My undergrad physics labs involved writing out ten iterations by hand, pooling with 4 other tables of students to get 50, then doing statistics on them. The error bars were so freaking huge we generally couldn't see the forest for the trees, so to speak.
A friend's undergrad physics labs (at UCSD, if memory serves) used computers as data collectors. Pendulum motion was timed to the millisecond by a magnetic switch. Three data runs of 100 results apiece let them test both the arc-width invariability of a pendulum period and make a stab at the gravitational constant. The students pooled their data via spreadsheet copy/paste, lab sections pooled data further, and the omnibus results had error bars nearer to.1% -- needless to say, they walked out with: more statistical awareness, more trust in physics's 'realness', less pain, more attention on the scientific method and less on rote data collection.
That was 15+ years ago.
There are ways that books, calculators and computers can become crutches that impede learning. But no matter WHAT stage in the process, computers can improve the process: as adaptive-rote-learning drills (a la mavis beacon or mathblaster), via visualization, via data collection, via symbolic math tools, via simulations, via reference-material portability (ebooks) and instant research (wikipedia).
Don't be a luddite -- it isn't the computer's fault, it's ours. We've got to find ways to learn that don't fit the 19th-century teaching paradigms. For example, I taught my mom what an integral was and what made it cool with a 2-minute youtube video. Can she do the math? Nope. But she groks the mathematical concept behind rate-of-change, Newton's law of cooling, etc.
Nope, those (plus parents) are all wrong/inapplicable questions.
GP seems to be after question: how much risk will you put your children in vs. how much risk to strangers.
The odds of his actions going pearshaped and leading to complications that maimed/killed his family were pretty slim. The odds of that pickup t-boning other cars and causing serious injury or deaths were much higher.
BTW, economics of car crashes are straightforward: a car costs $20k or less to fix; medical bills are rarely that cheap. Someone's insurance company owes this guy a huge damn thank-you.
Um, you contradict yourself a bit there. On those occasions where one of the AP's 'own reporters' writes a story, the AP *is* the source. This is akin to war or political-campaign news stories relying on a 'pool' reporter. On short-term work (chilean miners), a nearby journo or freelancer is often put on contract for the duration.
As for GP, there are fewer papers and news agencies assigning reporters and sportswriters and etc elsewhere. Sharing / pooling writers and photographers is cheaper. The NYT, Reuters, news mags, etc still put reporters on assignment, at which point THEY ARE the source. While NYT's reporter count is way down, they're still their own primary sources on a LOT of content.
Not to be pedantic, but every movie already is an op-ed on common societal memes. That's a crux part of storytelling.
We're idiots if we don't call out the lie (of bootstrap bob, the self-made zillionaire who dun it all hisseff, wiff no hepp from cities or trains or other people, or in this case, without net neutrality) when it is shamelessly pushed by corporatist anti-neutrality detractors (MPAA, studios, and any actors, performers that buy that baloney).
Kudos to Lessig. Double kudos for his frank admission that people he supported have fallen damn far short of keeping their campaign promises on net neutrality.
Kudos. Wish you were modded 5 instead of parent. Per my too-long rant above, you're far more right about this stuff than parent is.
Incidentally, the stuff that bit us on the ass last year tended to be much smaller than in our first such exercises. The most notable was a panicked boss overruling his techs and causing minor damage. But all in all, team members come away calmer, surer, more familiar with procedure (and more engaged when asked to edit procedure), and with relationships with CERT and peers at other agencies/facilities that they're quick to use when they see phantoms.
One last take-away: Without training, every pattern or surge or shadow looks scary. After training, fewer false positives are declared, because staff resorts to a few simple self-checks before calling a much calmer, more specific "Hi, I'm sending you a pcap... does this look wrong to you, too?" sort of report.
Its great news. If I get my neighbour's internet connections taken out my download speeds should shoot right up.
Nevermind your neighbor... suppose I give you this box... if you push the button your internet speeds will shoot right up. But be forewarned... someone you don't know will be cut off the internet forever. Do you push the button?;)
ISP: If you push that button too much, you'll go blind! Mini-me: How many times can I push it and just need glasses?
Where's the auction inventory? I'm still game for picking over SCO's ruins for anything of value, then trying to pool enough OSS money to buy and rerelease it.
Then again, just because SCO says they *own* the IP... (shit!)
> For those of us that haven't eaten cereal that comes with > prizes for at least 40 years now, can you express that in > more traditional units, e.g. volkswagens, libraries of > congress, or common US coins? Alternatively, you you just > give the fucking dimensions.
