Would have been happy to, but didn't see a link to it in the article. Perhaps I should have tracked it down at loc.gov, but was a little pressed for time and figured another slashdotter would eventually post one. My comment that I'd like to read the law was intended to acknowledge that I had not read the law, and doing so would likely answer at least some of the questions I had.
I think that the problem, to the extent that a problem exists, is due more to marketing itself than to any particular lingo that marketing types use.
The point of marketing is to sell as much of a given thing as possible. It doesn't really matter what the thing is or how it works so long as you can beat your competition with it and make a bunch of money. To a marketer of hammers, there are very few customer problems that don't look like nails. Worse, it's advantageous to a marketer to sell a general solution to some idealized version of a problem instead of learning about individual clients and addressing their needs.
Our economy has realized huge productivity gains by generalizing problems and providing standard solutions. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to products which are difficult to use or which don't solve a given version of a problem particularly well. When companies like Sun fail to see the disparity between their solution and their customers' problems, they leave themselves open attack by competitors.
If Sun is going to improve its business and make itself more competitive, it should follow IBM's lead and eshew Microsoft. IBM makes a healthy living by providing decent tools as well as consulting and customizing services which help a client apply those tools. Microsoft, on the other hand, thinks that customers should work the way their tools let them, and not the other way around. To MS, we're all nails.
the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined
That's different from the headline of this/. article, which asks whether politics and journalism are inextricably linked. It's important to note that politics and democracy are not the same thing... all groups have politics, but not all groups have democracy. Indeed, it seems to me that politics is often the largest single impediment to democracy.
I think this could also be quite useful for the average office lackey like me!
Can you imagine the hellish predicament you'd be in if you developed the equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome in your eyelids? In order to rest your lids enough to heal, you'd probably have to choose between leaving your eyes closed and thus being temporarily blind, and wearing some sort of yet-to-be-invented protective device that would let you keep them open all the time.
Yes, I know, carpal tunnel syndrome is due to inflamed tendons and nerves in your wrist, and you don't have those parts in your eyelids. Nevertheless, your eyelids have a well established and important job to do. Making them do double duty as a 'nouse' button or other input device seems risky. In addition to potentially overworking the muscles, I can see damage to the surface of the eyes coming from consistant, long-term over-blinking or under-blinking.
Certainly, there are people for whom some risk to the eyes is a small price to pay for a way to communicate with others and control their environment. Able-bodied geeks, though, would probably be wise to move around a bit more rather than less. If you're just looking for an alternative to hand-actuated mice, try an input device like the footmouse instead.
Alcohol is the most damaging food product you can put in your body. It's far worse than trans-fatty acids, artificial ingredients (e.g., pesticides, food coloring), or sugar.
I think this statement is a good deal sillier than the article title. Quite obviously, it makes little sense to talk about the relative harm or benefit of any substance without discussing quantity. In excess, even water can pose an immdiate, serious health risk, and I'm not talking about drowning. But obviously, water is an essential nutrient.
Heart disease is, by far, the number one killer of both men and women. On a societal level, then, it's pretty easy to make a strong case that fat, sugar, and cholesterol are significantly more harmful than alcohol. On a personal level, fat, sugar, and cholesterol consumed in huge excess are obviously more harmful than alcohol consumed in moderation.
So, let's say for the moment that Apple acquiesces and drops the iTunes per-song rate so that it's the same as in France and Germany. Can Apple then get a guarantee from the UK government that the cost of doing business in the UK will be the same as that in France and Germany?
And why look at just France and Germany, btw? Given that 1 euro is currently worth slightly more than 1 US dollar, you can make a solid case that European customers still pay more than Americans. Will the UK Office of Fair Trade again take Apple to task for charging a higher price in the UK than it does in some other country?
If I were Apple, I'd take that deal and then insist that workers in the UK charge more per hour than workers in Indonesia, and landlords charge more per square foot than do landlords in Siberia, and ask them to make sure that I got the same deal in the UK that I can get elsewhere.
