The ATTBI service agreement was just about the most restricitve contract I've ever seen at an ISP. You weren't even allowed to post material that would be "considered embarrassing to a reasonable person"! Maybe this merger will make the agreement a little more sensible (and increase the bandwith cap while their at it too!)
the icon is the cause of the complexity of the (virtual) desktop. On a real desktop, do we have a box that we have to open to access things we want to see? No, we can put everything we use wherever we damn well want. The virtual desktop is limited because it is an attempt to imitate a 3-dimensional concept in 2 dimensions. Obviously there will be some drawbacks to this. I propose we transform the icon system into something more like hypertext and world wide web search engines, linking things together by subject relativity rather than location in a virtual filesystem. Just look at the success Google has had in making the WWW easy to use for everybody. While I agree with this article, it DOES NOT offer an alternative, so I'm just throwing this out there.
This is great, but will the new version be able to open Powerpoint 2002 files? I don't think so. People are using Powerpoint 2000/02 files now, which are not compatible with Powerpoint 97. So you'll still have to fork over a bundle of money if you work on presentations with people who use M$ products. Current price for Powerpoint 2002: $93.95. Good deal!
Er... Sorry, that's $129 after the rebate. I think you can buy from fry's online at outpost.com (but why would you do that when you can go to the store and enjoy the pleasant holiday experience?)
My local Fry's had an ad in the paper today for a Seagate 80 GB drive for only $119. While this is still more expensive (in $/MB) than other media types, the relative prices are decreasing significantly. Soon an affordable 1 TB of storage won't be just a dream for the average geek!
The article adresses this and says "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand." I never met the parents, so I wouldn't be able to tell you whether they had this, but I did meet the kids. I can tell you, it wouldn't matter if there were only 5 kids in a class, it still wouldn't work with these kids. They need INDIVIDUAL attention.
No, class sizes have not gotten bigger, they have gotten smaller (at least in California in grades K-3). While 10+ years ago classes could be as large as 35+ kids, now the cap is at 20. So you can't blame it on larger classes.
And no, not all kids in the Silicon Valley are rich, about 9% of the county's population is considered below the poverty line.
I do agree with you on one point, the programmer community should get more involved in the education process.
The BBC has an interesting article that gives some real numbers. The article says that about "pervasive developmental disorders" are running at a rate of about 46 per 10,000, and full out autism is about 17 per 10,000.
I realize many of you will simply dismiss this as poor research, but it is frighteningly true. A good friend of mine teaches elementary school here in the Silicon Valley, and last year she had the misfortune of having 2 children affected by this, one with Autism and the other with Asperger's. This was in a class of 20 children, mind you, and the odds of 2 in a group of 20 children having these are astronomical. So don't try to tell me this is BS!
Sorry, my mistake. The idea of watermarking jumped into my mind after reading about fingerprinting, I guess I just ignored the stuff about the algorithm mentioned later in the article.
No doubt the RIAA could think of some way to use this to their advantage. Maybe require all new radios to have some sort of hardware added that would prevent playback of songs without this fingerprint? Also, it could be used for phone authentication, have a hardware fingerprinting system to ensure the person on the other end of the line is really from where they say they are.
It seems kind of hopeless for all these companies and the audio fingerprinting. About a year and a half ago some company came out with a similar idea, except is was a separate device and you would have to wait until you got home and connect it to your computer. And it only worked with 2 radio stations. Obviously this idea was found to be a dud rather quickly. So now you can get the same information with a cell phone, this wouldn't by any chance be easier than actually calling the radio station and asking them what's playing? The only really effective method I've seen to do this are those giant billboards by the freeway with the screen that tells you what song is playing.
And what about the distortion this will cause in the audio? It's not like FM radio is great quality, but embedding some sort of watermark/fingerprint that only requires 3 seconds of playback has got to have some sort of negative impact on the sound.
Anyway, what the hell is up with all these trolls tonight? Time to start browsing at +2 now I guess.
Cable will soon be the same situation as DSL with AT&T and Time-Warner buying up all the smaller companies like Comcast. AT&T is now 1500/128 for $49.95 a month, and I'm sure the Verizon service is much more stable so it really seems like a better deal.
This is really interesting- could it happen to be a coincidence that this is announced the same day that Bush announced the U.S. withdrawl from the missile treaty even though Putin said it was a bad idea? On a side note, there seems to be hardly anything about this on all the top news sites, but it was on the front page of my newspaper this morning. How could something so significant be ignored so quickly?
I think this could be used to circumvent for prosecution for manipulating the stock market by doing such things as hyping or posting false news about a particular company, as long as it was not not "framed as a form of fact". A little bit more serious than libel, yes, but it is a somewhat alarming precedent.
Re:Microsoft can't be to happy about this...
on
XBox Netplay Already
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft will never say their product is costing them money, but they released the amount it costs to produce the Xbox at $375 (and that's just the production, it doesn't include marketing, etc.) Check out this article about a Merrill Lynch report about XBox last March
I wonder how visible these will be from urban areas- light pollution is getting to be a huge problem because of urban sprawl. I know from most of the Silicon Valley I can make out very few stars in the night sky even on a clear night.
While most shows on television do seem to be crap, some are actually quite good, even artistic. I liken this blazen defacement to a museum that stamps their logo in the bottom right hand corner of every piece of artwork they display. If people would never go for that, why do they allow it on their televisions?
It doesn't look like this will be too useful considering most of the kids I know are more technically minded than their parents and will probably have little trouble disabling the software.
