I do not like more automated shopping
experiences.
I do not like the self-checkout aisles, which
cannot deal with even trivial deviations from
what they expect (You want to buy a single,
unmarked apple? Sound the klaxon! We have
a troublemaker in self-checkout lane 2!). I
do not like always paying with a credit card,
or needing to carry a stack of $20's to go
shopping (for a $0.50 candy bar? Pah!).
So, call me a Luddite, but I will not use
these new carts. If I need to bring my own
handbasket to avoid using them, I will. I
will do my best to shut off every device I
pass that blinks or beeps at me and then spits
out a coupon (roughly a 90% success rate so
far, they always make it too easy to remove
the batteries). I will gather my groceries,
and proceed to a human cashier to pay for my
purchases. In the event that the store has
no human cashiers on a register, I will simply
leave my basked of frozen food on an unattended
register, and leave.
Obviously, NTT has failed to take one major
problem into consideration, which will doom
this concept to complete failure...
Geeks do not touch one another. Encouraging
them to do so for the sake of increased
bandwidth will simply confuse them, and
probably cause more than a few nervous
breakdowns (of course, that assumes that
having your bioelectric field modulated at
10MHz won't do that anyway).
Sigh. Yet another good idea sent to the
scrap heap for not understanding its target
audience.;-)
Compared to this, lotteries and slot machines
are easy
Sorry, but to put it bluntly, you don't know what
you say (and I don't say this defensively, I
couldn't care less about my former employer's
products, aside from the quality of my personal
contribution to the code base).
Every single point you mentioned that a voting
systems needs, also exists in a live lottery
POS terminal. You miss counting a single
powerball ticket, and you have a $100M lawsuit
on your hands (and possible several). Same
goes with registering the wrong number. They
must resist tampering, know when someone has
done so, and as for uptime, my former employer
used to receive fines of literally
millions of dollars per hour of downtime.
You may think of gambling as stupid and a toy
problem, but I assure you, it has an almost
identical set of security and accounting
requirements to a voting system (or rather, to
a voting system that works, not the crap Diebold
produced).
I do agree that such a system doesn't count as
trivial (I didn't mean that in the sense of one
hack could do it in his spare time, more that
known solutions to the major problems already
exist, which Diebold apparently ignored). But
I know of at least six major companies that do
it, and do it well. As for whether or not you
can hack such machines - Yes and no. Any system
will yield to a sufficiently complex attack.
I'd like to see you try to place a bogus
powerball wager after the draw, though - You
simply can't do it. For the customers I
used to deal with (states and countries, not
people or companies... As in, groups that can
personally throw you in prison for screwing up
or getting caught tampering with something),
you'd need collusion between no fewer than 120
people, spread across three companies, two
state agencies, and at least one independant
auditing firm. Good luck. Even those of
us (formerly) on the inside of one of those
groups of 120+ people used to laugh about
those who considered tampering with the
lottery as a serious possiblity.
Could it be that they truely did lose,
fair and square
Sure... by exactly 18181 votes, in no fewer
than five elections (so far, that I've heard
of - probably more that went unnoticed).
Hey, I acknowledge that coincidences do happen.
But on that scale? If you flip a coin and it
comes up heads 71 times in a row, wouldn't you
get a tad suspicious, even though it could
physically happen with a completely fair coin?
Because the probability of that roughly equals
that of five 18181-sided dice all hitting their
highest number.
Even my cyncial mind is having trouble
grasping the immense absurdity of the
problem with these machines.
No kidding...
I've worked in firmware (specifically, POS
lotterty terminals not all that unlike the
Diebold voting machines). And the level of
trouble these things have caused simply
astounds me. Really, it doesn't take that
much effort to come up with a stable, secure,
fully auditable terminal. These people control
all aspects of the machines! Literally nothing
unexpected can occur - No poorly-behaved third
party software, no bizarre user requests (with
only a handful of choices, linked to a big
touchscreen button, what can they do wrong?),
no external hacking attempts (on a private
net physically separate from the internet)...
If in my former work, if we had made terminals
that bad, we'd have people rioting in the streets
(literally). Even the few very minor flaws that
came to light received front-page headlines in
their respective jurisdictions (and in one case,
globally), for something FAR more minor than
crashes, recording the wrong user selection,
or outright invalid data (yeah, *sure* three
dark-horses all won by exactly 18181 votes).
Even in worst-case scenarios, such as harware
failure, opening the chassis, or a network
outage, the machines should respond gracefully
by offlining themselves, thus summoning a field
tech. And no auditing capabilities? Gimme a
frickin' break! They either lie outright (on
behalf of whoever bought various elections?) on
that point, or have such a broken implementation
they'd rather look like idiots for omitting such
a "feature" than admit how badly they screwed it
up.
But then, I coded for lottery machines, a
field where large sums of money change hands.
These Diebold machines "only" tally votes, thus
expressing the will of the people in choosing who
they want to lead them (assuming "each vote counts"
has ever held true). Far less important,
quite obviously.;-)
When asked, say you are bound by an NDA and
can't divulge any information about the projects
except in the broadest terms.