Who knows? This could be an end to any problems the UK might currently have with outsourcing. They could call it the "Bring the Third World Home" intiative.
will this effect Jabber's overall share of the IM market?
For whatever reason, slashdotters seem to make this mistake all the time. 'Effect,' as a verb, means 'to bring about.' The word you're looking for is 'affect,' which means (as a verb) 'to influence.'
I wouldn't normally worry about something like this, but I see it so often here on/. that I have to wonder if some highly contagious brain fungus has affected a significant portion of the/. population. Perhaps this message will effect a quick recovery.
I guess the point is that most home cooks in the US don't.
but nobody wants to spend their time squishing foodstuffs into various shaped volumetric measuring devices.
Uh, I think you're overstating the difficulty here. Bananas are an obvious exception, but most ingredients that are measured by volume can be moved in and out of a measuring cup with relative ease.
What really got to me were the people in this thread saying that 1 cup IS ~240g... hello, 1 cup of lead is a bit different to 1 cup of flour. Not that I use lead in my cookery. Not even when my mother-in-law is visiting.
Right. 1 cup is ~240ml, obviously, and should weigh ~240g if you're measuring water or anything else with similar density.
Still better to weigh the banana-mass in my opinion that try and squoosh the bananamatter into a cupmeasure.
Sure, I don't disagree. Sounds like the recipe in question was designed for a home cook, though, so measuring by volume makes sense. Not every home has an appropriate scale, but most everyone (in the US, anyway) has a measuring cup.
I once read a recipe : "1 cup banana"... no kidding.
Depending on what the recipe was for, I'd probably interpret that as either banana slices or mashed banana. I can't think of any dishes that make use of a single whole banana. Heck, even a banana split requires a little preparation of the main ingredient.
If the recipe said "1 banana," how would you know how much you actually needed? Bananas come in different sizes, from tiny finger bananas to quite large ones.
Mod parent up. As a software developer, every job I've had has included assigned projects with deadlines. And I've always had to record my time. Nevertheless, I've always been FTE (full time, exempt), meaning that I've never been eligible for overtime except under very particular and rare circumstances.
"They" can do whatever the hell they want, unless "we" decide to stop them. You and I, therefore, should hie to the polls on Election Day and cast a vote to remove from office the most secretive administration the US has ever seen.
I personally don't get that many e-mails at work but i've heard the Finance director saying he gets 400 e-mails a week. I fail to accept that reading all these e-mail is a productive use of his time and companies ran just fine before e-mail.
There are a few things going on here.
Before e-mail, the guy would have had a secretary or administrative assistant who took his calls, opened his mail, and managed his calendar. This person would have filtered the contacts which needed his attention from those that didn't. Now, with e-mail, he can probably do much of that himself. His assistant, if he has one, likely works at a higher level.
Many people consider the volume of e-mail one receives each day to be some sort of measure of status and importance. If you let everyone know that you receive a huge number of messages each day, you're telling them "I'm the hardest working guy in the company." It's also a built-in excuse for not dealing with someone, particularly someone beneath you on the corporate ladder. "Oh, did you e-mail me? I'm sorry if I didn't respond, but I get 400 messages a day."
The corollary to that, of course, is that you should subscribe to several high-volume mailing lists at work so that you, too, can walk around and honestly say: "Oh! 400 isn't so bad... I receive an average of 1200 messages each day. Yes, I'm the hardest working guy in the company. You may bow down before me."
On the other hand, before e-mail, there's a good chance that a peon at your company would never have been able to talk directly to the Finance Director. You'd have to get through a couple lines of defenses, and even then it would usually have been considered inappropriate. These days, it's not so much a faux pas to bring something directly to an executive's attention, and they often encourage that sort of thing. (Just be sure that you're not going behind your manager's back or over his head.)
OS X is not "secure" because it uses Open Source, it's less targeted because it has far less market share
These things are not mutually exclusive. OS X may, in fact, be more secure because it uses open source, and also has fallen to fewer (zero?) exploits in part because it has smaller market share.
