I just, and I mean just, got email from local faculty who has misplaced his "dell laptop charger" and wants to know if anyone has seen it. So clearly, this thing you want exists. Talk to Dell.
Remember how all the magazines used to say that the only profitable business on the web is porn? Remember how all the magazines were saying that biotech is the "next big thing" like the internet was a few years ago?
Put two and two together and you have your answer.:)
I don't know a helluva lot about rabbit anatomy, but I don't think the rabbit penis qualifies as the "next big thing" by any measure.
The client registers a mime-type so when you click on a BitTorrent download link it hands it to the p2p client...
Again, edonkey already does this. Has for a while. I imagine the other mentioned programs can as well.
What makes BitTorent new is they are actually trying to get it used for a legitimate application instead of just arguing that "people could use it for something other than piracy".
Now, I don't know how long BitTorent has been around, but it appears not to be new (too many "I can download foo real fast with it" comments to think it's just out). This is possibly not their original goal and really just something to point at if a lawyer comes calling (or to try and get VCs to come calling).
Killustrator's creators are protected
by law because their name is a parody...
That's not a parody. That's an obviously similar name meant to draw attention to the fact that the product is similar to Adobe's Illustrator.
The name says 'well, this product is practically Illustrator'. That's why Adobe objected, and was within their rights to do so.
You can't just parody the name and copy the product anyway - it wouldn't be protectable under fair-use laws as a proper parody. A protectable parody of Illustrator would require the product to be a parody, too. Ill-lust-trader,
a p2p/vector-graphics combo program for creating/viewing/trading fetish porn... THAT would be parody.
Did ICANN ever resolve the issue that there was a pre-existing.biz domain which the (IIRC) Alternic people were supporting?
According to their list of TLDs, Alternic does not support a.biz domain. I think you want biztld.com, which also has a blurb about ICANN's announcment (not a happy one).
... the right to censor scientific and technical knowledge that threatens their outdated business models
Don't proliferate these ideas, even in jest. The more we repeat things like "American business needs new legislation, like the DMCA, to control technological threats to its intelectual property" the more it sounds like a valid argument. The problem is that businesses are trying to protect trade secrets, something previously offered no legal protection, from technological attacks instead of using the patent system (which requires that they themselves publish how these things work).
Thanks to the DMCA, the RIAA, SDMI group, and Verance are running around suing on the grounds that people are reverse engineering their trade-secret "access control" mechanisms for today's digital music media, when a patent on the technique could already have percluded unlicensed decryption for longer than the current technology will likely remain in favor. Why? 'Cause they'd have to tell us how it worked to get the patent. 'Cause they'd have to make sure they didn't miss any important claims in the decryption patent, or some clever sole might come up with an alternate solution which violated none of the claims. That'd be pretty hard. So maybe they could have made the encryption/decryption algorithms stronger, so you couldn't practically break them any way other than the one described in the patent. Well, that'd be pretty hard too.. probably cost a lot as well. What if they could just do anything, not tell anyone how, but get the laws changed so it was protected like a patented technique. Hell, while their at it, maybe they can do away with the expiration of the legal protection. That'd be cheap and easy. Just pay some lobbyist once to get the law changed, and blammo, now IP can be protected by threat of litigation without a patent.
If you are arguing that there is some "user interface" context definition of gesture which disallows clicking a button, then fine, and I think giving the taxonomy which include strokes, gestures, and whatever else would be interesting. But getting away from human-computer interaction, I'd say that the presence or absence of "contact", if you'll allow that analogy to the mouse click, doesnt preclude these other things form being gestural in nature.
... gesture-based navigation (made popular recently in the game Black&White) as a standard feature...
B&W doesn't have gesture based navigation. You gesture for common commands (pick up leash, drop leash, change leash, perform miracle, perform special move). Which is really more what Opera appears to be doing - the most common browser commands happen to be navigation.
