PCs don't deliver novel features. They are the following: slightly less complicated to use for simple applications, and still a novelty. They are pretty much doomed in the middle term.
There isn't a "killer app" because they're basically more limited multipurpose computing devices. Every app a PC could run, a minicomputer could already run, and the good ones are already invented and quite refined for existing UI paradigms.
It's never been about "novel features"; it's about bringing computer technology to places it wasn't previously available, whether you're talking about mainframes, minicomputers, or mobile computing.
"App" is to "Application" as "Droid" is to "Android" and "Sudafed" is to "Pseudoephedrine". All are made-up abbreviations that were invented exclusively for use as trademarks, and in all three cases, there are still unprotected generic terms available to describe the broader markets in which these products compete. There is compelling evidence that Apple was the first to use "App Store" to refer to their "Electronic Marketplace"; they were certainly the first to trademark it. The fact that there are other companies selling similar offerings does not make these "App Stores", just as the fact that someone's pizza stand is small and crude does not make it a "Pizza Hut".
There's one part of this "the 'Close Door' button is disconnected" legend that really bothers me: the purported behavior is so trivially easy to test, but we keep falling back on "Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact", even though this is precisely the type of appeal to authority that we are all so quick to condemn when we observe it elsewhere. Several commenters have pointed out that they don't see this behavior in the elevators they encounter - so isn't it about time that we all did some rigorous scientific analysis?
Here, I'll start.
My own experience suggests that the close button often works, so that's the hypothesis I'm going to test. The elevator in my building is a Kone (unfortunately, I have no other information about it - no serial number was listed, and the State of Georgia doesn't seem to post elevator inspection details online).
After the doors first opened and I walked in, I observed a roughly 5 second delay on my stopwatch before the doors attempted to close. The same delay-before-closing was present when I called an elevator but did not step on, and when I took the elevator to a different floor, whether or not I stepped off. The delay before closing was reduced to three seconds for subsequent closing attempts if I interrupted the first closing of the doors with my arm. These measurements served as my baseline for subsequent testing.
I began a fresh test by stepping out of the elevator, letting the door close, and then calling it again. Upon entering the elevator, I immediately pressing the "Door Close" button without first selecting a floor, and observed the door closing immediately after. The same behavior occurred when I selected a floor before pressing "door close", but no change from the baseline was observed when selecting a floor without pressing "door close".
Conclusion: For this particular elevator model, the "door close" button does indeed cause the doors to close sooner.
I don't have a way of quickly determining whether there are, in fact, elevators out there that have intentionally disabled close buttons, but I've got a working theory about where this legend is coming from.
First, every time I've heard the claim that the "Door Close" button doesn't work, it has come from an Otis Elevator representative. It's quite possible that this is a claim that is only true for Otis elevators, but is only reported because there's very little news in putting on a ThyssenKrupp representative saying, "Our 'Door Close' buttons actually work!"
Second, I have been in elevators where selecting a floor would automatically trigger a door close event. It's plain to see that with this design, a door close button is redundant - but it's also easy to imagine a customer refusing to buy an elevator without a "Door Close" button. Adding a nonfunctional button allows the sales team to get that extra checkmark on the feature list, and also makes for a great story about "dumb management decisions" for the engineers to pass around.
I'd encourage you all to experiment with this on your own to see if this also applies for other manufactures. If you e-mail me your observations (peter@stormlash.net), I'll tabulate the data and provide it to anyone who is interested. I recommend the following test rubric: 1) How long does the door take to close when no buttons are pressed? 2) Does the time for the door to close decrease when a previous close attempt has been interrupted? 3) Does "door close" cause this time to decrease when no floor is selected? 4) Does selecting a floor cause this time to decrease? 5) Does pressing "door close" with a floor selected change anything?
Within computing, "kilobyte" has always been an ambiguous term - not only was the meaning of "kilo" ambiguous, but "byte" could refer to anywhere between six and nine bits. This wasn't cause for concern as long as systems were internally consistent, so engineers continued to use the term due to the utility it offered. This consistency is no longer possible since computers are now key components in communication systems which have always interpreted "kilo" as a SI unit.
