There are already stories that when Verizon installs FIOS, they conveniently remove the copper wire connection that has served you so faithfully for sixty years. If you ask them to leave it in place they are supposed to honor the request, but other stories suggest that if you aren't physically present when they install the service that request is apt to get overlooked.
The ultrareliable telephone service the U. S. has known for about a century is going away. It just doesn't make much money for the carriers, and they seem to be systematically trying to nibble away at it within the limits of what regulation allows them.
You might as well decide that it's a good bargain to swap the ability to get help in an emergency for the ability to buy thousands of cable channels and overpriced locked-down video downloads, because the FCC has already accepted that bargain on your behalf.
...he'll come up with some common-sense restatement.
If the PR guy is smart, I'd suggest a factual statement of what occurred that simply omits any opinion on whether or not there was "a fire" which does not seem to be of any importance.
For example, something like, "Our technician cut a wire, causing a short-circuit, sparks, and smoke visible to passers-by. Verizon called the Needham fire department was called immediately. The technician is OK. The problem was quickly contained. Nothing outside the electrical panel ignited. Verizon takes full responsibility and will pay for repair of the minor damage that resulted."
A great time to have done this would have been slightly before the silly story got posted to Slashdot.
Sometimes the best spin is no spin. In fact, make that "often." In fact, make that "always." Honesty is the best policy.
Yeah, right. And when GemStar decided to go out of the eBook business, they kept their DRM servers in place... for about a year. Then they shut them down.
The natural lifespan of a book is well over a century. The natural lifespan of a vinyl LP is at least half a century, and equipment for playing one (and digitizing one) is still readily available. Then natural lifespan of a CD gives every indication of being equally long.
The natural lifespan of anything with DRM seems to be a couple of years.
This is very cool, and I wonder how similar it is to what the brain does with respect to blind spots?
For those who don't know: each eye has a surprisingly large blind spot at the place where the optic nerve enters the eye. At reading distance, in the right eye, it's about four or five inches to the right of the spot at which you are gaving, and many textbooks and "fun with optical illusions"-type books will have a diagram... like the one on this web page... and directions for finding it. The blind spot is much larger than the dot on that web page, incidentally. If you explore, you'll find that... at the distance at which the dot disappears... the blind spot is nearly an inch wide and an inch-and-a-half high.
Even allowing for the fact that each eye has the blind spot in a different place so they fill in for each other, once you discover how big the blind spot is... and how relatively close to your position of gaze it is... you'll be astonished that almost nobody notices it until it is pointed out.
The brain does something more or less like filling in the blind spot. I say "more or less like" because it is very hard to answer the question "what do you see in the blind spot." For example, if you hold a computer keyboard at the right distance so that you're looking at the "G" key and the "K" key is in your blind spot, what do you see? Certainly not a black spot, certainly not a white spot, certainly not a "hole" or emptiness. Probably you have an impression of computer keys. Do you see a letter K? Certainly not, yet somehow you don't see a blank key, either.
Incidentally, I used to suffer from migraine headaches, and one of the symptoms for some people is the formation of blind spots which can be even larger than the "normal" blind spot, and can appear in central vision. One one memorable occasion, I was looking at the cover of a hardbound book, and I can tell you that when I looked at the title, my perception was the stamped, printed title disappeared, yet I would have sworn in a court of law that I still saw the cloth texture extending across the blind spot.
Although he does not specifically refer to it as a migraine illusion, I believe Lewis Carroll was known to be a migraineur, and in Chapter V of Through the Looking-Glass, "Wool and Water," Alice notices that "The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things -- but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite, empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold." Any migraineur who experiences central blind spots will recognize this description.
Hays and Efros' system--relatively-simple algorithm operating on a large database of previously-seen images--seems to me to be the sorta-kinda way in which one could imagine the brain working.
Fidelity Investments is suing the Bureau of Printing and Engraving over its use of Fidelity's distinctive "pyramid-and-eye" motif on the dollar bill...