PalmOS did this earlier, the most common PDA commands are "input character", "delete", "select", and "scroll". In turn, this comes from writing and proofer's marks (you know, omit, insert, new paragraph. These have a proper name?), which is just recording gestures (the written alphabet, the marks) in pen and ink for later use. You might argue that drag-and-drop, especially in the context of cut-and-paste, is gestural input.
I'm not discounting the usefulness, or the novelty of incorporating gestures into a standard WIMP interface application. I'm just putting a little perspective on the above quote.
Its the developers, the games, and the popularity. The console world is a lot different than the PC world.
No, that's pretty much why MS Windows is still the dominant desktop OS. They have more application developers, better games, and more popularity (as measured by installations). And some upstart desktop OS is going to have a harder time winning converts/investors than the incumbant will have keeping them.
There's how much I've cared about the CueCat nonsense. When I read the title, I followed the link because I thought I was going to read about how the PO had regulations against household convenience items becoming wired or otherwise digitally-capable. Nope, it's the CueCat... again.
Sure we do. We call it a review usually. They are about the only form of feedback we have to Redmond. Given that PCs will ship with Windows ME, whether we use something else or not, it won't be noticable enough to their bottom line for all UNIX-like users to refuse to buy it. But we can still raise a stink on the 'net and point to the features we don't like. Goading MS into making a system that we'd actually want to use should be considered a good thing.
Now, this new feature doesn't actually sound like a bad thing. They've been saying they'd do this for a long time; good for them that they finally did. One poster seems to misinterpret this as the end of the command prompt, but that's not what this is... this is the end of Windows over DOS... a 2000/NT like command prompt will still be there (too much of MS's own current stuff needs a command prompt to ditch that).
One click shopping? I go to the grocery store, when it's time to pay, I swipe my credit card through the credit card swipe machine thing and go on my way. This is the same as one click shopping, with the addition that you not only need to move your wrist (to position your mouse over the button) but also have to move your finger as well.
Well, nearly. It's more like if they kept your credit card number on file and tied it in a database to one of those "preferred customer" cards, so they could keep tabs on what you use the store for while providing you a "convenience" (namely not having to sign or provide other id, just look over their records on you and say "yep, that's me").
Not that I'm defending the patent. And I expect we'll see something like what I've described in stores before too long -- it might be there already for all I know.
Gosh, I'm already boycotting 'em as a result of their last patent.
What's the next step?
Something more active, like informing others about what's going on and asking them to join your boycott. And I don't mean other Slashdotters, I mean people who think of Amazon.com first when they think "buy on the internet"; I mean your friends and family that mostly know about what's on the internet from the commercials on TV.
I'm a college student, so I went home for xmas break. While there I told friends who had been looking at Etoys.com for gifts for their kids about etoy.com -- I was able to get from them the "that's not right" reaction I felt. Then I named other places they could buy toys for their kids online. I like to think I swung a few dollars away from a company I felt wasn't playing nice on the internet.
So, if you feel your own personal boycott isn't effective enough, if you feel they are continuing to act the bully, if you feel they are becoming worse neighbors instead of better, then tell more people about it. Convince others (and not just others here, or on other forums where these discussions are the norm) to join you in your boycott.
None of these. I disagree with the notion that the right way to implement this is closed, black-box software algorithms.
My computer is not my babysitter.
The cost of installing/maintaining censorware and dealing with "Oops, you're right, you should have access to that" is far higher than a one time shift of furniture which places the computers in an open, high-traffic area (for a given library) which would prohibit browsing porn in a way which is actually guided by a community's standards instead of the software vendor's standards.
It's a virtual machine! It's not an emulator. If Micros~1 software ever was intended to work on Intel hardware as implemented by VMWare, then it *is* by definition certified on VMware (or else VMWare implemented it wrong).