1 - I still buy *THAT KIND* of cereal, you insensitive clod! Also, Crackerjack. You should, too. Live a little. 2 - The whole analogy is busted -- I never see prizes anymore. FWIW, Crackerjack prizes suck the wax tadpole, too. That's the cardinal flaw with this description: there are probably young/.'ers that have never seen a toy in/from a cereal box, and not because their mom was one of those twisted no-corn-sugar holistic diet types. 3 - The good news is that Happy Meals are the new Crackerjack. Nerd-toys and a waist-friendly lunch for Three Bucks = W00T!!11! 4 - Alas, the sensor is smaller than the usual Happy Meal toy. 5 - Where do you shop that has bulk-package foods big enough that cereal prizes (e.g., secret decoder rings) could possibly compare in size to volkswagens or libraries? My wife wants that membership!
5 - Here's your answer in lame (slashdot-friendly) ascii art:
(Before anyone accuses me of trolling or forgetting UI resize functionality, Locke did mention it's been 40 yrs since (s)he bought cereal with a prize, so I'm guessing (s)he's rockin' the bigfonts regardless of which browser they're using... oops, now I am trollin'. Sorry!)
How does fiber become 'obsolete'? If we're not talking decay due to physical rot or some other abuse, I'm not seeing it.
A semiconductor fab built 20 or 30 years ago sees obsolescence due to clean-room air-quality standards increasing, but the old fab is still far cleaner than hospital standards -- medical products suppliers are buying/leasing old fabs to convert to their own manufacturing needs. But for fiber to be *obsolete*, there needs to be some technical qualification they no longer meet. What changed?
there is a fake me out there, with a fake name, a fake birthday, a fake home address, a fake mother's maiden name, a fake birth city, fake likes and dislikes, etc. every time i am asked for this info online, i consistently and continually use the fake alter ego
this is the future of privacy: aliases
FakeYou and You link together seamlessly within doubleclick and other usage-tracking data, unless other always isolated in every way (IP, userspace data and cache, accounts and sites visited, fingerprinting based on anything from hours of use to packet and request strings). We're accomplishing almost nothing.
OTOH, if aliases are shared (this happens accidentally via bugmenot's accounts), the usage data consolidated becomes a view of several users. FakeYou gets smushed with 50 other fakeSomeones or more, making the job of following circletimesquare inordinately harder (the Lost In A Crowd trope). It'll still be extractible for valuable cases (surveillance, espionage, high profile targets), but the cost/benefit would give most of us back some reasonable amount of anonymity.
If I really needed to hide my acts, I'd use a dedicated machine/VM and someone else's compromised wifi as my point of origin, and then I'd resort to all the above steps (yours AND mine).
The pessimist in me fears this (the near impossibility of anonymity) WILL come around to bite us on the ass. Someone will find ways to abuse this information.
Let me help you with your Ubuntu Fanboism
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
It's a fool's dream to really expect strangers to do your bidding perfectly and for free, isn't it?
As far as Ubuntu fanboism, I learned yesterday that Ubuntu One, which is a cloud-storage / music store / etc. initiative by Canonical, will keep the server component closed-source.
For those not likely to RTFL, the comment highlights are:
Developers arguing that this isn't a real bug since Canonical refuses to open-source the server.
Users' rebuttal of this, pointing to Ubuntu bug 1 (the need for a FOSS alternative to the MSoft hegemony)
Same UbuntuOne devs complaining this bug's noise is making it hard for them to track 'real' bugs,
Mention of how this decision has Canonical diluting the Ubuntu trademark,
the irony of Canonical trying to monetize by closed-sourcing the cloud server software.
Disclaimer: I'm generally classifiable as a Ubuntu/Debian fanboi (I really like Ubuntu). But I'm really just another twice-burned greybearded gadget geek, which makes me an ex-fanboi of everything else over the last 30 yrs.. I'm not surprised to see Ubuntu / Canonical has warts -- it was only a matter of time before Ubuntu did something that left me less-than-impressed.
C'est la vie -- I figure either I'm going to be annoyed or Shuttleworth is, and he's paying more for the project than I am.
Since the other AC didn't bother to explain Shakespeare's greatness, I'll try. Keep in mind, this isn't my field.
Shakespeare's underlying stories are good. Pacing is good. Themes are well-addressed. Plots have twists and the plays are populated with dialogue that help build rich, full characters.
So far, we're at the Bruckheimer level you mentioned. But next, we've got subtlety and reveal. Watch a movie apiece from each decade and notice how the film industry (and their audiences) progress through learning how to reveal story. Playwrights are similarly hampered. Now, go back and compare Shakespeare's abilities here. They're not 21st-century good, but they're much better than one would expect for being CENTURIES old. He shared details with audience sometimes, kept them for dramatic twists in others, and used everything from soliloquy to asides to engage audiences and unfold the story as he wanted.
Finally, the plays use metric and mnemonic techniques common for plays in an illiterate era: actors needed to be able to store all that prolix, lyrical prose by the pageful in their heads. They needed to know lines to a dozen roles in as many plays. This was done by structures and rhythms that helped establish the words as strongly as the ideas -- they sounded so cool because the patter guided actors to the same words, rather than paraphrasing. Some of what feels stilted about his writing isn't because we talk differently now, but because plays talked differently expressly because that distinctive rhyme and structure was a tool to really help actors memorize this dialogue.
