I bet it works something like this
on
"Not a Mini-Spy"
·
· Score: 3
Arbitron has already tested their Personal People Meter in Philly. It included a motion detector to make sure you are wearing it and relied on signals embedded in the radio/tv broadcasts to determine what you were 'watching'. Sounds like Neilson's got similar technology in a watch.
I think the slot machine concept fits into Microsoft's vision of client access licensing via a coin slot. The slot machine just may be the first of many. I just hope the X-BOX team doesn't get wind of this concept.
With MS hardware, will the market have to ignore the sound advice of avoiding critical deployments until the first service pack is out?
As far as blue screens in embedded systems, I find it heartwarming to see the occasional guru meditation when the Amiga running my cable guide crashes. I doubt those running Vegas casinos will be as forgiving as I. That's what all those holes in the desert are for. If the deployments don't work, have two ready for Gates and Balmer.
Why should you think AIDS doesn't affect me? As a single male, living in a large urban area, I have seen my share of AIDS devastation. Every time you meet someone in a bar, you need to think about the implications of AIDS. AIDS is much more of a concern when you are young than lung cancer or prostate cancer.
If Pfizer is making a product that has such large margins, what's to stop another company from developing a competing product with less side effects or easier dosing? Without those margins, would competing companies see an incentive? If we shouldn't force companies to sell at a certain price, why should we force them to license at a certain price? The efforts are Pfizer's; the fruits should be theirs as well.
It sounds like your idea of competition is having one company develop a product, then give it away to bunch more companies to manufacture it. Let companies' price products the way they want. Given enough profit, I expect competitors to develop alternate products that can compete on price and features.
Would you be willing to have your labors scrutinized by the government? What line of work are you in? What is your cost of your product? How much profit should you be willing to make? Is that the governments business or is that between you and your employer or customer?
Should I care how drug companies make their money? Does it matter that companies have to recoup costs in areas other than R&D to make a profit?
Do we want government to tell companies how much of a profit is enough? Do we think government can set price or profit limits without unforeseen consequences that might impact that rate of future developments?
If you are truly concerned, why not give to charities and let them buy drugs to give away where there is need. Seems like the best way to use our abundance to help the world without effecting the natural human greed that drives free market advancement.
I didn't vote for either of the majors and don't expect much of a difference in the post-Clinton era. I don't see much civil liberty protection coming from either of the majors. I expect things will get worse with the anti-abortion nonsense though.
The one area of the Net that I expect the old guard politicians to embrace is online fundraising. Didn't John McCain raise US$500K in one day over the Net? Expect any new limitations to Net freedom to exclude online fundraising.
Bet on the fact that politicians will stop seeing the Net as a threat if it ever becomes a major source of campaign revenue.
Typical media over-hype here. Finding proteins that control immune response are good first steps, but whenever someone talks about "Master Switches" as "Holy Grails" I get worried.
Immune response is more subtle and complicated than "on" or "off" states. The real power of immune response is a highly targeted destruction of bad cells while neighboring good cells are allowed to grow and proliferate. A system like this is surely not controlled by the master switch of a single protein. Any therapy based on a master switch would probably have similar downsides to treatments we have now, where immune suppression is traded for higher risk of infection in other areas.
The immune "Holy Grail" won't be found in a single protein, but understanding the entirety of a much more complex system. CD45 is a good step in that direction, but not the final prize.
If photons drive like I do�
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
...then switching from a red laser to a yellow one is the surest way to get light to accelerate.
The biggest reason the sequels will be in trouble is that they are based on such a shitty original. Sure, the movie had some great visuals, but the plot was ill conceived.
The Matrix is a classic example of Hollywood style over substance. Seems that all the effort went into this new vision of live anime. In that effort they may have succeeded, but the concept of The Matrix is just an excuse for a second-rate TV cop show plot. If you are willing to put you brain on pause, maybe this movie works for you. I suspect the sequels will just devolve into a series of virtual car chases, ending with a spectacular crash into a virtual street vendor's fresh fruit stand.
I hope Hollywood surprises us by investing some more creativity into this franchise. I'm not holding my breath on this one.
