Years and years ago, Microsoft recognized the need for a standalone application that uses HTML as the UI. They call these class of apps "HTML Applications", HTA for short. You may be surprised to know that HTA lives on, even in Windows 7. The spirit -- if not the letter -- of HTA seems to have been promoted to a first-class UI approach in Windows 8, in which (we are told), the entire Windows UI will based on HTML 5 and CSS 3.
Running as you are on old Windows platforms, HTA might work well for you. One tip I'll pass along: you don't need to limit yourself to JavaScript when writing an HTA. You can use other scripting languages that talk to better to the underlying OS, such as Visual Basic. You'd be surprised how far you can go with this approach.
Mod parent up. Dynamic range (or lack thereof) is a matter of taste, and all this new standard does is give producers a new "brick wall" to run up against. However, since the new wall would be below the level of audio clipping, perhaps it's an improvement in that respect.
Eventually people will get tired of today's over-compressed sound, and will rediscover the joys of music dynamics. As a (very) small-time songwriter, I can appreciate the appeal of chest-thumping, all-11s sound, for a specific effect. But making EVERYTHING sound that way is like throwing away everything your crayon box except Magenta, and coloring everything one color.
If a game's financial mechanics breaks the game, then nobody will want to play it, and the money will dry up. I don't think this is very hard to explain to the money people. They understand the mechanics of investment. True, someone has to put it terms they understand: "If you put a microtransaction around that game element, we estimate it will suppress game involvement by 5%, which can reduce fees by $x per quarter."
The most expensive line item is salaries and benefits. The stimulus went to prop up the HR costs of state governments. You may have noticed that most public sector jobs were not lost during 2008 and 2009. That's where the money went.
It's a different picture now. The private sector shed 8 million jobs. There's no more support for another bailout/"stimulus", so expect to see a wave of contraction in public sector jobs.
OK, I'm game. How would you add more votes than there are voters ("ballot-stuffing") in a system where there are two independently-generated counts of voters and votes, audited each hour and recorded by a third party? Your constraints: the polling place is open to the public and can be monitored by a candidate's representative; the name of each person allowed into the voting booth is read aloud; each person has to present ID and be registered to vote prior to casting a vote; there are multiple voting machines, and no guarantee that a particular voter will get any particular machine (first come, first served.)
The veracity of an election is not based upon technology, so being able to hack into a server run by a state board of election means little. An election is a system, a tightly-controlled process completely specified in legal language, with many interlocking parts and thousands of people involved. At each interface point in the process, there are cross-checks to verify accuracy. You can't "fix" an election just by cracking into some file system somewhere, you'd have to beat the entire system.
For example, in Virginia where I am a poll-worker, we have independent tallies of the number of people allowed in to vote, and the number of votes cast on the voting machines. During an election, we compare these two numbers each hour and call them into the Registrar who records them in a third system. To "stuff" the ballots in this system, you'd have to compromise three sets of records, each of which are backed up in multiple formats. The chances that you'd get away with this in the open while people are watching the election are infinitesimal.
"You are giving dropbox the rights to do whatever they want to with your content, according to this. "
Let's qualify this. They can do what they want in order to deliver the advertised Service. They can't just up and decide to sell your stuff, for example, as that is not a Service they sell.
It leaves off the last sentence of the quoted paragraph from the TOS: "You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission."
IANAL, but I suspect that this is the linchpin of the terms. In order for any of the foregoing rights to be granted to dropbox, you must actually have rights in the first place. You are completely on the hook if you sync anything improperly.
This all sounds fine in theory, but I bet there's not a single dropbox customer who isn't running afoul of this term. It's not really dropbox's fault, it's the fault of our cockamamie copyright laws which grant automatic copyright on EVERYTHING on first publication.
When everything's covered, nothing's covered. Except for those who have the deep pockets to bring suit.
Your confidence in the efficacy of paper is misplaced. As paper is physically harder to manage, there are more opportunities for error, and thus _less_ reliable results. It's like the difference between doing your accounting with paper records and hand-written ledger books vs. using a software app.