Similarly, in an era before amplified audio, redundancy was needed in the dialogue so that listeners heard enough to track the story even if they missed hearing words occasionally. All that's in there, too, without detracting much from the story's pace.
The best contemporary children's writers and moviemakers are famous for plussing stuff onto their cartoons until the story engages the parents as well as the kids. Shakespeare was a bit less constrained about offending children and their protective parents, but he balanced humor in a way that titilated the elite and the masses, merchants and working stiffs, etc. He even was successful at touching on contemporary hot-button issues, kindling controversy when mentioning scandals without himself becoming a political pariah.
So, yeah... genius. It looks easy, but putting all that together ain't. And there will be revivals of some of contemporary lit/plays/videos, but a lot doesn't age well, much like Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's goopy novels.
(mumble mumble) created a system (mumble) threaten lives (mumble) cannot be tested or verified adequately (mumble) sounds like cause to deny sales
Wow. Just wow. Never has a nick been so apt.
This isn't a Toyota thing. It isn't even exclusive to the auto industry. System complexity was where so many cliches like "Fast, complete, cheap: pick any two" come from.
Sure, we can put missile-guidance software protocols into all sorts of software development; If I remember the metric, every line of code costs 10x as much as in general industry.
Another thought: Airbags took 15 years to get acceptance from their 1970's invention -- the industry quickly realized their safety value, but nobody wanted to pony up $800 (1980 estimated per-car cost) or increase the cost of a car to eat that cost.
And don't even get me started on FAA vs. adequate safety. Or Seldane and the FDA.
tl;dr: Toyota *DOES* test extensively. Shit happens.
Cool article. Like I said, I'll bet on the LED's. My objection was economic claims because the LED's with your specs (price and power) don't exist. Too much changes between limited runs in a lab and the assembly line.
Oh, and I know someone else pointed this out, but waste heat isn't always a downside: I live in a cold climate. Growing up in a farm family, I've seen plenty of creative uses of light bulb heat. Incandescent bulbs make thermally-benign animal incubators out of any old box, can heat a doghouse or corner of a barn where calves or cats curl up at night, gently warmed my desk or a workbench, make ad-hoc engine heaters on the few days per year that temps fall below -30 degrees F, gently defrost frozen plastics (fridge/freezer compartments, pvc pipe, etc).
Compared to $10 for heat tape, $30 for an electric blanket and the accidental damage risk of using a blow-dryer or heat gun, they're anything but worthless.
If engineers and not marketing wonks ran the universe, we'd push for overengineered / ruggedized filaments as a way to artificially reraise the price of incandescents until the other techs win on price without collapsing the market for incandescents entirely. Handwavium worries me less than Unobtanium.
Um, I disagree. First, that Postini bit is a red herring: it doesn't matter whose email app it *WAS*, it's Google's now. By your reasoning Cisco, Microsoft and IBM aren't anything special, either.
Second, a rather disturbing (from a security perspective) proportion of big orgs and companies have been advised by Gartner/Forrester/In-flight magazines toward seriously looking at corporate gmail (gmail premium, $50-58 per user per year). Given the push I'm seeing and per-enterprise costs for messaging and workflow and mobile data and calendaring and contact management and spam, I (unenthusiastically) see it becoming far bigger for Google than clicks and ads in the next 2 years.
To a lesser degree, this'll happen with Google's other online apps-as-service or cloud applications. The stuff in Picasa is disruptive to Adobe photoshop, the apps are disruptive to Office and Adobe pdf-type functions, etc.
So far, there's a struggle to make money off video content delivery, news aggregation, forums and blogs, etc. But 1 year before the itunes store, music was widely seen as 'impossible to monetize online'.
Google is a bandwidth and eyeballs company. And they currently control *ALL* the freakin' eyeballs some of the time, with more apps for monetizing the 'cloud' buzzword soup than anyone else.
To be fair, I'll bet on 10-watt LED's before I'd bet on aircars, but everything looks better in the hypothetical future than measurable technology in the boring old here and now.
I *DO* use electric heat. I live in a cold climate, too. And the heating system in many houses here is electric heating elements embedded in the ceiling. Under several inches of insulation. No, you don't heat the roof; you get warmed via radiant heat from above much like sunlight does, and the last 20+ years of homes are well-insulated enough that snow on the roof doesn't even melt. It's quite nice.
I'm not disagreeing with your contention that light bulbs won't do the same thing: you would never want to do this with kilowatt-rated incandescent bulbs; a point source of heat isn't comfortable like an n-square meter radiant ceiling. I'm just saying you and ShooterNeo appear to have no experience in this aspect of stuff you're pontificating about. That kind of puts your other statements into doubt.
Oh, and cost-wise, electric heat's not all bad-- I'm lucky enough to be in a region with cheap electricity. Most years, I see a 10-20% added cost, but a couple years ago, it was literally cheaper than the per-BTU prices of natural gas, propane, fuel oil and coal. But that was a first and only time, as far as I know.