I think you are taking umbrage with the wrong "end" of this point. That point doesn't read to me as a condemation of VMWare for not supplying a "Microsoft certified" environment, but as a comment that there are a group of people who need to see that certification to spend their money. Just because you understand that "it should just work" doesn't mean Joe Consumer will understand (or care). We may not agree with such a group, but trying to ignore them won't make them go away.
As a psych student, there's actually seven. the seventh is (i can't remember the name) having to do knowing how your muscles are positioned in relative to the rest of your body.
I didn't check that this wasn't answered in some post below my threshold, but the sense you speak of is called proprioception.
In absolute terms, yes, but that's not the point of "regressive" versus "progressive"; the point is the relative percentage of income spent. A poor person is likely to spend close to 100% of income on necessities of life, hence to be sales-taxed on close to 100% of income (so an 8% sales tax would represent close to 8% of the poor person's income). A rich person might spend 50% of income on necessities and luxuries, hence be sales-taxed only on 50% of income (so the sales tax on the rich person is 4% of their income).
I hear this argument a lot. To me, it appears that this ignores the fact that the 50% of income not spent is pretty much useless. Oh sure, you can invest it and it may make more money (potentially generating more taxes you have to pay), but even if you save that 50% of your income and eventually have millions in investments it still seems to have no practical value unless you spend it on something (and then end up paying the sales taxes).
At least, that's how I see it. I'm not an accountant or an economist. What am I missing?
With Amazon, if you buy from them and select "Do not spam me", they will anyway. I boycotted them when they started sending me 'important information'.
So then I use Barnes&Noble, where I again clicked "Do not spam me". They recently sent me a 'holiday gift' for $5. So now I don't use BN. Merry Christmas.
I'm using FatBrain now, hopefully they won't screw up either.
If you consider any email at all to be spam, then yes they will. I bought something from them under their old name (which was what? who remembers?), and I got a message a week or so ago about getting $20 off on any purchase before Dec 20th (w/ some minimum value, I'm sure).
Now, if what you're really saying is you checked -- or unchecked, as appropriate -- every box saying don't send me email then I suppose you do have a gripe.
As I'm writing this, I'm thinking (in an offtopic sort of way) about the number of places I've done business with that have actually left me alone when I asked them to... I think it's less than half, though most of those that didn't gave me a way to request they leave me alone again at the bottom of the email (and only one of those has failed to work).
Now it seems there was even less reason for this treatment. This wasn't a revenge of the geeks , but the geeks were still acused and *very* victimised about this whole thing. If anything there is more reason to scream out loud 'Innocent until proven guilty' as well as pointing out to people how much of their prejudices they were following.
True, social outsiders were singled-out and harassed after Columbine. And, yes, part of it is because they're easy targets for such treatment. But I think that whatever social group these kids had belonged to would have been singled-out.
Let's say that the kids were jocks, or members of some other typically "popular" high school social group. Then the first target of our collective blame (until we knew better) would have been the social down-side of being in a popular group -- the pressures & expectations of the peer group, being under the public eye, expectations of setting a good example, etc. There would be a cry for this group to be watched, counselled, and so forth. I think whatever group the killers happened to come from would get similar treatment, with their social position being the early bearer of the blame. Why? Because the kids ashed out socially.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that had it been a traditionally "popular" group, there would have been more of a "kid-gloves" approach; a public outcry for understanding instead of further ostracism... but again that plays off the traditional social position of the group.
One of the things we do here (a computer science deartment, so we have lots of monitors and everything is flourescent lighting) is have office lights arranged on two circuits. There are two standard 4-bulb fixtures in the ceiling; two bulbs per fixture are on one circuit (with one switch) and the others are on another circuit(with a second, independent switch). The the circuits are out of phase with eachother, so one peaks during the other's trough.
Now, my office has a window, and my offcemate and I each have new, large monitors driven at 72Hz+ refresh rates... so I'm probably not in a position to be the best judge of how well this works. I'll just say that if this didn't at least once have a benifit, I doubt they would hve gone to the trouble to arrange this in every office.
