Does this remind anyone of a similar case from a few years back?
A little bit, but the actual allegation has nothing to do with look-and-feel, but rather ``that some of the DaVinci operating system was lifted directly from the Palm OS'' (from the C|Net article). Of course, that could be made up, but it's not just another Mac-Windows or iMac-iPC style suit.
Hey, thanks for putting me on to the Happy Hacking keyboard... I just found a Linux Gazette review on it, and it appears to be just what I've been looking for in a new keyboard! I really miss my old Mac LC keyboard because of its size (and even that had a keypad). This has Esc and Ctrl in the "right" places (compared to the Sun I use at school), as has been said, and I couldn't get that on my Mac; I had tried to remap Control on my Mac keyboard, but ran into the "Control Lock" problem---Macs do the locking in hardware for their Caps Lock keys, so that you can remap them, but they still lock!:(
Anyway, as I said, thanks for pointing this one out. I think I'll be contacting the good folks at PFU America pretty soon. (So maybe they should thank you, too.;)
...they said you could just type in "1996 budget report" instead of the URL. But if a site is designed correctly, you should be able to navigate to reports, then budget, then 1996. Or budget department, then 1996 budget report.
Or even just type "1996 budget report" into a search line on the site itself. I agree that this could be handled on the individual webpage, but it would admittedly be rather convenient to just type it into the URL line. But, as always, I suspect this will get hijacked, so that typing "The Foo Company" will only work as I'd like if the Foo company has paid all the right fees to all the right people... sigh
I thought it was a good interview (more actual content than any other I've seen, I think), but I was a little perturbed at all the [editorial] modifications.
No kidding. Particularly when a lot of the modifications appear to have been from an acceptable English phrasing to a different, more verbose English phrasing... I mean, it's fine if the editing serves to explain some unfamiliar jargon, or gloss-replace a one-off slang term, but when the editing is just nitpicking his grammar? When it's perfectly good to start with?
(from a different post) When people are, you know, talking to an interviewer, a journalist, not, ummm, writing something where they can, er, edit, change what they wrote, make it compact, er, compact and clear, ummm, they often use a lot of words, more words than they really, uh, need to make their point, you know what I mean?
I'd agree with you, except that it's standard practice to abridge all that without even marking its loss. Especially things like "um" and "er", but even (perhaps to a lesser extent) "you know", "like", &c.
Yeah, I was going to point out that this was just Nomic all over again, dressed up for a popular audience. I think it's a cute idea---I particularly like how they intend to apply for nation status once they hit 5m people---but it's going to suffer from all the traditional problems of Nomic. Namely, that with no existence except online, there really isn't much to legislate about; and more importantly, even if there is some sort of legislation, there's no way to enforce it! In a Nomic, that's okay, because there's generally a ``spirit of the game'' motivating people not to break the rules, but when it's couched as an actual nation, it's not going to work so well....
An effective pw management scheme...
on
Password Overload
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· Score: 1
The most effective password management idea that I've heard is the advice we gave to people using our lab---come up with "password themes". That is, pick some class of passwords that are related and enumerable, munged in a fairly consistent way, and wouldn't be well known to anyone but you; this way you don't have twenty distinct things to remember, just one pattern that ties into something you already know.
For instance, ``Last names of people in my boy scout troop, with the first two letters swapped''. Or, ``First names of people at my last job, spelled backwards and with the fourth letter capitalised''. This sort of a method tends to be very productive, easy to remember, but hard to guess; and even if someone gets one of your passwords, they won't be able to figure out the others, unless they know you really well. And if you still can't remember your scheme, it's much safer to write down a dummy password that obeys the scheme, or even to write down the scheme itself, than to write down each valid password next to your computer.
Of course, it's probably easier if this gets used in combination with some of the other suggestions on this board---I think even this scheme would peter out if I needed to use a separate password for every registrable site I belong to.;)
Just remember, if they ever put Schindler's List back in the theaters, your kids won't be allowed to see it because it's rated R, and they're under 17. So much for learning from the past.