Prudential Financial is demanding that the U. K, owners of the Rock of Gibraltar,remove it, reshape it, or paint Prudential's name on it......and Subaru wants NASA to rearrange the Pleiades.
Oh, boy! I can hardly wait to decorate my website with all of these new elements! I haven't been so excited since the day I gave my entire home page the blink attribute!
Now all I want to know is, where can I get a spiffy "Enhanced for HTML 5" GIF to put on my web page so that everyone will know I'm hip and up to date?
What would you expect HP to say? "We believe there is a link between printer emissions and a public health risk?" I give HP enough credit to think that if they believed there was such a link, they would have done something about it... so by definition, since they haven't done anything about it they don't believe there's a problem.
And in further news, the CEO of Altria issued this statement: "Based on our own testing, Altria knows that many variables can affect the outcome of tests for cigarette smoke particulates. Although Altria is not aware of all of the specific methodologies used in the study, based on what we've seen in the report -- as well as our own work in this area -- we do not believe there is a link between our cigarettes and lung cancer."
This is so certain to fail that I really have to wonder what Microsoft's motivation could possibly be for trying it.
All the "mom-n-pop" nontechnical users I know hate Clippy, and Clippy is at least genuinely trying to help you.
They hate pop-ups and pop-unders on the Internet. They'd never buy or install a pop-up-blocker as such, but they really do discover and use whatever pop-up-blocker tools come free or preinstalled with whatever they're using.
Listening to the radio or watching television is a passive experience, and people are willing to let the ads roll into their benumbed brains. Using a computer is a participatory/em> experience and folks' reaction to be interrupted when they're in the middle of trying to get something done is completely different from their reaction to advertising in a passive medium.
If Microsoft thinks that deliberately irritating their customers will win them over and encourage them to buy less irritating software, they're nuts. This is a situation where they should be using focus groups, which would set them straight in a hurry.
Unless, as I said at the beginning, this initiative is intended to fail.
Actually, there are lots of reasons for believing that despite appearances all of these companies are undervalued and would be worth buying at two, three, maybe four times their current stock price. I personally believe everything Glassman and Hassett wrote in "Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market." They had it right, it's just going to take a little longer.
See, It's what's technically called a paradigm shift. None of the old rules apply. The secret to wealth without work has actually been found this time. It's as sound as tulips, international postal reply coupons, and Florida real estate.
We don't want "sophistication," we want reliability.
And since they are making the comparison... just how reliable are fingerprints, really?
True, a character in Mark Twain's 1893 novel Pudd'n'head Wilson tells a court
"Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified -- and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph canImage available not be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and mutations of time. This signature is not his face -- age can change that beyond recognition; it is not his hair, for that can fall out; it is not his height, for duplicates of that exist; it is not his form, for duplicates of that exist also, whereas this signature is each man's very own -- there is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe! This autograph consists of the delicate lines or corrugations with which Nature marks the insides of the hands and the soles of the feet."
and ever since Mark Twain said so everyone has believed it, but that doesn't necessarily make it true.
Are these sent by certified mail? Does the RIAA need proof of delivery to pursue their lawsuit successfully? Or can they just go ahead and sue, without the student getting any warning?
All the article says is that "The University will not, however, forward students the RIAA pre-litigation letter, which gives them the opportunity to settle out of court."
How does this help the student? That's a genuine question, not a rhetorical question. Anyone know the answer?
I am always leery of articles that do not disclose this early in the article. This article eventually says:
"The study was funded by the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme, a body which is itself funded by industry and government."
So, who exactly is the Mobile Telecommunication and Health Research programme? If this were the United States and the study had to do with health effects of nuclear power plants, and if "business and government" meant, say, the EPRI and the "government" agency were the NRC, I'd be very skeptical. On the other hand, if the government agency were the National Institutes of Health, I'd give it a lot of credence.