So I ask the/. crowd are there any good alternatives to passwords that are feasible?
Yes.
Something secure. Something that can be implemented on websites. What do you think we should be working towards?
Yes.
Is there already something in place that you can give an example of?
Yes.
This gets covered twice a month or more on/., plus countless trade and general-interest articles... Do you really expect us to drag your sorry ass up the hill teaching you security 101 when you've apparently been intentionally blase and ignorant until this very moment? Grab a clue, grab a book on security, or google up password security. Learn about the three factors that can be used to create 2-factor sets, learn about signatures and authority. Or, at the least, read anything you find on advice for creating better passwords. Pass phrases, for starters. Follow that advice and shoot for a mix of letters, numbers and symbols/gibberish characters that is more than 15 characters long. Have a plan to cope with forgetfulness (in other words, write the passwords on a piece of paper you keep in sock drawer or somewhere else private)... aw, shit, and suddenly I am sucked into this copypasta-smelling idiotic request for obvious information.
Better yet, give everything to charity and then nobody'll want your freakin' passwords.
You're all a pisspool of nattering armchair lawyers bragging about how they'd have won such-and-such case on court.tv without even knowing the details. How the *FSCK* would you even know? Did I miss where the terms of the contract were posted online?
Here are just the scenarios I've seen (or offered) in my own career:
"Hi, this project you're working on is great -- can we buy a nonexclusive license for $$$?"
"How much would we have to pay you to focus on functionality that'd do Y? How long would it take?"
"The tool is nice, but I just need to know how you did X, so I can incorporate it into a limited-niche project. Would you sell me source-code and your time at $$ plus $$ per hour? We'll readily sign NDA's and noncompetes."
"F*** it, I'm out of here. First job, any job..." (phone rings) "You want me to go pro with my open-source project? HELL YESSS!!"
"Great tool, and we'd love the prestige you've attained -- can we pay you a few years back salary and promise $$$$ forward salary. You'll get to focus on this project, some stock options, you'll build a division in our company, and we'll take over marketing and logistics."
Where exactly is the evidence of this being a shitty deal -- Reread egypt's comments at blog.metasploit and then tell me the last time any of you gasbags got offered a chance to exit a decent-but-hectic day job, focus in on a side project you dream about and struggle to find weekends to work on, get a big-ass raise, bump up your prestige, and probably get god knows what else in the way of one-time payments or stock options.
Yeah, because a couple of the world's most-known brands (not to mention Fortune-500 companies) getting caught using free / recycled Linux ad content wouldn't be a PR disaster for Apple or Microsoft and a market awareness Mother-of-All-Wins for Linux proponents.
There is no way Apple or Microsoft is dumb enough to touch this with a ten-foot-pole. Relax, people.
I stopped expecting/.'ers to have 'a modicum of (insert topic) sense' when I repeatedly saw the same utterly wrongheaded threads about anything NASA-related.
At the time, I attributed it to underlying truth to the cliche about 'rocket science'. Just because someone is a nerd (or slashdotter) doesn't mean they're smart enough to be rocket scientists. Rocket Science is much much more difficult than coding or virtually anything most of us do. Physics, behavior of materials at extremes, etc... space-related work ends up requiring unflinching expertise in all of them, or the launched device or people don't survive.
Ditto the stupidity on threads involving economics or geopolitics, and now you might want to join me as I add statistics to my cautious moron-filtering of slashdotter rhetoric.
There really are a substantial number of statistically astute commenters here that ARE jumping on the moron parade and trying to teach them two cents of statistical theory. But it's a losing proposition, like bailing back the tide. It may help on a one-at-a-time but the overall flood remains unchanged. Like holocaust deniers (denyers? Whatever, as long as I get credit for Godwinning myself) and the proverbial Chinese hoard, people carrying a rather substantial backpack of bad ideas on tough subjects *exist* in such astounding numbers that correcting a dozen EACH TIME they surface to spew their stupid won't change the number of idiots that'll appear NEXT TIME.
(Insert either 'save [world|self]' quote or reference PT Barnum's most famous quote. Both fit. My not using this account in 8+ months... same reason, sadly.)
Some more catchy homilies: Instead of 'The quick and the dead', let's go with 'Smart or Dead'. Them's really your choices. We're not talking the Gobi Desert sort of threatening, where there are several hours daily of survivable climate.
Darl may be mentally ill, but I can't be the only one withholding judgement on his status as a member of the human race until someone pays for independent review.
Of course, the very job of auditing Darl for evidence of humanity brings to mind the joke about lawyers v. labrats ('there are some things even a rat won't do').
Oh, you meant the cellmate?... um, Nevermind... </emily>
Given you blur the tug-of-war between two philosophies of dictionary editing (IANA Lexicographer, but believe they're called proscriptive vs. descriptive) into 'most dictionary compilers', I'm guessing you don't really know enough to talk on this subject with the authority you feel you have.