There's a strong parallel here to the "nautical mile", which was developed because of its tremendous utility in navigation, but which is confusing to those who don't realize that "mile" means something different on a boat. If you transfer your GPS unit from your car to your boat, which type of "mile" should the device use? If you copy a 10 GB file over a 8 Mb/s data link, how long is the transfer going to take?
Computer specialists can be expected to understand the special meaning of "kilo" in certain contexts, but what of those who work outside the field of computer engineering? The modern computing experience is built on tiers of abstractions that allow the "experience" of using a computer to differ greatly from how the computer is actually designed (e.g, file sizes are already given as "quantity of information stored" instead of "disk capacity consumed"), so it's reasonable to use the word "kilo" the way 95% of the population already understands it.
Also, by design, each downtown city block is 1/8 mile long, and spans a distance of 100 units. This makes it really convenient to compute distances, since you can just divide any address by 800 to find its distance in miles from downtown, or by 500 to find the distance in kilometers.
The bill as originally written, however, focuses primarily on penalties for promoting
counterfeit music, computer programs, and other media with identical labeling.
Counterfeit music? As in, "Made in imitation of what is genuine with the intent to defraud"? Does this mean an end to top-40 radio?
I'm Peter Sahlstrom, the Georgia Tech student who took the photos. I thought there were a few things I should mention.
1) A friend of mine pointed the conspicuous pile of voting machines out to me, and although I took the photos, he made the phone calls. We contacted the voting people, the press, and campus security; we received almost no response. The voting people told us the machines were locked (apparently they were...but not to anything. The mainstream press ignored us. And Campus Security said that, although they had complained to the voting people previously, they kept leaving the machines out like that.
2) The thing that finally drew attention was an article I posted to Dave Farber's "Interesting People List", (here) and to Declan McCullough's Politech (here).
3) I've made the best photos available to anyone interested. The Associated Press has two; I've got about 13 more of the highest quality (or most relevant) photos available, if someone wants to throw some bandwidth at me.
If anyone else has questions about things, let me know.
The big northeast blackout from last summer was caused in part by a software bug in an energy managment system sold by
General Electic, according to a story on SecurityFocus.
This is Slashdot! Isn't that supposed to say Microsoft? It's always Microsoft.
My question is: How will this affect Project Gutenberg Australia?
I don't imagine they will be able to recall public domain items back into copyright, but does this mean an end to the release of additional public domain works for the next 40 years (when current items released under the 50 year term reach the US level of 90 years)?
There has only been one other home console I can think of offhand with backward compatibility built in: the Atari 7800. And we all know what a great success that system was.
The Atari 7800 backwards compatability takes a whole different slant if you recognize the motivation behind it.
Atari didn't have a licensing policy for their games. So they only made money when they personally sold someone one of their products. Unfortunately, they also didn't have a copyright on their hardware architecture: so other platforms began to include Atari 2600 support alongside their own cartridge. When the Atari 5200 came out, it was one of the only machines in its class that wasn't backwards compatable with the 2600. The 7800 was, among other things, an attempt to address that problem.
The lesson to be learned: Backwards compatability can be good, or it can be bad. Nowadays, people don't necessarilly expect backwards compatability between systems, but they certainly appreciate it when it's there.
Potential discoveries include glycoprotein, which prevents Antarctic fish from freezing
Scientists expect this reasearch to lead to exciting new research in the field of pre-thawed frozen fish sticks.
Re:It shouldn't have happened yet
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 1
(from the article)
The MyDoom Internet worm claimed its first scalp Sunday, paralyzing the Web site of American software firm SCO Group (SCOX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) with a massive data blitz.
In a statement issued Sunday morning, the Utah-based company confirmed MyDoom knocked its site, http://www.sco.com, out of commission.
"Internet traffic began building momentum Saturday evening and by midnight Eastern Time the SCO Web site was flooded with requests beyond its capacity," the statement read.
Now, according to the parent post (and here), this virus shouldn't start attacking for another hour. Yet SCO is down. Why?
On one hand, SCO would be perfectly justified in taking their own server down to avoid the costs associated with the attack. But is it really fair, then, to say that the virus knocked their website out of commission, when the virus shouldn't even be attacking anything yet? It doesn't take a great imagination to think of what the media would do with this ("SCO attacks own website").