The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme has a website,, but I can't judge from it whether this is real science or not.
I view with alarm the increasing use of "artificial intelligence" to filter, screen, or otherwise judge human-generated material. In this case it's not enormously important, but it's part of a growing trend.
The issue is lack of responsibility or accountability, because at a certain level of complexity, it is no longer practical to understand or explain the basis of individual decision. The company can just say "the computer did it."
A few years back there was serious consideration being given to using neural nets or something like that to make judgements on loan applications. IIRC the proposed way of handling some sort of legal issues regarding accountability was to add to the system a subsystem that would automatically test the effect of hypothetical changes in the applicant's income. Thus the company could always say "this application was rejected because the applicant's income was too low, and would have been accepted if the applicant had earned X thousand more a year." Raising the question, of course, of whether this was the real reason. Or what it means to talk about "the real reason" in the case of a decision made by a neural net.
In the case of a neural net made of meat, it's possible to cross-examine the net and attempt to find out whether illegal bias played a role in the decision. In the case of an AI neural net, there may be bias built-in... but there's no way to ask the neural net itself about this, and unless the programmers did it deliberately and consciously and left a paper trail, it's pretty hard to find out about it.
Isn't it a little premature for Microsoft to be working on the next Windows release? Wouldn't it be more seemly for Windows to _finish_ VIsta first, i.e. fixing the big problems with it and delivering all the stuff that was promised to be in it (in the days when it was still called Longhorn?)
Evidence that learning/benefit ratio is too low
on
Five Finger Keyboards
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I once considered buying a used stenotyping machine--it was on sale for $15 IIRC. It was in working condition. I could press combination any combination of keys I liked, all at the same time, and it would enter them all together in a horizontal row across a piece of something like adding-machine tape, then advance the tape to the next line. The ribbon even had ink and everything. It was just so cool I was tempted, just for the joy of possessing one.
The stenotype machine was, invented in 1830, still in production, and still in use by court reporters who can attain up to 300 wpm with it. In contrast, the record sustained typing speed for a Dvorak typist is 150 wpm.
The fact that stenotype machines have been around for well over a century and that nobody but court reporters use them... and that when Doug Engelbart and his group invented the mouse, it was only intended to be used only in conjunction with a chording keyboard... and the fact that most modern keyboards actually allow a form of chording (shift, control, alt, and a letter) but there are no common hacks to use this to increase typing speed... strongly suggest to me that the learning/benefit ratio is way too low for any scheme of this kind to be adopted.
If I recall correctly there was a glove-like chording keyboard marketed a few years ago, whose designers had even devised a clever chording scheme in which the fingers you used sorta-kinda had a relationship to the shape of the letter, and a number of reviewers praised it and said they were able to achieve facility with it in a week or so. It obviously didn't take the world by storm.
Every single one of these format wars is between two formats that were, in fact, reasonable comparable. This is all war stories and middle-aged nostalgia. As Pete Seeger put it (in his added stanza to "Both Sides, Now") "Something's lost and something's gained in living every day."
Each of the defeated formats had some nice stuff about it, but it's not as if there was anything so terrible about their passing, other than angst for those who bought into the orphaned formats. Some of his comments are just weird. For example, he praises 8-track tapes basically because of its being marginally easier to find individual songs on them... which is true only if you're comparing it to cassettes, not to CDs.
Yeahyeahyeah and what's more a B24 Liberator was soooo much better than a B17 Flying Fortress, the U. S. should have adopted PAL instead of NTSC, and a Pickett and Eckel slide rule was way better than a Keuffel and Esser.
I mean, it's not like Cinerama. Cinerama was great, so much better than CInemaScope or IMAX or any of the other wide-screen processes, and it just blew away anything you think you've seen on HDTV. Cinerama really mattered. The world would actually have been a better place if CInerama had won the format wars. In all likelihood, if only Cinerama had survived, movies would be better, the Beatles would never have broken up, and the Arabs and Israelis would have put aside their differences, united by the joy of watching widescreen movies.