I'll also remind everyone that it has had it's share of URI handler problems, but of course people will claim they only had those problems because they used a closed-source browser.
True, but that was a problem with one application, and technically not the "operating system." I know Microsoft wants us all to believe that a web browser is an essential, inseperable component of an OS, but on OS X it's just another app. The URI handler exploit does point up a problem in that, IIRC, it could be used to gain root and do whatever. But it's misguided to think of it as some inherent security flaw in the kernel.
I got Apple laptops for the family (which you can have when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers)
No thanks, I'm really not interested in "having" your family in any sense of the word.
People have an irrational hate for Microsoft
Some people do. Some people have a rational dislike of Microsoft.
and even when presented with easier opportunities elsewhere, will often prefer to write exploits for Microsoft products.
I think you're speculating here. I doubt very much that hatred of Microsoft, rational or otherwise, is a primary motivation for most of the people out there writing viruses. Indeed, most of the people I know who really dislike MS avoid using its products, and therefore use either Linux or MacOS. (Though I guess you could make a pretty good argument that if you use Windows long enough, you'll build a pretty solid dislike of MS.)
My point is, the people who write Windows viruses and worms and such are probably NOT Mac and Linux users. They're Windows users who want to show off their programming skillz and build some kind of hacker cred. They're not mainly driven by ideology, but by their own egos. And when it comes to "easier opportunities," well, it doesn't seem like there are any that are easier than Windows.
That's not going to change any time soon, and given Apple's rabid fan base and rapidly swelling Open Source cheerleading squad, it's only likely to go the other way.
Dude, you've been reading too much Microsoft PR. When was the last time you met a "rabid" (meaning "infected with rabies" or implying foaming at the mouth, wild-eyed, unable to think clearly) Mac user? We're mostly a pretty mellow bunch, and we just want to get our work done without the OS getting in the way. We like that it looks nice, works well, and has some cool features. And Apple makes pretty darn nice hardware. What's irrational about that? What's so wrong with thinking Microsoft products are crappy?
Apple will be glad to know it's got a rapidly expanding open source cheerleading squad, but only if it leads to rapidly expanding sales.
What? They use Bluetooth?
on
Disney Goes Boom!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Is it really true that they use Bluetooth for shell detonation? I thought the range was limited. And it seems rather expensive compared to fuses. But I guess it's Disney...:-)
hidden enough that you don't see 'em while you're sitting at the machine, and
easily accessible at all times.
IMO, that's a really nice design feature. When the CPU is under your desk, it's a pain to connect things and you end up having to buy hubs and such just so you can periodically connect your camera or camcorder. With this new iMac, the connectors are right there, and not, at the same time.
I wish they'd kept a 15" model at $999. This lack of low end is Apple's greatest problem with consumers.
Hello, eMac.
You can buy an eMac for $799, and they might even throw in a printer. Yes, it doesn't have an LCD, but it does have a nice, flat display and it's plenty cheap if that's all you want. If you want a little more speed and a little more flash, spend a few hundred extra bucks and get an iMac.
Of course they'll replace both the point-of-sale and the internet cafe machines. Those machines don't just serve their apparent purpose... they're also advertisements.
Given all of the talk about an economic turnaround, are we looking at a potential tech turnover spike as individuals leave positions they have stayed in only because of a dismal job market?
One can only hope.
On the other hand, I don't see any increase in hiring in the tech sector so far.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe you should do that THEN post your concerns?
Would have been happy to, but didn't see a link to it in the article. Perhaps I should have tracked it down at loc.gov, but was a little pressed for time and figured another slashdotter would eventually post one. My comment that I'd like to read the law was intended to acknowledge that I had not read the law, and doing so would likely answer at least some of the questions I had.
That's nice, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
Which of my several e-mail addresses must I disclose?
And for how long after the file transfer takes place must the address remain valid?
How often, if ever, am I required to check for messages?
And does the state impose any particular requirements on what kinds of filters I can apply to my incoming mail?