Unfortunately, if your move chair.NET into another room, you will have to reregister your license.
One client access license is required for each set of butt cheeks to use the chair.
If you don't purchase a client access license within 90 days, chair.NET will grow a series of wheeled legs, much like professor Frink's AT-5000 auto-dialer, so the chair can effectively exit any situations that might violate the licensing agreement.
Engineering is as �white� as hip-hop is �black�
on
Racism At Microsoft?
·
· Score: 2
Chuck D could ask the same questions of hip-hop. Why is it so predominantly a "black" art form? Is it racism or just the makeup and backgrounds of the individuals that make up the group? It just so happens that hip-hop is an expression of a culture that is largely non-white.
Engineering is largely the sport of white males. There are certainly many Asians and Indians represented, so I don't think it's purely a race thing. The problem with geeks is that they are not the types likely to reach out to any group that is not like themselves. Is this racism? I think it is more the introverted nature of geeks. If anything the geek love of knowledge and new ideas makes them more able to bridge the race gap. You just have to figure out how to get these divergent groups together to be able to share the resource of these ideas.
The real question is not about Microsoft but why black males are so underrepresented in engineering across the board. What is it about the culture and economic situations that make this so. This is where the real problem lies and where any solutions will come from.
This brings back memories of a book from the mid eighties called Star Warriors by William J. Broad. This books highlights the people involved with advanced weapon research. A surprising number of young genius geeks were involved in this research. Not sure if the book is still in print, but slashdotters will probably find a good read.
At the time of the book, EMP pulses were being generated using nuclear weapons. There was work being done to tune the properties of the pulse to control the range, shape and direction of the pulse. The thought was to generate a pulse that could disrupt the electrical workings of a living human brain. A pulse weapon could be detonated high over troops or other populated area. After the troops were adequately "confused", the invading army could make quick work of the opposing force.
I sure hope this book was a fairy tale or these experiments turned out to be fruitless. Now they have a non-nuclear based EMP weapon. One can only hope it will just affect electronics.
I like Clinton and believe he may have been able to win a third term if the constitution allowed, but waiting till the end of your term to tell these truths, makes him look like a buffoon and a hypocrite.
Whether you love or hate the NSA, this is a good thing for Linux. It's a seal of legitimacy when an agency like the NSA wants to use your OS and needs it to be easier to secure.
If this thing takes off, it's sure to lead to better security in the long run. Short term this might make things worse.
If you have to put your machine on a network, there is some level of security in the anonymity of your OS. If you are running a Unix variant that is not widely distributed with a security model that isn't widely used, the number of hackers who have direct knowledge of how your system works is smaller. If I know what variant you are running and how it works, I have a better chance of uncovering flaws.
If the NSA standard for securing Linux becomes ubiquitous, you will have a large pool of potential hackers with an intimate insight of potential flaws. In the beginning this should uncover many security flaws. It will take time for corrections to be made, but the source code access should insure that there is just as big a pool of people ready to correct flaws. This will lead to a hardening of the new model over time. In the short run, this secured OS may be less secure than its more anonymous cousins. Over time, a widely available, heavily attacked, open source OS should trump any security found in the less common deployments.
It will be ironic if the NSA gives the world an OS that allows individuals the same levels of security that the NSA expects will protect American secrets. The NSAs work may become much harder if other countries start adopting the fruits of NSA labor. Will this be such a bad thing?
It was a delusion to think that virtual communities would be trouble free when they are composed of the same people that ruin real communities. Sure, the anonymity of the Internet does lead to excess, but for all the noise, there is still enough signal to make the benefits of global communications significant.
I don't hear people whining about how sales and crank calls are ruining the virtual communities created by the telephone. Slashdot does pretty well considering all the first post nonsense. Virtual communities will do just fine, but never be perfect. If you expect technology will create nirvana from collections of imperfect humans, you are doomed to disappointment.
What do we really know about our solar system? What myths about planetary formation become science simply because we don't have enough direct evidence to confirm or refute a hypothesis? Where are the real dangers of planetary impact? What about life on other planets? Can we really know without understanding the entirety of the solar system?
