patent application to be reviewed and accepted or rejected. While a 2-year patent on internet technologies seems more reasonable, it's meaningless, since the application would be pending all that time.
I recently visited Los Angeles and was invited to see two prescreenings (The Italian Job and Bruce Almighty). In both screenings they searched bags and wanded the patrons.
They had a list of 'disallowed' items including still cameras, video cameras, and cellphones. In practice, they didn't do anything about cellphones, as most people had them and would be unwilling to leave them at the door.
As for the cameras, I didn't know the restriction at my first screening, and I had my digicam with me. I put it in my jacket pocket and held my jacket in my hand when I held my arms out for wanding. They didn't notice a thing. I didn't use it at all, but it was pretty silly how easy it would be to get a camera in.
The second time around they felt my jacket pockets and found a lump where I kept my paperback book. They peeked in to the pocket and said, "What's that?"
"It's a book." (under my breath, "It's what we used for entertainment before movies.")
Anyhow, it's nice if they can block recording in select theaters. I recall an earlier slashdot story a year ago about this, and how it would be useless unless they got it in *every* theater. At least in prescreening situations, this technology seems a lot more useful.
The Toshiba 1.8" drives used in ipods made huge waves in portable MP3 designs. Granted, 1" is even better, but let's not forget the leaders in the field.
"Do you really think a slashdotting is that intense? Slashdot isn't a particularly big site, and it handles the load. CNN's traffic dwarfs/.'s on a slow news day, let alone during war coverage."
CNN doesn't link to external sites, and usually doesn't even name the URLs of sites they talk about, hence no 'CNN effect.'
Also, the linear chronological nature of/.'s format means that a story goes from zero prominence (well, except for the editors and the 15-minute advance for subscribers) to full blast at the top of the page. CNN's stories, other than 'Breaking News' never starts out in the 'first read' position, and 'Breaking News' *never* has external links.
Maybe it'd be nice if/. could find a way to stagger publishing of non-time-sensitive stories, but face it: Ners want the latest shit sooner than everyone else. This makes the/. effect a hammerblow instead of just a wind.
I for one don't have a problem with forming a possible link between Asian CD and DVD duplicators making forged copies to generate cashflow, but we need to bifurcate the term 'piracy' before things get too far.
It seems to me that the idea of fabricating copies of something and selling them for profit is a completely different act than downloading an MP3 off the net for personal use.
Even if both are illegal, calling both 'piracy,' hoping to villify the home-downloader with imagry of aiding terrorism is just FUD.
So, if piracy only referred to one of these acts, and a new term covered the other, what should these terms be? I'd propose FORGERY for the act of making duplicate copies and selling them. Anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
What mail client do you suggest using? Apparently you know of one that makes people not retarded.
Pine.
Speaking of huge databases of user preferences, iTunes knows every mp3 track you have, and even knows how much you like them, if you've gone through the trouble of rating them. It's only a matter of time before Apple, the company that licensed Amazon's One Click patent, enhances iTunes to use this user data to suggest music you might like, be it indie or mainstream.
According to this page both Washington DC and Toronto have the same 4-digit code: '8C Q8'
Seriously though, a huge benefit of the Zip5 code is that it's human comprehensible. Near numbers are near, and numbers are distributed by population density, not physical distance. It makes it much easier for all items in the '914xx' zip to go to the same routing center than AB AL-AK, AD AW-C4, etc going to one place.
The proposed system ignores the human checksum, and ignoring the fact that humans ultimately correct the course of most computer systems is a path filled with hubris and big flamy death.
Oops!
The /. article claims that the US abolished selective availability three years ago, but that's not the case. They abolished the 'fuzzing' of resolution, so that ordinary joes could get 10-foot accuracy instead of 70, but that's not selective availability.
Selective availability is the capability of 'turning off' GPS in specific geographic regions during times of war or for any other reason. They did it in Afghanistan last year, and they can do it whenever and wherever they want, though it's on an incident by incident basis.
What went wrong? As I said, it's simply too complex a product, with too many interdependencies, for a single team and linear build to maintain a quality QA process.
yet still someone comes in here and starts making out that Microsoft have bad QA and the open source model is vastly superior. How sad.
I suppose I didn't state it clearly enough: I think Microsoft has GOOD QA, but that even with the BEST QA, there exists a product complexity level which, when exceeded, means that a distributed, ongoing, proactive QA system, such as that afforded by open source (or even Apple's bug/enhancement submission procedure) is a much better way to ensure a more consistantly stable product.
