I remember that series Magnum Robot Fighter 4000 AD. Not the retelling one but the orginal from the 60's.
That old Magnus I read, I still remember pretty well. Had great noir artwork and a fairly interesting story, at least to a 6 year old. I think Magnus would make a decent subject for a film, but done in a similar style to Bladerunner.
Its not just IT workers that are in danger, and its not just Indian workers that are taking away jobs.
So you're dinking around, posting whinges on/. instead of getting off your fat duff and starting you're own robot making assembly line. What do you want, applause?
You know an upcoming story will undoubtably involve people getting stupid patents for robots that can thread a needle or dodge a puddle.
Oh, yeah. I can just see the original thinkers at Hollywood, Inc. making a movie about these. Robots, designed to serve and help mankind,
a minor flaw, they think for themselves and start taking out the patients systematically until some tough macho cop, probably played by a typecast actor
shows up and swaggers a lot and blows them apart with the kind of gun only SWAT teams and infantry are issued, all the while uttering expletives which
only entertain juveniles. They'll probably rip off the title of some great sci-fi classic, too, just to promote the lousy thing.
There was a comic I won at a school fair in the late 60's, with cover ripped off (probably return donated by distributor) Magnus Robot Fighter, which would fit the
bill rather well.
It really isn't remotely clever. You could probably do this with a Mr. Microphone.
We used to be able to buy these little Archer-Kit 100mw FM transmitters from Radio Shack, which ran off a 9v battery. You could do all sorts of crap with that, like play voice over the station they're listening to: "I suck d!ck, come bl0w me.", etc. Though I'd be more inclined to find the noisiest little 1.5v DC motor I can find and feed, through like a 0.01 ufd cap, the brush noise. I'm sure that'd be a big hit.
Problem is, most of these jerks you want to mess with are listing to a CD or MP3.
I later went back to look at the laws in my state governing self-defense. They are totally impractical. The legal system is set up in such a way that you really have to let the animals control the streets.
That really is wonderful. Then the judge or the police say useful things like, "well you shouldn't take the law into your own hands" or "don't bother them and they won't bother you" and the ever popular "just ignore them."
Small wonder there's so much gun violence in this country. We can't stand each other.
Sadly, probably everyone knows of at least one annoying jerk.
There are laws concerning noise pollution, which fall under disturbing the peace, but try to get anyone to actually enforce them when police spend half their calls on domestic violence.
After years of seeing the tricksy titles of spam for installing worms, I've skeptical enough of anything which claims to be a fix, even when it really comes from the product company. This is the 'Executive Band-Aid', meant to trick decision makers into a false sense of security.
"There, see? They've fixed it already. Nothing to worry about."
Original: "In the meantime, we have provided customers with prescriptive guidance to help mitigate these issues."
This translates to a set of instructions for making changes in I.E. settings since the default settings are not terribly good for security. THe MS spokesperson said that a "comprehensive" security pack for I.E. will be out later this summer.
Translation: After all those horses get out of the way, we'll have your barn door fixed in a jiffy.
What's next, a recommendation that everyone stop using Microsoft Windows?
New: Microsox Windlls FU SP7 w/Ubernet Exploiter (a free pile of bugs in each release!)
I have been saying this for a long time but now it is offical.
<Shakespeare mode=Hamlet>: There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this.</Shakespeare>
Really. How long before the Whitehouse figuratively grabs Tom Ridge by the lapels and tries to throttle him. Such harsh treatment for a huge dono^H^H^H^Hemployer. Oddsbodkins, what next, the GWB DoJ was soft in pursuing the danger of
monopoly exploitation of the browser market?
Is the consumers software industry slowing down? OR is it just the giants that are stagnating because they don't want decreased profots?
Declining returns means more effort put in for less yield, like a mine what was initially opened because rich deposites of ore were found on the surface, now poorer ore is deeper down and requires more expense to extract. Windows, in case you haven't noticed, and to which I alluded, isn't about the operating system, but all the junk that comes bundled with it. To maintain the same profit margin and growth Microsoft has enjoyed for years they need to find some way for you the NEED the n, n+1, n+2...nth version but making it do all sorts of things a computer operating system isn't at all about.
On an unrelated topic, something like the RIAA example of not knowing how to deal with all the innovation comming in.