There were many crazy myths about the early American west from tales of strange animals to a mythical northwest passage. Many educated minds believed in these tales because we had no direct knowledge of this vast new landscape.
We probably know as much about our solar system as the early America knew about its vast uncharted western territories. Who knows what we may find in an expedition to Pluto? Maybe the space station, Mars missions, Titan or Europa might yield better discoveries, but there is no way to be certain. One thing is clear, without comprehensive exploration of our solar system we can't claim to understand anything if we limit our exploration to Earth and a few of the more fashionable rocks, which share the neighborhood.
Once you get passed breeding age, there is no longer any evolutionary rationale for extending lifespan past that date.
I know most geeks won't understand this, but in evolutionary terms, most people would have been expected to have sex by their twenties and fulfilled their evolutionary destiny.
I had one "war room" development experience. Not sure if was the company's idea or Anderson consulting.
No cubicles, no dividers, and no monitors that faced into walls or corners. Everything was public and open to inspection at all times. At first, the lack of privacy was maddening. Even if you had time to surf for porn, you wouldn't dare. The noise was a problem, but I found that you quickly adapted. Most people were pissed to fuming at the beginning but this passed.
The most amazing thing was the teaming that went on. You would think this sort of forced teaming wouldn't work, but it did. Programmers that normally played their hands close to the deck became show offs. Spontaneous groups would form for discussion or demos or to show off some nice coding tricks. By simply removing cubicles, a totally different dynamic was created!
I now work alone much of the time and I miss my "war room" days. Maybe more companies will follow if the productivity claims are proven. Maybe in the future, programmers will be placed in open glass enclosures to be shown off during company tours. As long as those touring are advised to keep their hands away from the programmers, there should be little injury. Most programmers might be surprised that they would actually thrive in a fishbowl of an environment. I know I was.
I can't remember a software project where quality was even talked about let alone quantified. Was an expected defect level ever in a spec you have written or been given? Have you worked on a project where the design was thoroughly reviewed BEFORE the code was written? I can't remember a project where the design wasn't a moving target. Can we expect quality software, if quality is not a requirement from day one? Can we even quantify software quality the way we judge the quality of hard goods?
I remember when Six Sigma quality control (3.4 parts per million defects allowed or 99.99966% quality) was the big buzzword around management. Not sure if you could ever apply manufacturing line techniques to software quality, but at least someone started talking about quality. Nothing much ever happened, but I'm sure a bunch of buzzword books were sold.
I think quality will improve if quality is a requirement before coding starts. It must begin before the design phase to have any affect on the completed code.
"Of the 3.4 billion chemical building blocks that make up the human DNA strand, scientists believe only 3 to 5 percent represent actual instructions that make some people tall, some blue-eyed and some prone to heart disease. The other 95 percent of the human genome has been dubbed "junk" DNA.
I bet the junk genes spend their time soliciting porn sites, penny stocks, and get rich quick schemes.
Re:John Harrison: 1st Open Source Inventor?
on
Longitude
·
· Score: 1
My US public education prevented me from actually reading the book or knowing much about history, but the A&E dramatization implied that British government board was never going to grant Harrison the award.
Harrison was seen as an outsider in the British class structure. No one was going to let a country carpenter upset the establishment of astronomers and their unwieldy lunar cycles solution.
The dismantling of H4 was shown, not as a positive early example of open source, but as a simple delaying tactic. They were hoping they might damage the single model Harrison had made. I think this story says more about how the British class structure was threatened by a visionary from outside their midst than some early example of open source evangelism.
The dramatization also indicates the board never gave in and paid Harrison. He only received his just reward by act of parliament.
Haven't read the book but the NOVA episode was cool:
NOVA .
The A&E mini series was on of the best things I saw on TV last year. Watch it when you get the chance:
A&E
Slashdot Mirror
Arbitron has already tested their Personal People Meter in Philly. It included a motion detector to make sure you are wearing it and relied on signals embedded in the radio/tv broadcasts to determine what you were 'watching'. Sounds like Neilson's got similar technology in a watch.