And the irony in that case is that Schindler's List was shown on network TV during prime time about three years back---uncensored, uncut. Sort of silly to restrict anyone from seeing it at the cinema, then.:)
Of course, the more serious counterpart to that is the fact that many, many kids have virtually unlimited access to HBO (all five of them), Showtime, Cinemax, and all the other "pay channels", because their parents want them and can't be bothered to set parental control passwords on them (if even they knew how), or because they don't care, or because they do think their kid is mature enough to watch it. There is something to be said about big-screen vs. small-screen (namely, the big screen makes everything feel much more graphic), but there seem to be a whole lot of cases where kids are denied access to something at the cineplex when they have full access to equally bad or worse things on TV....
If they force AOL to open the standard, and then capture the market with their own messenger, and THEN close the standard once more - then everyone loses...
True enough; but there are at least some restrictions on how this could happen. If MS got the open standard, then instantly broke it, people would say, ``hey, I can't talk to my friends now, I'm going back to AIM.'' MS would have to wait until they got a large percentage of the market share... and I'm not completely convinced that would happen. For one thing, they're starting at 0% in an already large market, so at least it would take a while. And, AOL's IM is not going to fade away. And, I expect free clients to be taking up at least part of the share....
So while it's certainly possible that MS could funge this situation up, I disagree with many of the doomsayers. While I'm sure MS is monetarily motivated in this move, that doesn't diminish the fact that it is a Good Thing. Hopefully we'll see more of the same in the future (even if it's monetarily motivated---especially if---I mean, isn't one of our prime arguments for OS that it makes good business sense?).
Well, I think NASA should stick around for a while yet, but I do think that private sector investment is on the verge of becoming realistic and relevant. Does anyone else remember the announcement a few months ago that some hotel (Hilton, I think) was looking into a space station hotel-conference center? And that's just the barest bump of the tip of the iceberg.
And just wait for the 31 July moon crash---if that kicks up any water vapour, expect to see a working moon colony within ten years, largely or entirely financed from the private sector. Talk about cool!
Something I didn't quite get while reading the article---it made it sound as if the offence was not (e.g.) someone walking into an office and saying, ``Hey, you're being bugged'', it was someone going to the public and saying, ``Hey, my company is being bugged''. Which is even scarier, really. Particularly the fact that any sort of complaint could result in a two-year jail sentence, without a proper trial. (Of course, my ideas of what comprises a ``proper trial'' are shaped by the fact I live in the US; but I'm guessing that ``excluding the complainant from attending and issuing orders to keep secret the evidence on national security grounds'' is not exactly the usual procedure in the UK, either.)
This really does sound like something out of a dystopian novel. Even worse than some of the stuff the US has been pulling lately. I should hope it gets resolved quickly (and correctly!)... it looks like there are at least a few MPs on the right track. Does anyone know what the approximate likelihood of this passing is? (The article seemed to indicate that it hadn't come up for a vote yet.)
I wouldn't exactly call it a monopoly, since it does have UPS and FedEx (and assorted minor carriers) to compete with. It used to be---at one point, a number of roads were designated "Post Roads" and legally could not be used to deliver things, except by the government postal service.
Of course, now the USPS has been privatised, although it is still sort of quasi-governmental. But there is something that people here either don't know or just aren't considering: urban delivery subsidises the rural post. I mean, it's just not that hard to pick up and deliver all the mail when an entire zip code fits within a couple blocks. But when one post office has to serve many square miles of sparsely populated land, the overhead goes up quite a bit. That's why it's "so expensive" and "ridiculously slow" sometimes---yes, a private company could maybe cut costs for most of us, but I can almost guarantee that prices would go up (substantially, I suspect) in the more rural areas. If not, then that means that someone is still subsidising them, and the prices wouldn't go down (much).
Oh, and another thing---there's nothing stopping any new mail delivery services from starting up, but I don't see any. Perhaps it's not as cost-effective as you think?
Geez, if the government ever needed an example of why file-format patenting is bad, GIF is certainly it. I'm so sick of hearing about one thing or another going under because GIF is proprietary. As has been mentioned here, PNG is nice, and (most importantly) free.
Although I still have yet to see any large number of PNG graphics on the net, it does seem to be a better format than GIF, and netscrape and exploder (claim to) support it. It does everything GIF does, but it also allows more than 256 colours, full alpha, and a few other features. Here's the PNG homepage.