The digital verification I'm thinking of would show the vote, but nothing about the voter, thus coercion is not possible. The verification would also take place after the polls have been closed, so it would be of no use to anyone but the voter.
What makes vote tabulation trustworthy is having multiple, independently-reported tallies stored in multiple formats. Just like balancing a checkbook (remember that?), the key is getting agreement on the numbers from more than one source.
For example, in the state of Virginia where I am a poll worker, we count the number of people who have been allowed to vote, and we count the number of votes cast on the machines. Each hour, we compare the two numbers, and call them into the Registrar who records them in a third system. If the numbers differ, it means that a voter walked out of the voting booth without properly casting a vote (this very rarely happens.) As a result, ballot-stuffing is nearly impossible. You'd have to "fix" the numbers on three different systems.
No technology is needed to achieve this effect -- just good processes.
The problem with paper is that it is actually a rather messy, error-prone medium. Paper gets jammed, lost, defaced, torn, etc. Paperless is far more reliable and controlled. (And no, throwing a scanner into the mix doesn't fix the underlying problems with paper.) While I agree that being able to physically recount a paper ballot might help in extreme edge cases, the cost will be a much higher rate of error in every other case. We're not talking the standard 80/20 split here, it's more like 99.5/0.5 (that is, a paperless process would benefit 99.5% of races vs. a paper-based process helping.5%.)
What I would like to see is a paperless voting tally that is digitally signed. The voter, on request, can get a printed receipt of the decryption key, which they can use later on via the web to verify that their individual vote was indeed included in the final result. That way, we don't need to perfectly manage the paper, the voter can have confidence their vote was counted, and we'll add yet another independent verification process to the mix, which is all to the better.
I snagged a couple of nice Samsung netbooks for $250 recently. These are great little boxes, with more than enough oomph for Linux Mint and 6 hours of battery life. They do everything an iPad does for 1/2 the cost.
Maybe we don't need a $100 price-point, but even $175 would be a game-changer. When you add in the cost of a binder cover and a bluetooth keyboard, the cost of an iPad starts looking pretty ridiculous.
The 18th century saw the birth of both the Industrial Age and the Age of Enlightenment. This was a time of profound change on a global scale that easily rivals the impact of our own information age.
You may ask what is the point in studying history -- who cares about the impact of steam power, for example? Here's the thing: although technology improves over time, people basically remain the same. By understanding the dislocation of farmers to factories in 1750, you can gain insight into the dislocation of national workers to global workers today.
To get access to literally every single published work from this period is going to be amazing. Bravo UK and Google!
Right-to-work is the principle is that no employee should ever be forced to join a union in order to get a job. What this means in practical terms is that both employer and employee can sever their relationship at any time for any cause. Typically, employers do offer probationary periods followed by more permanent arrangements, with this difference: during the probationary period, if the employee is fired, it often is put immediately into effect, whereas after probation, the employer typically gives advance notice, usually 2 weeks.
Just because the government doesn't dictate the terms of employment, however, don't think that all employees are at the mercy of their employers. Larger companies have to compete for talent, so they usually provide competitive termination benefits such as severance pay, assistance in finding another job, etc. Small businesses, however, typically run without the padding of these kinds of benefits.
It actually works out pretty well. Right-to-work states (most of the South and Mountain states) are generally considered more business-friendly, and typically weather things such as the current recession better than unionized states, IMHO.
There are a lot of things lumped under the "HTML5" moniker that go well beyond HTML the language: WebGL, Web Sockets, SVG, Geolocation, File API, Real-Time Events, Threading, not to mention the very large assortment of styling modules lumped under "CSS3". HTML5 represents more of an ecosystem now, like.NET.
No, it's not the end of the line for other ecosystems, this is just another new one. A very, very important one, to be sure, but it obviously won't fill every need for a client UI out there. That said, if my new shiny app could even remotely be done as a web app, I'd be a fool to spend a whole lot of time and money porting it.