The RIAA simply wasn't forward looking, they were content to sit on their fat asses and collect on old works, invent new manufactured acts of shite music and screw to death anyone who tried to cut their own slice of the pie. Simply put, it was all about fear of losing control and not wanting to actually work out where music needed to go for the future, like MP3's and such. They've got a buddy in Microsoft though, who will work with them to ensure they both get rich and keep consumers under their thumb with DMCA an DRM.
On the other hand, Linux may commercialize, gain momentum and start having all the risks the windows market have. But, by the way how things are set up right now. At least I can control what goes into my source/applicaiton tree.
The beauty of Linux is the many distros and different packaging available. You can build your own OS with no more or no less than you need. It's far harder for some scumbags to put in a half-assed effort and distribute bug-riddled code, since it's checked by many eyes. It's also very hard for a special interest to force upon Linux things like DRM, since the code is open and a reasonably bright programmer could work around it. Which probably has something to do with more crap winding up in firmware for devices, like DVD drives, which are outside a programmers control.
My comments: In order to see what a real inovation is, one has to compare firefox's mouse gestures to Ie's SP2. I mean, who gives a damn about mouse whatnot, we don't want viruses, right?
Not meaning to stray offtopic, but have you bought or sold on eBay lately? If you did business on there, like I had, you were probably instantly frustrated and angered beyond mere contempt for the way they just threw out a whole pile of changes about a month back. Customers were furious at the way it was simply thrown out there on a population who had no idea it was coming and suddenly struggled to make their wonderful, creative and innovative (not to mention terminally cute*) design meet the needs the previous interface did rather better in some aspects (some aspects which are now gone completely, which were far better.)
Microsoft's 'innovations' are pretty much to this point. Declining returns and actual reversals, where consumers (personal and business) have little choice but to bolt on the latest great idea to occur to MS designers and programmers, while the 'OS' (and I use that term very loosely as it's about 10% OS and the rest is bundled stuff you may or may never need or use.) You may assume SP2 will fix a great many things, you know it will add more features and you can expect a pile of hidden features (not necessarily to benefit YOU) will be in there, too, along with a passle of new bugs for people to find. It's getting tough to decide, do you eat worms or do you eat bugs. Thanks to the massive cave by DoJ you're going to wind up eating one or the other or both.
* You'd need to be a long time Zippy the Pinhead follower to comprehend this fully, but I think you can get the gist.
UPS is adding services above and beyond shipping. I remember 8-9 years ago having them do warehousing and packing.
I worked for a company years ago that did pretty much this same thing. It was a freight and logistics company and one of the customers was Apple Computer. We coordinated supply chains for the parts and brought the assembled systems, packaged and all, to where the end customer or store was. Less bother for the manufacturer.
a complete, self-contained CDMA cell that can be moved to wherever it's needed, such as the scene of a natural disaster or a large public event.
I rather wonder, aside from the hobby aspect, how much longer Amature Radio will remain relevant. Seems disasters where AR would really shine and this sort of thing seems to replace them, as now pretty much anyone can afford a hand held phone, where once transmitters and receivers were the domain of those who actually cared enough to outfit and train themselves to be available for when there was need. Now you just whip out a cell phone and dial 911.
That never stops anyone from using any technology or the latest and greatest for other than its intended use.
Read the Viewsonic product page: ideal for satellite imaging and digital content creation. Says nothing about a playable framerate (with a friggin Matrox Parhelia!) or watching bootleg anime DiVX movies.
And a few of them will find their way into those jobs. The rest will be bought by or for people who don't absolutely need them but absolutely can't resist.
This is a problem common to Slashdot readers -- "if it doesn't work for me, it's obviously not good for anybody."
No, it's an insight into the behaviour of people in general. Who actually buys "good enough"? If you do, you find in about 3 years time that it isn't. It was only good enough for then, but eveything else moved on.
P.S. after a year on a 23" CRT I can't imagine downgrading to anything less; a friend of mine uses two of them!
As if to underscore my point... who really needs a 23". Once they've been to to big city it's so hard to keep them down on the farm.
I guess it will be 2 years till I see one of these on my desktop.
But if you worked at some of the places I had, you'd see it on an executive's desktop with amazing speed. It does confound me that budgets can be razor thin, but the person least needy of this sort of thing is the first to "evaluate it." I did graphic and forms designwork on an el-cheapo Dell CRT.