OTOH, GP seems to get this since they're talking their losing trust in Websters as 'authoritative'. Many dictionaries are mere reporters, but there's market and value in acting as an arbiter of language, differentiating between slang and proper language, between proper and lazy spelling, etc.
(and no, I'm not picking a side... I just know that formal writing doesn't tolerate ain't, bling, and the likes).
Slashdot Mirror
My undergrad physics labs involved writing out ten iterations by hand, pooling with 4 other tables of students to get 50, then doing statistics on them. The error bars were so freaking huge we generally couldn't see the forest for the trees, so to speak.
A friend's undergrad physics labs (at UCSD, if memory serves) used computers as data collectors. Pendulum motion was timed to the millisecond by a magnetic switch. Three data runs of 100 results apiece let them test both the arc-width invariability of a pendulum period and make a stab at the gravitational constant. The students pooled their data via spreadsheet copy/paste, lab sections pooled data further, and the omnibus results had error bars nearer to .1% -- needless to say, they walked out with: more statistical awareness, more trust in physics's 'realness', less pain, more attention on the scientific method and less on rote data collection.
That was 15+ years ago.
There are ways that books, calculators and computers can become crutches that impede learning. But no matter WHAT stage in the process, computers can improve the process: as adaptive-rote-learning drills (a la mavis beacon or mathblaster), via visualization, via data collection, via symbolic math tools, via simulations, via reference-material portability (ebooks) and instant research (wikipedia).
Don't be a luddite -- it isn't the computer's fault, it's ours. We've got to find ways to learn that don't fit the 19th-century teaching paradigms. For example, I taught my mom what an integral was and what made it cool with a 2-minute youtube video. Can she do the math? Nope. But she groks the mathematical concept behind rate-of-change, Newton's law of cooling, etc.
Nope, those (plus parents) are all wrong/inapplicable questions.
GP seems to be after question: how much risk will you put your children in vs. how much risk to strangers.
The odds of his actions going pearshaped and leading to complications that maimed/killed his family were pretty slim. The odds of that pickup t-boning other cars and causing serious injury or deaths were much higher.
BTW, economics of car crashes are straightforward: a car costs $20k or less to fix; medical bills are rarely that cheap. Someone's insurance company owes this guy a huge damn thank-you.
Um, you contradict yourself a bit there. On those occasions where one of the AP's 'own reporters' writes a story, the AP *is* the source. This is akin to war or political-campaign news stories relying on a 'pool' reporter. On short-term work (chilean miners), a nearby journo or freelancer is often put on contract for the duration.
As for GP, there are fewer papers and news agencies assigning reporters and sportswriters and etc elsewhere. Sharing / pooling writers and photographers is cheaper. The NYT, Reuters, news mags, etc still put reporters on assignment, at which point THEY ARE the source. While NYT's reporter count is way down, they're still their own primary sources on a LOT of content.
Not to be pedantic, but every movie already is an op-ed on common societal memes. That's a crux part of storytelling.
We're idiots if we don't call out the lie (of bootstrap bob, the self-made zillionaire who dun it all hisseff, wiff no hepp from cities or trains or other people, or in this case, without net neutrality) when it is shamelessly pushed by corporatist anti-neutrality detractors (MPAA, studios, and any actors, performers that buy that baloney).
Kudos to Lessig. Double kudos for his frank admission that people he supported have fallen damn far short of keeping their campaign promises on net neutrality.
Kudos. Wish you were modded 5 instead of parent. Per my too-long rant above, you're far more right about this stuff than parent is.
Incidentally, the stuff that bit us on the ass last year tended to be much smaller than in our first such exercises. The most notable was a panicked boss overruling his techs and causing minor damage. But all in all, team members come away calmer, surer, more familiar with procedure (and more engaged when asked to edit procedure), and with relationships with CERT and peers at other agencies/facilities that they're quick to use when they see phantoms.
One last take-away: Without training, every pattern or surge or shadow looks scary. After training, fewer false positives are declared, because staff resorts to a few simple self-checks before calling a much calmer, more specific "Hi, I'm sending you a pcap... does this look wrong to you, too?" sort of report.
ISP: If you push that button too much, you'll go blind!
Mini-me: How many times can I push it and just need glasses?
Where's the auction inventory? I'm still game for picking over SCO's ruins for anything of value, then trying to pool enough OSS money to buy and rerelease it.
Then again, just because SCO says they *own* the IP... (shit!)
> For those of us that haven't eaten cereal that comes with
> prizes for at least 40 years now, can you express that in
> more traditional units, e.g. volkswagens, libraries of
> congress, or common US coins? Alternatively, you you just
> give the fucking dimensions.
1 - I still buy *THAT KIND* of cereal, you insensitive clod! Also, Crackerjack. You should, too. Live a little. /.'ers that have never seen a toy in/from a cereal box, and not because their mom was one of those twisted no-corn-sugar holistic diet types.
