"So if I spent 3 billion dollars and mapped out every cubic meter of NYC in 3-D, to within a few meters accuracy, and used that in the next Grand Theft Auto game, you are saying you should be able to just copy that data wholesale and use it in Flight Simulator 2007?"
Actually, I believe that the current situation is that I am free to map out NYC for myself but that I cannot help myself to your workproduct. This is what protects publishers who compile public records and make them available in a convenient form. The records are not copyright but the work product is protected.
Sure you can. All you have to do is dig out those Dos 6.0 disks. Both your boot and application startup times will be blindingly fast. I've been tempted to try it:)
Absolutley. The if I call a number that I know belongs to the credit card company I expect to give them some data to identify myself. In this case I was calling a number that I didn't recognize to respond to a phone call that didn't explain itself. How do I know who I've actually reached. My complaint was that the message wasn't specific enough. They should explain why I got the phone call without my having to identify myself - either in the call or when I reach the number. Otherwise it's a standoff.
I bought my first Dell (a 20mhz 386) about 20 years ago. I was astounded at how good their telephone sales and support were at that time - light years ahead of anybody else. Since then I've bought dozens of machines from them and have had mixed experiences with support. The Indian techs are often difficult to work with and hard to understand. The domestic support has been pretty good. I've had a number of service calls to replace parts and have never had a problem that wasn't resolved satisfactorily. I continue to buy from them.
The other day I got an atuomated call from a credit card company asking me to call an 800 number to review account details. When I called I was in the voice-mail system that sounded like the company but without any explanation of what I was to do. When I finally managed to get to an operator she wouldn't discuss the matter with me without the last four digits of my social security number, and I wouldn't give her those. So there we were, she didn't know who I was and I didn't know who she was. I got through two levels of supervisor and still never found out what the call was about.
Maybe, but the real reason sailing ships went out of use wasn't the cost of transporting the cargo. Remember that sailing ships didn't need space for engines or fuel; and, by the end of the 19th century they were sailed by very small crews. They were always the cheapest way to get cargo from one point to another. What killed them was the unreliability of their passage times: In order to gurarantee a steady supply of a commodity you had to have big wharehouses at each end. Steamships eliminated the wharehouses so the end-to-end cost was less. Just in time inventory anybody?
Speaking of DVD annoyances, why oh why does each DVD have to have its own cute menu system. I often have trouble deciding which option the cursor is on, let alone which option I really want.
We could learn something from the Chinese efforts to adopt a romanized spelling. Chinese has 20,000 characters but only about about 1,300 distinct syllables. Each character is pronounced with a single syllable. This means that the number of characters way exceeds the number of syllables. The result is that when you write them phonetically it is very difficult to know which of the many characters with the same sound is meant. This has doomed pinyin (the most recent system of romanizing Chinese) to use by foreigners.
English has the same problem to a lesser degree. We have a very large number of homonyms that are distinguished by their spelling. If we spelled them all phonetically it would become more difficult to tell which was meant.
Also we would cut ourselves off from 500 years of printed material in English.
Certainly sex has been at the heart of a lot of new industries -- Polaroid cameras, VCRs, Internet, camcorders but it isn't the only common thread shared by the spam in my 'junk' mailbox. Almost all of the offers are either illegal or of dubious legality. Fake Rolex watches, under-the-counter drugs, porn, financial scams. The thing that they all have in common is that they cannot advertise through legitimate channels. Spam is the electronic eqivalent of the guy in the trench coat hanging out in the dark alley who makes a furtive offer under his breath as you walk by.
I'm old enough to remember Watergate. I also remember wondering whether the military would obey the peresident or the Congress if it really came to a showdown. I think that we demonstrated then that the military will ultimately obey the law. Perhaps we can't count on that for ever but for the moment I think that's the case.
I live in the city and spend a lot of time walking around. I have reached the point where if I see a driver on a cell phone I assume that they will not see me and I stay well out of their way. They are in a little world of their own with very little awareness of what's around them.
The NY Times had an interesting article on this recently (Times Select subscription required). Researchers put video cameras in cars and collected information about what was going on in the car in the seconds before an accident. The result was that "driver inattention was the overwhelming cause of the crashes in the study."