If I record a protest song and choose to distribute it anonymously (perhaps to avoid retribution by the state), am I prohibited from doing that?
Can I write a letter or produce a film and distribute it anonymously? How about if I use a pseudonym?
I'd like to actually read this law. I find it difficult to imagine that such a law could possibly stand up to any sort of scrutiny in the courts.
I think that the problem, to the extent that a problem exists, is due more to marketing itself than to any particular lingo that marketing types use.
The point of marketing is to sell as much of a given thing as possible. It doesn't really matter what the thing is or how it works so long as you can beat your competition with it and make a bunch of money. To a marketer of hammers, there are very few customer problems that don't look like nails. Worse, it's advantageous to a marketer to sell a general solution to some idealized version of a problem instead of learning about individual clients and addressing their needs.
Our economy has realized huge productivity gains by generalizing problems and providing standard solutions. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to products which are difficult to use or which don't solve a given version of a problem particularly well. When companies like Sun fail to see the disparity between their solution and their customers' problems, they leave themselves open attack by competitors.
If Sun is going to improve its business and make itself more competitive, it should follow IBM's lead and eshew Microsoft. IBM makes a healthy living by providing decent tools as well as consulting and customizing services which help a client apply those tools. Microsoft, on the other hand, thinks that customers should work the way their tools let them, and not the other way around. To MS, we're all nails.
What Moyers said was:
/. article, which asks whether politics and journalism are inextricably linked. It's important to note that politics and democracy are not the same thing... all groups have politics, but not all groups have democracy. Indeed, it seems to me that politics is often the largest single impediment to democracy.
the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined
That's different from the headline of this
I think this could also be quite useful for the average office lackey like me!
Can you imagine the hellish predicament you'd be in if you developed the equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome in your eyelids? In order to rest your lids enough to heal, you'd probably have to choose between leaving your eyes closed and thus being temporarily blind, and wearing some sort of yet-to-be-invented protective device that would let you keep them open all the time.
Yes, I know, carpal tunnel syndrome is due to inflamed tendons and nerves in your wrist, and you don't have those parts in your eyelids. Nevertheless, your eyelids have a well established and important job to do. Making them do double duty as a 'nouse' button or other input device seems risky. In addition to potentially overworking the muscles, I can see damage to the surface of the eyes coming from consistant, long-term over-blinking or under-blinking.
Certainly, there are people for whom some risk to the eyes is a small price to pay for a way to communicate with others and control their environment. Able-bodied geeks, though, would probably be wise to move around a bit more rather than less. If you're just looking for an alternative to hand-actuated mice, try an input device like the footmouse instead.
Alcohol is the most damaging food product you can put in your body. It's far worse than trans-fatty acids, artificial ingredients (e.g., pesticides, food coloring), or sugar.
I think this statement is a good deal sillier than the article title. Quite obviously, it makes little sense to talk about the relative harm or benefit of any substance without discussing quantity. In excess, even water can pose an immdiate, serious health risk, and I'm not talking about drowning. But obviously, water is an essential nutrient.
Heart disease is, by far, the number one killer of both men and women. On a societal level, then, it's pretty easy to make a strong case that fat, sugar, and cholesterol are significantly more harmful than alcohol. On a personal level, fat, sugar, and cholesterol consumed in huge excess are obviously more harmful than alcohol consumed in moderation.
For a truly satisfying listening experience, might I suggest a split-leaf philodendron?
Uh, yeah, okay, cool. Does it have an input for my 8-track?
So, let's say for the moment that Apple acquiesces and drops the iTunes per-song rate so that it's the same as in France and Germany. Can Apple then get a guarantee from the UK government that the cost of doing business in the UK will be the same as that in France and Germany?
And why look at just France and Germany, btw? Given that 1 euro is currently worth slightly more than 1 US dollar, you can make a solid case that European customers still pay more than Americans. Will the UK Office of Fair Trade again take Apple to task for charging a higher price in the UK than it does in some other country?