Cool, time to go fluff my resume with an imaginary
major project under an NDA!;-)
Seriously, though, this doesn't strike me as
helpful. Although companies value the ability
of their potential employees to keep their mouths
shut, how does an interviewer know if you really
worked on such a project, or just made it up? Not
like they can just ask your former employer (or
rather, that your former employer would say yes
or no to such a question without sending the
issue to simmer in the legal department for a
few weeks)...
HTML is such a neat little language, but it
does take knowledge and time for humans to code
in it.
To use all its features, yes, it takes time.
For tasks such as basic text enhancement,
however, I find it no more time consuming
that writing plaintext. I think most people
(or rather, most geeks) feel similarly, judging
by the ratio of HTML-formatted Slashdot posts
to plaintext posts. Email does not equal
a news/blog site, however.:-)
No person I have ever really wanted to deal
with would take the time to try to gussy the
email up with HTML before sending it
That part I agree completely with. I have
always considered email a plaintext format,
and use it only in that manner. The few "real"
people who do send me HTML email usually do
not even realize they have done so (many email
programs simply default to sending HTML or mime
multi), nor have they used any actual HTML
features in their message. So why, as I
mentioned, do most email programs default to
using it? It at least doubles the size of an
email (assuming mime multi), and usually quite
a bit more since the HTML version takes up
2-3 times more space just by itself than the
plaintext version...
Is it possible for an individual to buy a
Transmeta processor plus a motherboard on which
it can live?
Not that I know of, unfortunately.
I've looked (though only quick checks here
and there, nothing very thorough), and found
that you can either get laptops, SBCs, and
blade-based servers, but nothing desktop-like.
Really a pity, too... Although not as powerful
as a typical desktop CPU, those of us running
things like fileservers and/or internet gateways
on our home LANs could benefit greatly from
such a beast - The single most common cause of
failure of machines I've owned comes from fans
dying and taking something out with them (usually
the power supply or CPU, both of which tend to
take other parts out along with them when they
overheat). Having a moderately powerful system
with purely passive cooling would completely
eliminate that problem.
If you find such a motherboard, please, let me
know.
I would expect they need to sue the FCC
as well... Since the FCC has permitted the use
of 2.4GHz for various purposes, doesn't that
place the burden on this group of parents to
demonstrate some direct health hazard?
Perfect test case... to see if DMCA really has
merit in the courts. This is so nutty its
unbelievable.
I know this doesn't involve patent law, but
would the idea of "prior art" help this guy
out?
Because, if it would, when they first announced
this new broken-CD-technology, about a hundred
Slashdot posters all said the same thing, to just
disable autorun with the shift key.
Gotta agree with you, though... Unbelievable.
And to think that people joked about
this suit (before it happened), in the same
first article about this on Slashdot... "Hey,
better not say that too loud, they'll whack
you with the DMCA".
Sad that not only have companies become that
predictable, but that an obvious joke turns
into reality.
I have no problems closing it as the
WinNT/2k/XP kernel is preemptive. You're
not still running a 9x product, are you?
(Note: I'm still running media player 6.4)
Win2k sp4, WMP 7.01. I expect M$ probably
used one of their magical "we wrote this so
we can ignore the normal rules" hacks to give
WMP a slight edge over other apps. But in any
case, no ambiguity about it, WMP occasionally
locks the machine.
How is this faster than using alt-tab to bring windows to top?
Because you don't have to press alt-tab? They
already have a visible spot on the desktop.
Additionally, if you need to do a series of
calculations, it takes a LOT less effort to
just run through it all without even changing
focus from the calculator, than to go through
"get a number from app 1, alt-tab, enter in
calc, alt-tab, get another number, alt-tab,
enter in calc, alt-tab, get another number...".
And that only deals with interactive tasks such
as a calulator. How about something passive but
informative, like the task manager (or top, in the
*nix world), where you need it visible to make use
of it? I can't even count how many times I've
avoided a crash because I noticed the CPU use
suddenly spike as some app began behaving poorly.
If I didn't have that window always visible, I'd
never see the usage spike until the machine started
to crawl, by which time the opportunity to kill the
offending process may have passed (Windows Media
Player does that on occasion, just brings the
machine to a crawl and leaves no choice but to
reboot - But if you catch it within about five
seconds, the machine hasn't totally stopped responding
and you can kill it).
I don't claim you can't do things almost
as well with a single monitor. But once you've
used a dual, you'll never go back.
This is almost as good as one of those "A
study conducted by Microsoft and Forrester
Research concludes that Windows is Holy and
Linux causes lepersy" studies.
Though I see your point, I have to disagree
that the findings seem excessively biased.
Compare the cost of a pair of 17" monitors to
a single 21"... Pricewatch currently lists
$69 for the former, and $299 for the latter.