I think the slot machine concept fits into Microsoft's vision of client access licensing via a coin slot. The slot machine just may be the first of many. I just hope the X-BOX team doesn't get wind of this concept.
With MS hardware, will the market have to ignore the sound advice of avoiding critical deployments until the first service pack is out?
As far as blue screens in embedded systems, I find it heartwarming to see the occasional guru meditation when the Amiga running my cable guide crashes. I doubt those running Vegas casinos will be as forgiving as I. That's what all those holes in the desert are for. If the deployments don't work, have two ready for Gates and Balmer.
Why should you think AIDS doesn't affect me? As a single male, living in a large urban area, I have seen my share of AIDS devastation. Every time you meet someone in a bar, you need to think about the implications of AIDS. AIDS is much more of a concern when you are young than lung cancer or prostate cancer.
If Pfizer is making a product that has such large margins, what's to stop another company from developing a competing product with less side effects or easier dosing? Without those margins, would competing companies see an incentive? If we shouldn't force companies to sell at a certain price, why should we force them to license at a certain price? The efforts are Pfizer's; the fruits should be theirs as well.
It sounds like your idea of competition is having one company develop a product, then give it away to bunch more companies to manufacture it. Let companies' price products the way they want. Given enough profit, I expect competitors to develop alternate products that can compete on price and features.
Would you be willing to have your labors scrutinized by the government? What line of work are you in? What is your cost of your product? How much profit should you be willing to make? Is that the governments business or is that between you and your employer or customer?
... the failure of an o-ring on Michael's can of Mountain Dew destroyed the rest of this story.
Should I care how drug companies make their money? Does it matter that companies have to recoup costs in areas other than R&D to make a profit?
Do we want government to tell companies how much of a profit is enough? Do we think government can set price or profit limits without unforeseen consequences that might impact that rate of future developments?
If you are truly concerned, why not give to charities and let them buy drugs to give away where there is need. Seems like the best way to use our abundance to help the world without effecting the natural human greed that drives free market advancement.
Hmm, I wonder whom Katz didn't vote for?
I didn't vote for either of the majors and don't expect much of a difference in the post-Clinton era. I don't see much civil liberty protection coming from either of the majors. I expect things will get worse with the anti-abortion nonsense though.
The one area of the Net that I expect the old guard politicians to embrace is online fundraising. Didn't John McCain raise US$500K in one day over the Net? Expect any new limitations to Net freedom to exclude online fundraising.
Bet on the fact that politicians will stop seeing the Net as a threat if it ever becomes a major source of campaign revenue.
Nothing beats the power of putrefying flesh.
Here in Philly, we prefer thinly sliced scrapple.
For poetic justice, good old Spam (of the Hormel variety) should work nicely.
Typical media over-hype here. Finding proteins that control immune response are good first steps, but whenever someone talks about "Master Switches" as "Holy Grails" I get worried.
Immune response is more subtle and complicated than "on" or "off" states. The real power of immune response is a highly targeted destruction of bad cells while neighboring good cells are allowed to grow and proliferate. A system like this is surely not controlled by the master switch of a single protein. Any therapy based on a master switch would probably have similar downsides to treatments we have now, where immune suppression is traded for higher risk of infection in other areas.
The immune "Holy Grail" won't be found in a single protein, but understanding the entirety of a much more complex system. CD45 is a good step in that direction, but not the final prize.
...then switching from a red laser to a yellow one is the surest way to get light to accelerate.
The biggest reason the sequels will be in trouble is that they are based on such a shitty original. Sure, the movie had some great visuals, but the plot was ill conceived.
The Matrix is a classic example of Hollywood style over substance. Seems that all the effort went into this new vision of live anime. In that effort they may have succeeded, but the concept of The Matrix is just an excuse for a second-rate TV cop show plot. If you are willing to put you brain on pause, maybe this movie works for you. I suspect the sequels will just devolve into a series of virtual car chases, ending with a spectacular crash into a virtual street vendor's fresh fruit stand.
I hope Hollywood surprises us by investing some more creativity into this franchise. I'm not holding my breath on this one.