2 - The whole analogy is busted -- I never see prizes anymore. FWIW, Crackerjack prizes suck the wax tadpole, too. That's the cardinal flaw with this description: there are probably young
3 - The good news is that Happy Meals are the new Crackerjack. Nerd-toys and a waist-friendly lunch for Three Bucks = W00T!!11!
4 - Alas, the sensor is smaller than the usual Happy Meal toy.
5 - Where do you shop that has bulk-package foods big enough that cereal prizes (e.g., secret decoder rings) could possibly compare in size to volkswagens or libraries? My wife wants that membership!
5 - Here's your answer in lame (slashdot-friendly) ascii art:
SENSOR-S-SENSOR
SENSOR-E-SENSOR
SENSOR-N-SENSOR
SENSOR-S-SENSOR
SENSOR-O-SENSOR
SENSOR-R-SENSOR
(Before anyone accuses me of trolling or forgetting UI resize functionality, Locke did mention it's been 40 yrs since (s)he bought cereal with a prize, so I'm guessing (s)he's rockin' the bigfonts regardless of which browser they're using... oops, now I am trollin'. Sorry!)
How does fiber become 'obsolete'? If we're not talking decay due to physical rot or some other abuse, I'm not seeing it.
A semiconductor fab built 20 or 30 years ago sees obsolescence due to clean-room air-quality standards increasing, but the old fab is still far cleaner than hospital standards -- medical products suppliers are buying/leasing old fabs to convert to their own manufacturing needs. But for fiber to be *obsolete*, there needs to be some technical qualification they no longer meet. What changed?
FakeYou and You link together seamlessly within doubleclick and other usage-tracking data, unless other always isolated in every way (IP, userspace data and cache, accounts and sites visited, fingerprinting based on anything from hours of use to packet and request strings). We're accomplishing almost nothing.
OTOH, if aliases are shared (this happens accidentally via bugmenot's accounts), the usage data consolidated becomes a view of several users. FakeYou gets smushed with 50 other fakeSomeones or more, making the job of following circletimesquare inordinately harder (the Lost In A Crowd trope). It'll still be extractible for valuable cases (surveillance, espionage, high profile targets), but the cost/benefit would give most of us back some reasonable amount of anonymity.
If I really needed to hide my acts, I'd use a dedicated machine/VM and someone else's compromised wifi as my point of origin, and then I'd resort to all the above steps (yours AND mine).
The pessimist in me fears this (the near impossibility of anonymity) WILL come around to bite us on the ass. Someone will find ways to abuse this information.
It's a fool's dream to really expect strangers to do your bidding perfectly and for free, isn't it?
As far as Ubuntu fanboism, I learned yesterday that Ubuntu One, which is a cloud-storage / music store / etc. initiative by Canonical, will keep the server component closed-source.
Here's bug 375272 comments.
For those not likely to RTFL, the comment highlights are:
Disclaimer: I'm generally classifiable as a Ubuntu/Debian fanboi (I really like Ubuntu). But I'm really just another twice-burned greybearded gadget geek, which makes me an ex-fanboi of everything else over the last 30 yrs.. I'm not surprised to see Ubuntu / Canonical has warts -- it was only a matter of time before Ubuntu did something that left me less-than-impressed.
C'est la vie -- I figure either I'm going to be annoyed or Shuttleworth is, and he's paying more for the project than I am.
Since the other AC didn't bother to explain Shakespeare's greatness, I'll try. Keep in mind, this isn't my field.
Shakespeare's underlying stories are good. Pacing is good. Themes are well-addressed. Plots have twists and the plays are populated with dialogue that help build rich, full characters.
So far, we're at the Bruckheimer level you mentioned. But next, we've got subtlety and reveal. Watch a movie apiece from each decade and notice how the film industry (and their audiences) progress through learning how to reveal story. Playwrights are similarly hampered. Now, go back and compare Shakespeare's abilities here. They're not 21st-century good, but they're much better than one would expect for being CENTURIES old. He shared details with audience sometimes, kept them for dramatic twists in others, and used everything from soliloquy to asides to engage audiences and unfold the story as he wanted.
Finally, the plays use metric and mnemonic techniques common for plays in an illiterate era: actors needed to be able to store all that prolix, lyrical prose by the pageful in their heads. They needed to know lines to a dozen roles in as many plays. This was done by structures and rhythms that helped establish the words as strongly as the ideas -- they sounded so cool because the patter guided actors to the same words, rather than paraphrasing. Some of what feels stilted about his writing isn't because we talk differently now, but because plays talked differently expressly because that distinctive rhyme and structure was a tool to really help actors memorize this dialogue.
Similarly, in an era before amplified audio, redundancy was needed in the dialogue so that listeners heard enough to track the story even if they missed hearing words occasionally. All that's in there, too, without detracting much from the story's pace.