If I were Apple, I'd take that deal and then insist that workers in the UK charge more per hour than workers in Indonesia, and landlords charge more per square foot than do landlords in Siberia, and ask them to make sure that I got the same deal in the UK that I can get elsewhere.
Who knows? This could be an end to any problems the UK might currently have with outsourcing. They could call it the "Bring the Third World Home" intiative.
I just got this new geranium and you've gotta hear it? Sweet treble, clear midtones, and WICKED bass!
will this effect Jabber's overall share of the IM market?
/. that I have to wonder if some highly contagious brain fungus has affected a significant portion of the /. population. Perhaps this message will effect a quick recovery.
For whatever reason, slashdotters seem to make this mistake all the time. 'Effect,' as a verb, means 'to bring about.' The word you're looking for is 'affect,' which means (as a verb) 'to influence.'
I wouldn't normally worry about something like this, but I see it so often here on
How do you weigh things?!)
... hello, 1 cup of lead is a bit different to 1 cup of flour. Not that I use lead in my cookery. Not even when my mother-in-law is visiting.
I guess the point is that most home cooks in the US don't.
but nobody wants to spend their time squishing foodstuffs into various shaped volumetric measuring devices.
Uh, I think you're overstating the difficulty here. Bananas are an obvious exception, but most ingredients that are measured by volume can be moved in and out of a measuring cup with relative ease.
What really got to me were the people in this thread saying that 1 cup IS ~240g
Right. 1 cup is ~240ml, obviously, and should weigh ~240g if you're measuring water or anything else with similar density.
Still better to weigh the banana-mass in my opinion that try and squoosh the bananamatter into a cupmeasure.
Sure, I don't disagree. Sounds like the recipe in question was designed for a home cook, though, so measuring by volume makes sense. Not every home has an appropriate scale, but most everyone (in the US, anyway) has a measuring cup.
I didn't know men were illiterate.
Exactly.
I think "their funny way of looking at the world" must mean "smart enough to read and follow directions."
I once read a recipe : "1 cup banana" ... no kidding.
Depending on what the recipe was for, I'd probably interpret that as either banana slices or mashed banana. I can't think of any dishes that make use of a single whole banana. Heck, even a banana split requires a little preparation of the main ingredient.
If the recipe said "1 banana," how would you know how much you actually needed? Bananas come in different sizes, from tiny finger bananas to quite large ones.
Mod parent up. As a software developer, every job I've had has included assigned projects with deadlines. And I've always had to record my time. Nevertheless, I've always been FTE (full time, exempt), meaning that I've never been eligible for overtime except under very particular and rare circumstances.
Would someone explain how they can do this?
"They" can do whatever the hell they want, unless "we" decide to stop them. You and I, therefore, should hie to the polls on Election Day and cast a vote to remove from office the most secretive administration the US has ever seen.
I personally don't get that many e-mails at work but i've heard the Finance director saying he gets 400 e-mails a week. I fail to accept that reading all these e-mail is a productive use of his time and companies ran just fine before e-mail.
There are a few things going on here.
Before e-mail, the guy would have had a secretary or administrative assistant who took his calls, opened his mail, and managed his calendar. This person would have filtered the contacts which needed his attention from those that didn't. Now, with e-mail, he can probably do much of that himself. His assistant, if he has one, likely works at a higher level.
Many people consider the volume of e-mail one receives each day to be some sort of measure of status and importance. If you let everyone know that you receive a huge number of messages each day, you're telling them "I'm the hardest working guy in the company." It's also a built-in excuse for not dealing with someone, particularly someone beneath you on the corporate ladder. "Oh, did you e-mail me? I'm sorry if I didn't respond, but I get 400 messages a day."
The corollary to that, of course, is that you should subscribe to several high-volume mailing lists at work so that you, too, can walk around and honestly say: "Oh! 400 isn't so bad... I receive an average of 1200 messages each day. Yes, I'm the hardest working guy in the company. You may bow down before me."