Dropbox isn't just a "cloud" app; it spans both cloud and local platforms. Every PC you setup with Dropbox is a local backup copy. Even better, you can selectively partition your repository onto different machines. And, Dropbox keeps a rolling history of every file, going back a month.
Dropbox makes your data thoroughly pervasive and robust, with a minimal amount effort. The risk of data loss is much, much greater than the risk of being hacked. How many times have you lost a hard drive? Or accidentally deleted an important file? Or had your computer stolen? These things happen all the time, and they are very debilitating.
We ought to be practical and focus on the real risks we're likely to face. Much as we would like to think we're important enough to be a LulzSec target, the reality is we're all pretty boring, data-wise.
The article notes that the Chinese government has been installing these devices at no charge since 2007. Well, there's your biggest reason to be suspicious. What kind of respectable government would actually buy _you_ something? In the US, drivers have to buy their own RFID transponders just for the privilege of being able to pay tolls electronically. In China, one would expect to not only pay for the transponder, but slip some money under the table at the same time, no?
Take a look at Web Workers. I needed to synchronize multiple browsers to a common clock. Used ajax push engine as a message bus to send sync event timecodes, and a web worker on each client to run a timer in a separate thread from the main UI code. Works pretty good under Chrome.
When you get past the big, scary headlines to the inside of the Times article, you see statements like this:
"We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.” (Emphasis added)
Wait, we're gonna have to come up some new technologies to lessen our environmental footprint?! Help!
In this case, blaming it on IT might be accurate. The photos were apparently snapped by anti-theft software LANRev, now rebranded as Absolute Manage. The LANRev feature set has been permanently dropped from the product line in response to these lawsuits.
Potential breakthrough capability, if it works
on
Solar Powered Laptops
·
· Score: 1
I bought a Samsung NB30 to try out Pixel Qi's daylight-readable screen, and have been very impressed with Samsung's engineering. Since the display enables me to carry the NB30 everywhere, it's taking quite a beating. Fortunately, it has a waterproof membrane undr the keyboard, a feature I've accidentally tested with many spills. The drive automatically parks, so the several times I've dropped it has not done more than break small pieces off of the case. This is one tough little PC.
Right now, my biggest limitation is being tethered to a power outlet. If Samsung can deliver truly mobile, continously replenished power, that would be a breakthrough technology everywhere, not just in Africa.
After harvesting your password, they would then try to change your forwarding and delegation settings. Since this would be done from their machine, they'd face a 2-factor challenge prompt from gmail which they could not meet, unless they had also stolen your phone.
Even if you are a driven individual, however, the "going rate" for theology is far less than the rate for Petroleum Engineers (about $30K vs. $120K.) Your driven individual still needs to pick the more profitable major if he wants to monetize his energy and skill.
Of course, not everyone needs to monetize their works to be a success. Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century American theologian, immediately comes to mind. He was, by all accounts, an enormously driven person; his collected works of theology fill 26 volumes. I don't believe he made any money, even though he was very well known in his time.
once you get past the race and gender tables. The actual facts about the comparative values of various majors starts around Table 30.
The problem with looking at this from a race/gender perspective is that the data tells us almost nothing about why there is a difference between these categories. For example, the study reveals that Petroleum is a specialty major, that 100% of the people who majored in it are men, and that this major has the highest median income.
OK, facts noted. Does this mean that men are better suited to be Petroleum Engineers than women? There's no way to tell from this data set. Maybe women would be great petroleum engineers, but they don't choose it because it sounds like it would be uninteresting or unpleasant or too inflexible.
What we _can learn from the data is that if you want a major that will bring in a steady, terrific income, Petroleum Engineering and other specialty majors are pretty awesome. The Study makes it pretty clear that people with "hard" majors make about twice as much as people with "soft" majors, so if money is your thing, pick a hard major. Put another way, if what you love to do is a soft major, prepare yourself for a life where you will never be tempted by the siren call of enormous wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
Years and years ago, Microsoft recognized the need for a standalone application that uses HTML as the UI. They call these class of apps "HTML Applications", HTA for short. You may be surprised to know that HTA lives on, even in Windows 7. The spirit -- if not the letter -- of HTA seems to have been promoted to a first-class UI approach in Windows 8, in which (we are told), the entire Windows UI will based on HTML 5 and CSS 3.