So if the hardware suppliers wanted to make
more money by biasing their study, it would
seem that they should have found the exact
opposite results - That a single large monitor
helps more than two smaller monitors. But
they didn't.
Of course, running dual-headed myself, I
agree 100% with the study - I find it painful
now to have to limit myself to only one
desktop, with all that annoying switching
between apps.
I've never "gotten" dual head. I guess two
17" monitors running at 1400x1050 are somewhat
cheaper than a 21" monitor running at 2048x1536,
and they both display about the same # of pixels,
but doesn't the seam running down the middle of
the dual-head setup really suck?
You think about it the wrong way. Don't think
in terms of "cheaper", think in terms of "on
the screen but not in my way". (I'll write
the rest of this from a Windows point of view,
but all the ideas apply equally well to X)
Consider what you normally use a computer for at
work... Perhaps you code, or use Word/Excel,
or whatever. But most likely you have some
primary app open most of the time, to which you
want to give as much screen real-estate as
possible.
But, having other programs open at the same
time, such as Winamp, task manager, a graphing
calculator, perhaps a small notepad window for
jotting things down - All of those you would
normally need to switch back and forth with
your primary screen-sucking app. Personally,
I usually have some development environment
filling my primary screen, and find it very
annoying to keep finding my calculator, plug
in some numbers, switch back, repeat 200 times
a day.
Well, a second monitor makes all of that a non
issue. I have my 21" primary monitor taken up
with the dev tools, and the 15" secondary
keeps what I mentioned (Winamp, taskman,
graphcalc, notepad, and usually one or two
other random programs) instantly accessible,
without having to minimize anything or go
searching on the taskbar.
So try thinking of dual monitors in terms of
dual-but-separate desktops, rather than a
single large desktop (where yes, the line down
the middle would drive most people nuts).
I'd like to see this study conducted with
a constant amount of $ invested in either a
2-head or 1-head rig, and see which comes out
on top. I'm betting on 1-head.
Given a choice between a 19" and a 15", or a
single 21", I'd gladly take the former over
the latter, hands down.
Additionally, consider the cost from another
angle - Most people working with a computer
8 hours a day will have at least a 19" monitor,
frequently even a panel rather than a CRT,
often connected to a high-end video card. You
can easily blow a grand just on getting a
decent primary display for a workstation-class
machine (and far more for a high-end graphics
oriented system - The CAD guys at my last
employer had systems where the display hardware
alone cost over ten grand).
So, if for another $100, a tenth the price of
the primary display, you can boost productivity
by a significant margin, would you skimp on
such a small amount?
I notice that the question is "Man vs. Machine".
You completely ignore the hundreds of grandmaster
chess players that happen to be female.
Name a few.
Any in the top ten?
Didn't think so.
More importantly, the article mentions
a match against Kasparov, most certainly
a male. Thus, although we can philosophically
ponder the bigger question of "human vs machine",
the title has no sexism involved, without even
resorting to a discussion on the use of the
masculine neutral in English.
for the phone company to know in advance
of the deadline who is signing up is worth
$$$, and if you dial the 800 number, guess
who finds out? probably, two phone companies.
other permutations too... read the article.
I consider it unfortunate you posted as AC, you
have a good point deserving a score better than
zero.
However, while I agree with you, consider the
long-term (and not all that long, actually, a
month or two) difference between giving them
your phone number, vs giving them your email
address. When this all settles down in a few
weeks, the phone number will no longer benefit
anyone (though admittedly it may do so until
then). Once we start seeing enforcement of the
DNC list, however, the email address will not
only still exist, but becomes far more
valuable, since it belongs to someone that
telemarketers can no longer call (and even the
information that it belongs to someone on the
DNC list has value).
So, I maintain my original stance - Don't use
the web form, just call. That way you give out
the smallest amount of useful data necessary
to get on the list.
the "don't call me, spam me" list.. saying
they are collecting millions of email from
users and have a dubious privacy policy.
Agreed. So, why do Slashdotters, a group I
consider more privacy-aware than most people,
sign up through their website? Use the 800
number, and you don't need an email address
(and you don't really "give up" any info by
telling them your phone number, since they
need to know it to block it anyway).
Strange. I agree completely this looks a
tad bit unkosher, but a very very simple way
around it exists. Use the phone, Luke!
Why we currently discuss music so much,
rather than books or movies, centers on
how people use them, as well as what people
can reasonably download compared with the
time it takes to "use" that download.
With a book, you can find OCR'd copies of just
about anything in existance with a carefully
worded Google search, and they only weigh a
few meg at most. However, reading them then
takes at least a few hours per book, and people
likely will not read the same thing again for
quite a while. Additionally, many people have
a strong bias for dead tree versions, and even
a printout doesn't really satisfy that bias (not
to mention that, on an inkjet, printing out a
complete book might well cost more just buying
the book in the first place).