My own opinion is that conversations inside the car are less distracting than cell phone conversations because the second party to the converstation is aware of the situation outside the car and knows when to shut up or to wait for an answer. The person on the other end of the cell phone conversation doesn't have this extra input and so the conversation doesn't have the natural breaks for heavy traffic that an in-car converstation would have.
I think it's more complicated than this. Employers respond to the environment around them. They must offer pay/working conditions thar are good enough in comparison to the other alternatives to allow them to attract employees. They must NOT offer pay/working conditions that are so good that they drive up costs to the point where the firm can't function. It's hard to generalize but most employers that I know would like to be able to offer good pay and conditions. Often they simply don't feel able - I know, this isn't universally true but it's probably more true than most people believe.
The conditions in China are vastly different from the conditions here. If an employer in China - whether on his/her own or led by a union - offered Western pay/conditions they would quickly be driven out of business. They simply couldn't compete. On the other hand, the pay/conditions that are being offered are enough better than life on the farm that millions of people flock to the new jobs every year. China has a tremendous balancing act to perform. They have to keep pay down enough to create the huge number of new jobs that they need to absorb all the people leaving the farm. At the same time they have to build imfrastructure, tackle their environmental problems and raise living conditions enough to avoid unrest. Not an enviable task. I doubt that unions would be much help at this stage.
That article is a typical pice of sales department puffery. If you really want to know what it was like to design a computer in those days read Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine. It chronicles the efforts by Data General engineers to create a new computer. At the time I was working as an engineer for Honeywell's EDP (Electronic Data Processing) division and I can vouch for the accuracy of Kidder's reporting. I recognized all the problems and all the actors even though it was a different company.
At a given point in the development of computers a lot of people end up working on the same problems and often come up with similar solutions. While I was at Honeywell they bought GE's computer division and we got to see the design documents for GE's new computer. It was very interesting reading since we could look at each turning point in the design and say: "Oh, they decided to do it that way." All of the problems were ones that we'd worked on and the solutions were all ones that we'd considered. For the most part they'd made the same decisions we had. It was an experience that's given me a real respect for the notion that an invention is "in the air." It isn't necessarily because the problems are being widely discussed but more that a given state of technology dictates certain questions and that the solutions follow logically from the questions.
Yes, a good chair is a big help. I've been programming for longer than I care to admit and started having back trouble many years ago. I've tried all sorts of chairs (kneely rockers, straight-backed dinning room chairs, an office chair that the salesman claimed was used by air traffic controllers - that one was pretty good, actually). My feeling after all this experience is that a good chair makes a huge difference. It's also important to get up frequently and move around. Walking and stretching exercises are also helpful.
Having said all that. NOTHING is worth real back trouble. If you start to have real problems find some other work. I speak from experience.
What we really need is a widely-accepted system for micropayments. Then we could impose a small (say $.0001 per email) charge for sending messages. This would be small enough so that it would be of no consequence to legitimate users and big enough to stop spammers dead in their tracks. The revenue could go to support the Internet.
It could be made compatible with the existing system by allowing a header to indicate that the postage had been paid. Then all you'd have to do is to filter out the junk (unpaid) messages.
Yes, but the issue isn't how pretty the fonts look but how readable they are. Sans-serif fonts are unreadable at 2400 dpi and they are unreadable at 96. Their readablility doesn't improve just because you have a lower resolution.
The serif fonts may not look as beautiful at 96 dpi as they do at 600 or 2400 but they are still much more readable for a substantial fraction of the population.
I used to be in the publishing business and we would never use sans-serif type in the body of any substantial piece of type. They are much better restrited to headlines. Many - not all - people find it much harder to read. Big blocks of sans-serif type make my eyes wander; I just can't read them.
If you don't believe this go look in a library or bookstore. You will find very few books set in sans-serif. People don't buy them because they are hard to read.
This question deserves to be taken seriously. I know of a case where a gentleman died and left no record of his passwords. This affects both your local computer and network accounts. It can take a lot of time and energy for relatives to get into important data on a computer, if it's possible at all.
Furthermore, if you have your own servers, a supoena isn't going to get anyone access to them without the password. In my case that would mean that my Web sites would go on without change until someone pulled the plug - and that's assuming they could figure out where the server is physically - it's not in my house.
I have a master list of accounts and passwords in a safe location and my kids know where it is.