...it will emerge that the pornographic material the kids were browsing was J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," Titian's and Disney's "The Little Mermaid."
I wish I had a nickel for every jerk who has instantly pointed the finger at Apple for any IT issue in which Macintoshes were involved.
Or described the NuBus "proprietary" and the AT bus and Micro Channel as "standard."
Or claimed that the ASCII standard defines CR+LF as the proper character combination for a line break.
Or asked me to "go to the 'START' button" on my Mac and, when I said I didn't have one because I was on a Mac, told me that Macs weren't supported even though their website says that they are.
...they'll find another self-serving dubious metric to avoid facing the truth.
"U. S. research articles consistently rated higher than European articles on the Flesch Reading Ease scale."
"U. S. research articles have been shown to be higher in 'eyeball stickiness.' Readers spend more time per page, go back and read each page more often, and 'click through' to generate more reprint requests than European articles."
"The NAS reported that although U. S. research failed to meet all eighteen of its benchmarks, it had made satisfactory progress toward achieving eight of them."
It needs to have a spiffy name like Extreme HTML or HTML-Pro or Sup-R-HTML or HOT!ml.
Or... I have it. Call it HTML 2.0.
Bother the fact that that version number has already been used, everyone knows that the purpose of version numbers is not to identify sequence but to communicate a marketing message and what could be better than an implication that it's "the HTML for Web 2.0?"
Is there a regular market in these things? Or is this the same machine going through cycles of spiffing up and reselling? Either way, I'm not sure every Enigma that goes on sale is "stuff that matters."
Slashdot Mirror
There are already stories that when Verizon installs FIOS, they conveniently remove the copper wire connection that has served you so faithfully for sixty years. If you ask them to leave it in place they are supposed to honor the request, but other stories suggest that if you aren't physically present when they install the service that request is apt to get overlooked.
The ultrareliable telephone service the U. S. has known for about a century is going away. It just doesn't make much money for the carriers, and they seem to be systematically trying to nibble away at it within the limits of what regulation allows them.
You might as well decide that it's a good bargain to swap the ability to get help in an emergency for the ability to buy thousands of cable channels and overpriced locked-down video downloads, because the FCC has already accepted that bargain on your behalf.
It has nothing to do directly with sex appeal.
Warriors shave their beard and cut their hair short so that, in hand-to-hand combat, it is hard for opponents to grab their hair.
(Of course, many chicks go for warriors... or the warrior "look.")
...he'll come up with some common-sense restatement.
If the PR guy is smart, I'd suggest a factual statement of what occurred that simply omits any opinion on whether or not there was "a fire" which does not seem to be of any importance.
For example, something like, "Our technician cut a wire, causing a short-circuit, sparks, and smoke visible to passers-by. Verizon called the Needham fire department was called immediately. The technician is OK. The problem was quickly contained. Nothing outside the electrical panel ignited. Verizon takes full responsibility and will pay for repair of the minor damage that resulted."
A great time to have done this would have been slightly before the silly story got posted to Slashdot.
Sometimes the best spin is no spin. In fact, make that "often." In fact, make that "always." Honesty is the best policy.
...check my email. Be right back.
Yeah, right. And when GemStar decided to go out of the eBook business, they kept their DRM servers in place... for about a year. Then they shut them down.
The natural lifespan of a book is well over a century. The natural lifespan of a vinyl LP is at least half a century, and equipment for playing one (and digitizing one) is still readily available. Then natural lifespan of a CD gives every indication of being equally long.
The natural lifespan of anything with DRM seems to be a couple of years.
This is very cool, and I wonder how similar it is to what the brain does with respect to blind spots?