With movies, downloading them currently takes
too long even over broadband (as someone else
mentioned, I can run to Blockbuster and back
and have the movie quicker). But even when
network speeds and compression techniques make
dowloading them in realtime possible, most
people don't watch a given movie over and
over and over... Yeah, perhaps a regular
"Saturday night Brazil" showing among
a group of really obsessive friends, but not
several times each day.
Music, however... Just the right file size to
make a noticeable dent in bandwidth, yet still
download in realtime. And the usage pattern
differs from books and movies in a very critical
way - People can listen to music in the
background, and do so repeatedly.
We don't listen to a song once or twice, then
let it gather dust in the library. We listen
to it, and if we like it, we add it to our
playlist. It then gets played every few days,
or even a few times each day, for at least a
few months.
So although music cannot possibly compare with
a book, or even a cheesy Hollywood hit, for
depth of content, we "use" only moderately decent
music far, far more than even our most beloved
books and movies.
I used that very same argument when my
colleges lamented the shooting death of the
9 year old here the other day but here 5
year old brother.
Appeal to emotion tends to work poorly with
geeks.
As well it should, since it has no logical
validity whatsoever, but, just thought you
might want to know so you can better match
your arguments to your audience in the future.
No reason to give a fuck about unlikely
things like that.
Sarcasm aside, no, we shouldn't worry about
unlikely things like that. You or I could die
tomorrow from having a chunk of airplane tire
fall from the sky and hit us, but do you worry
about that, too?
Statistics, when properly used, lets us
determine how much we should worry about a
particular threat. For example, malaria kills
more people per year than any other pathogen,
meaning we should REALLY feel concerned
that studies have found Anopheles spp.
mosquitos as far North as upstate New York. OTOH,
school shootings kill fewer people each year
than lightning strikes. Yeah, they may point
to societal problems in general which we should
take into consideration, but it forms an insufficient
sample to make any drastic changes on a
rational basis.
Or to put it into an "emotional" context for you,
over a hundred times as many nine-year-olds
died last year from car accidents (not even
involving drunks) than firearm accidents. Ooooh,
spooky, lets all run out and panic over the
number of cars on our block.
Statistical correction of the day - the most recent
ONDCP/NIDA advert mentioning pot and car accidents
states that a third of drivers in accidents that
test positive for some drug, test positive for
marijuana. Yet, by their own numbers, that means
that marijuana users actually have a lower
risk for a car accident compared to other drugs,
since far more than a third of drug users use
marijuana. Gotta love them numbers, NIDA...
then he strongly implies that Verision
Sitefinder's drawbacks had a technical
solution other than complete negation of
what they'd done.
Well, an alternative technical solution
does exist, it just wouldn't put
money in Verisign's pockets...
Instead of returning basically an ad, they
could instead compare the result against a
table of, say, the top 1000 domains to see
if they have a close match (such as off by
one character). If so, return that as a
likely misspelling.
This would solve two problems with one
solution - It would undo most of the
damage caused by resolving everything to
sitefinder, and it would make squatting
on anything currently popular quite a
lot more difficult.
If Linux becomes more popular, media
recognition and increasingly "dumbed down"
distros will make it a good platform virus
writers.
No.
The very fact that Unix-like OSs have a
concept of a "root" account (which the
Windows "equivalent", "administrator", does
not even come CLOSE to matching in
terms of actual separation of permissions),
makes it all but invincible to virii.
Yes, if Linux becomes popular enough for virus
authors to target it, we'll see a round of
trojans using root exploits - But unlike
Windows exploits, very few of these exist to
start with, and they will (and do) get
fixed within a few hours of discovery.
Actually, for that reason, I think more Linux
virii would help Linux security overall,
as it would expose those root exploits faster
than we can discover them normally. Yeah, a
few boxes would suffer, but the community as
a whole would benefit.
This could really cut out the relevance of
application support behind an OS. Any application
not supported by your current OS could be built
in with the app and booted separately almost like
a Knoppix CD.
Ah, someone else who sees the bigger picture,
rather than the trivial idea of making
virtualization just a bit faster...
Rather than viewing a program build as bound
to a particular OS, each program can act as
its own OS. I see this as a fairly
logical extension to the idea of multitasking
in general - The OS no longer needs to multitask,
because the CPU does it explicitly.
This wouldn't benefit every program, and in fact
would hurt programs (like IE and Word, to use
the parent article's own example) that already
work well together. For any application that
doesn't need to interact with other programs
on the system, however, this would increase
both reliability and ease of programming. Sick
of Windows' hideous system calls needed to do
seemingly simple tasks? Use an open source
microkernel and let your program run as its
own OS. Sick of requiring OS support for certain
hardware features (such as MMX on the PII)? You
no longer need it.
This will do a lot to improve PC stability
in general, and I look forward to it. To all
those who ask "why", or only see it as faster
virtualization, I say, "look beyond Windows vs
Linux".
Should it be necessary that they inform
you of the lack of full speed utilization?
If Dell sells you a PC with a "Pentium 4 3.2GHz",
would you feel a tad bit peeved to discover that,
while it actually does have a 3.2GHz P4 in it,
they chose a noname chipset that only clocks it
at 800MHz?