The best contemporary children's writers and moviemakers are famous for plussing stuff onto their cartoons until the story engages the parents as well as the kids. Shakespeare was a bit less constrained about offending children and their protective parents, but he balanced humor in a way that titilated the elite and the masses, merchants and working stiffs, etc. He even was successful at touching on contemporary hot-button issues, kindling controversy when mentioning scandals without himself becoming a political pariah.
So, yeah... genius. It looks easy, but putting all that together ain't. And there will be revivals of some of contemporary lit/plays/videos, but a lot doesn't age well, much like Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's goopy novels.
Erroneus wrote:
Wow. Just wow. Never has a nick been so apt.
This isn't a Toyota thing. It isn't even exclusive to the auto industry. System complexity was where so many cliches like "Fast, complete, cheap: pick any two" come from.
Sure, we can put missile-guidance software protocols into all sorts of software development; If I remember the metric, every line of code costs 10x as much as in general industry.
Another thought: Airbags took 15 years to get acceptance from their 1970's invention -- the industry quickly realized their safety value, but nobody wanted to pony up $800 (1980 estimated per-car cost) or increase the cost of a car to eat that cost.
And don't even get me started on FAA vs. adequate safety. Or Seldane and the FDA.
tl;dr: Toyota *DOES* test extensively. Shit happens.
Cool article. Like I said, I'll bet on the LED's. My objection was economic claims because the LED's with your specs (price and power) don't exist. Too much changes between limited runs in a lab and the assembly line.
Oh, and I know someone else pointed this out, but waste heat isn't always a downside: I live in a cold climate. Growing up in a farm family, I've seen plenty of creative uses of light bulb heat. Incandescent bulbs make thermally-benign animal incubators out of any old box, can heat a doghouse or corner of a barn where calves or cats curl up at night, gently warmed my desk or a workbench, make ad-hoc engine heaters on the few days per year that temps fall below -30 degrees F, gently defrost frozen plastics (fridge/freezer compartments, pvc pipe, etc).
Compared to $10 for heat tape, $30 for an electric blanket and the accidental damage risk of using a blow-dryer or heat gun, they're anything but worthless.
If engineers and not marketing wonks ran the universe, we'd push for overengineered / ruggedized filaments as a way to artificially reraise the price of incandescents until the other techs win on price without collapsing the market for incandescents entirely. Handwavium worries me less than Unobtanium.
Um, I disagree. First, that Postini bit is a red herring: it doesn't matter whose email app it *WAS*, it's Google's now. By your reasoning Cisco, Microsoft and IBM aren't anything special, either.
Second, a rather disturbing (from a security perspective) proportion of big orgs and companies have been advised by Gartner/Forrester/In-flight magazines toward seriously looking at corporate gmail (gmail premium, $50-58 per user per year). Given the push I'm seeing and per-enterprise costs for messaging and workflow and mobile data and calendaring and contact management and spam, I (unenthusiastically) see it becoming far bigger for Google than clicks and ads in the next 2 years.
To a lesser degree, this'll happen with Google's other online apps-as-service or cloud applications. The stuff in Picasa is disruptive to Adobe photoshop, the apps are disruptive to Office and Adobe pdf-type functions, etc.
So far, there's a struggle to make money off video content delivery, news aggregation, forums and blogs, etc. But 1 year before the itunes store, music was widely seen as 'impossible to monetize online'.
Google is a bandwidth and eyeballs company. And they currently control *ALL* the freakin' eyeballs some of the time, with more apps for monetizing the 'cloud' buzzword soup than anyone else.
Handwavium.
Yeah, and Someday we'll have aircars.
To be fair, I'll bet on 10-watt LED's before I'd bet on aircars, but everything looks better in the hypothetical future than measurable technology in the boring old here and now.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
I *DO* use electric heat. I live in a cold climate, too. And the heating system in many houses here is electric heating elements embedded in the ceiling. Under several inches of insulation. No, you don't heat the roof; you get warmed via radiant heat from above much like sunlight does, and the last 20+ years of homes are well-insulated enough that snow on the roof doesn't even melt. It's quite nice.
I'm not disagreeing with your contention that light bulbs won't do the same thing: you would never want to do this with kilowatt-rated incandescent bulbs; a point source of heat isn't comfortable like an n-square meter radiant ceiling. I'm just saying you and ShooterNeo appear to have no experience in this aspect of stuff you're pontificating about. That kind of puts your other statements into doubt.