Running as you are on old Windows platforms, HTA might work well for you. One tip I'll pass along: you don't need to limit yourself to JavaScript when writing an HTA. You can use other scripting languages that talk to better to the underlying OS, such as Visual Basic. You'd be surprised how far you can go with this approach.
Mod parent up. Dynamic range (or lack thereof) is a matter of taste, and all this new standard does is give producers a new "brick wall" to run up against. However, since the new wall would be below the level of audio clipping, perhaps it's an improvement in that respect.
Eventually people will get tired of today's over-compressed sound, and will rediscover the joys of music dynamics. As a (very) small-time songwriter, I can appreciate the appeal of chest-thumping, all-11s sound, for a specific effect. But making EVERYTHING sound that way is like throwing away everything your crayon box except Magenta, and coloring everything one color.
If a game's financial mechanics breaks the game, then nobody will want to play it, and the money will dry up. I don't think this is very hard to explain to the money people. They understand the mechanics of investment. True, someone has to put it terms they understand: "If you put a microtransaction around that game element, we estimate it will suppress game involvement by 5%, which can reduce fees by $x per quarter."
The most expensive line item is salaries and benefits. The stimulus went to prop up the HR costs of state governments. You may have noticed that most public sector jobs were not lost during 2008 and 2009. That's where the money went.
It's a different picture now. The private sector shed 8 million jobs. There's no more support for another bailout/"stimulus", so expect to see a wave of contraction in public sector jobs.
OK, I'm game. How would you add more votes than there are voters ("ballot-stuffing") in a system where there are two independently-generated counts of voters and votes, audited each hour and recorded by a third party? Your constraints: the polling place is open to the public and can be monitored by a candidate's representative; the name of each person allowed into the voting booth is read aloud; each person has to present ID and be registered to vote prior to casting a vote; there are multiple voting machines, and no guarantee that a particular voter will get any particular machine (first come, first served.)
The veracity of an election is not based upon technology, so being able to hack into a server run by a state board of election means little. An election is a system, a tightly-controlled process completely specified in legal language, with many interlocking parts and thousands of people involved. At each interface point in the process, there are cross-checks to verify accuracy. You can't "fix" an election just by cracking into some file system somewhere, you'd have to beat the entire system.
For example, in Virginia where I am a poll-worker, we have independent tallies of the number of people allowed in to vote, and the number of votes cast on the voting machines. During an election, we compare these two numbers each hour and call them into the Registrar who records them in a third system. To "stuff" the ballots in this system, you'd have to compromise three sets of records, each of which are backed up in multiple formats. The chances that you'd get away with this in the open while people are watching the election are infinitesimal.
"You are giving dropbox the rights to do whatever they want to with your content, according to this. "
Let's qualify this. They can do what they want in order to deliver the advertised Service. They can't just up and decide to sell your stuff, for example, as that is not a Service they sell.
It leaves off the last sentence of the quoted paragraph from the TOS: "You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission."
IANAL, but I suspect that this is the linchpin of the terms. In order for any of the foregoing rights to be granted to dropbox, you must actually have rights in the first place. You are completely on the hook if you sync anything improperly.
This all sounds fine in theory, but I bet there's not a single dropbox customer who isn't running afoul of this term. It's not really dropbox's fault, it's the fault of our cockamamie copyright laws which grant automatic copyright on EVERYTHING on first publication.
When everything's covered, nothing's covered. Except for those who have the deep pockets to bring suit.
"That's why paper is such a great medium."
Your confidence in the efficacy of paper is misplaced. As paper is physically harder to manage, there are more opportunities for error, and thus _less_ reliable results. It's like the difference between doing your accounting with paper records and hand-written ledger books vs. using a software app.