My bad. I read a really interesting comprehensive article on Microsoft's build and QA process for Windows NT a few months ago, and I just assumed that that was what the link pointed to. Now I wish I could find the article because it's something /.ers would love (if /. isn't where I found it in the first place).
Anyone know where that article is?
All jokes aside, the amount of testing and the build process for NT is one of the most tightly organized and comprehensive testing methodologies in existence.
Rather than take 'miller time' pot shots at Microsoft, the real takeaway is the understanding that, no matter how rigorous the testing and build process, there is a complexity limit where a unified one-organization nightly fix-build-test model simply can't provide a product of suitable quality.
Better to acknowledge the best-of-breed methodology Microsoft uses to test their OSes, and conclude that while this breed works okay for applications, a world-class operating system needs peer review and distributed open source development to create a quality, secure product.
The tone of the article talks about shoot-from-the-hip developers acting irresponsibly, on impulse. They're taking a recognized and thoughtful practice and painting it as irresponsibility.
Monday is the best time to implement changes to most sites. The irresponsible coder implements on Friday, when errors might not be caught, or fixed, until the next working day, after a full weekend of downtime, bugginess, or insecure behavior.
But that wouldn't make for an interesting story. News flash: updating code often results in bugs that need to be fixed. When do the authors suggest we roll out new versions?
So Kolomogorov's 0-1 law would still apply if the monkeys weren't causally related to each other?
err, and weren't identical?
Clearly the author has no concept of infinity.
Heck, give six Elizabethans quills and ink and they'll probably make a mess too. The point is that if one of the six managed to type even two characters, then an infinite number could probably write shakespeare.
More to the point, when dealing with infinities, even probabilistic modifiers like 'probably' are meaningless. If it's at all feasable, then one of an infinite number would do it, even if they had to evolve out of the trees, invent tragedy and comedy, conquer England, and live in London to do so.
"Nasa along with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency have launched a towards Saturn"
Goddamn. They're spending our letters like they grow on trees. Sure, today they're just launching 'a', but tomorrow it'll be 'x', and then 't'. I want to know when they're planning on launching'u' and 'i' in to space...
TiVo's been advertising heavily in selected demographics. Mostly sports...
I've never thought their advertising did the service justice, but I heard from a TiVo marketing person two years ago that they cut back sharply on TV ads when Microsoft started hawking the Ultimate TV.
It turned out that the UTV commercials would get people to come to Circuit City, where they found they'd have to ditch their cable or satellite and get Dish Network to get to sue the UTV. When they got turned off on that idea, the salesperson would show them TiVo, which works equally well with satellite, cable, digital cable, or rabbit ears.
Every dollar Microsoft put into TV spots helped TiVo more than Microsoft. That's one of the reasons you don't see Ultimate TV advertised anymore. (Well, that and it sucked and is basically mothballed now).
TiVo does it right. Established companies are still partnering to make new hardware. You can't say that about webTV, U-TV, or ReplayTV.
" The default settings are such that you click "buy song" and it starts downloading."
Nope. The defaults ask you to enter your password, and also bring up a confirmation dialog box, both of which have 'dnot show me this again' checkboxes, to make it truly one-click. You won't accidentally buy music until you configure it that way.
That said, it is pretty damn addictive.
The good news is, for every person who's addicted, Apple gets $$. For every person who thinks DRM is shite, Apple doesn't lose any money. They can only win.
Streaming doesn't mean copying. A streamed song can only be listened to, not saved, or passed on again. It's just like shoutcast (except there aren't tools (yet) for pirating the stream to your hard disk).
A lot of people have natural immunity to brand new diseases. That's why it's called natural immunity. If they got the immunity from having had the disease, they have what's called acquired immunity.
For many diseases there are people who, no matter how many times they're exposed, will not become ill with that disease. That's what natural immunity means.
As for 'there are already 6 mutations of SARS', can you back that up with a link? At first glance there are a few doctors who are speculating that it might be undergoing its first mutation, as some SARS patients are exhibiting intestinal problems as well as respiratory, but 6 distinctly different strains? Please cut down on the FUD, or back it up.
I've stayed out of this thread because I believe people are doing a good job of identifying the ways that SARS is a bigger threat than some would like to think, but this post is stupid.
"The flu is always going to be the flu, its not getting stronger."
