Most barcode symbologies already do this. UPC and EAN are fixed-length symbologies, but some others (Code 39, Pharmacode, etc) have variable length within a certain range, most of them up to 50 digits.
What's stopping arbitrary-length barcodes from appearing is the hardware. The laser has to track along the barcode and be able to measure the width of all the bars and spaces. If your barcode is two feet long, you have to either (a) hold the scanner a ways away, or (b) have the laser track on a wider field. Both of these present significant challenges for decoding.
RFID is one solution; the "most standard" option right now is a tag that holds a 96-bit code. That aughtta hold us a while. There also exist two-dimensional barcodes that can hold upwards of 400 characters, but the decoding hardware is expensive, so these aren't seen very often.
Perhaps. But the scanner that read that first pack of Juicy Fruit was a Spectraphysics Model A. The company (the one I work for, incidentally), after many mergers and acquisitions, is now known as PSC.
It's important to realize that this guy is writing from a management perspective. In a small company, or a small group of developers, one Harley-riding super hero can really save the day with a week-long coding coma. An extraordinary manager can get to know a ragtag band of cowboy developers and come up with a schedule.
In a large company, extraordinary-ness is discouraged, because it's inherently unpredictable. For every superstar you'll have a moron who's writing in the wrong language. Law of averages. This also applies to managers; for every Herb Brooks you have a PHB. Since you can't count on your superstar developers working for your superstar managers, you have to damp out unpredictable behavior so that mediocre managers can handle it.
http://www.wagnerconsultingllc.com/ goes nowhere. Hidden backdoors in BSD? One Eyed Jack? His journal claims that he's charging Rusty six figures for work on kuro5hin.org's back-end code, and his other entries are almost as amusing.
Sir, your fiction borders on the believable, in a Clancy-esque way. I congratulate you.
And it's pretty. And it's easier to use. And it requires less knowledge for everyday use.
While cost is definitely an issue with the average consumer, security and trustworthiness aren't even secondary. The SSL bug you mention was never even noticed by 99.9% of users.
"Black & Decker makes the best toaster, therefore all other appliance companies are worthless!"
The hi-fi community has been aware of this issue for quite some time. Those with "golden eyes and ears" probably claim that they notice a 10ms delay between video and audio, so the advent of digital displays provoked a "I can't stand that stuff" response.
In answer to your question, most midrange (in hi-fi circles, "midrange" generally means between $500 and $1000) and all high-end receivers and preprocessors designed for home theater use will have an adjustable audio delay. I'm not sure how far this has penetrated into the mainstream, hi-fi-low-end market, but I'd expect the upper end of Sony's or Kenwood's range would have this feature.
For example, Denon's AVR line have this feature starting at the 3803 model (retail $1200, can be had for a bit more than half that).
Where's the criminal act? Say I make an electronic gadget, and you buy it. Even if my gadget doesn't work very well, I haven't committed a crime. You chose to buy my gadget; I didn't make you, and you probably should have done more research.
There's also the issue of how to send a corporation to prison. Jail all the employees? (Is the front-desk receptionist responsible for a product defect?) Or just those responsible? (Of course, every product has an engineering team, etc. etc.) If we're punishing a corporation for an incomplete product, how do we define "incomplete"?
Yes, the ignorant masses are being duped by the marketing dollars of large corporations. This has happened throughout history (ask any woman if Victoria's Secret underwear is actually comfortable), and it's not likely to stop.
I've got to admit that I'm a bit awed at the sheer volume of ire aroused about firmware upgrades. Aren't there better things to be angry about?
"I think that the MS guy wasn't very clear. He didn't read off MS's 5-year plan, and he didn't lay out the grand strategy so that any 10-year-old could understand it. All he did was waffle and redirect so that MS's competitors wouldn't get any useful information. The article wasn't worth my time."
There are a couple of problems with your argument.
Number one is that the airline industry subsidies are probably a good thing. If the three largest airlines were to collapse and disappear, the USA (and a good chunk of the world) would enter a 2-year recession. While it would probably be replaced by a more efficient airline industry, millions would suffer in the meantime.
Number two is that most corporate entities don't pay any income tax (since they're smart enough to spend their income on assets that will generate more money), and subsidies are so rare as to be practically nonexistant. Plus, who cares? A corporation can't be "rich," can it?
The implication is that we should tax people based on how much they own. That's a good way to get people to clean out their garage, but I don't think it's a good way to tax.