The digital verification I'm thinking of would show the vote, but nothing about the voter, thus coercion is not possible. The verification would also take place after the polls have been closed, so it would be of no use to anyone but the voter.
What makes vote tabulation trustworthy is having multiple, independently-reported tallies stored in multiple formats. Just like balancing a checkbook (remember that?), the key is getting agreement on the numbers from more than one source.
For example, in the state of Virginia where I am a poll worker, we count the number of people who have been allowed to vote, and we count the number of votes cast on the machines. Each hour, we compare the two numbers, and call them into the Registrar who records them in a third system. If the numbers differ, it means that a voter walked out of the voting booth without properly casting a vote (this very rarely happens.) As a result, ballot-stuffing is nearly impossible. You'd have to "fix" the numbers on three different systems.
No technology is needed to achieve this effect -- just good processes.
The problem with paper is that it is actually a rather messy, error-prone medium. Paper gets jammed, lost, defaced, torn, etc. Paperless is far more reliable and controlled. (And no, throwing a scanner into the mix doesn't fix the underlying problems with paper.) While I agree that being able to physically recount a paper ballot might help in extreme edge cases, the cost will be a much higher rate of error in every other case. We're not talking the standard 80/20 split here, it's more like 99.5/0.5 (that is, a paperless process would benefit 99.5% of races vs. a paper-based process helping .5%.)
What I would like to see is a paperless voting tally that is digitally signed. The voter, on request, can get a printed receipt of the decryption key, which they can use later on via the web to verify that their individual vote was indeed included in the final result. That way, we don't need to perfectly manage the paper, the voter can have confidence their vote was counted, and we'll add yet another independent verification process to the mix, which is all to the better.
Make that a 10-12 inch screen. The earlier screen were really too darned small.
I snagged a couple of nice Samsung netbooks for $250 recently. These are great little boxes, with more than enough oomph for Linux Mint and 6 hours of battery life. They do everything an iPad does for 1/2 the cost.
Maybe we don't need a $100 price-point, but even $175 would be a game-changer. When you add in the cost of a binder cover and a bluetooth keyboard, the cost of an iPad starts looking pretty ridiculous.
The 18th century saw the birth of both the Industrial Age and the Age of Enlightenment. This was a time of profound change on a global scale that easily rivals the impact of our own information age.
You may ask what is the point in studying history -- who cares about the impact of steam power, for example? Here's the thing: although technology improves over time, people basically remain the same. By understanding the dislocation of farmers to factories in 1750, you can gain insight into the dislocation of national workers to global workers today.
To get access to literally every single published work from this period is going to be amazing. Bravo UK and Google!
Right-to-work is the principle is that no employee should ever be forced to join a union in order to get a job. What this means in practical terms is that both employer and employee can sever their relationship at any time for any cause. Typically, employers do offer probationary periods followed by more permanent arrangements, with this difference: during the probationary period, if the employee is fired, it often is put immediately into effect, whereas after probation, the employer typically gives advance notice, usually 2 weeks.
Just because the government doesn't dictate the terms of employment, however, don't think that all employees are at the mercy of their employers. Larger companies have to compete for talent, so they usually provide competitive termination benefits such as severance pay, assistance in finding another job, etc. Small businesses, however, typically run without the padding of these kinds of benefits.
It actually works out pretty well. Right-to-work states (most of the South and Mountain states) are generally considered more business-friendly, and typically weather things such as the current recession better than unionized states, IMHO.
There are a lot of things lumped under the "HTML5" moniker that go well beyond HTML the language: WebGL, Web Sockets, SVG, Geolocation, File API, Real-Time Events, Threading, not to mention the very large assortment of styling modules lumped under "CSS3". HTML5 represents more of an ecosystem now, like .NET.
No, it's not the end of the line for other ecosystems, this is just another new one. A very, very important one, to be sure, but it obviously won't fill every need for a client UI out there. That said, if my new shiny app could even remotely be done as a web app, I'd be a fool to spend a whole lot of time and money porting it.