Can't get enough foreshadowing? Feel cheated because there wasn't a scene in Attack of the Clones where someone says "You're a pretty good Moff, Tarkin, but you're not quite a grand Moff"? Well, you're going to be ass-clenchingly happy with Episode III, because our sources inform us that there's going to be plenty more of the awkward, forced foreshadowing that filled the first two prequels! Check out this preview:
"Golly, no one will ever make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs!"
"If I ever have a son, I'd like him to have my lightsaber when he's old enough. But not to use against me!"
"In local news, Mos Eisley has moved up to second-most wretched hive of scum and villany."
"Okay, me and the rest of the Bothans will be back soon with the information! Don't worry, we won't die!"
"Call me Ben. Obi-Wan is a name I hope not to hear again in a long time. A long time."
"These new 'Scout Walkers' can handle anything you throw at them. Except wood of course."
"Your voice is kind of whiny and reedy for a Sith Lord, Anakin. Can't you get a voice coach or something?"
"Jedi Master Windu's bravery and wisdom will be remembered for, oh, 27 years, tops."
"Aren't the Skywalker twins cute? And such sexual tension between them!"
"Let's remove R2's jet rockets and put in some sort of teddy bear zapping device instead."
The spot aired on Jan. 22, 1984, the date of that year's Super Bowl.
...although technically, it also aired for the first time on December 15, 1983, at 1:00 AM (the sign off slot for KMVT 11, Twin Falls, Idaho), so that it would be elligable to receive awards the following year.
Read up on Mars Direct. It's a plan to do Mars missions on the same budgetary scale as the Apollo missions. Those were done for about the same budget that NASA currently gets.
Yes, but remember, that was 1969 dollars. Multiply those 1969 dollars by 6 and you'll be closer to current values.
For a general estimate: the moon landing would have cost $100 billion in 1994 dollars...convert that to 2002 dollars and it looks more like $127 billion. That's about 42% of what the Pentagon had budgeted for it last year. That amount is comparable to NASA's total budget for the next 8 years.
I'm all for space exploration, but this just strikes me as nothing more than a political game.
That $1 billion increase sounds good at first, but spread it out over 5 years, and you've got $200 million/year. On the other hand, increasing NASA's budget at a rate consistent even with November's unusually low inflation rate of 1.77% would give a yearly increase of $230 million. So, in the best case, they're treading water. (For comparison, NASA's 2004 budget received a roughly 3% increase over 2003.)
What about that other $12 billion in exploration money? It "will come from reallocation of $11 billion that is currently within the five-year total NASA budget of $86 billion". So, NASA just got 13% of their budget reallocated.
Aside from the apparent fiscal impotency of the plan, the thing is just dripping with political rhetoric. From the white house release: "From 1992 to 2000, NASA's budget decreased by a total of 5 percent. Since the year 2000, NASA's budget has increased by approximately 3 percent per year." What an interesting point to suddenly bring up! Why yes, it is an election year!
"Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places, my friend we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty, let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?"
Slashdot Mirror
Let me explain why VisiCalc will never succeed:
PCs don't deliver novel features. They are the following: slightly less complicated to use for simple applications, and still a novelty. They are pretty much doomed in the middle term.
There isn't a "killer app" because they're basically more limited multipurpose computing devices. Every app a PC could run, a minicomputer could already run, and the good ones are already invented and quite refined for existing UI paradigms.
It's never been about "novel features"; it's about bringing computer technology to places it wasn't previously available, whether you're talking about mainframes, minicomputers, or mobile computing.
Gaa, I forgot to log in before posting that.
Anyway, feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about getting going on iOS programming.
"App" is to "Application" as "Droid" is to "Android" and "Sudafed" is to "Pseudoephedrine". All are made-up abbreviations that were invented exclusively for use as trademarks, and in all three cases, there are still unprotected generic terms available to describe the broader markets in which these products compete. There is compelling evidence that Apple was the first to use "App Store" to refer to their "Electronic Marketplace"; they were certainly the first to trademark it. The fact that there are other companies selling similar offerings does not make these "App Stores", just as the fact that someone's pizza stand is small and crude does not make it a "Pizza Hut".
There's one part of this "the 'Close Door' button is disconnected" legend that really bothers me: the purported behavior is so trivially easy to test, but we keep falling back on "Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact", even though this is precisely the type of appeal to authority that we are all so quick to condemn when we observe it elsewhere. Several commenters have pointed out that they don't see this behavior in the elevators they encounter - so isn't it about time that we all did some rigorous scientific analysis?
