Does it circle the 7-11 for you on autopilot while you're inside getting your Hostess cupcakes and lottery tickets?
Well, in that case, a perpetually running car is possible, provided the 7-11's pump nozzle has a very long hoze and the car's owner has an infinitely deep Amex credit.
Okay, here's the first thing newly hired patent reviewers of all patent offices in the world are told: If it says "perpetual motion" or "endless source of energy" anywhere in the patent application, grab the red stamp labelled "crackpot idea", stamp the patent application, send the application down the "rejected" chute and move to the next one. If you know nothing else, know how to do that.
Perpetual motion is proven impossible. That's why the feds raided this guy, because asking investment money to fund research on perpetual motion is like screaming "I've got this great scam for you".
Check out that page from the SPOT page, and dig that quote: "This is the next evolutionary step in personal computing."
- Bill Mitchell Corp Vice President, Microsoft
No ? Really ? Messrs Microsoft, you should at least find someone who doesn't work for you to praise your products. We're certain Bill Mitchell is genuinely impressed by SPOT, from the bottom of his heart, but in any case it's not like he's ever going to say SPOT sucks toilet water as long as he's one of your employees. This quote is so useless it makes you wonder about the rest of the product...
Instead of hiring that web designer Rob to make smart watches, they should have hired, say, Jasmine St. Claire. Now I bet any Smart Personal Object Technology gizmo she would design would be a huge seller, much more than a silly wristwatch.
You know, LI and Caldera/Lineo were best buddies for a long time. The original Caldera founders (Bryan Sparks and his friends from Novell) were good honest-to-goodness people who wanted to make Linux and OSS happen. But things started to degrade when Ransome Love replaced Bryan, and now SCO has nothing of Caldera left in it. Caldera was a good company (good as in benefactor of the community), got the first successful commercial Linux distro out back in 1995 (if I remember correctly), then got shafted by RedHat over RPM, then pretty much missed all the opportunities that could have made them great, and now they're just plain aggressive idiots.
In short : John Hall must feel like he's walking on eggs here. SCO isn't at all the Caldera he was talking to back in the good days. I wonder what ties remain between LI and SCO, and if they could be severed for good at last.
how to migrate comic books from print to web and make it work
I used to read comic books. I still do on occasion, as well as comics on the web. I notice one thing : comics that work well on the web are shorter, simpler in drawing and text and quicker-paced than paper comics. In short, web comics have their own style, quite distinguishable from paper comics. I reckon that's merely due to current screen resolutions : 75dpi, even 100 dpi isn't much to display nice graphics, complex actions or texts, while paper can bear (near-)infinitely complex details.
Once, I started to scan my old paper copy of Art Spiegelman's Maus, which is my all-time favorite comic, because the poor book was getting worn out and I wanted to preserve it. Well, after 2 or 3 pages, the digital result turned out to be awful and I reckon took away much of the atmosphere of the book, so I gave up and ended up buying another, recent hardback.
So is it such a good idea to migrate printed comics to the web ? I'm not that sure. It would certainly give an idea of what the original work is, but I think many comics deserve to be read on the media they were designed for originally. Maybe web comics could be considered as a wholly separate subform of comics in general, with its own style and talented authors ?
Finally, as a side note, there's another reason to prefer printed comics over web ones : have you noticed, on cheap comics, that sometimes you can see through the paper and have a look at what's on the next page, in reverse ? if that next page is colorful, or packed in action, you can see something's going to happen in the story and it makes you anticipate the rest with great pleasure. Web-based comics don't do that, and in a way that can take some of the reading experience away.
The guys from NW Test Alliance pitted Red Hat, UnitedLinux, and Windows against each other and rated them on several rubrics. Red Hat won by a slight margin
So, they compared RH (Linux), UnitedLinux (Linux again) against Windows (not Linux). Guess which OS has 66% chances of winning, given that, honestly, modern Linux distros and Windows are very close in features and user friendliness ?
What's more, for one such comparison test where a Linux distro wins that gets posted on Slashdot, how many get ignored my Taco & Co because the Windows OS wins and not Linux ?
Finally, I would have much preferred a Windows vs RH vs MacOS X review : see, I don't plan on buying a Mac, but I'd like someone to describe OS X to me and compare them to similar KDE or Windows features, for example. Yes, I know they don't run on the same platforms (well, RH could) but I'd like to see a detailed comparison chart with Windows, RH and MacOS X compatibility ratings and desktop features/ease of use. Now/that/ would be much more interesting IMHO...