Plus, owning things does not make one rich. If I win the lottery and spend my $236 million on a warehouse full of footballs, am I rich? The footballs aren't exactly legal tender; I couldn't trade 10,000 of them for a car. You're only rich if the things you own are generating money for you.
Are you listening to yourself? You write as though the object of Prada opening a store is to keep lowlifes out of it.
Prada is in business to make money. If they're smart (and they seem to be), they'll do what's best for business. This includes profiling customers to focus attention on steady high rollers. But if a salesperson sees you in Levi's and Hanes, but their handheld tells them that you bought two handbags and a set of luggage last month, I don't think you'll be spurned.
Prada does not make money by kicking non-disruptive people out of stores. Let's look at this like what it is; an attempt to improve service, as well as get good publicity.
One of the things that I never understood about email clients was why they insisted on trying to store all of the contact information about a person. Who sends things to a snail mail address from an email client?
Answer: nobody. But having redundant backups for your addressbook is a good idea.
Say my addresses (snail, email, and phone) are synced between my PC, PDA, and phone. If my phone is dropped down a toilet, I don't have to ask all my friends for their numbers again (or wait for them to call); I just sync the new phone with my PC. If I reformat my Windows PC after the standard 6-month decrufting period, I don't have to manually backup and restore my Outlook contacts database. It's even easier with Bluetooth, since the devices sync without even being told to.
People were saying these same things when Japanese and Korean companies started selling cars in the US. "The American automobile industry will come crashing down!" Guess what happened: Ford and GM are still here.
Just because Chinese labor is cheaper doesn't mean that all manufacturing jobs will go to China. Just because Indian IT is cheaper doesn't mean that all programming jobs will go to India. All it means is that certain hegemonies will no longer exist (i.e. IBM), and the market will adjust. That's real-world economics.
This isn't costing them much now(pocket change, relatively speaking), and in the 20-year view, probably 10-15% of these third-world countries will be second-world or better, and will have businesses whose employees only know Microsoft tools. Sure, in the two-month view, this sounds like a waste of money, but that's the case with most charity.
There's a fundamental problem with IP law. Copyright was invented to protect things that are written; patents were invented to protect things that are material. In the 18th century, a wrench couldn't be copyrighted (because it wasn't written), and a song couldn't be patented (because it didn't have a physical form).
Unfortunately, we're at a point where that's no longer a real distinction. The Linux kernel is both a functional tool and a work of literature. It's just text, but it does something. That's not something that IP law is equipped to deal with.
With apologies to Neal Stephenson, how would IP law deal with a nam-shub? A sequence of syllables that acts like a program in the human brain. What if I write one that cures cancer? Do I patent it, copyright it, or both? What's the proper way to protect things like this?
Anybody read Machiavelli? Those in power want to keep it, and those without want to take it away. Certain individuals of both groups will do anything to accomplish their goal. The moral outrage from the peanut gallery when somebody gets caught is an unfortunate inconvenience, but it in no way stops the show.
It's nice to believe that those people we elect to represent us really, truly care about what we do, and want to do the right thing. But in the end, it takes a certain amount of dirtiness to gain any position of power, and he who is willing to get the dirtiest wins, if he isn't caught first.
I'm not sure this is the case. If you launch directly from Kennedy, you've got to carry all the fuel to escape Earth's gravity, all the supplies for the 1- or 2-year journey to Mars, and all the supplies to hold you until the next supply drop. The Saturn V rocket is 330 feet tall, and it was only pushing one crew module and one lander. You'll need to move something at least 10-20 times as big to get to Mars.
If you assemble in LEO, you've got a lot more flexibility as to how the craft is constructed. You can use high-efficiency-but-low-thrust engines. All the things that go wrong between Earth and orbit can be fixed before the craft leaves. You don't need high vibration or thrust tolerances. You can test in zero gravity. Lots of benefits here.
I'll agree that assembling on Luna is ridiculous; unless we have a large industrial base there, all the parts go from Earth to Luna, and then out of another gravity well before they get underway. Plus you lose all the benefits described above.
On an unrelated note: does anybody know what the official names are for these things? Terra or Earth? Luna, or The Moon?
Slashdot Mirror
Most barcode symbologies already do this. UPC and EAN are fixed-length symbologies, but some others (Code 39, Pharmacode, etc) have variable length within a certain range, most of them up to 50 digits.