Here, I'll start.
My own experience suggests that the close button often works, so that's the hypothesis I'm going to test. The elevator in my building is a Kone (unfortunately, I have no other information about it - no serial number was listed, and the State of Georgia doesn't seem to post elevator inspection details online).
After the doors first opened and I walked in, I observed a roughly 5 second delay on my stopwatch before the doors attempted to close. The same delay-before-closing was present when I called an elevator but did not step on, and when I took the elevator to a different floor, whether or not I stepped off. The delay before closing was reduced to three seconds for subsequent closing attempts if I interrupted the first closing of the doors with my arm. These measurements served as my baseline for subsequent testing.
I began a fresh test by stepping out of the elevator, letting the door close, and then calling it again. Upon entering the elevator, I immediately pressing the "Door Close" button without first selecting a floor, and observed the door closing immediately after. The same behavior occurred when I selected a floor before pressing "door close", but no change from the baseline was observed when selecting a floor without pressing "door close".
Conclusion: For this particular elevator model, the "door close" button does indeed cause the doors to close sooner.
I don't have a way of quickly determining whether there are, in fact, elevators out there that have intentionally disabled close buttons, but I've got a working theory about where this legend is coming from.
First, every time I've heard the claim that the "Door Close" button doesn't work, it has come from an Otis Elevator representative. It's quite possible that this is a claim that is only true for Otis elevators, but is only reported because there's very little news in putting on a ThyssenKrupp representative saying, "Our 'Door Close' buttons actually work!"
Second, I have been in elevators where selecting a floor would automatically trigger a door close event. It's plain to see that with this design, a door close button is redundant - but it's also easy to imagine a customer refusing to buy an elevator without a "Door Close" button. Adding a nonfunctional button allows the sales team to get that extra checkmark on the feature list, and also makes for a great story about "dumb management decisions" for the engineers to pass around.
I'd encourage you all to experiment with this on your own to see if this also applies for other manufactures. If you e-mail me your observations (peter@stormlash.net), I'll tabulate the data and provide it to anyone who is interested. I recommend the following test rubric:
1) How long does the door take to close when no buttons are pressed?
2) Does the time for the door to close decrease when a previous close attempt has been interrupted?
3) Does "door close" cause this time to decrease when no floor is selected?
4) Does selecting a floor cause this time to decrease?
5) Does pressing "door close" with a floor selected change anything?
Within computing, "kilobyte" has always been an ambiguous term - not only was the meaning of "kilo" ambiguous, but "byte" could refer to anywhere between six and nine bits. This wasn't cause for concern as long as systems were internally consistent, so engineers continued to use the term due to the utility it offered. This consistency is no longer possible since computers are now key components in communication systems which have always interpreted "kilo" as a SI unit.
There's a strong parallel here to the "nautical mile", which was developed because of its tremendous utility in navigation, but which is confusing to those who don't realize that "mile" means something different on a boat. If you transfer your GPS unit from your car to your boat, which type of "mile" should the device use? If you copy a 10 GB file over a 8 Mb/s data link, how long is the transfer going to take?
Computer specialists can be expected to understand the special meaning of "kilo" in certain contexts, but what of those who work outside the field of computer engineering? The modern computing experience is built on tiers of abstractions that allow the "experience" of using a computer to differ greatly from how the computer is actually designed (e.g, file sizes are already given as "quantity of information stored" instead of "disk capacity consumed"), so it's reasonable to use the word "kilo" the way 95% of the population already understands it.
Also, by design, each downtown city block is 1/8 mile long, and spans a distance of 100 units. This makes it really convenient to compute distances, since you can just divide any address by 800 to find its distance in miles from downtown, or by 500 to find the distance in kilometers.
Hey, look at that, I made Slashdot!
I'm Peter Sahlstrom, the Georgia Tech student who took the photos. I thought there were a few things I should mention.
1) A friend of mine pointed the conspicuous pile of voting machines out to me, and although I took the photos, he made the phone calls. We contacted the voting people, the press, and campus security; we received almost no response. The voting people told us the machines were locked (apparently they were...but not to anything. The mainstream press ignored us. And Campus Security said that, although they had complained to the voting people previously, they kept leaving the machines out like that.