...maybe I don't get it, but how are RFID tags a violation of your privacy. They have an effective range of a few feet. They are the next logical evolution up from barcodes. Are we that paranoid and afraid of technology? Somebody please enlighten me...
Allow me then : with barcodes, one has to purposedly point the barcode to the reader, or the reader to the barcode, or even swipe the barcode with passive readers, to read the barcode. When you've purchased all your articles at the cash registers and all your items are hidden away in your big bag when you head back to your car at the supermarket, the barcode the items bear are effectively unreadable.
Now with RFID tags, the range may be only a few feet, but these tags are readable from under the bag. It is very conceivable that, say, a shop in a high street sets up their RFID terminal to track what items you bought in the other shops in the high street. It's also possible that this odd "arch of joy" those weird Hare Krishna people made you pass under was a RFID scanner and the Hare Krishnas were marketers.
But there is only one slashdot.org and there are many, many John Smiths in New York...
Well then, how come you manage to find the right John Smith in New York using the phone book ? because you also look up the street address, city and state. Did I say people should be looked up by name only in my previous post ?
I don't know what's trollish about wanting telephones with a keyboard and screen to look up people directly from the phone line, instead of using the phone book. The French nearly got that right : you can look up people with the Minitel, but the Minitel doesn't connect you directly, you still have to dial manually.
The only thing I'm saying is this : printing phone directories and requiring people to dial numbers is turn of the previous century technology, and I think there should be a better, cheaper, more elegant way of doing this by now, but there isn't, which is odd.
Re:[OT] idea for a 'new? domain naming concep
on
Happy Birthday, Dear DNS
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This would be kind of like palm graffiti where each "shape", that you draw in the silkscreen, is registered as a character.
In Asian languages, that "new" concept is called "ideograms".
100.000 concepts, 100.000 ideograms. That may work for educated chinese or japanese people, but for internet websites, you're talking about gazillions of "URL graphitis", not just tens of thousands. Considering the difficulty standard computers still have translating handwritten latin alphabet, which is only 26 letters, I think this is a crackpot idea. And even if it worked, did you think about handicapped people, or blind people, who might just like to type URLs in plaintext ?
Isn't it weird that people take automated name resolving for granted in the internet world, and yet don't find it odd to have to look up other people up themselves manually in another, older, even bigger world wide network called the "telephone system", using an regionalized locally-cached database called the "phone directory" that's updated only once a year ? In the 21st century, I find it really surprising that phones still feature a 10 key touchpad and cheapo dialtones to talk to you.
Separate all the screen tubes from their plastic casings, line them up together, then weld the tube edges together with a blowtorch. You might need to degauss all the screens when you're done.
Lots of people, including me, use different middle names or initials when applying for something in writing, by snail mail or by telephone. When junk mail comes back in the mailbox, it's easy to know what company sold your information to whom, or at least which company was the initial recipient of the bogus info and which was the last.
first we are given a number rather than our names, like dogs with tags
Ask your parents, I bet they chose your name before getting your SSN. As for dog tags, they usually bear doggy's name on it.
then it's required for all sorts of services it should have nothing to do with - like why the hell do I need one to get medical insurance
Thank your fellow countrymen for lobbying against a national ID card : after all, don't you use your driver's license to write checks too ? Driving cars and writing checks don't have much in common either.
and finally, worst of all, it is attached to one of the largest, most fraudlent ponzi, pyramid, investment aleged retirement schemes in the history of human existence.
I've always said and will always say that people who are credulous enough to be taken in Ponzi or MLM scams deserve what happens to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it circle the 7-11 for you on autopilot while you're inside getting your Hostess cupcakes and lottery tickets?
Well, in that case, a perpetually running car is possible, provided the 7-11's pump nozzle has a very long hoze and the car's owner has an infinitely deep Amex credit.
Assuming that this guy isn't a crackpot
:
Okay, here's the first thing newly hired patent reviewers of all patent offices in the world are told
If it says "perpetual motion" or "endless source of energy" anywhere in the patent application, grab the red stamp labelled "crackpot idea", stamp the patent application, send the application down the "rejected" chute and move to the next one. If you know nothing else, know how to do that.