Why should I shell out money for a monitor that costs more than my Harley?
You bought a cheap Harley.
At least there's an option for you to be buried with it.
Maybe you could have one of these great monitors put in place of your headstone, showing you smiling away in your heyday as you cruised the american road. I wonder when we'll get like that.
At $6000, what a deal. Just hook that baby up with your Blue Light Special and you'll rule
your block with an iron fist.
Now, if there were only something worth watching on TV... Oh, the TdF is coming up, but usually the resolution is on par with
VHS, unless they do something vastly different this year.
I'm still happy with my 1.3 megapixel 500:1 contrast 17" LCD. Anything wider and I get some weird
feeling my head needs to be stretched. Has anyone else noticed something like that? There was something about a big convex display that didn't cause that sort of
sensation.
And that 3840x2400 resolution should give your graphics card a workout trying to render your FPS games at biggie frame rates. At what pixel density do you fail to notice
a difference in image quality, anyway? I turned on one pixel on my monitor and can hardly even see it!
Um, HELLO, quality will drop, bugs in software will increase exponentially as a result and Micro$fot will finally die from the burdens of this load and the world will proliferate with GOOD software.
**wakes up from dream**
Yeah. Dream is right. Television is the opiate of the masses these days and what better source of opiate than China, with a little help for a Yankee trader (Microsoft) to bring it to market around the world.
As more technology is needed (or not needed but crammed in there anyway to obfuscate signals and control content distribution) TV moves further from a free medium into a medium locked down by content providers. Lovely.
Yeah, no shit... This is news? Bad programming = security issues. Wow... we learn something new every day on slashdot.
Here's a tip editor boys: if group A says statement A and you post it as a news item, great. But when group B, C, D, E, F, G, and H all say the same statement A, it's not news. It's redundant (remember that modifier you put in? -1 Redundant? That's what it is).
Here's a clue: Not everyone started programming at the same time, back in the enlightened age of limited resources and cautious programming. When I saw some jerk writing login spoofs on a PDP 11, back in the early 80's I worked out a few ways to spot these running and suspend them. (Also pass information on to Campus Police to have the perpetrator evicted from the grounds.) People are still learning to program and it's not uncommon for them to take idiot-proofing for granted, unless one of two things took place: 1) They had a good instructor who warned them of the consequences untrapped errors 2) There's a directive where they work which they must follow. I expect even Microsoft must be able to backtrack to the person who wrote leaky code. Problem also is two or more departments whose products must interface, but pass the buck on who is responsible for trapping errors, etc. That role should be filled by a management group responsible for the work between groups.
Microsoft responded with ActiveX, which bypasses security entirely by making it easy to blame the user for authorizing bad code to execute.'"
When's the tenth anniversary of the Win95 bug which allowed people to hack Quicken?
Slashdot Mirror
That old Magnus I read, I still remember pretty well. Had great noir artwork and a fairly interesting story, at least to a 6 year old. I think Magnus would make a decent subject for a film, but done in a similar style to Bladerunner.
Or have a few ampules of saline along with the real thing, only the robot knows which is which.
So you're dinking around, posting whinges on /. instead of getting off your fat duff and starting you're own robot making assembly line. What do you want, applause?
You know an upcoming story will undoubtably involve people getting stupid patents for robots that can thread a needle or dodge a puddle.
There was a comic I won at a school fair in the late 60's, with cover ripped off (probably return donated by distributor) Magnus Robot Fighter, which would fit the bill rather well.
It really isn't remotely clever. You could probably do this with a Mr. Microphone.
We used to be able to buy these little Archer-Kit 100mw FM transmitters from Radio Shack, which ran off a 9v battery. You could do all sorts of crap with that, like play voice over the station they're listening to: "I suck d!ck, come bl0w me.", etc. Though I'd be more inclined to find the noisiest little 1.5v DC motor I can find and feed, through like a 0.01 ufd cap, the brush noise. I'm sure that'd be a big hit.
Problem is, most of these jerks you want to mess with are listing to a CD or MP3.
That really is wonderful. Then the judge or the police say useful things like, "well you shouldn't take the law into your own hands" or "don't bother them and they won't bother you" and the ever popular "just ignore them."
Small wonder there's so much gun violence in this country. We can't stand each other. Sadly, probably everyone knows of at least one annoying jerk.