Dropbox isn't just a "cloud" app; it spans both cloud and local platforms. Every PC you setup with Dropbox is a local backup copy. Even better, you can selectively partition your repository onto different machines. And, Dropbox keeps a rolling history of every file, going back a month.
Dropbox makes your data thoroughly pervasive and robust, with a minimal amount effort. The risk of data loss is much, much greater than the risk of being hacked. How many times have you lost a hard drive? Or accidentally deleted an important file? Or had your computer stolen? These things happen all the time, and they are very debilitating.
We ought to be practical and focus on the real risks we're likely to face. Much as we would like to think we're important enough to be a LulzSec target, the reality is we're all pretty boring, data-wise.
We cannot predict the future. Somebody may come up with an important breakthrough in treatment. As long as you have life, you have hope.
The article notes that the Chinese government has been installing these devices at no charge since 2007. Well, there's your biggest reason to be suspicious. What kind of respectable government would actually buy _you_ something? In the US, drivers have to buy their own RFID transponders just for the privilege of being able to pay tolls electronically. In China, one would expect to not only pay for the transponder, but slip some money under the table at the same time, no?
Take a look at Web Workers. I needed to synchronize multiple browsers to a common clock. Used ajax push engine as a message bus to send sync event timecodes, and a web worker on each client to run a timer in a separate thread from the main UI code. Works pretty good under Chrome.
When you get past the big, scary headlines to the inside of the Times article, you see statements like this:
"We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.” (Emphasis added)
Wait, we're gonna have to come up some new technologies to lessen our environmental footprint?! Help!
In this case, blaming it on IT might be accurate. The photos were apparently snapped by anti-theft software LANRev, now rebranded as Absolute Manage. The LANRev feature set has been permanently dropped from the product line in response to these lawsuits.
I bought a Samsung NB30 to try out Pixel Qi's daylight-readable screen, and have been very impressed with Samsung's engineering. Since the display enables me to carry the NB30 everywhere, it's taking quite a beating. Fortunately, it has a waterproof membrane undr the keyboard, a feature I've accidentally tested with many spills. The drive automatically parks, so the several times I've dropped it has not done more than break small pieces off of the case. This is one tough little PC.
Right now, my biggest limitation is being tethered to a power outlet. If Samsung can deliver truly mobile, continously replenished power, that would be a breakthrough technology everywhere, not just in Africa.
After harvesting your password, they would then try to change your forwarding and delegation settings. Since this would be done from their machine, they'd face a 2-factor challenge prompt from gmail which they could not meet, unless they had also stolen your phone.
Even if you are a driven individual, however, the "going rate" for theology is far less than the rate for Petroleum Engineers (about $30K vs. $120K.) Your driven individual still needs to pick the more profitable major if he wants to monetize his energy and skill.
Of course, not everyone needs to monetize their works to be a success. Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century American theologian, immediately comes to mind. He was, by all accounts, an enormously driven person; his collected works of theology fill 26 volumes. I don't believe he made any money, even though he was very well known in his time.
once you get past the race and gender tables. The actual facts about the comparative values of various majors starts around Table 30.
The problem with looking at this from a race/gender perspective is that the data tells us almost nothing about why there is a difference between these categories. For example, the study reveals that Petroleum is a specialty major, that 100% of the people who majored in it are men, and that this major has the highest median income.
OK, facts noted. Does this mean that men are better suited to be Petroleum Engineers than women? There's no way to tell from this data set. Maybe women would be great petroleum engineers, but they don't choose it because it sounds like it would be uninteresting or unpleasant or too inflexible.
What we _can learn from the data is that if you want a major that will bring in a steady, terrific income, Petroleum Engineering and other specialty majors are pretty awesome. The Study makes it pretty clear that people with "hard" majors make about twice as much as people with "soft" majors, so if money is your thing, pick a hard major. Put another way, if what you love to do is a soft major, prepare yourself for a life where you will never be tempted by the siren call of enormous wealth.