Because, that would satisfy your condition - It
has the advertized part in it, but only clocks
it at 25% of its rated maximum.
Yes, people expect (and should expect)
a product to make full use of the standards
it supposedly meets. If companies only wants
to bother with an allowed subset of a standard,
I consider it nothing short of fraud to not
explicitly say, on the outside of any packaging,
that it does not meet the entire spec.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not like more automated shopping experiences.
I do not like the self-checkout aisles, which cannot deal with even trivial deviations from what they expect (You want to buy a single, unmarked apple? Sound the klaxon! We have a troublemaker in self-checkout lane 2!). I do not like always paying with a credit card, or needing to carry a stack of $20's to go shopping (for a $0.50 candy bar? Pah!).
So, call me a Luddite, but I will not use these new carts. If I need to bring my own handbasket to avoid using them, I will. I will do my best to shut off every device I pass that blinks or beeps at me and then spits out a coupon (roughly a 90% success rate so far, they always make it too easy to remove the batteries). I will gather my groceries, and proceed to a human cashier to pay for my purchases. In the event that the store has no human cashiers on a register, I will simply leave my basked of frozen food on an unattended register, and leave.
Obviously, NTT has failed to take one major problem into consideration, which will doom this concept to complete failure...
;-)
Geeks do not touch one another. Encouraging them to do so for the sake of increased bandwidth will simply confuse them, and probably cause more than a few nervous breakdowns (of course, that assumes that having your bioelectric field modulated at 10MHz won't do that anyway).
Sigh. Yet another good idea sent to the scrap heap for not understanding its target audience.
Compared to this, lotteries and slot machines are easy
Sorry, but to put it bluntly, you don't know what you say (and I don't say this defensively, I couldn't care less about my former employer's products, aside from the quality of my personal contribution to the code base).
Every single point you mentioned that a voting systems needs, also exists in a live lottery POS terminal. You miss counting a single powerball ticket, and you have a $100M lawsuit on your hands (and possible several). Same goes with registering the wrong number. They must resist tampering, know when someone has done so, and as for uptime, my former employer used to receive fines of literally millions of dollars per hour of downtime.
You may think of gambling as stupid and a toy problem, but I assure you, it has an almost identical set of security and accounting requirements to a voting system (or rather, to a voting system that works, not the crap Diebold produced).
I do agree that such a system doesn't count as trivial (I didn't mean that in the sense of one hack could do it in his spare time, more that known solutions to the major problems already exist, which Diebold apparently ignored). But I know of at least six major companies that do it, and do it well. As for whether or not you can hack such machines - Yes and no. Any system will yield to a sufficiently complex attack. I'd like to see you try to place a bogus powerball wager after the draw, though - You simply can't do it. For the customers I used to deal with (states and countries, not people or companies... As in, groups that can personally throw you in prison for screwing up or getting caught tampering with something), you'd need collusion between no fewer than 120 people, spread across three companies, two state agencies, and at least one independant auditing firm. Good luck. Even those of us (formerly) on the inside of one of those groups of 120+ people used to laugh about those who considered tampering with the lottery as a serious possiblity.
Could it be that they truely did lose, fair and square
Sure... by exactly 18181 votes, in no fewer than five elections (so far, that I've heard of - probably more that went unnoticed).
Hey, I acknowledge that coincidences do happen. But on that scale? If you flip a coin and it comes up heads 71 times in a row, wouldn't you get a tad suspicious, even though it could physically happen with a completely fair coin? Because the probability of that roughly equals that of five 18181-sided dice all hitting their highest number.
Even my cyncial mind is having trouble grasping the immense absurdity of the problem with these machines.
;-)
No kidding...
I've worked in firmware (specifically, POS lotterty terminals not all that unlike the Diebold voting machines). And the level of trouble these things have caused simply astounds me. Really, it doesn't take that much effort to come up with a stable, secure, fully auditable terminal. These people control all aspects of the machines! Literally nothing unexpected can occur - No poorly-behaved third party software, no bizarre user requests (with only a handful of choices, linked to a big touchscreen button, what can they do wrong?), no external hacking attempts (on a private net physically separate from the internet)...
If in my former work, if we had made terminals that bad, we'd have people rioting in the streets (literally). Even the few very minor flaws that came to light received front-page headlines in their respective jurisdictions (and in one case, globally), for something FAR more minor than crashes, recording the wrong user selection, or outright invalid data (yeah, *sure* three dark-horses all won by exactly 18181 votes).
Even in worst-case scenarios, such as harware failure, opening the chassis, or a network outage, the machines should respond gracefully by offlining themselves, thus summoning a field tech. And no auditing capabilities? Gimme a frickin' break! They either lie outright (on behalf of whoever bought various elections?) on that point, or have such a broken implementation they'd rather look like idiots for omitting such a "feature" than admit how badly they screwed it up.