Perpetual motion is proven impossible. That's why the feds raided this guy, because asking investment money to fund research on perpetual motion is like screaming "I've got this great scam for you".
Check out that page from the SPOT page, and dig that quote :
...
"This is the next evolutionary step in personal computing."
- Bill Mitchell
Corp Vice President,
Microsoft
No ? Really ? Messrs Microsoft, you should at least find someone who doesn't work for you to praise your products. We're certain Bill Mitchell is genuinely impressed by SPOT, from the bottom of his heart, but in any case it's not like he's ever going to say SPOT sucks toilet water as long as he's one of your employees. This quote is so useless it makes you wonder about the rest of the product
Instead of hiring that web designer Rob to make smart watches, they should have hired, say, Jasmine St. Claire. Now I bet any Smart Personal Object Technology gizmo she would design would be a huge seller, much more than a silly wristwatch.
Can you say 'patent infringement suit'?
Yeah, I bet Akamai even installed a vixie-cron job to launch the suit automatically in the next few days.
You know, LI and Caldera/Lineo were best buddies for a long time. The original Caldera founders (Bryan Sparks and his friends from Novell) were good honest-to-goodness people who wanted to make Linux and OSS happen. But things started to degrade when Ransome Love replaced Bryan, and now SCO has nothing of Caldera left in it. Caldera was a good company (good as in benefactor of the community), got the first successful commercial Linux distro out back in 1995 (if I remember correctly), then got shafted by RedHat over RPM, then pretty much missed all the opportunities that could have made them great, and now they're just plain aggressive idiots.
In short : John Hall must feel like he's walking on eggs here. SCO isn't at all the Caldera he was talking to back in the good days. I wonder what ties remain between LI and SCO, and if they could be severed for good at last.
The open-source development community is an international treasure and should be protected as such
John can hide the entire open-source community in his beard to protect it and keep it warm.
how to migrate comic books from print to web and make it work
I used to read comic books. I still do on occasion, as well as comics on the web. I notice one thing : comics that work well on the web are shorter, simpler in drawing and text and quicker-paced than paper comics. In short, web comics have their own style, quite distinguishable from paper comics. I reckon that's merely due to current screen resolutions : 75dpi, even 100 dpi isn't much to display nice graphics, complex actions or texts, while paper can bear (near-)infinitely complex details.
Once, I started to scan my old paper copy of Art Spiegelman's Maus, which is my all-time favorite comic, because the poor book was getting worn out and I wanted to preserve it. Well, after 2 or 3 pages, the digital result turned out to be awful and I reckon took away much of the atmosphere of the book, so I gave up and ended up buying another, recent hardback.
So is it such a good idea to migrate printed comics to the web ? I'm not that sure. It would certainly give an idea of what the original work is, but I think many comics deserve to be read on the media they were designed for originally. Maybe web comics could be considered as a wholly separate subform of comics in general, with its own style and talented authors ?
Finally, as a side note, there's another reason to prefer printed comics over web ones : have you noticed, on cheap comics, that sometimes you can see through the paper and have a look at what's on the next page, in reverse ? if that next page is colorful, or packed in action, you can see something's going to happen in the story and it makes you anticipate the rest with great pleasure. Web-based comics don't do that, and in a way that can take some of the reading experience away.
The guys from NW Test Alliance pitted Red Hat, UnitedLinux, and Windows against each other and rated them on several rubrics. Red Hat won by a slight margin
/that/ would be much more interesting IMHO ...
So, they compared RH (Linux), UnitedLinux (Linux again) against Windows (not Linux). Guess which OS has 66% chances of winning, given that, honestly, modern Linux distros and Windows are very close in features and user friendliness ?
What's more, for one such comparison test where a Linux distro wins that gets posted on Slashdot, how many get ignored my Taco & Co because the Windows OS wins and not Linux ?
Finally, I would have much preferred a Windows vs RH vs MacOS X review : see, I don't plan on buying a Mac, but I'd like someone to describe OS X to me and compare them to similar KDE or Windows features, for example. Yes, I know they don't run on the same platforms (well, RH could) but I'd like to see a detailed comparison chart with Windows, RH and MacOS X compatibility ratings and desktop features/ease of use. Now
Allow me then : with barcodes, one has to purposedly point the barcode to the reader, or the reader to the barcode, or even swipe the barcode with passive readers, to read the barcode. When you've purchased all your articles at the cash registers and all your items are hidden away in your big bag when you head back to your car at the supermarket, the barcode the items bear are effectively unreadable.