For those who don't know: each eye has a surprisingly large blind spot at the place where the optic nerve enters the eye. At reading distance, in the right eye, it's about four or five inches to the right of the spot at which you are gaving, and many textbooks and "fun with optical illusions"-type books will have a diagram... like the one on this web page... and directions for finding it. The blind spot is much larger than the dot on that web page, incidentally. If you explore, you'll find that... at the distance at which the dot disappears... the blind spot is nearly an inch wide and an inch-and-a-half high.
Even allowing for the fact that each eye has the blind spot in a different place so they fill in for each other, once you discover how big the blind spot is... and how relatively close to your position of gaze it is... you'll be astonished that almost nobody notices it until it is pointed out.
The brain does something more or less like filling in the blind spot. I say "more or less like" because it is very hard to answer the question "what do you see in the blind spot." For example, if you hold a computer keyboard at the right distance so that you're looking at the "G" key and the "K" key is in your blind spot, what do you see? Certainly not a black spot, certainly not a white spot, certainly not a "hole" or emptiness. Probably you have an impression of computer keys. Do you see a letter K? Certainly not, yet somehow you don't see a blank key, either.
Incidentally, I used to suffer from migraine headaches, and one of the symptoms for some people is the formation of blind spots which can be even larger than the "normal" blind spot, and can appear in central vision. One one memorable occasion, I was looking at the cover of a hardbound book, and I can tell you that when I looked at the title, my perception was the stamped, printed title disappeared, yet I would have sworn in a court of law that I still saw the cloth texture extending across the blind spot.
Although he does not specifically refer to it as a migraine illusion, I believe Lewis Carroll was known to be a migraineur, and in Chapter V of Through the Looking-Glass, "Wool and Water," Alice notices that "The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things -- but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite, empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold." Any migraineur who experiences central blind spots will recognize this description.
Hays and Efros' system--relatively-simple algorithm operating on a large database of previously-seen images--seems to me to be the sorta-kinda way in which one could imagine the brain working.
I wonder if there's any way to test this?
Fidelity Investments is suing the Bureau of Printing and Engraving over its use of Fidelity's distinctive "pyramid-and-eye" motif on the dollar bill...
...and Subaru wants NASA to rearrange the Pleiades.
Prudential Financial is demanding that the U. K, owners of the Rock of Gibraltar,remove it, reshape it, or paint Prudential's name on it...
Oh, boy! I can hardly wait to decorate my website with all of these new elements! I haven't been so excited since the day I gave my entire home page the blink attribute!
Now all I want to know is, where can I get a spiffy "Enhanced for HTML 5" GIF to put on my web page so that everyone will know I'm hip and up to date?
What would you expect HP to say? "We believe there is a link between printer emissions and a public health risk?" I give HP enough credit to think that if they believed there was such a link, they would have done something about it... so by definition, since they haven't done anything about it they don't believe there's a problem.
And in further news, the CEO of Altria issued this statement: "Based on our own testing, Altria knows that many variables can affect the outcome of tests for cigarette smoke particulates. Although Altria is not aware of all of the specific methodologies used in the study, based on what we've seen in the report -- as well as our own work in this area -- we do not believe there is a link between our cigarettes and lung cancer."
This is so certain to fail that I really have to wonder what Microsoft's motivation could possibly be for trying it.
All the "mom-n-pop" nontechnical users I know hate Clippy, and Clippy is at least genuinely trying to help you.
They hate pop-ups and pop-unders on the Internet. They'd never buy or install a pop-up-blocker as such, but they really do discover and use whatever pop-up-blocker tools come free or preinstalled with whatever they're using.
Listening to the radio or watching television is a passive experience, and people are willing to let the ads roll into their benumbed brains. Using a computer is a participatory/em> experience and folks' reaction to be interrupted when they're in the middle of trying to get something done is completely different from their reaction to advertising in a passive medium.
If Microsoft thinks that deliberately irritating their customers will win them over and encourage them to buy less irritating software, they're nuts. This is a situation where they should be using focus groups, which would set them straight in a hurry.