... no one can hear you scream without prior written approval!
Unfortunately, if your move chair.NET into another room, you will have to reregister your license.
One client access license is required for each set of butt cheeks to use the chair.
If you don't purchase a client access license within 90 days, chair.NET will grow a series of wheeled legs, much like professor Frink's AT-5000 auto-dialer, so the chair can effectively exit any situations that might violate the licensing agreement.
Chuck D could ask the same questions of hip-hop. Why is it so predominantly a "black" art form? Is it racism or just the makeup and backgrounds of the individuals that make up the group? It just so happens that hip-hop is an expression of a culture that is largely non-white.
Engineering is largely the sport of white males. There are certainly many Asians and Indians represented, so I don't think it's purely a race thing. The problem with geeks is that they are not the types likely to reach out to any group that is not like themselves. Is this racism? I think it is more the introverted nature of geeks. If anything the geek love of knowledge and new ideas makes them more able to bridge the race gap. You just have to figure out how to get these divergent groups together to be able to share the resource of these ideas.
The real question is not about Microsoft but why black males are so underrepresented in engineering across the board. What is it about the culture and economic situations that make this so. This is where the real problem lies and where any solutions will come from.
This brings back memories of a book from the mid eighties called Star Warriors by William J. Broad. This books highlights the people involved with advanced weapon research. A surprising number of young genius geeks were involved in this research. Not sure if the book is still in print, but slashdotters will probably find a good read.
At the time of the book, EMP pulses were being generated using nuclear weapons. There was work being done to tune the properties of the pulse to control the range, shape and direction of the pulse. The thought was to generate a pulse that could disrupt the electrical workings of a living human brain. A pulse weapon could be detonated high over troops or other populated area. After the troops were adequately "confused", the invading army could make quick work of the opposing force.
I sure hope this book was a fairy tale or these experiments turned out to be fruitless. Now they have a non-nuclear based EMP weapon. One can only hope it will just affect electronics.
I like Clinton and believe he may have been able to win a third term if the constitution allowed, but waiting till the end of your term to tell these truths, makes him look like a buffoon and a hypocrite.
Now he is advocating decriminalization of marijuana in Rolling Stone. During his administration, over 4 million Americans have been arrested on marijuana, 88% for simple possession. Hardly fair, given Clinton's history.
Mr. Clinton, why didn't you feel the need to speak your mind until you were a lame duck. I hope history does not reward such cowardice and hypocrisy.
Whether you love or hate the NSA, this is a good thing for Linux. It's a seal of legitimacy when an agency like the NSA wants to use your OS and needs it to be easier to secure.
If this thing takes off, it's sure to lead to better security in the long run. Short term this might make things worse.
If you have to put your machine on a network, there is some level of security in the anonymity of your OS. If you are running a Unix variant that is not widely distributed with a security model that isn't widely used, the number of hackers who have direct knowledge of how your system works is smaller. If I know what variant you are running and how it works, I have a better chance of uncovering flaws.
If the NSA standard for securing Linux becomes ubiquitous, you will have a large pool of potential hackers with an intimate insight of potential flaws. In the beginning this should uncover many security flaws. It will take time for corrections to be made, but the source code access should insure that there is just as big a pool of people ready to correct flaws. This will lead to a hardening of the new model over time. In the short run, this secured OS may be less secure than its more anonymous cousins. Over time, a widely available, heavily attacked, open source OS should trump any security found in the less common deployments.
It will be ironic if the NSA gives the world an OS that allows individuals the same levels of security that the NSA expects will protect American secrets. The NSAs work may become much harder if other countries start adopting the fruits of NSA labor. Will this be such a bad thing?
It was a delusion to think that virtual communities would be trouble free when they are composed of the same people that ruin real communities. Sure, the anonymity of the Internet does lead to excess, but for all the noise, there is still enough signal to make the benefits of global communications significant.
I don't hear people whining about how sales and crank calls are ruining the virtual communities created by the telephone. Slashdot does pretty well considering all the first post nonsense. Virtual communities will do just fine, but never be perfect. If you expect technology will create nirvana from collections of imperfect humans, you are doomed to disappointment.