Oh, and cost-wise, electric heat's not all bad-- I'm lucky enough to be in a region with cheap electricity. Most years, I see a 10-20% added cost, but a couple years ago, it was literally cheaper than the per-BTU prices of natural gas, propane, fuel oil and coal. But that was a first and only time, as far as I know.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
This gets covered twice a month or more on /., plus countless trade and general-interest articles... Do you really expect us to drag your sorry ass up the hill teaching you security 101 when you've apparently been intentionally blase and ignorant until this very moment? Grab a clue, grab a book on security, or google up password security. Learn about the three factors that can be used to create 2-factor sets, learn about signatures and authority. Or, at the least, read anything you find on advice for creating better passwords. Pass phrases, for starters. Follow that advice and shoot for a mix of letters, numbers and symbols/gibberish characters that is more than 15 characters long. Have a plan to cope with forgetfulness (in other words, write the passwords on a piece of paper you keep in sock drawer or somewhere else private)... aw, shit, and suddenly I am sucked into this copypasta-smelling idiotic request for obvious information.
Better yet, give everything to charity and then nobody'll want your freakin' passwords.
You're all a pisspool of nattering armchair lawyers bragging about how they'd have won such-and-such case on court.tv without even knowing the details. How the *FSCK* would you even know? Did I miss where the terms of the contract were posted online?
Here are just the scenarios I've seen (or offered) in my own career:
"Hi, this project you're working on is great -- can we buy a nonexclusive license for $$$?"
"How much would we have to pay you to focus on functionality that'd do Y? How long would it take?"
"The tool is nice, but I just need to know how you did X, so I can incorporate it into a limited-niche project. Would you sell me source-code and your time at $$ plus $$ per hour? We'll readily sign NDA's and noncompetes."
"F*** it, I'm out of here. First job, any job..." (phone rings) "You want me to go pro with my open-source project? HELL YESSS!!"
"Great tool, and we'd love the prestige you've attained -- can we pay you a few years back salary and promise $$$$ forward salary. You'll get to focus on this project, some stock options, you'll build a division in our company, and we'll take over marketing and logistics."
Where exactly is the evidence of this being a shitty deal -- Reread egypt's comments at blog.metasploit and then tell me the last time any of you gasbags got offered a chance to exit a decent-but-hectic day job, focus in on a side project you dream about and struggle to find weekends to work on, get a big-ass raise, bump up your prestige, and probably get god knows what else in the way of one-time payments or stock options.
Yeah, because a couple of the world's most-known brands (not to mention Fortune-500 companies) getting caught using free / recycled Linux ad content wouldn't be a PR disaster for Apple or Microsoft and a market awareness Mother-of-All-Wins for Linux proponents.
There is no way Apple or Microsoft is dumb enough to touch this with a ten-foot-pole. Relax, people.
I stopped expecting /.'ers to have 'a modicum of (insert topic) sense' when I repeatedly saw the same utterly wrongheaded threads about anything NASA-related.
At the time, I attributed it to underlying truth to the cliche about 'rocket science'. Just because someone is a nerd (or slashdotter) doesn't mean they're smart enough to be rocket scientists. Rocket Science is much much more difficult than coding or virtually anything most of us do. Physics, behavior of materials at extremes, etc... space-related work ends up requiring unflinching expertise in all of them, or the launched device or people don't survive.
Ditto the stupidity on threads involving economics or geopolitics, and now you might want to join me as I add statistics to my cautious moron-filtering of slashdotter rhetoric.
There really are a substantial number of statistically astute commenters here that ARE jumping on the moron parade and trying to teach them two cents of statistical theory. But it's a losing proposition, like bailing back the tide. It may help on a one-at-a-time but the overall flood remains unchanged. Like holocaust deniers (denyers? Whatever, as long as I get credit for Godwinning myself) and the proverbial Chinese hoard, people carrying a rather substantial backpack of bad ideas on tough subjects *exist* in such astounding numbers that correcting a dozen EACH TIME they surface to spew their stupid won't change the number of idiots that'll appear NEXT TIME.
(Insert either 'save [world|self]' quote or reference PT Barnum's most famous quote. Both fit. My not using this account in 8+ months... same reason, sadly.)
Or the ApPal II. With that soothing 'SoSuMi' sound that plays on startup.
Wow, ever heard of Despair, Inc?
Some more catchy homilies: Instead of 'The quick and the dead', let's go with 'Smart or Dead'. Them's really your choices. We're not talking the Gobi Desert sort of threatening, where there are several hours daily of survivable climate.
Darl may be mentally ill, but I can't be the only one withholding judgement on his status as a member of the human race until someone pays for independent review.
Of course, the very job of auditing Darl for evidence of humanity brings to mind the joke about lawyers v. labrats ('there are some things even a rat won't do').
Oh, you meant the cellmate?... um, Nevermind... </emily>
Given you blur the tug-of-war between two philosophies of dictionary editing (IANA Lexicographer, but believe they're called proscriptive vs. descriptive) into 'most dictionary compilers', I'm guessing you don't really know enough to talk on this subject with the authority you feel you have.
OTOH, GP seems to get this since they're talking their losing trust in Websters as 'authoritative'. Many dictionaries are mere reporters, but there's market and value in acting as an arbiter of language, differentiating between slang and proper language, between proper and lazy spelling, etc.
(and no, I'm not picking a side... I just know that formal writing doesn't tolerate ain't, bling, and the likes).