On the other hand, before e-mail, there's a good chance that a peon at your company would never have been able to talk directly to the Finance Director. You'd have to get through a couple lines of defenses, and even then it would usually have been considered inappropriate. These days, it's not so much a faux pas to bring something directly to an executive's attention, and they often encourage that sort of thing. (Just be sure that you're not going behind your manager's back or over his head.)
OS X is not "secure" because it uses Open Source, it's less targeted because it has far less market share
These things are not mutually exclusive. OS X may, in fact, be more secure because it uses open source, and also has fallen to fewer (zero?) exploits in part because it has smaller market share.
I'll also remind everyone that it has had it's share of URI handler problems, but of course people will claim they only had those problems because they used a closed-source browser.
True, but that was a problem with one application, and technically not the "operating system." I know Microsoft wants us all to believe that a web browser is an essential, inseperable component of an OS, but on OS X it's just another app. The URI handler exploit does point up a problem in that, IIRC, it could be used to gain root and do whatever. But it's misguided to think of it as some inherent security flaw in the kernel.
I got Apple laptops for the family (which you can have when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers)
No thanks, I'm really not interested in "having" your family in any sense of the word.
People have an irrational hate for Microsoft
Some people do. Some people have a rational dislike of Microsoft.
and even when presented with easier opportunities elsewhere, will often prefer to write exploits for Microsoft products.
I think you're speculating here. I doubt very much that hatred of Microsoft, rational or otherwise, is a primary motivation for most of the people out there writing viruses. Indeed, most of the people I know who really dislike MS avoid using its products, and therefore use either Linux or MacOS. (Though I guess you could make a pretty good argument that if you use Windows long enough, you'll build a pretty solid dislike of MS.)
My point is, the people who write Windows viruses and worms and such are probably NOT Mac and Linux users. They're Windows users who want to show off their programming skillz and build some kind of hacker cred. They're not mainly driven by ideology, but by their own egos. And when it comes to "easier opportunities," well, it doesn't seem like there are any that are easier than Windows.
That's not going to change any time soon, and given Apple's rabid fan base and rapidly swelling Open Source cheerleading squad, it's only likely to go the other way.
Dude, you've been reading too much Microsoft PR. When was the last time you met a "rabid" (meaning "infected with rabies" or implying foaming at the mouth, wild-eyed, unable to think clearly) Mac user? We're mostly a pretty mellow bunch, and we just want to get our work done without the OS getting in the way. We like that it looks nice, works well, and has some cool features. And Apple makes pretty darn nice hardware. What's irrational about that? What's so wrong with thinking Microsoft products are crappy?
Apple will be glad to know it's got a rapidly expanding open source cheerleading squad, but only if it leads to rapidly expanding sales.
Is it really true that they use Bluetooth for shell detonation? I thought the range was limited. And it seems rather expensive compared to fuses. But I guess it's Disney... :-)
IMO, that's a really nice design feature. When the CPU is under your desk, it's a pain to connect things and you end up having to buy hubs and such just so you can periodically connect your camera or camcorder. With this new iMac, the connectors are right there, and not, at the same time.
I wish they'd kept a 15" model at $999. This lack of low end is Apple's greatest problem with consumers.
Hello, eMac.
You can buy an eMac for $799, and they might even throw in a printer. Yes, it doesn't have an LCD, but it does have a nice, flat display and it's plenty cheap if that's all you want. If you want a little more speed and a little more flash, spend a few hundred extra bucks and get an iMac.
Of course they'll replace both the point-of-sale and the internet cafe machines. Those machines don't just serve their apparent purpose... they're also advertisements.
Given all of the talk about an economic turnaround, are we looking at a potential tech turnover spike as individuals leave positions they have stayed in only because of a dismal job market?
One can only hope.
On the other hand, I don't see any increase in hiring in the tech sector so far.
The Mac runs OS X, while the Dell runs Windows XP.
You couldn't pay me $1,373 to use the Dell, but I'll likely buy one of these new iMacs.
Well said, AC. Wish I could mod that comment up.