Not only that but he didn't invent the cubicle in 1968. I went to work for Honeywell in 1965 and we sure had cubicles. I still have the bakalite nameplate that slid into the slot on the outside. So I guess the article had it wrong at both ends.
I once visited a data center in Virginia that housed Google servers. It was an interesting sight. They were using standard racks but they'd taken the covers off the boxes so that they could fit in about double the density of servers. I was told that the data center had to renegotiate Google's contract once they figured out how much air conditioning they were using. The data center was one where the major backbone links peered to each other. Oh, and the servers were in a cage about the size of a tennis court. I wonder how many of these they have?
The problem with most beginning computer books is that they explain what the various parts of the computer are but don't tell the reader why he/she needs to know about them. What the user really needs is the ability to reason about the computer; the ability to figure out for themselves that the Internet connection is down, or that the mouse is unplugged.
Certainly you can't reason about a computer without understanding the various parts, so you still need to describe them. But perhaps you could do it within the framework of a series of common problems. So, for example, you could have a chapter "What to do if your printer doesn't work." In that chapter you'd provide the usual troubleshooting advice but accompany it with an explanation of why you are performing the various steps and what you expect to learn from them.
This approach might make a more interesting book to read and leave the reader with the ability to approach new problems on their own.
I had a copy of The Little Red Book that I bought in the sixties and carried around from house to house for decades. I last saw it about a year ago and now it seems to be missing. You don't suppose the spooks came and picked it up do you? I even tried to read it but it was an awful bore and I didn't get far.
Re:Couple more (Score:?) by wbean (222522) on Thursday August 25, @12:18PM Actually, if you use the CPI inflator found at http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/inflateCPI.html, you find that the ticket-price inflation occured prior to 1967. Prices have been remarkably stable since then - even through the high-inflation period in the 70's.
My problem is that I don't want to sit through 20 minutes of commercials for movies I'd rather not see and the volume is often loud enought that I've taken to carrying earplugs.
Slashdot Mirror
"So if I spent 3 billion dollars and mapped out every cubic meter of NYC in 3-D, to within a few meters accuracy, and used that in the next Grand Theft Auto game, you are saying you should be able to just copy that data wholesale and use it in Flight Simulator 2007?"
Actually, I believe that the current situation is that I am free to map out NYC for myself but that I cannot help myself to your workproduct. This is what protects publishers who compile public records and make them available in a convenient form. The records are not copyright but the work product is protected.
Sure you can. All you have to do is dig out those Dos 6.0 disks. Both your boot and application startup times will be blindingly fast. I've been tempted to try it :)
Absolutley. The if I call a number that I know belongs to the credit card company I expect to give them some data to identify myself. In this case I was calling a number that I didn't recognize to respond to a phone call that didn't explain itself. How do I know who I've actually reached. My complaint was that the message wasn't specific enough. They should explain why I got the phone call without my having to identify myself - either in the call or when I reach the number. Otherwise it's a standoff.
I bought my first Dell (a 20mhz 386) about 20 years ago. I was astounded at how good their telephone sales and support were at that time - light years ahead of anybody else. Since then I've bought dozens of machines from them and have had mixed experiences with support. The Indian techs are often difficult to work with and hard to understand. The domestic support has been pretty good. I've had a number of service calls to replace parts and have never had a problem that wasn't resolved satisfactorily. I continue to buy from them.
The other day I got an atuomated call from a credit card company asking me to call an 800 number to review account details. When I called I was in the voice-mail system that sounded like the company but without any explanation of what I was to do. When I finally managed to get to an operator she wouldn't discuss the matter with me without the last four digits of my social security number, and I wouldn't give her those. So there we were, she didn't know who I was and I didn't know who she was. I got through two levels of supervisor and still never found out what the call was about.
Maybe, but the real reason sailing ships went out of use wasn't the cost of transporting the cargo. Remember that sailing ships didn't need space for engines or fuel; and, by the end of the 19th century they were sailed by very small crews. They were always the cheapest way to get cargo from one point to another. What killed them was the unreliability of their passage times: In order to gurarantee a steady supply of a commodity you had to have big wharehouses at each end. Steamships eliminated the wharehouses so the end-to-end cost was less. Just in time inventory anybody?
Speaking of DVD annoyances, why oh why does each DVD have to have its own cute menu system. I often have trouble deciding which option the cursor is on, let alone which option I really want.