Unless, as I said at the beginning, this initiative is intended to fail.
Actually, there are lots of reasons for believing that despite appearances all of these companies are undervalued and would be worth buying at two, three, maybe four times their current stock price. I personally believe everything Glassman and Hassett wrote in "Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market." They had it right, it's just going to take a little longer.
See, It's what's technically called a paradigm shift. None of the old rules apply. The secret to wealth without work has actually been found this time. It's as sound as tulips, international postal reply coupons, and Florida real estate.
Buddy, can you s'paradigm?
We don't want "sophistication," we want reliability.
And since they are making the comparison... just how reliable are fingerprints, really?
True, a character in Mark Twain's 1893 novel Pudd'n'head Wilson tells a court
"Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified -- and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph canImage available not be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and mutations of time. This signature is not his face -- age can change that beyond recognition; it is not his hair, for that can fall out; it is not his height, for duplicates of that exist; it is not his form, for duplicates of that exist also, whereas this signature is each man's very own -- there is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe! This autograph consists of the delicate lines or corrugations with which Nature marks the insides of the hands and the soles of the feet."
and ever since Mark Twain said so everyone has believed it, but that doesn't necessarily make it true.
..."carbon paper."
Are these sent by certified mail? Does the RIAA need proof of delivery to pursue their lawsuit successfully? Or can they just go ahead and sue, without the student getting any warning?
All the article says is that "The University will not, however, forward students the RIAA pre-litigation letter, which gives them the opportunity to settle out of court."
How does this help the student? That's a genuine question, not a rhetorical question. Anyone know the answer?
I am always leery of articles that do not disclose this early in the article. This article eventually says:
"The study was funded by the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme, a body which is itself funded by industry and government."
So, who exactly is the Mobile Telecommunication and Health Research programme? If this were the United States and the study had to do with health effects of nuclear power plants, and if "business and government" meant, say, the EPRI and the "government" agency were the NRC, I'd be very skeptical. On the other hand, if the government agency were the National Institutes of Health, I'd give it a lot of credence.
The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme has a website,, but I can't judge from it whether this is real science or not.
I view with alarm the increasing use of "artificial intelligence" to filter, screen, or otherwise judge human-generated material. In this case it's not enormously important, but it's part of a growing trend.
The issue is lack of responsibility or accountability, because at a certain level of complexity, it is no longer practical to understand or explain the basis of individual decision. The company can just say "the computer did it."
A few years back there was serious consideration being given to using neural nets or something like that to make judgements on loan applications. IIRC the proposed way of handling some sort of legal issues regarding accountability was to add to the system a subsystem that would automatically test the effect of hypothetical changes in the applicant's income. Thus the company could always say "this application was rejected because the applicant's income was too low, and would have been accepted if the applicant had earned X thousand more a year." Raising the question, of course, of whether this was the real reason. Or what it means to talk about "the real reason" in the case of a decision made by a neural net.
In the case of a neural net made of meat, it's possible to cross-examine the net and attempt to find out whether illegal bias played a role in the decision. In the case of an AI neural net, there may be bias built-in... but there's no way to ask the neural net itself about this, and unless the programmers did it deliberately and consciously and left a paper trail, it's pretty hard to find out about it.
Isn't it a little premature for Microsoft to be working on the next Windows release? Wouldn't it be more seemly for Windows to _finish_ VIsta first, i.e. fixing the big problems with it and delivering all the stuff that was promised to be in it (in the days when it was still called Longhorn?)
I once considered buying a used stenotyping machine--it was on sale for $15 IIRC. It was in working condition. I could press combination any combination of keys I liked, all at the same time, and it would enter them all together in a horizontal row across a piece of something like adding-machine tape, then advance the tape to the next line. The ribbon even had ink and everything. It was just so cool I was tempted, just for the joy of possessing one.