There are laws concerning noise pollution, which fall under disturbing the peace, but try to get anyone to actually enforce them when police spend half their calls on domestic violence.
After years of seeing the tricksy titles of spam for installing worms, I've skeptical enough of anything which claims to be a fix, even when it really comes from the product company. This is the 'Executive Band-Aid', meant to trick decision makers into a false sense of security.
"There, see? They've fixed it already. Nothing to worry about."
This translates to a set of instructions for making changes in I.E. settings since the default settings are not terribly good for security. THe MS spokesperson said that a "comprehensive" security pack for I.E. will be out later this summer.
Translation: After all those horses get out of the way, we'll have your barn door fixed in a jiffy.
Do they have Firestones on their Explorers?
Enquiring minds want to know.
What's next, a recommendation that everyone stop using Microsoft Windows?
New: Microsox Windlls FU SP7 w/Ubernet Exploiter (a free pile of bugs in each release!)
I have been saying this for a long time but now it is offical.
<Shakespeare mode=Hamlet>: There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this.</Shakespeare>
Really. How long before the Whitehouse figuratively grabs Tom Ridge by the lapels and tries to throttle him. Such harsh treatment for a huge dono^H^H^H^Hemployer. Oddsbodkins, what next, the GWB DoJ was soft in pursuing the danger of monopoly exploitation of the browser market?
Don't you see? It's a big left wing liberal conspiracy to get NASA to continue to repair and support that aging hulk of a telescope!
Maybe it would just be easier to brainwash him... considering the subject, only a light rinse may be needed.
Declining returns means more effort put in for less yield, like a mine what was initially opened because rich deposites of ore were found on the surface, now poorer ore is deeper down and requires more expense to extract. Windows, in case you haven't noticed, and to which I alluded, isn't about the operating system, but all the junk that comes bundled with it. To maintain the same profit margin and growth Microsoft has enjoyed for years they need to find some way for you the NEED the n, n+1, n+2...nth version but making it do all sorts of things a computer operating system isn't at all about.
On an unrelated topic, something like the RIAA example of not knowing how to deal with all the innovation comming in.
The RIAA simply wasn't forward looking, they were content to sit on their fat asses and collect on old works, invent new manufactured acts of shite music and screw to death anyone who tried to cut their own slice of the pie. Simply put, it was all about fear of losing control and not wanting to actually work out where music needed to go for the future, like MP3's and such. They've got a buddy in Microsoft though, who will work with them to ensure they both get rich and keep consumers under their thumb with DMCA an DRM.
On the other hand, Linux may commercialize, gain momentum and start having all the risks the windows market have. But, by the way how things are set up right now. At least I can control what goes into my source/applicaiton tree.
The beauty of Linux is the many distros and different packaging available. You can build your own OS with no more or no less than you need. It's far harder for some scumbags to put in a half-assed effort and distribute bug-riddled code, since it's checked by many eyes. It's also very hard for a special interest to force upon Linux things like DRM, since the code is open and a reasonably bright programmer could work around it. Which probably has something to do with more crap winding up in firmware for devices, like DVD drives, which are outside a programmers control.
Not meaning to stray offtopic, but have you bought or sold on eBay lately? If you did business on there, like I had, you were probably instantly frustrated and angered beyond mere contempt for the way they just threw out a whole pile of changes about a month back. Customers were furious at the way it was simply thrown out there on a population who had no idea it was coming and suddenly struggled to make their wonderful, creative and innovative (not to mention terminally cute*) design meet the needs the previous interface did rather better in some aspects (some aspects which are now gone completely, which were far better.)
Microsoft's 'innovations' are pretty much to this point. Declining returns and actual reversals, where consumers (personal and business) have little choice but to bolt on the latest great idea to occur to MS designers and programmers, while the 'OS' (and I use that term very loosely as it's about 10% OS and the rest is bundled stuff you may or may never need or use.) You may assume SP2 will fix a great many things, you know it will add more features and you can expect a pile of hidden features (not necessarily to benefit YOU) will be in there, too, along with a passle of new bugs for people to find. It's getting tough to decide, do you eat worms or do you eat bugs. Thanks to the massive cave by DoJ you're going to wind up eating one or the other or both.
* You'd need to be a long time Zippy the Pinhead follower to comprehend this fully, but I think you can get the gist.