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The ATTBI service agreement was just about the most restricitve contract I've ever seen at an ISP. You weren't even allowed to post material that would be "considered embarrassing to a reasonable person"! Maybe this merger will make the agreement a little more sensible (and increase the bandwith cap while their at it too!)
the icon is the cause of the complexity of the (virtual) desktop. On a real desktop, do we have a box that we have to open to access things we want to see? No, we can put everything we use wherever we damn well want. The virtual desktop is limited because it is an attempt to imitate a 3-dimensional concept in 2 dimensions. Obviously there will be some drawbacks to this. I propose we transform the icon system into something more like hypertext and world wide web search engines, linking things together by subject relativity rather than location in a virtual filesystem. Just look at the success Google has had in making the WWW easy to use for everybody. While I agree with this article, it DOES NOT offer an alternative, so I'm just throwing this out there.
This is great, but will the new version be able to open Powerpoint 2002 files? I don't think so. People are using Powerpoint 2000/02 files now, which are not compatible with Powerpoint 97. So you'll still have to fork over a bundle of money if you work on presentations with people who use M$ products. Current price for Powerpoint 2002: $93.95. Good deal!
If by low addiction rates you mean 6.1% of the U.S. population over the age of 12, yes, you are correct.
Er... Sorry, that's $129 after the rebate. I think you can buy from fry's online at outpost.com (but why would you do that when you can go to the store and enjoy the pleasant holiday experience?)
My local Fry's had an ad in the paper today for a Seagate 80 GB drive for only $119. While this is still more expensive (in $/MB) than other media types, the relative prices are decreasing significantly. Soon an affordable 1 TB of storage won't be just a dream for the average geek!
The article adresses this and says "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand." I never met the parents, so I wouldn't be able to tell you whether they had this, but I did meet the kids. I can tell you, it wouldn't matter if there were only 5 kids in a class, it still wouldn't work with these kids. They need INDIVIDUAL attention.
No, class sizes have not gotten bigger, they have gotten smaller (at least in California in grades K-3). While 10+ years ago classes could be as large as 35+ kids, now the cap is at 20. So you can't blame it on larger classes.
And no, not all kids in the Silicon Valley are rich, about 9% of the county's population is considered below the poverty line.
I do agree with you on one point, the programmer community should get more involved in the education process.
The BBC has an interesting article that gives some real numbers. The article says that about "pervasive developmental disorders" are running at a rate of about 46 per 10,000, and full out autism is about 17 per 10,000.
I realize many of you will simply dismiss this as poor research, but it is frighteningly true. A good friend of mine teaches elementary school here in the Silicon Valley, and last year she had the misfortune of having 2 children affected by this, one with Autism and the other with Asperger's. This was in a class of 20 children, mind you, and the odds of 2 in a group of 20 children having these are astronomical. So don't try to tell me this is BS!
Sorry, my mistake. The idea of watermarking jumped into my mind after reading about fingerprinting, I guess I just ignored the stuff about the algorithm mentioned later in the article.
No doubt the RIAA could think of some way to use this to their advantage. Maybe require all new radios to have some sort of hardware added that would prevent playback of songs without this fingerprint? Also, it could be used for phone authentication, have a hardware fingerprinting system to ensure the person on the other end of the line is really from where they say they are.
It seems kind of hopeless for all these companies and the audio fingerprinting. About a year and a half ago some company came out with a similar idea, except is was a separate device and you would have to wait until you got home and connect it to your computer. And it only worked with 2 radio stations. Obviously this idea was found to be a dud rather quickly. So now you can get the same information with a cell phone, this wouldn't by any chance be easier than actually calling the radio station and asking them what's playing? The only really effective method I've seen to do this are those giant billboards by the freeway with the screen that tells you what song is playing.
And what about the distortion this will cause in the audio? It's not like FM radio is great quality, but embedding some sort of watermark/fingerprint that only requires 3 seconds of playback has got to have some sort of negative impact on the sound.
Anyway, what the hell is up with all these trolls tonight? Time to start browsing at +2 now I guess.
The Mexican-American war? Is that some sort of civil rights thing? Or did you mean the Mexican War?
Cable will soon be the same situation as DSL with AT&T and Time-Warner buying up all the smaller companies like Comcast. AT&T is now 1500/128 for $49.95 a month, and I'm sure the Verizon service is much more stable so it really seems like a better deal.
Hey, I know you're a big fan of those postings from alt.sex.stories, but there's no reason share this sick incestuous shit with the rest of us.
This is really interesting- could it happen to be a coincidence that this is announced the same day that Bush announced the U.S. withdrawl from the missile treaty even though Putin said it was a bad idea? On a side note, there seems to be hardly anything about this on all the top news sites, but it was on the front page of my newspaper this morning. How could something so significant be ignored so quickly?
I think this could be used to circumvent for prosecution for manipulating the stock market by doing such things as hyping or posting false news about a particular company, as long as it was not not "framed as a form of fact". A little bit more serious than libel, yes, but it is a somewhat alarming precedent.
Microsoft will never say their product is costing them money, but they released the amount it costs to produce the Xbox at $375 (and that's just the production, it doesn't include marketing, etc.) Check out this article about a Merrill Lynch report about XBox last March
I believe in Blood and Blood 2 you had a flare gun, and if you shot enough rounds at someone they would catch on fire and yell "It burns! It burns!"
I believe the voice used on OK Computer was "Fred" which was the only available voice until OS 8.
I wonder how visible these will be from urban areas- light pollution is getting to be a huge problem because of urban sprawl. I know from most of the Silicon Valley I can make out very few stars in the night sky even on a clear night.
While most shows on television do seem to be crap, some are actually quite good, even artistic. I liken this blazen defacement to a museum that stamps their logo in the bottom right hand corner of every piece of artwork they display. If people would never go for that, why do they allow it on their televisions?
It doesn't look like this will be too useful considering most of the kids I know are more technically minded than their parents and will probably have little trouble disabling the software.
They failed to take over Afghanistan because we supported the opposition. Please get the facts straight.