But then, I coded for lottery machines, a field where large sums of money change hands. These Diebold machines "only" tally votes, thus expressing the will of the people in choosing who they want to lead them (assuming "each vote counts" has ever held true). Far less important, quite obviously.
When asked, say you are bound by an NDA and can't divulge any information about the projects except in the broadest terms.
;-)
Cool, time to go fluff my resume with an imaginary major project under an NDA!
Seriously, though, this doesn't strike me as helpful. Although companies value the ability of their potential employees to keep their mouths shut, how does an interviewer know if you really worked on such a project, or just made it up? Not like they can just ask your former employer (or rather, that your former employer would say yes or no to such a question without sending the issue to simmer in the legal department for a few weeks)...
HTML is such a neat little language, but it does take knowledge and time for humans to code in it.
:-)
To use all its features, yes, it takes time. For tasks such as basic text enhancement, however, I find it no more time consuming that writing plaintext. I think most people (or rather, most geeks) feel similarly, judging by the ratio of HTML-formatted Slashdot posts to plaintext posts. Email does not equal a news/blog site, however.
No person I have ever really wanted to deal with would take the time to try to gussy the email up with HTML before sending it
That part I agree completely with. I have always considered email a plaintext format, and use it only in that manner. The few "real" people who do send me HTML email usually do not even realize they have done so (many email programs simply default to sending HTML or mime multi), nor have they used any actual HTML features in their message. So why, as I mentioned, do most email programs default to using it? It at least doubles the size of an email (assuming mime multi), and usually quite a bit more since the HTML version takes up 2-3 times more space just by itself than the plaintext version...
Is it possible for an individual to buy a Transmeta processor plus a motherboard on which it can live?
Not that I know of, unfortunately. I've looked (though only quick checks here and there, nothing very thorough), and found that you can either get laptops, SBCs, and blade-based servers, but nothing desktop-like.
Really a pity, too... Although not as powerful as a typical desktop CPU, those of us running things like fileservers and/or internet gateways on our home LANs could benefit greatly from such a beast - The single most common cause of failure of machines I've owned comes from fans dying and taking something out with them (usually the power supply or CPU, both of which tend to take other parts out along with them when they overheat). Having a moderately powerful system with purely passive cooling would completely eliminate that problem.
If you find such a motherboard, please, let me know.
I guess they should sue the FCC, too.
I would expect they need to sue the FCC as well... Since the FCC has permitted the use of 2.4GHz for various purposes, doesn't that place the burden on this group of parents to demonstrate some direct health hazard?
Idiots, the lot of 'em.
Perfect test case... to see if DMCA really has merit in the courts. This is so nutty its unbelievable.
I know this doesn't involve patent law, but would the idea of "prior art" help this guy out?
Because, if it would, when they first announced this new broken-CD-technology, about a hundred Slashdot posters all said the same thing, to just disable autorun with the shift key.
Gotta agree with you, though... Unbelievable. And to think that people joked about this suit (before it happened), in the same first article about this on Slashdot... "Hey, better not say that too loud, they'll whack you with the DMCA".
Sad that not only have companies become that predictable, but that an obvious joke turns into reality.
I have no problems closing it as the WinNT/2k/XP kernel is preemptive. You're not still running a 9x product, are you? (Note: I'm still running media player 6.4)
Win2k sp4, WMP 7.01. I expect M$ probably used one of their magical "we wrote this so we can ignore the normal rules" hacks to give WMP a slight edge over other apps. But in any case, no ambiguity about it, WMP occasionally locks the machine.
How is this faster than using alt-tab to bring windows to top?
Because you don't have to press alt-tab? They already have a visible spot on the desktop.
Additionally, if you need to do a series of calculations, it takes a LOT less effort to just run through it all without even changing focus from the calculator, than to go through "get a number from app 1, alt-tab, enter in calc, alt-tab, get another number, alt-tab, enter in calc, alt-tab, get another number...".
And that only deals with interactive tasks such as a calulator. How about something passive but informative, like the task manager (or top, in the *nix world), where you need it visible to make use of it? I can't even count how many times I've avoided a crash because I noticed the CPU use suddenly spike as some app began behaving poorly. If I didn't have that window always visible, I'd never see the usage spike until the machine started to crawl, by which time the opportunity to kill the offending process may have passed (Windows Media Player does that on occasion, just brings the machine to a crawl and leaves no choice but to reboot - But if you catch it within about five seconds, the machine hasn't totally stopped responding and you can kill it).
I don't claim you can't do things almost as well with a single monitor. But once you've used a dual, you'll never go back.
This is almost as good as one of those "A study conducted by Microsoft and Forrester Research concludes that Windows is Holy and Linux causes lepersy" studies.
Though I see your point, I have to disagree that the findings seem excessively biased.
Compare the cost of a pair of 17" monitors to a single 21"... Pricewatch currently lists $69 for the former, and $299 for the latter.
So if the hardware suppliers wanted to make more money by biasing their study, it would seem that they should have found the exact opposite results - That a single large monitor helps more than two smaller monitors. But they didn't.