Are you looking to get a more focused education in some area of CS? If so, which area? If not, then you're in it for the money? If you want money in CS then (short term) get the job, screw grad school, or (long term) get a masters from just about anywhere (ok, ok, upper tier schools can open upper tier jobs, but it's not the only way) while getting job experience (intern/co-op).
Figure out why you want the degree (for "the challenge" is not that good a reason, you might be happier with a challenging job instead). Check US News Online and see where the good schools are. Ask your professors where they went, what they think, what they'd do different.
Good luck.
(for the record, I'm a PhD student studying graphics at UNC Chapel Hill)
Slashdot Mirror
I just, and I mean just, got email from local faculty who has misplaced his "dell laptop charger" and wants to know if anyone has seen it. So clearly, this thing you want exists. Talk to Dell.
I don't know a helluva lot about rabbit anatomy, but I don't think the rabbit penis qualifies as the "next big thing" by any measure.
... some people just read /. for the articles.
Again, edonkey already does this. Has for a while. I imagine the other mentioned programs can as well.
What makes BitTorent new is they are actually trying to get it used for a legitimate application instead of just arguing that "people could use it for something other than piracy".
Now, I don't know how long BitTorent has been around, but it appears not to be new (too many "I can download foo real fast with it" comments to think it's just out). This is possibly not their original goal and really just something to point at if a lawyer comes calling (or to try and get VCs to come calling).
Amazon.com/Toys'R'Us has them for $49.99 US.
That's not a parody. That's an obviously similar name meant to draw attention to the fact that the product is similar to Adobe's Illustrator. The name says 'well, this product is practically Illustrator'. That's why Adobe objected, and was within their rights to do so.
You can't just parody the name and copy the product anyway - it wouldn't be protectable under fair-use laws as a proper parody. A protectable parody of Illustrator would require the product to be a parody, too. Ill-lust-trader, a p2p/vector-graphics combo program for creating/viewing/trading fetish porn
Did ICANN ever resolve the issue that there was a pre-existing .biz domain which the (IIRC) Alternic people were supporting?
.biz domain. I think you want biztld.com, which also has a blurb about ICANN's announcment (not a happy one).
According to their list of TLDs, Alternic does not support a
Thanks to the DMCA, the RIAA, SDMI group, and Verance are running around suing on the grounds that people are reverse engineering their trade-secret "access control" mechanisms for today's digital music media, when a patent on the technique could already have percluded unlicensed decryption for longer than the current technology will likely remain in favor. Why? 'Cause they'd have to tell us how it worked to get the patent. 'Cause they'd have to make sure they didn't miss any important claims in the decryption patent, or some clever sole might come up with an alternate solution which violated none of the claims. That'd be pretty hard. So maybe they could have made the encryption/decryption algorithms stronger, so you couldn't practically break them any way other than the one described in the patent. Well, that'd be pretty hard too .. probably cost a lot as well. What if they could just do anything, not tell anyone how, but get the laws changed so it was protected like a patented technique. Hell, while their at it, maybe they can do away with the expiration of the legal protection. That'd be cheap and easy. Just pay some lobbyist once to get the law changed, and blammo, now IP can be protected by threat of litigation without a patent.
If you are arguing that there is some "user interface" context definition of gesture which disallows clicking a button, then fine, and I think giving the taxonomy which include strokes, gestures, and whatever else would be interesting. But getting away from human-computer interaction, I'd say that the presence or absence of "contact", if you'll allow that analogy to the mouse click, doesnt preclude these other things form being gestural in nature.
B&W doesn't have gesture based navigation. You gesture for common commands (pick up leash, drop leash, change leash, perform miracle, perform special move). Which is really more what Opera appears to be doing - the most common browser commands happen to be navigation.