We could learn something from the Chinese efforts to adopt a romanized spelling. Chinese has 20,000 characters but only about about 1,300 distinct syllables. Each character is pronounced with a single syllable. This means that the number of characters way exceeds the number of syllables. The result is that when you write them phonetically it is very difficult to know which of the many characters with the same sound is meant. This has doomed pinyin (the most recent system of romanizing Chinese) to use by foreigners.
English has the same problem to a lesser degree. We have a very large number of homonyms that are distinguished by their spelling. If we spelled them all phonetically it would become more difficult to tell which was meant.
Also we would cut ourselves off from 500 years of printed material in English.
Certainly sex has been at the heart of a lot of new industries -- Polaroid cameras, VCRs, Internet, camcorders but it isn't the only common thread shared by the spam in my 'junk' mailbox. Almost all of the offers are either illegal or of dubious legality. Fake Rolex watches, under-the-counter drugs, porn, financial scams. The thing that they all have in common is that they cannot advertise through legitimate channels. Spam is the electronic eqivalent of the guy in the trench coat hanging out in the dark alley who makes a furtive offer under his breath as you walk by.
I'm old enough to remember Watergate. I also remember wondering whether the military would obey the peresident or the Congress if it really came to a showdown. I think that we demonstrated then that the military will ultimately obey the law. Perhaps we can't count on that for ever but for the moment I think that's the case.
I live in the city and spend a lot of time walking around. I have reached the point where if I see a driver on a cell phone I assume that they will not see me and I stay well out of their way. They are in a little world of their own with very little awareness of what's around them.
The NY Times had an interesting article on this recently (Times Select subscription required). Researchers put video cameras in cars and collected information about what was going on in the car in the seconds before an accident. The result was that "driver inattention was the overwhelming cause of the crashes in the study."
My own opinion is that conversations inside the car are less distracting than cell phone conversations because the second party to the converstation is aware of the situation outside the car and knows when to shut up or to wait for an answer. The person on the other end of the cell phone conversation doesn't have this extra input and so the conversation doesn't have the natural breaks for heavy traffic that an in-car converstation would have.
I think it's more complicated than this. Employers respond to the environment around them. They must offer pay/working conditions thar are good enough in comparison to the other alternatives to allow them to attract employees. They must NOT offer pay/working conditions that are so good that they drive up costs to the point where the firm can't function. It's hard to generalize but most employers that I know would like to be able to offer good pay and conditions. Often they simply don't feel able - I know, this isn't universally true but it's probably more true than most people believe.
The conditions in China are vastly different from the conditions here. If an employer in China - whether on his/her own or led by a union - offered Western pay/conditions they would quickly be driven out of business. They simply couldn't compete. On the other hand, the pay/conditions that are being offered are enough better than life on the farm that millions of people flock to the new jobs every year. China has a tremendous balancing act to perform. They have to keep pay down enough to create the huge number of new jobs that they need to absorb all the people leaving the farm. At the same time they have to build imfrastructure, tackle their environmental problems and raise living conditions enough to avoid unrest. Not an enviable task. I doubt that unions would be much help at this stage.
That article is a typical pice of sales department puffery. If you really want to know what it was like to design a computer in those days read Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine. It chronicles the efforts by Data General engineers to create a new computer. At the time I was working as an engineer for Honeywell's EDP (Electronic Data Processing) division and I can vouch for the accuracy of Kidder's reporting. I recognized all the problems and all the actors even though it was a different company.
At a given point in the development of computers a lot of people end up working on the same problems and often come up with similar solutions. While I was at Honeywell they bought GE's computer division and we got to see the design documents for GE's new computer. It was very interesting reading since we could look at each turning point in the design and say: "Oh, they decided to do it that way." All of the problems were ones that we'd worked on and the solutions were all ones that we'd considered. For the most part they'd made the same decisions we had. It was an experience that's given me a real respect for the notion that an invention is "in the air." It isn't necessarily because the problems are being widely discussed but more that a given state of technology dictates certain questions and that the solutions follow logically from the questions.
Yes, a good chair is a big help. I've been programming for longer than I care to admit and started having back trouble many years ago. I've tried all sorts of chairs (kneely rockers, straight-backed dinning room chairs, an office chair that the salesman claimed was used by air traffic controllers - that one was pretty good, actually). My feeling after all this experience is that a good chair makes a huge difference. It's also important to get up frequently and move around. Walking and stretching exercises are also helpful.