The flu changes every year. Some years it's mild, and other years it's particularly deadly, killing literally millions of people. In any given year there are 2-3 different strains of flu and virologists use contagion models to distribute the vaccine for the most likely 'dominant strain'.
"SARS as it spreads becomes STRONGER. Meaning the more immune systems it kills, the better it becomes at killing"
This is sensationalistic rubbish. What kind of evidence do you have for this? SARS isn't a DnD character. It's a virus.
As for the spread factor, there's one crucial number that nobody knows, and that's what percent of the population has a natural immunity to the disease. Nobody has a guess as to that number until there are many more documented infections, and that number is vital to understanding how the virus will spread.
Also pivotal to any model is an understanding of SARS's 'superspreader' model, where some patients manage to infect dozens of people in a very short time, while others won't infect anyone. 'superspreaders' have been seen from the beginnings of this virus, and aren't more prevalent now than they were then, so this doesn't indicate any sort of 'mutation' or strengthening.
We have a strong sense of security because we haven't had a 'middle-ground' virus since smallpox. AIDS spreads too slowly to be perceived as a single-year pandemic, and Hanta and Ebola kill so fast that they burn themselves out before thy spread too far.
basically, we're going to have to learn fear the hard way.
Neal Stephenson's speaking at Carnegie Mellon on Thursday. I'll have to ask him about the project...
Hydrogen is a fuel, and as such, is potential energy that can be converted to kinetic energy, and as such, is a source of (kinetic) energy.
/. blurb says the station is a clean source of energy, and I think that's a perfectly valid statement.
It all depends on where you draw your boxes. For a hydrogen car owner, hydrogen is teh source of energy. For the hydrogen plant that uses tidal forces, the oceans are the source of energy. to the oceans, the gravitation of the sun and moon are sources of energy, and it goes on and on.
The
The problem is that it currently takes over 2 years for a patent application to be reviewed and accepted or rejected. While a 2-year patent on internet technologies seems more reasonable, it's meaningless, since the application would be pending all that time.
I recently visited Los Angeles and was invited to see two prescreenings (The Italian Job and Bruce Almighty). In both screenings they searched bags and wanded the patrons.
They had a list of 'disallowed' items including still cameras, video cameras, and cellphones. In practice, they didn't do anything about cellphones, as most people had them and would be unwilling to leave them at the door.
As for the cameras, I didn't know the restriction at my first screening, and I had my digicam with me. I put it in my jacket pocket and held my jacket in my hand when I held my arms out for wanding. They didn't notice a thing. I didn't use it at all, but it was pretty silly how easy it would be to get a camera in.
The second time around they felt my jacket pockets and found a lump where I kept my paperback book. They peeked in to the pocket and said, "What's that?"
"It's a book." (under my breath, "It's what we used for entertainment before movies.")
Anyhow, it's nice if they can block recording in select theaters. I recall an earlier slashdot story a year ago about this, and how it would be useless unless they got it in *every* theater. At least in prescreening situations, this technology seems a lot more useful.
The Toshiba 1.8" drives used in ipods made huge waves in portable MP3 designs. Granted, 1" is even better, but let's not forget the leaders in the field.
"Do you really think a slashdotting is that intense? Slashdot isn't a particularly big site, and it handles the load. CNN's traffic dwarfs /.'s on a slow news day, let alone during war coverage."
/.'s format means that a story goes from zero prominence (well, except for the editors and the 15-minute advance for subscribers) to full blast at the top of the page. CNN's stories, other than 'Breaking News' never starts out in the 'first read' position, and 'Breaking News' *never* has external links.
/. could find a way to stagger publishing of non-time-sensitive stories, but face it: Ners want the latest shit sooner than everyone else. This makes the /. effect a hammerblow instead of just a wind.
CNN doesn't link to external sites, and usually doesn't even name the URLs of sites they talk about, hence no 'CNN effect.'
Also, the linear chronological nature of
Maybe it'd be nice if
I for one don't have a problem with forming a possible link between Asian CD and DVD duplicators making forged copies to generate cashflow, but we need to bifurcate the term 'piracy' before things get too far.
It seems to me that the idea of fabricating copies of something and selling them for profit is a completely different act than downloading an MP3 off the net for personal use.
Even if both are illegal, calling both 'piracy,' hoping to villify the home-downloader with imagry of aiding terrorism is just FUD.
So, if piracy only referred to one of these acts, and a new term covered the other, what should these terms be? I'd propose FORGERY for the act of making duplicate copies and selling them. Anyone?