My favourite quote: ``[Elizabeth Kaufman of Cisco] said that even with the decontrol legislation, industry is willing to work with government on a way to give law enforcement access to unscrambled data without compromising the customer's security.'' Say what? How does that work, exactly? Isn't law enforcement access to unscrambled data by definition a compromise of customer security?
This would be an amazingly cool thing---if it worked. We'll have to wait for the demo to know for sure, but call me skeptical. There are too many jobs this system would have to perform, each of which is a potential point of failure. Here's a brief rundown:
Voice recognition. In each language. Note that the current state of the art in voice recognition involves a *lot* of hand-tuning, which would then have to be done in each of the six languages. Also, to get reasonable performance you really need to let the system get to know you---not practical in this case ("Um, hi, mr. travel agent, could you talk into this box for about an hour? Be back in a jiffy.")
Sentence parsing. The absolute best results these days have just under 90% accuracy; the best results (that I know of) with something approaching real-time speed are down around 80%. Some of that (I'd guess 5% or so) is legitimate ambiguity, that probably wouldn't affect a translation much, but much of the inaccuracy would cause problems.
Word-sense disambiguation. This is far more important to a real-time translator, but the state-of-the-art still isn't perfect, and more importantly, the SotA algorithms generally work on entire articles, not just sentences, so (particularly for short conversations) they'll be at a disadvantage. This is the source of most of the classic translation errors (like "the vodka is eager, but the meat is rotten"). More importantly, it's harder to forgive than most other errors, since e.g. pauses or slightly off grammar generally don't render the text unintelligible, but using the completely wrong word can totally obscure the sentence. The speech translation problem is slightly worse, too, because there are (typically, in most languages I know of) more homonyms than homographs.
Text-to-speech. This area's not so bad, in that computers can generally produce (relatively) understandable speech, but in a Talking Moose sort of way. Again, though, this has to be hand-tailored to each individual language, at least to some extent.
My concern is that each of these things will introduce substantial error; and further that the SotA in speed is not the same as the SotA in quality, so that in order to do real-time translation, the quality degrades even further.
Another, more cynical/paranoid concern, is the fact that (most of) the conversation will be between people who are, presumably, prepped for it. They can be told to speak slowly and in a clear voice (which is reasonable enough, I suppose), to restrict their vocabulary (which is not reasonable), and to limit their interaction to certain other languages (also not reasonable). The Heidelberg man-on-the-street (Straßenmann?;) conversations should be more informative in this regard. But I wonder if their system can actually handle translations between any two languages, or only certain combinations? And if they can translate between any two, do they use a "hub-language" or translate directly? Two clicks at babelfish can show you just how much further the former would degrade the quality....
Oh well. I'll certainly keep my eyes open for the results of the demo. Are any slashdotters going to be there? Make sure to post your impressions.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Does this remind anyone of a similar case from a few years back?
A little bit, but the actual allegation has nothing to do with look-and-feel, but rather ``that some of the DaVinci operating system was lifted directly from the Palm OS'' (from the C|Net article). Of course, that could be made up, but it's not just another Mac-Windows or iMac-iPC style suit.
Hey, thanks for putting me on to the Happy Hacking keyboard... I just found a Linux Gazette review on it, and it appears to be just what I've been looking for in a new keyboard! I really miss my old Mac LC keyboard because of its size (and even that had a keypad). This has Esc and Ctrl in the "right" places (compared to the Sun I use at school), as has been said, and I couldn't get that on my Mac; I had tried to remap Control on my Mac keyboard, but ran into the "Control Lock" problem---Macs do the locking in hardware for their Caps Lock keys, so that you can remap them, but they still lock! :(
Anyway, as I said, thanks for pointing this one out. I think I'll be contacting the good folks at PFU America pretty soon. (So maybe they should thank you, too. ;)
Or even just type "1996 budget report" into a search line on the site itself. I agree that this could be handled on the individual webpage, but it would admittedly be rather convenient to just type it into the URL line. But, as always, I suspect this will get hijacked, so that typing "The Foo Company" will only work as I'd like if the Foo company has paid all the right fees to all the right people... sigh
I thought it was a good interview (more actual content than any other I've seen, I think), but I was a little perturbed at all the [editorial] modifications.