2) The thing that finally drew attention was an article I posted to Dave Farber's "Interesting People List", (here) and to Declan McCullough's Politech (here).
3) I've made the best photos available to anyone interested. The Associated Press has two; I've got about 13 more of the highest quality (or most relevant) photos available, if someone wants to throw some bandwidth at me.
If anyone else has questions about things, let me know.
Or even his own network!
This is Slashdot! Isn't that supposed to say Microsoft? It's always Microsoft.
Maybe he took the song "Love Hertz" a little too seriously...
My question is: How will this affect Project Gutenberg Australia?
I don't imagine they will be able to recall public domain items back into copyright, but does this mean an end to the release of additional public domain works for the next 40 years (when current items released under the 50 year term reach the US level of 90 years)?
The Atari 7800 backwards compatability takes a whole different slant if you recognize the motivation behind it.
Atari didn't have a licensing policy for their games. So they only made money when they personally sold someone one of their products. Unfortunately, they also didn't have a copyright on their hardware architecture: so other platforms began to include Atari 2600 support alongside their own cartridge. When the Atari 5200 came out, it was one of the only machines in its class that wasn't backwards compatable with the 2600. The 7800 was, among other things, an attempt to address that problem.
The lesson to be learned: Backwards compatability can be good, or it can be bad. Nowadays, people don't necessarilly expect backwards compatability between systems, but they certainly appreciate it when it's there.
On one hand, SCO would be perfectly justified in taking their own server down to avoid the costs associated with the attack. But is it really fair, then, to say that the virus knocked their website out of commission, when the virus shouldn't even be attacking anything yet? It doesn't take a great imagination to think of what the media would do with this ("SCO attacks own website").
With apologies to The Brunching Shuttlecocks: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Foreshadowing
Can't get enough foreshadowing? Feel cheated because there wasn't a scene in Attack of the Clones where someone says "You're a pretty good Moff, Tarkin, but you're not quite a grand Moff"? Well, you're going to be ass-clenchingly happy with Episode III, because our sources inform us that there's going to be plenty more of the awkward, forced foreshadowing that filled the first two prequels! Check out this preview:
"Golly, no one will ever make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs!"
"If I ever have a son, I'd like him to have my lightsaber when he's old enough. But not to use against me!"
"In local news, Mos Eisley has moved up to second-most wretched hive of scum and villany."
"Okay, me and the rest of the Bothans will be back soon with the information! Don't worry, we won't die!"
"Call me Ben. Obi-Wan is a name I hope not to hear again in a long time. A long time."
"These new 'Scout Walkers' can handle anything you throw at them. Except wood of course."
"Your voice is kind of whiny and reedy for a Sith Lord, Anakin. Can't you get a voice coach or something?"
"Jedi Master Windu's bravery and wisdom will be remembered for, oh, 27 years, tops."
"Aren't the Skywalker twins cute? And such sexual tension between them!"
"Let's remove R2's jet rockets and put in some sort of teddy bear zapping device instead."
"Well, that's it. There's no hope."
(See here or here for details)
Second on the list: "Marriage"
For a general estimate: the moon landing would have cost $100 billion in 1994 dollars...convert that to 2002 dollars and it looks more like $127 billion. That's about 42% of what the Pentagon had budgeted for it last year. That amount is comparable to NASA's total budget for the next 8 years.
I'm all for space exploration, but this just strikes me as nothing more than a political game.
That $1 billion increase sounds good at first, but spread it out over 5 years, and you've got $200 million/year. On the other hand, increasing NASA's budget at a rate consistent even with November's unusually low inflation rate of 1.77% would give a yearly increase of $230 million. So, in the best case, they're treading water. (For comparison, NASA's 2004 budget received a roughly 3% increase over 2003.)
What about that other $12 billion in exploration money? It "will come from reallocation of $11 billion that is currently within the five-year total NASA budget of $86 billion". So, NASA just got 13% of their budget reallocated.
Aside from the apparent fiscal impotency of the plan, the thing is just dripping with political rhetoric. From the white house release: "From 1992 to 2000, NASA's budget decreased by a total of 5 percent. Since the year 2000, NASA's budget has increased by approximately 3 percent per year." What an interesting point to suddenly bring up! Why yes, it is an election year!