What do we really know about our solar system? What myths about planetary formation become science simply because we don't have enough direct evidence to confirm or refute a hypothesis? Where are the real dangers of planetary impact? What about life on other planets? Can we really know without understanding the entirety of the solar system?
There were many crazy myths about the early American west from tales of strange animals to a mythical northwest passage. Many educated minds believed in these tales because we had no direct knowledge of this vast new landscape.
We probably know as much about our solar system as the early America knew about its vast uncharted western territories. Who knows what we may find in an expedition to Pluto? Maybe the space station, Mars missions, Titan or Europa might yield better discoveries, but there is no way to be certain. One thing is clear, without comprehensive exploration of our solar system we can't claim to understand anything if we limit our exploration to Earth and a few of the more fashionable rocks, which share the neighborhood.
This Slashdot article talked about this concept in August. Looks like it was turned into a commercial product pretty quickly.
Once you get passed breeding age, there is no longer any evolutionary rationale for extending lifespan past that date.
I know most geeks won't understand this, but in evolutionary terms, most people would have been expected to have sex by their twenties and fulfilled their evolutionary destiny.
I had one "war room" development experience. Not sure if was the company's idea or Anderson consulting.
No cubicles, no dividers, and no monitors that faced into walls or corners. Everything was public and open to inspection at all times. At first, the lack of privacy was maddening. Even if you had time to surf for porn, you wouldn't dare. The noise was a problem, but I found that you quickly adapted. Most people were pissed to fuming at the beginning but this passed.
The most amazing thing was the teaming that went on. You would think this sort of forced teaming wouldn't work, but it did. Programmers that normally played their hands close to the deck became show offs. Spontaneous groups would form for discussion or demos or to show off some nice coding tricks. By simply removing cubicles, a totally different dynamic was created!
I now work alone much of the time and I miss my "war room" days. Maybe more companies will follow if the productivity claims are proven. Maybe in the future, programmers will be placed in open glass enclosures to be shown off during company tours. As long as those touring are advised to keep their hands away from the programmers, there should be little injury. Most programmers might be surprised that they would actually thrive in a fishbowl of an environment. I know I was.
Good points.
I can't remember a software project where quality was even talked about let alone quantified. Was an expected defect level ever in a spec you have written or been given? Have you worked on a project where the design was thoroughly reviewed BEFORE the code was written? I can't remember a project where the design wasn't a moving target. Can we expect quality software, if quality is not a requirement from day one? Can we even quantify software quality the way we judge the quality of hard goods?
I remember when Six Sigma quality control (3.4 parts per million defects allowed or 99.99966% quality) was the big buzzword around management. Not sure if you could ever apply manufacturing line techniques to software quality, but at least someone started talking about quality. Nothing much ever happened, but I'm sure a bunch of buzzword books were sold.
I think quality will improve if quality is a requirement before coding starts. It must begin before the design phase to have any affect on the completed code.
"Of the 3.4 billion chemical building blocks that make up the human DNA strand, scientists believe only 3 to 5 percent represent actual instructions that make some people tall, some blue-eyed and some prone to heart disease. The other 95 percent of the human genome has been dubbed "junk" DNA.
I bet the junk genes spend their time soliciting porn sites, penny stocks, and get rich quick schemes.
My US public education prevented me from actually reading the book or knowing much about history, but the A&E dramatization implied that British government board was never going to grant Harrison the award.
Harrison was seen as an outsider in the British class structure. No one was going to let a country carpenter upset the establishment of astronomers and their unwieldy lunar cycles solution.
The dismantling of H4 was shown, not as a positive early example of open source, but as a simple delaying tactic. They were hoping they might damage the single model Harrison had made. I think this story says more about how the British class structure was threatened by a visionary from outside their midst than some early example of open source evangelism.
The dramatization also indicates the board never gave in and paid Harrison. He only received his just reward by act of parliament.
Haven't read the book but the NOVA episode was cool: NOVA . The A&E mini series was on of the best things I saw on TV last year. Watch it when you get the chance: A&E