No kidding. Particularly when a lot of the modifications appear to have been from an acceptable English phrasing to a different, more verbose English phrasing... I mean, it's fine if the editing serves to explain some unfamiliar jargon, or gloss-replace a one-off slang term, but when the editing is just nitpicking his grammar? When it's perfectly good to start with?
(from a different post)
When people are, you know, talking to an interviewer, a journalist, not, ummm, writing something where they can, er, edit, change what they wrote, make it compact, er, compact and clear, ummm, they often use a lot of words, more words than they really, uh, need to make their point, you know what I mean?
I'd agree with you, except that it's standard practice to abridge all that without even marking its loss. Especially things like "um" and "er", but even (perhaps to a lesser extent) "you know", "like", &c.
Yeah, I was going to point out that this was just Nomic all over again, dressed up for a popular audience. I think it's a cute idea---I particularly like how they intend to apply for nation status once they hit 5m people---but it's going to suffer from all the traditional problems of Nomic. Namely, that with no existence except online, there really isn't much to legislate about; and more importantly, even if there is some sort of legislation, there's no way to enforce it! In a Nomic, that's okay, because there's generally a ``spirit of the game'' motivating people not to break the rules, but when it's couched as an actual nation, it's not going to work so well....
The most effective password management idea that I've heard is the advice we gave to people using our lab---come up with "password themes". That is, pick some class of passwords that are related and enumerable, munged in a fairly consistent way, and wouldn't be well known to anyone but you; this way you don't have twenty distinct things to remember, just one pattern that ties into something you already know.
For instance, ``Last names of people in my boy scout troop, with the first two letters swapped''. Or, ``First names of people at my last job, spelled backwards and with the fourth letter capitalised''. This sort of a method tends to be very productive, easy to remember, but hard to guess; and even if someone gets one of your passwords, they won't be able to figure out the others, unless they know you really well. And if you still can't remember your scheme, it's much safer to write down a dummy password that obeys the scheme, or even to write down the scheme itself, than to write down each valid password next to your computer.
Of course, it's probably easier if this gets used in combination with some of the other suggestions on this board---I think even this scheme would peter out if I needed to use a separate password for every registrable site I belong to. ;)
Just remember, if they ever put Schindler's List back in the theaters, your kids won't be allowed to see it because it's rated R, and they're under 17. So much for learning from the past.
And the irony in that case is that Schindler's List was shown on network TV during prime time about three years back---uncensored, uncut. Sort of silly to restrict anyone from seeing it at the cinema, then. :)
Of course, the more serious counterpart to that is the fact that many, many kids have virtually unlimited access to HBO (all five of them), Showtime, Cinemax, and all the other "pay channels", because their parents want them and can't be bothered to set parental control passwords on them (if even they knew how), or because they don't care, or because they do think their kid is mature enough to watch it. There is something to be said about big-screen vs. small-screen (namely, the big screen makes everything feel much more graphic), but there seem to be a whole lot of cases where kids are denied access to something at the cineplex when they have full access to equally bad or worse things on TV....
If they force AOL to open the standard, and then capture the market with their own messenger, and THEN close the standard once more - then everyone loses...
True enough; but there are at least some restrictions on how this could happen. If MS got the open standard, then instantly broke it, people would say, ``hey, I can't talk to my friends now, I'm going back to AIM.'' MS would have to wait until they got a large percentage of the market share... and I'm not completely convinced that would happen. For one thing, they're starting at 0% in an already large market, so at least it would take a while. And, AOL's IM is not going to fade away. And, I expect free clients to be taking up at least part of the share....
So while it's certainly possible that MS could funge this situation up, I disagree with many of the doomsayers. While I'm sure MS is monetarily motivated in this move, that doesn't diminish the fact that it is a Good Thing. Hopefully we'll see more of the same in the future (even if it's monetarily motivated---especially if---I mean, isn't one of our prime arguments for OS that it makes good business sense?).