What's stopping arbitrary-length barcodes from appearing is the hardware. The laser has to track along the barcode and be able to measure the width of all the bars and spaces. If your barcode is two feet long, you have to either (a) hold the scanner a ways away, or (b) have the laser track on a wider field. Both of these present significant challenges for decoding.
RFID is one solution; the "most standard" option right now is a tag that holds a 96-bit code. That aughtta hold us a while. There also exist two-dimensional barcodes that can hold upwards of 400 characters, but the decoding hardware is expensive, so these aren't seen very often.
Hamster
Perhaps. But the scanner that read that first pack of Juicy Fruit was a Spectraphysics Model A. The company (the one I work for, incidentally), after many mergers and acquisitions, is now known as PSC.
Hamster
Expense. Privacy concerns. Entrenched systems. Training. Lack of standards. I can think of lots of reasons.
It's important to realize that this guy is writing from a management perspective. In a small company, or a small group of developers, one Harley-riding super hero can really save the day with a week-long coding coma. An extraordinary manager can get to know a ragtag band of cowboy developers and come up with a schedule.
In a large company, extraordinary-ness is discouraged, because it's inherently unpredictable. For every superstar you'll have a moron who's writing in the wrong language. Law of averages. This also applies to managers; for every Herb Brooks you have a PHB. Since you can't count on your superstar developers working for your superstar managers, you have to damp out unpredictable behavior so that mediocre managers can handle it.
Hamster
Perhaps moderators should check sources as well.
http://www.wagnerconsultingllc.com/ goes nowhere. Hidden backdoors in BSD? One Eyed Jack? His journal claims that he's charging Rusty six figures for work on kuro5hin.org's back-end code, and his other entries are almost as amusing.
Sir, your fiction borders on the believable, in a Clancy-esque way. I congratulate you.
Hamster
While cost is definitely an issue with the average consumer, security and trustworthiness aren't even secondary. The SSL bug you mention was never even noticed by 99.9% of users.
"Black & Decker makes the best toaster, therefore all other appliance companies are worthless!"
Hamster
I think your case is a bit different. The AVM20 is like the Jaguar of home theater processors. :)
Hamster
In answer to your question, most midrange (in hi-fi circles, "midrange" generally means between $500 and $1000) and all high-end receivers and preprocessors designed for home theater use will have an adjustable audio delay. I'm not sure how far this has penetrated into the mainstream, hi-fi-low-end market, but I'd expect the upper end of Sony's or Kenwood's range would have this feature.
For example, Denon's AVR line have this feature starting at the 3803 model (retail $1200, can be had for a bit more than half that).
Hamster
They put the boxes on the sealing? That must take a lot of tape.
Hamster
That's "quite a bit," you insensitive clod!
Don't believe me? Look at Excedrin; it's just a mixture of aspirin and caffiene.
-- Hamster
There's also the issue of how to send a corporation to prison. Jail all the employees? (Is the front-desk receptionist responsible for a product defect?) Or just those responsible? (Of course, every product has an engineering team, etc. etc.) If we're punishing a corporation for an incomplete product, how do we define "incomplete"?
Yes, the ignorant masses are being duped by the marketing dollars of large corporations. This has happened throughout history (ask any woman if Victoria's Secret underwear is actually comfortable), and it's not likely to stop.
I've got to admit that I'm a bit awed at the sheer volume of ire aroused about firmware upgrades. Aren't there better things to be angry about?
-- Hamster
Joel's 'UI Design For Programmers'
Hamster
Summary of parent comment:
"I think that the MS guy wasn't very clear. He didn't read off MS's 5-year plan, and he didn't lay out the grand strategy so that any 10-year-old could understand it. All he did was waffle and redirect so that MS's competitors wouldn't get any useful information. The article wasn't worth my time."
-- Hamster
There are a couple of problems with your argument.
Number one is that the airline industry subsidies are probably a good thing. If the three largest airlines were to collapse and disappear, the USA (and a good chunk of the world) would enter a 2-year recession. While it would probably be replaced by a more efficient airline industry, millions would suffer in the meantime.
Number two is that most corporate entities don't pay any income tax (since they're smart enough to spend their income on assets that will generate more money), and subsidies are so rare as to be practically nonexistant. Plus, who cares? A corporation can't be "rich," can it?
Hamster
The implication is that we should tax people based on how much they own. That's a good way to get people to clean out their garage, but I don't think it's a good way to tax.