PalmOS did this earlier, the most common PDA commands are "input character", "delete", "select", and "scroll". In turn, this comes from writing and proofer's marks (you know, omit, insert, new paragraph. These have a proper name?), which is just recording gestures (the written alphabet, the marks) in pen and ink for later use. You might argue that drag-and-drop, especially in the context of cut-and-paste, is gestural input.
I'm not discounting the usefulness, or the novelty of incorporating gestures into a standard WIMP interface application. I'm just putting a little perspective on the above quote.
Its the developers, the games, and the popularity. The console world is a lot different than the PC world.
No, that's pretty much why MS Windows is still the dominant desktop OS. They have more application developers, better games, and more popularity (as measured by installations). And some upstart desktop OS is going to have a harder time winning converts/investors than the incumbant will have keeping them.
There's how much I've cared about the CueCat nonsense. When I read the title, I followed the link because I thought I was going to read about how the PO had regulations against household convenience items becoming wired or otherwise digitally-capable. Nope, it's the CueCat ... again.
Sure we do. We call it a review usually. They are about the only form of feedback we have to Redmond. Given that PCs will ship with Windows ME, whether we use something else or not, it won't be noticable enough to their bottom line for all UNIX-like users to refuse to buy it. But we can still raise a stink on the 'net and point to the features we don't like. Goading MS into making a system that we'd actually want to use should be considered a good thing.
Now, this new feature doesn't actually sound like a bad thing. They've been saying they'd do this for a long time; good for them that they finally did. One poster seems to misinterpret this as the end of the command prompt, but that's not what this is
One click shopping? I go to the grocery store, when it's time to pay, I swipe my credit card through the credit card swipe machine thing and go on my way. This is the same as one click shopping, with the addition that you not only need to move your wrist (to position your mouse over the button) but also have to move your finger as well.
Well, nearly. It's more like if they kept your credit card number on file and tied it in a database to one of those "preferred customer" cards, so they could keep tabs on what you use the store for while providing you a "convenience" (namely not having to sign or provide other id, just look over their records on you and say "yep, that's me").
Not that I'm defending the patent. And I expect we'll see something like what I've described in stores before too long -- it might be there already for all I know.
Gosh, I'm already boycotting 'em as a result of their last patent.
What's the next step?
Something more active, like informing others about what's going on and asking them to join your boycott. And I don't mean other Slashdotters, I mean people who think of Amazon.com first when they think "buy on the internet"; I mean your friends and family that mostly know about what's on the internet from the commercials on TV.
I'm a college student, so I went home for xmas break. While there I told friends who had been looking at Etoys.com for gifts for their kids about etoy.com -- I was able to get from them the "that's not right" reaction I felt. Then I named other places they could buy toys for their kids online. I like to think I swung a few dollars away from a company I felt wasn't playing nice on the internet.
So, if you feel your own personal boycott isn't effective enough, if you feel they are continuing to act the bully, if you feel they are becoming worse neighbors instead of better, then tell more people about it. Convince others (and not just others here, or on other forums where these discussions are the norm) to join you in your boycott.
Which premise do you disagree with?
None of these. I disagree with the notion that the right way to implement this is closed, black-box software algorithms.
My computer is not my babysitter.
The cost of installing/maintaining censorware and dealing with "Oops, you're right, you should have access to that" is far higher than a one time shift of furniture which places the computers in an open, high-traffic area (for a given library) which would prohibit browsing porn in a way which is actually guided by a community's standards instead of the software vendor's standards.
I think you are taking umbrage with the wrong "end" of this point. That point doesn't read to me as a condemation of VMWare for not supplying a "Microsoft certified" environment, but as a comment that there are a group of people who need to see that certification to spend their money. Just because you understand that "it should just work" doesn't mean Joe Consumer will understand (or care). We may not agree with such a group, but trying to ignore them won't make them go away.
As a psych student, there's actually seven. the seventh is (i can't remember the name) having to do knowing how your muscles are positioned in relative to the rest of your body.