Well, I think NASA should stick around for a while yet, but I do think that private sector investment is on the verge of becoming realistic and relevant. Does anyone else remember the announcement a few months ago that some hotel (Hilton, I think) was looking into a space station hotel-conference center? And that's just the barest bump of the tip of the iceberg.
And just wait for the 31 July moon crash---if that kicks up any water vapour, expect to see a working moon colony within ten years, largely or entirely financed from the private sector. Talk about cool!
Here's the BBC article on the bill. It also provides a link to a copy of the actual draft bill.
Something I didn't quite get while reading the article---it made it sound as if the offence was not (e.g.) someone walking into an office and saying, ``Hey, you're being bugged'', it was someone going to the public and saying, ``Hey, my company is being bugged''. Which is even scarier, really. Particularly the fact that any sort of complaint could result in a two-year jail sentence, without a proper trial. (Of course, my ideas of what comprises a ``proper trial'' are shaped by the fact I live in the US; but I'm guessing that ``excluding the complainant from attending and issuing orders to keep secret the evidence on national security grounds'' is not exactly the usual procedure in the UK, either.)
This really does sound like something out of a dystopian novel. Even worse than some of the stuff the US has been pulling lately. I should hope it gets resolved quickly (and correctly!)... it looks like there are at least a few MPs on the right track. Does anyone know what the approximate likelihood of this passing is? (The article seemed to indicate that it hadn't come up for a vote yet.)
I wouldn't exactly call it a monopoly, since it does have UPS and FedEx (and assorted minor carriers) to compete with. It used to be---at one point, a number of roads were designated "Post Roads" and legally could not be used to deliver things, except by the government postal service.
Of course, now the USPS has been privatised, although it is still sort of quasi-governmental. But there is something that people here either don't know or just aren't considering: urban delivery subsidises the rural post. I mean, it's just not that hard to pick up and deliver all the mail when an entire zip code fits within a couple blocks. But when one post office has to serve many square miles of sparsely populated land, the overhead goes up quite a bit. That's why it's "so expensive" and "ridiculously slow" sometimes---yes, a private company could maybe cut costs for most of us, but I can almost guarantee that prices would go up (substantially, I suspect) in the more rural areas. If not, then that means that someone is still subsidising them, and the prices wouldn't go down (much).
Oh, and another thing---there's nothing stopping any new mail delivery services from starting up, but I don't see any. Perhaps it's not as cost-effective as you think?
Geez, if the government ever needed an example of why file-format patenting is bad, GIF is certainly it. I'm so sick of hearing about one thing or another going under because GIF is proprietary. As has been mentioned here, PNG is nice, and (most importantly) free.
Although I still have yet to see any large number of PNG graphics on the net, it does seem to be a better format than GIF, and netscrape and exploder (claim to) support it. It does everything GIF does, but it also allows more than 256 colours, full alpha, and a few other features. Here's the PNG homepage.
My favourite quote: ``[Elizabeth Kaufman of Cisco] said that even with the decontrol legislation, industry is willing to work with government on a way to give law enforcement access to unscrambled data without compromising the customer's security.'' Say what? How does that work, exactly? Isn't law enforcement access to unscrambled data by definition a compromise of customer security?
This would be an amazingly cool thing---if it worked. We'll have to wait for the demo to know for sure, but call me skeptical. There are too many jobs this system would have to perform, each of which is a potential point of failure. Here's a brief rundown:
My concern is that each of these things will introduce substantial error; and further that the SotA in speed is not the same as the SotA in quality, so that in order to do real-time translation, the quality degrades even further.
Another, more cynical/paranoid concern, is the fact that (most of) the conversation will be between people who are, presumably, prepped for it. They can be told to speak slowly and in a clear voice (which is reasonable enough, I suppose), to restrict their vocabulary (which is not reasonable), and to limit their interaction to certain other languages (also not reasonable). The Heidelberg man-on-the-street (Straßenmann? ;) conversations should be more informative in this regard. But I wonder if their system can actually handle translations between any two languages, or only certain combinations? And if they can translate between any two, do they use a "hub-language" or translate directly? Two clicks at babelfish can show you just how much further the former would degrade the quality....
Oh well. I'll certainly keep my eyes open for the results of the demo. Are any slashdotters going to be there? Make sure to post your impressions. :)