Now with RFID tags, the range may be only a few feet, but these tags are readable from under the bag. It is very conceivable that, say, a shop in a high street sets up their RFID terminal to track what items you bought in the other shops in the high street. It's also possible that this odd "arch of joy" those weird Hare Krishna people made you pass under was a RFID scanner and the Hare Krishnas were marketers.
has posted proposed legislation that would require a product to be labeled if it contained an RFID tag
Use RFID tags under the labels to facilitate the tracking of RFID warning labels.
integrated package that runs on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server distributions
...
I can't wait to see a version of Novell's package for OpenLinux, or even UnixWare+LKP
A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed
...
Just imagine the chess performances of a 8086 at 1GHz. And you get a space heater too, for those cold chess-playing winter nights
yes they are !
But there is only one slashdot.org and there are many, many John Smiths in New York...
Well then, how come you manage to find the right John Smith in New York using the phone book ? because you also look up the street address, city and state. Did I say people should be looked up by name only in my previous post ?
I don't know what's trollish about wanting telephones with a keyboard and screen to look up people directly from the phone line, instead of using the phone book. The French nearly got that right : you can look up people with the Minitel, but the Minitel doesn't connect you directly, you still have to dial manually.
The only thing I'm saying is this : printing phone directories and requiring people to dial numbers is turn of the previous century technology, and I think there should be a better, cheaper, more elegant way of doing this by now, but there isn't, which is odd.
This would be kind of like palm graffiti where each "shape", that you draw in the silkscreen, is registered as a character.
In Asian languages, that "new" concept is called "ideograms".
100.000 concepts, 100.000 ideograms. That may work for educated chinese or japanese people, but for internet websites, you're talking about gazillions of "URL graphitis", not just tens of thousands. Considering the difficulty standard computers still have translating handwritten latin alphabet, which is only 26 letters, I think this is a crackpot idea. And even if it worked, did you think about handicapped people, or blind people, who might just like to type URLs in plaintext ?
Isn't it weird that people take automated name resolving for granted in the internet world, and yet don't find it odd to have to look up other people up themselves manually in another, older, even bigger world wide network called the "telephone system", using an regionalized locally-cached database called the "phone directory" that's updated only once a year ? In the 21st century, I find it really surprising that phones still feature a 10 key touchpad and cheapo dialtones to talk to you.
An Australian computer chip designer will this weekend risk the wrath of Microsoft
Naah, who would risk going after those Ford Falcon driving weapon-carrying reckless Aussies, hey ?
Check out this page and look at the date on the bottom photo : does that look like a 1 1/3 year old news or is it just me ?
/. ...
Way to go
Separate all the screen tubes from their plastic casings, line them up together, then weld the tube edges together with a blowtorch. You might need to degauss all the screens when you're done.
With all them PCs running under his desk, the guy must be wondering why he still hears the wind roars when his plane is parked.
Lots of people, including me, use different middle names or initials when applying for something in writing, by snail mail or by telephone. When junk mail comes back in the mailbox, it's easy to know what company sold your information to whom, or at least which company was the initial recipient of the bogus info and which was the last.
...
Old new
first we are given a number rather than our names, like dogs with tags
Ask your parents, I bet they chose your name before getting your SSN. As for dog tags, they usually bear doggy's name on it.
then it's required for all sorts of services it should have nothing to do with - like why the hell do I need one to get medical insurance
Thank your fellow countrymen for lobbying against a national ID card : after all, don't you use your driver's license to write checks too ? Driving cars and writing checks don't have much in common either.
and finally, worst of all, it is attached to one of the largest, most fraudlent ponzi, pyramid, investment aleged retirement schemes in the history of human existence.
I've always said and will always say that people who are credulous enough to be taken in Ponzi or MLM scams deserve what happens to them.
Here it is (partially) :
:
xxx-xx-1337
And of course, Bill Gates (again, only partially)
666-xx-xxxx
I had already hit Slashdot for my semi-hourly dose of content
It takes your half an hour to find the content in Slashdot ?