Having said all that. NOTHING is worth real back trouble. If you start to have real problems find some other work. I speak from experience.
Except that by using it you are consuming a valuble resource (bandwith) and are interfearing with the paying customer's access to that resource.
Or just maybe the UI is fine and the user selected exactly the tool he/she wanted.... This is a case about leaks, after all.
What we really need is a widely-accepted system for micropayments. Then we could impose a small (say $.0001 per email) charge for sending messages. This would be small enough so that it would be of no consequence to legitimate users and big enough to stop spammers dead in their tracks. The revenue could go to support the Internet.
It could be made compatible with the existing system by allowing a header to indicate that the postage had been paid. Then all you'd have to do is to filter out the junk (unpaid) messages.
Yes, but the issue isn't how pretty the fonts look but how readable they are. Sans-serif fonts are unreadable at 2400 dpi and they are unreadable at 96. Their readablility doesn't improve just because you have a lower resolution.
The serif fonts may not look as beautiful at 96 dpi as they do at 600 or 2400 but they are still much more readable for a substantial fraction of the population.
I used to be in the publishing business and we would never use sans-serif type in the body of any substantial piece of type. They are much better restrited to headlines. Many - not all - people find it much harder to read. Big blocks of sans-serif type make my eyes wander; I just can't read them.
If you don't believe this go look in a library or bookstore. You will find very few books set in sans-serif. People don't buy them because they are hard to read.
This question deserves to be taken seriously. I know of a case where a gentleman died and left no record of his passwords. This affects both your local computer and network accounts. It can take a lot of time and energy for relatives to get into important data on a computer, if it's possible at all.
Furthermore, if you have your own servers, a supoena isn't going to get anyone access to them without the password. In my case that would mean that my Web sites would go on without change until someone pulled the plug - and that's assuming they could figure out where the server is physically - it's not in my house.
I have a master list of accounts and passwords in a safe location and my kids know where it is.
Not only that but he didn't invent the cubicle in 1968. I went to work for Honeywell in 1965 and we sure had cubicles. I still have the bakalite nameplate that slid into the slot on the outside. So I guess the article had it wrong at both ends.
I once visited a data center in Virginia that housed Google servers. It was an interesting sight. They were using standard racks but they'd taken the covers off the boxes so that they could fit in about double the density of servers. I was told that the data center had to renegotiate Google's contract once they figured out how much air conditioning they were using. The data center was one where the major backbone links peered to each other. Oh, and the servers were in a cage about the size of a tennis court. I wonder how many of these they have?
The problem with most beginning computer books is that they explain what the various parts of the computer are but don't tell the reader why he/she needs to know about them. What the user really needs is the ability to reason about the computer; the ability to figure out for themselves that the Internet connection is down, or that the mouse is unplugged.
Certainly you can't reason about a computer without understanding the various parts, so you still need to describe them. But perhaps you could do it within the framework of a series of common problems. So, for example, you could have a chapter "What to do if your printer doesn't work." In that chapter you'd provide the usual troubleshooting advice but accompany it with an explanation of why you are performing the various steps and what you expect to learn from them.
This approach might make a more interesting book to read and leave the reader with the ability to approach new problems on their own.
I had a copy of The Little Red Book that I bought in the sixties and carried around from house to house for decades. I last saw it about a year ago and now it seems to be missing. You don't suppose the spooks came and picked it up do you? I even tried to read it but it was an awful bore and I didn't get far.
Re:Couple more (Score:?)
by wbean (222522) on Thursday August 25, @12:18PM
Actually, if you use the CPI inflator found at http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/inflateCPI.html, you find that the ticket-price inflation occured prior to 1967. Prices have been remarkably stable since then - even through the high-inflation period in the 70's.
My problem is that I don't want to sit through 20 minutes of commercials for movies I'd rather not see and the volume is often loud enought that I've taken to carrying earplugs.
Here are some sample datapoints:
Year Price Price in 2004 $
2004 $6.21 6.21
2000 $5.39 5.91
1990 $4.22 6.09
1980 $2.69 6.16
1967 $1.22 6.90
1963 $0.86 5.30
1958 $0.68 4.44
1954 $0.49 3.44
1948 $0.36 2.82