I didn't check that this wasn't answered in some post below my threshold, but the sense you speak of is called proprioception.
In absolute terms, yes, but that's not the point of "regressive" versus "progressive"; the point is the relative percentage of income spent. A poor person is likely to spend close to 100% of income on necessities of life, hence to be sales-taxed on close to 100% of income (so an 8% sales tax would represent close to 8% of the poor person's income). A rich person might spend 50% of income on necessities and luxuries, hence be sales-taxed only on 50% of income (so the sales tax on the rich person is 4% of their income).
I hear this argument a lot. To me, it appears that this ignores the fact that the 50% of income not spent is pretty much useless. Oh sure, you can invest it and it may make more money (potentially generating more taxes you have to pay), but even if you save that 50% of your income and eventually have millions in investments it still seems to have no practical value unless you spend it on something (and then end up paying the sales taxes).
At least, that's how I see it. I'm not an accountant or an economist. What am I missing?
With Amazon, if you buy from them and select "Do not spam me", they will anyway. I boycotted them when they started sending me 'important information'.
... I think it's less than half, though most of those that didn't gave me a way to request they leave me alone again at the bottom of the email (and only one of those has failed to work).
So then I use Barnes&Noble, where I again clicked "Do not spam me". They recently sent me a 'holiday gift' for $5. So now I don't use BN. Merry Christmas.
I'm using FatBrain now, hopefully they won't screw up either.
If you consider any email at all to be spam, then yes they will. I bought something from them under their old name (which was what? who remembers?), and I got a message a week or so ago about getting $20 off on any purchase before Dec 20th (w/ some minimum value, I'm sure).
Now, if what you're really saying is you checked -- or unchecked, as appropriate -- every box saying don't send me email then I suppose you do have a gripe.
As I'm writing this, I'm thinking (in an offtopic sort of way) about the number of places I've done business with that have actually left me alone when I asked them to
True, social outsiders were singled-out and harassed after Columbine. And, yes, part of it is because they're easy targets for such treatment. But I think that whatever social group these kids had belonged to would have been singled-out.
Let's say that the kids were jocks, or members of some other typically "popular" high school social group. Then the first target of our collective blame (until we knew better) would have been the social down-side of being in a popular group -- the pressures & expectations of the peer group, being under the public eye, expectations of setting a good example, etc. There would be a cry for this group to be watched, counselled, and so forth. I think whatever group the killers happened to come from would get similar treatment, with their social position being the early bearer of the blame. Why? Because the kids ashed out socially.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that had it been a traditionally "popular" group, there would have been more of a "kid-gloves" approach; a public outcry for understanding instead of further ostracism
One of the things we do here (a computer science deartment, so we have lots of monitors and everything is flourescent lighting) is have office lights arranged on two circuits. There are two standard 4-bulb fixtures in the ceiling; two bulbs per fixture are on one circuit (with one switch) and the others are on another circuit(with a second, independent switch). The the circuits are out of phase with eachother, so one peaks during the other's trough.
... so I'm probably not in a position to be the best judge of how well this works. I'll just say that if this didn't at least once have a benifit, I doubt they would hve gone to the trouble to arrange this in every office.
Now, my office has a window, and my offcemate and I each have new, large monitors driven at 72Hz+ refresh rates
It all depends on what you want to do ...
Are you looking to get a more focused education in some area of CS?
If so, which area?
If not, then you're in it for the money?
If you want money in CS then (short term) get the job, screw grad school, or (long term) get a masters from just about anywhere (ok, ok, upper tier schools can open upper tier jobs, but it's not the only way) while getting job experience (intern/co-op).
Figure out why you want the degree (for "the challenge" is not that good a reason, you might be happier with a challenging job instead). Check US News Online and see where the good schools are. Ask your professors where they went, what they think, what they'd do different.
Good luck.
(for the record, I'm a PhD student studying graphics at UNC Chapel Hill)