Of course, running dual-headed myself, I agree 100% with the study - I find it painful now to have to limit myself to only one desktop, with all that annoying switching between apps.
I've never "gotten" dual head. I guess two 17" monitors running at 1400x1050 are somewhat cheaper than a 21" monitor running at 2048x1536, and they both display about the same # of pixels, but doesn't the seam running down the middle of the dual-head setup really suck?
You think about it the wrong way. Don't think in terms of "cheaper", think in terms of "on the screen but not in my way". (I'll write the rest of this from a Windows point of view, but all the ideas apply equally well to X)
Consider what you normally use a computer for at work... Perhaps you code, or use Word/Excel, or whatever. But most likely you have some primary app open most of the time, to which you want to give as much screen real-estate as possible.
But, having other programs open at the same time, such as Winamp, task manager, a graphing calculator, perhaps a small notepad window for jotting things down - All of those you would normally need to switch back and forth with your primary screen-sucking app. Personally, I usually have some development environment filling my primary screen, and find it very annoying to keep finding my calculator, plug in some numbers, switch back, repeat 200 times a day.
Well, a second monitor makes all of that a non issue. I have my 21" primary monitor taken up with the dev tools, and the 15" secondary keeps what I mentioned (Winamp, taskman, graphcalc, notepad, and usually one or two other random programs) instantly accessible, without having to minimize anything or go searching on the taskbar.
So try thinking of dual monitors in terms of dual-but-separate desktops, rather than a single large desktop (where yes, the line down the middle would drive most people nuts).
I'd like to see this study conducted with a constant amount of $ invested in either a 2-head or 1-head rig, and see which comes out on top. I'm betting on 1-head.
Given a choice between a 19" and a 15", or a single 21", I'd gladly take the former over the latter, hands down.
Additionally, consider the cost from another angle - Most people working with a computer 8 hours a day will have at least a 19" monitor, frequently even a panel rather than a CRT, often connected to a high-end video card. You can easily blow a grand just on getting a decent primary display for a workstation-class machine (and far more for a high-end graphics oriented system - The CAD guys at my last employer had systems where the display hardware alone cost over ten grand).
So, if for another $100, a tenth the price of the primary display, you can boost productivity by a significant margin, would you skimp on such a small amount?
She's 11th.
;-)
Good, at least someone caught my intention in asking about the top-10.
I notice that the question is "Man vs. Machine". You completely ignore the hundreds of grandmaster chess players that happen to be female.
Name a few.
Any in the top ten?
Didn't think so.
More importantly, the article mentions a match against Kasparov, most certainly a male. Thus, although we can philosophically ponder the bigger question of "human vs machine", the title has no sexism involved, without even resorting to a discussion on the use of the masculine neutral in English.
for the phone company to know in advance of the deadline who is signing up is worth $$$, and if you dial the 800 number, guess who finds out? probably, two phone companies. other permutations too... read the article.
I consider it unfortunate you posted as AC, you have a good point deserving a score better than zero.
However, while I agree with you, consider the long-term (and not all that long, actually, a month or two) difference between giving them your phone number, vs giving them your email address. When this all settles down in a few weeks, the phone number will no longer benefit anyone (though admittedly it may do so until then). Once we start seeing enforcement of the DNC list, however, the email address will not only still exist, but becomes far more valuable, since it belongs to someone that telemarketers can no longer call (and even the information that it belongs to someone on the DNC list has value).
So, I maintain my original stance - Don't use the web form, just call. That way you give out the smallest amount of useful data necessary to get on the list.
the "don't call me, spam me" list.. saying they are collecting millions of email from users and have a dubious privacy policy.
Agreed. So, why do Slashdotters, a group I consider more privacy-aware than most people, sign up through their website? Use the 800 number, and you don't need an email address (and you don't really "give up" any info by telling them your phone number, since they need to know it to block it anyway).
Strange. I agree completely this looks a tad bit unkosher, but a very very simple way around it exists. Use the phone, Luke!
I made it to number "Could not write to counter file: /docs/cgi-bin/Counter/data/dcarpaneto.dat".
Wow.
;-)
Looks like someone runs a counter that dislikes massively overlaped updates.
Why we currently discuss music so much, rather than books or movies, centers on how people use them, as well as what people can reasonably download compared with the time it takes to "use" that download.
With a book, you can find OCR'd copies of just about anything in existance with a carefully worded Google search, and they only weigh a few meg at most. However, reading them then takes at least a few hours per book, and people likely will not read the same thing again for quite a while. Additionally, many people have a strong bias for dead tree versions, and even a printout doesn't really satisfy that bias (not to mention that, on an inkjet, printing out a complete book might well cost more just buying the book in the first place).
With movies, downloading them currently takes too long even over broadband (as someone else mentioned, I can run to Blockbuster and back and have the movie quicker). But even when network speeds and compression techniques make dowloading them in realtime possible, most people don't watch a given movie over and over and over... Yeah, perhaps a regular "Saturday night Brazil" showing among a group of really obsessive friends, but not several times each day.