The stenotype machine was, invented in 1830, still in production, and still in use by court reporters who can attain up to 300 wpm with it. In contrast, the record sustained typing speed for a Dvorak typist is 150 wpm.
The fact that stenotype machines have been around for well over a century and that nobody but court reporters use them... and that when Doug Engelbart and his group invented the mouse, it was only intended to be used only in conjunction with a chording keyboard... and the fact that most modern keyboards actually allow a form of chording (shift, control, alt, and a letter) but there are no common hacks to use this to increase typing speed... strongly suggest to me that the learning/benefit ratio is way too low for any scheme of this kind to be adopted.
If I recall correctly there was a glove-like chording keyboard marketed a few years ago, whose designers had even devised a clever chording scheme in which the fingers you used sorta-kinda had a relationship to the shape of the letter, and a number of reviewers praised it and said they were able to achieve facility with it in a week or so. It obviously didn't take the world by storm.
Every single one of these format wars is between two formats that were, in fact, reasonable comparable. This is all war stories and middle-aged nostalgia. As Pete Seeger put it (in his added stanza to "Both Sides, Now") "Something's lost and something's gained in living every day."
Each of the defeated formats had some nice stuff about it, but it's not as if there was anything so terrible about their passing, other than angst for those who bought into the orphaned formats. Some of his comments are just weird. For example, he praises 8-track tapes basically because of its being marginally easier to find individual songs on them... which is true only if you're comparing it to cassettes, not to CDs.
Yeahyeahyeah and what's more a B24 Liberator was soooo much better than a B17 Flying Fortress, the U. S. should have adopted PAL instead of NTSC, and a Pickett and Eckel slide rule was way better than a Keuffel and Esser.
I mean, it's not like Cinerama. Cinerama was great, so much better than CInemaScope or IMAX or any of the other wide-screen processes, and it just blew away anything you think you've seen on HDTV. Cinerama really mattered. The world would actually have been a better place if CInerama had won the format wars. In all likelihood, if only Cinerama had survived, movies would be better, the Beatles would never have broken up, and the Arabs and Israelis would have put aside their differences, united by the joy of watching widescreen movies.
Sorry, Disney... I meant J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," Titian'sVenus d'Urbino and Disney's "The Little Mermaid."
...it will emerge that the pornographic material the kids were browsing was J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," Titian's and Disney's "The Little Mermaid."
I wish I had a nickel for every jerk who has instantly pointed the finger at Apple for any IT issue in which Macintoshes were involved.
Or described the NuBus "proprietary" and the AT bus and Micro Channel as "standard."
Or claimed that the ASCII standard defines CR+LF as the proper character combination for a line break.
Or asked me to "go to the 'START' button" on my Mac and, when I said I didn't have one because I was on a Mac, told me that Macs weren't supported even though their website says that they are.
...they'll find another self-serving dubious metric to avoid facing the truth.
"U. S. research articles consistently rated higher than European articles on the Flesch Reading Ease scale."
"U. S. research articles have been shown to be higher in 'eyeball stickiness.' Readers spend more time per page, go back and read each page more often, and 'click through' to generate more reprint requests than European articles."
"The NAS reported that although U. S. research failed to meet all eighteen of its benchmarks, it had made satisfactory progress toward achieving eight of them."
What are these people, engineers or something?
It needs to have a spiffy name like Extreme HTML or HTML-Pro or Sup-R-HTML or HOT!ml.
Or... I have it. Call it HTML 2.0.
Bother the fact that that version number has already been used, everyone knows that the purpose of version numbers is not to identify sequence but to communicate a marketing message and what could be better than an implication that it's "the HTML for Web 2.0?"
...Enigma machines were offered in 2003?, and offered on eBay in 2006."
Is there a regular market in these things? Or is this the same machine going through cycles of spiffing up and reselling? Either way, I'm not sure every Enigma that goes on sale is "stuff that matters."