I worked for a company years ago that did pretty much this same thing. It was a freight and logistics company and one of the customers was Apple Computer. We coordinated supply chains for the parts and brought the assembled systems, packaged and all, to where the end customer or store was. Less bother for the manufacturer.
I dunno, but maybe at those frequencies a stationary platform is desirable over something buffeted by wind?
I rather wonder, aside from the hobby aspect, how much longer Amature Radio will remain relevant. Seems disasters where AR would really shine and this sort of thing seems to replace them, as now pretty much anyone can afford a hand held phone, where once transmitters and receivers were the domain of those who actually cared enough to outfit and train themselves to be available for when there was need. Now you just whip out a cell phone and dial 911.
That never stops anyone from using any technology or the latest and greatest for other than its intended use.
Read the Viewsonic product page: ideal for satellite imaging and digital content creation. Says nothing about a playable framerate (with a friggin Matrox Parhelia!) or watching bootleg anime DiVX movies.
And a few of them will find their way into those jobs. The rest will be bought by or for people who don't absolutely need them but absolutely can't resist.
This is a problem common to Slashdot readers -- "if it doesn't work for me, it's obviously not good for anybody."
No, it's an insight into the behaviour of people in general. Who actually buys "good enough"? If you do, you find in about 3 years time that it isn't. It was only good enough for then, but eveything else moved on.
P.S. after a year on a 23" CRT I can't imagine downgrading to anything less; a friend of mine uses two of them!
As if to underscore my point... who really needs a 23". Once they've been to to big city it's so hard to keep them down on the farm.
But if you worked at some of the places I had, you'd see it on an executive's desktop with amazing speed. It does confound me that budgets can be razor thin, but the person least needy of this sort of thing is the first to "evaluate it." I did graphic and forms designwork on an el-cheapo Dell CRT.
You bought a cheap Harley.
At least there's an option for you to be buried with it.
Maybe you could have one of these great monitors put in place of your headstone, showing you smiling away in your heyday as you cruised the american road. I wonder when we'll get like that.
Now, if there were only something worth watching on TV... Oh, the TdF is coming up, but usually the resolution is on par with VHS, unless they do something vastly different this year.
I'm still happy with my 1.3 megapixel 500:1 contrast 17" LCD. Anything wider and I get some weird feeling my head needs to be stretched. Has anyone else noticed something like that? There was something about a big convex display that didn't cause that sort of sensation.
And that 3840x2400 resolution should give your graphics card a workout trying to render your FPS games at biggie frame rates. At what pixel density do you fail to notice a difference in image quality, anyway? I turned on one pixel on my monitor and can hardly even see it!
Microsoft has reviewed the problem and their recommendation is that you continue to buy more Microsoft products.
**wakes up from dream**
Yeah. Dream is right. Television is the opiate of the masses these days and what better source of opiate than China, with a little help for a Yankee trader (Microsoft) to bring it to market around the world.
As more technology is needed (or not needed but crammed in there anyway to obfuscate signals and control content distribution) TV moves further from a free medium into a medium locked down by content providers. Lovely.
"Are you watching that Blue Screen show again?"
Here's a tip editor boys: if group A says statement A and you post it as a news item, great. But when group B, C, D, E, F, G, and H all say the same statement A, it's not news. It's redundant (remember that modifier you put in? -1 Redundant? That's what it is).
Here's a clue: Not everyone started programming at the same time, back in the enlightened age of limited resources and cautious programming. When I saw some jerk writing login spoofs on a PDP 11, back in the early 80's I worked out a few ways to spot these running and suspend them. (Also pass information on to Campus Police to have the perpetrator evicted from the grounds.) People are still learning to program and it's not uncommon for them to take idiot-proofing for granted, unless one of two things took place: 1) They had a good instructor who warned them of the consequences untrapped errors 2) There's a directive where they work which they must follow. I expect even Microsoft must be able to backtrack to the person who wrote leaky code. Problem also is two or more departments whose products must interface, but pass the buck on who is responsible for trapping errors, etc. That role should be filled by a management group responsible for the work between groups.
Microsoft responded with ActiveX, which bypasses security entirely by making it easy to blame the user for authorizing bad code to execute.'"
When's the tenth anniversary of the Win95 bug which allowed people to hack Quicken?
Sure you can! "Bad Joss Taipan!"