Music, however... Just the right file size to make a noticeable dent in bandwidth, yet still download in realtime. And the usage pattern differs from books and movies in a very critical way - People can listen to music in the background, and do so repeatedly.
We don't listen to a song once or twice, then let it gather dust in the library. We listen to it, and if we like it, we add it to our playlist. It then gets played every few days, or even a few times each day, for at least a few months.
So although music cannot possibly compare with a book, or even a cheesy Hollywood hit, for depth of content, we "use" only moderately decent music far, far more than even our most beloved books and movies.
I used that very same argument when my colleges lamented the shooting death of the 9 year old here the other day but here 5 year old brother.
Appeal to emotion tends to work poorly with geeks.
As well it should, since it has no logical validity whatsoever, but, just thought you might want to know so you can better match your arguments to your audience in the future.
No reason to give a fuck about unlikely things like that.
Sarcasm aside, no, we shouldn't worry about unlikely things like that. You or I could die tomorrow from having a chunk of airplane tire fall from the sky and hit us, but do you worry about that, too?
Statistics, when properly used, lets us determine how much we should worry about a particular threat. For example, malaria kills more people per year than any other pathogen, meaning we should REALLY feel concerned that studies have found Anopheles spp. mosquitos as far North as upstate New York. OTOH, school shootings kill fewer people each year than lightning strikes. Yeah, they may point to societal problems in general which we should take into consideration, but it forms an insufficient sample to make any drastic changes on a rational basis.
Or to put it into an "emotional" context for you, over a hundred times as many nine-year-olds died last year from car accidents (not even involving drunks) than firearm accidents. Ooooh, spooky, lets all run out and panic over the number of cars on our block.
Statistical correction of the day - the most recent ONDCP/NIDA advert mentioning pot and car accidents states that a third of drivers in accidents that test positive for some drug, test positive for marijuana. Yet, by their own numbers, that means that marijuana users actually have a lower risk for a car accident compared to other drugs, since far more than a third of drug users use marijuana. Gotta love them numbers, NIDA...
then he strongly implies that Verision Sitefinder's drawbacks had a technical solution other than complete negation of what they'd done.
Well, an alternative technical solution does exist, it just wouldn't put money in Verisign's pockets...
Instead of returning basically an ad, they could instead compare the result against a table of, say, the top 1000 domains to see if they have a close match (such as off by one character). If so, return that as a likely misspelling.
This would solve two problems with one solution - It would undo most of the damage caused by resolving everything to sitefinder, and it would make squatting on anything currently popular quite a lot more difficult.
If Linux becomes more popular, media recognition and increasingly "dumbed down" distros will make it a good platform virus writers.
No.
The very fact that Unix-like OSs have a concept of a "root" account (which the Windows "equivalent", "administrator", does not even come CLOSE to matching in terms of actual separation of permissions), makes it all but invincible to virii.
Yes, if Linux becomes popular enough for virus authors to target it, we'll see a round of trojans using root exploits - But unlike Windows exploits, very few of these exist to start with, and they will (and do) get fixed within a few hours of discovery.
Actually, for that reason, I think more Linux virii would help Linux security overall, as it would expose those root exploits faster than we can discover them normally. Yeah, a few boxes would suffer, but the community as a whole would benefit.
This could really cut out the relevance of application support behind an OS. Any application not supported by your current OS could be built in with the app and booted separately almost like a Knoppix CD.
Ah, someone else who sees the bigger picture, rather than the trivial idea of making virtualization just a bit faster...
Rather than viewing a program build as bound to a particular OS, each program can act as its own OS. I see this as a fairly logical extension to the idea of multitasking in general - The OS no longer needs to multitask, because the CPU does it explicitly.
This wouldn't benefit every program, and in fact would hurt programs (like IE and Word, to use the parent article's own example) that already work well together. For any application that doesn't need to interact with other programs on the system, however, this would increase both reliability and ease of programming. Sick of Windows' hideous system calls needed to do seemingly simple tasks? Use an open source microkernel and let your program run as its own OS. Sick of requiring OS support for certain hardware features (such as MMX on the PII)? You no longer need it.
This will do a lot to improve PC stability in general, and I look forward to it. To all those who ask "why", or only see it as faster virtualization, I say, "look beyond Windows vs Linux".
Should it be necessary that they inform you of the lack of full speed utilization?
If Dell sells you a PC with a "Pentium 4 3.2GHz", would you feel a tad bit peeved to discover that, while it actually does have a 3.2GHz P4 in it, they chose a noname chipset that only clocks it at 800MHz?
Because, that would satisfy your condition - It has the advertized part in it, but only clocks it at 25% of its rated maximum.
Yes, people expect (and should expect) a product to make full use of the standards it supposedly meets. If companies only wants to bother with an allowed subset of a standard, I consider it nothing short of fraud to not explicitly say, on the outside of any packaging, that it does not meet the entire spec.