Plus, owning things does not make one rich. If I win the lottery and spend my $236 million on a warehouse full of footballs, am I rich? The footballs aren't exactly legal tender; I couldn't trade 10,000 of them for a car. You're only rich if the things you own are generating money for you.
Hamster
Are you listening to yourself? You write as though the object of Prada opening a store is to keep lowlifes out of it.
Prada is in business to make money. If they're smart (and they seem to be), they'll do what's best for business. This includes profiling customers to focus attention on steady high rollers. But if a salesperson sees you in Levi's and Hanes, but their handheld tells them that you bought two handbags and a set of luggage last month, I don't think you'll be spurned.
Prada does not make money by kicking non-disruptive people out of stores. Let's look at this like what it is; an attempt to improve service, as well as get good publicity.
-- Hamster
Good idea, but this might backfire. The DVD should run just fine; an "uncompressed" DVD A/V stream is specced at only 20Mb of bandwidth.
The remote booting will bottleneck in local storage before you even get close to 2.5Gb throughput.
-- Hamster
Say my addresses (snail, email, and phone) are synced between my PC, PDA, and phone. If my phone is dropped down a toilet, I don't have to ask all my friends for their numbers again (or wait for them to call); I just sync the new phone with my PC. If I reformat my Windows PC after the standard 6-month decrufting period, I don't have to manually backup and restore my Outlook contacts database. It's even easier with Bluetooth, since the devices sync without even being told to.
Hamster
People were saying these same things when Japanese and Korean companies started selling cars in the US. "The American automobile industry will come crashing down!" Guess what happened: Ford and GM are still here.
Just because Chinese labor is cheaper doesn't mean that all manufacturing jobs will go to China. Just because Indian IT is cheaper doesn't mean that all programming jobs will go to India. All it means is that certain hegemonies will no longer exist (i.e. IBM), and the market will adjust. That's real-world economics.
-- Hamster
I realize that IHBT, but hey, life is short.
This isn't costing them much now(pocket change, relatively speaking), and in the 20-year view, probably 10-15% of these third-world countries will be second-world or better, and will have businesses whose employees only know Microsoft tools. Sure, in the two-month view, this sounds like a waste of money, but that's the case with most charity.
-- Hamster
There's a fundamental problem with IP law. Copyright was invented to protect things that are written; patents were invented to protect things that are material. In the 18th century, a wrench couldn't be copyrighted (because it wasn't written), and a song couldn't be patented (because it didn't have a physical form).
Unfortunately, we're at a point where that's no longer a real distinction. The Linux kernel is both a functional tool and a work of literature. It's just text, but it does something. That's not something that IP law is equipped to deal with.
With apologies to Neal Stephenson, how would IP law deal with a nam-shub? A sequence of syllables that acts like a program in the human brain. What if I write one that cures cancer? Do I patent it, copyright it, or both? What's the proper way to protect things like this?
-- Hamster
Anybody read Machiavelli? Those in power want to keep it, and those without want to take it away. Certain individuals of both groups will do anything to accomplish their goal. The moral outrage from the peanut gallery when somebody gets caught is an unfortunate inconvenience, but it in no way stops the show.
It's nice to believe that those people we elect to represent us really, truly care about what we do, and want to do the right thing. But in the end, it takes a certain amount of dirtiness to gain any position of power, and he who is willing to get the dirtiest wins, if he isn't caught first.
-- Hamster
March ain't just a month, soldier.
-- Hamster
I'm not sure this is the case. If you launch directly from Kennedy, you've got to carry all the fuel to escape Earth's gravity, all the supplies for the 1- or 2-year journey to Mars, and all the supplies to hold you until the next supply drop. The Saturn V rocket is 330 feet tall, and it was only pushing one crew module and one lander. You'll need to move something at least 10-20 times as big to get to Mars.
If you assemble in LEO, you've got a lot more flexibility as to how the craft is constructed. You can use high-efficiency-but-low-thrust engines. All the things that go wrong between Earth and orbit can be fixed before the craft leaves. You don't need high vibration or thrust tolerances. You can test in zero gravity. Lots of benefits here.
I'll agree that assembling on Luna is ridiculous; unless we have a large industrial base there, all the parts go from Earth to Luna, and then out of another gravity well before they get underway. Plus you lose all the benefits described above.
On an unrelated note: does anybody know what the official names are for these things? Terra or Earth? Luna, or The Moon?
-- Hamster