No doubt, just as aircraft companies test the calculations on their plane by putting hydraulics jacks under the wings of a prototype and forcing them upward to see if they break when the calculations say they are supposed to.
And, yeah, a plane is a pretty good Faraday cage and it isn't grounded and so forth.
But if a plane isn't quite what it was when it was new (think Aloha Airlines Flight 243), or if the storm is a little stronger than the one the engineers planned for, or the pilots are more tired then they are supposed to be... well, the margin of safety has to be wider flying through clear weather than flying through a storm.
The Audio Home Recording Act of 1991 gave consumers the right to copy CDs as long as they were copied onto specially-encoded blank media ("Music CD-Rs" or "Audio CD-Rs") whose price included a fee paid to the music industry.
I owned a home audio recorder (computerless CD copier) that fell within the scope of that act. I bought the prescribed media. It worked quite well for a number of years. It used a technical mechanism called SCCS which sounds very similar to this "managed copying." It allowed first-generation copies from original media, but would not copy the copies.
Then the music publishers came out with copy-protected CDs. My home audio recorder would not copy these CDs. Basically, the SCCS mechanism cut in, insisting that the copy limit had already been reached and that further copying was prohibited.
It was all well and good that the law gave me the right to copy them, and that I paid for every copy I ever made (in the form of the extra costs of the "music CD-Rs"). But there was basically no way I could take advantage of this right.
I made numerous calls, send emails, and letters to the CD publisher (UMI) and the recorder vendor (TEAC) trying to resolve the issue. I was never able to get satisfaction, beyond returning the CD for a refund.
It's the usual consumer problem. These guys were breaking the law, but it's awfully hard to stop a big company from cheating consumers if they only cheat each individual consumer by a small amount.
What's to stop the DVD publishers from making this "managed copying" available for a while, then using technical means to renege on the terms a few years later?
What's the good of a reasonably fair-sounding deal if David has no way to hold Goliath to the terms of the deal?
I do not like the idea of anything that give airlines an incentive to fly through storms.
There is a certain amount of hubris in the idea that we have tamed nature to that extent. It is not always obvious where the downdrafts are. Tornadoes, after all, begin inside clouds and are invisible until they start to pick up moisture, dirt, houses, etc.
On several occasions I've been on commercial flights that were hit by lightning while in flight. The times it happened, it was no big deal... but it shouldn't be taken for granted that it is never a big deal. Particularly with the increasing dependence of basic aircraft flight systems on electronics.
Strictly ignorant lay opinion here, but I'd think it would be OK according to the informal fair-use guidelines widely referenced by universities and libraries, e.g. the University of Texas system.
"Factor 1: Character of the use:" seems to me that in their first column it's nonprofit, and arguably educational. In the middle, it's criticism, commentary, and most bodaciously "transformative."
"Factor 2: What is the nature of the work to be used?": Imaginative and published, somewhere in the "doesn't tip the balance" part of University of Texas' scale.
"Factor 3: How much of the work will you use?" Only a small amount is being used for each work. I'm not sure what the total amount used from any individual work is, but it's tiny.
"Factor 4: If this kind of use were widespread, what effect would it have on the market for the original or for permissions?" I find it impossible to believe that a person with a copy of this video would show it to their kids in lieu of any of the Disney films from which the clips were taken. And I don't believe the Disney organization is currently making any money at all licensing clips for use in videos like this one.
...he might have married Joshua Speed instead of Mary Todd. And, as a result, he might have been unelectable in 1860 or 2008. And might not have had a political career. And might not have been assassinated.
But if HIV had been available, he might have gotten AIDS.
But if acyclovir had been available, he might not have died from it.
But if nuclear weapons had been available, the Civil War might have turned into a nuclear holocaust and he might had died from that.
But if global warming had been available, the United States might have been uninhabitable and he might have been an Englishman.
"If the devices can be engineered to conveniently and robustly support multiple functions, what rational reason would you have to oppose it?" OK, serious answer:
I wouldn't. But it's a heck of a big "if." And I don't believe for a nanosecond that Microsoft's proposal stems from someone waking up at 3 a.m. saying "Aha!" with some brilliant human factors or industrial design innovation. It stems from Microsoft making all their money from Windows and trying to use it for everything.
The big thing to notice in the article is that Mundie said that "software needs to be designed in context, with a knowledge of the devices around them. Data must be scaled to the server or phone, while the data must be able to be interacted with via keynoard, pen or even gestures." He didn't say Microsoft has done this. He didn't say Microsoft knows how to do this. He saids it needs to be done before Fone+ is practical. Absolutely right. And I can have my helicar as soon as someone invents Furloy, too.
Nobody has come close to solving the cognitive problems of multifunction devices yet. Last time I looked, Staples was selling plenty of calculators.
Nobody has solved the engineering tradeoff problems yet. Would you use the camera in your cell phone for your vacation pictures? Can you imagine hiring a wedding photographer showing up to take the pictures with a cell phone?
Can you imagine an operating room with nothing in the instrument tray but a Leatherman tool with 250 different, sterile blades?
Even the Swiss Army knife has issues. All the tools in it really work. But even there, though, I can't apply as much force to a Phillips head screw as I can with a real screwdriver, because the screwdriver blade is offcenter and the knife body isn't a very comfortable handle. And I sometimes open the wrong tool, because it's difficult to tell one shiny edge from another. How about you?
Arrange for some convincing actors armed with high-quality toy weapons to threaten the idiot teachers who did this, in some time and place where they aren't expecting it. See how "educational" they find it.
You know, some decades ago... before Columbine, before the year 2000 incident when what's his name shot coworkers at Edgewater Technology, and I believe before incidents in post offices made the phrase "going postal" part of the language... on one Halloween I thought it would be funny to wear a Halloween mask at work. It was a corpse-like mask that fit over my head. Apart from the mask, I was wearing my ordinary work clothes. I sort of scrooged down behind my computer monitor. I waited for a couple of coworkers to walk buy, then slowly stood up, saying nothing.
Let me tell you, I was completely taken aback by the intensity of the moment of terror that evoked in my coworkers. The unspoken thought was that people don't wear masks unless they're robbing a bank, or something. I immediately took of the mask, apologized profusely, never did it again. I wasn't fired, lectured, or disciplined, but those coworkers were cool toward me for some time. I realized I'd made a serious goof.
They were adults. It was Halloween. I did not have any weapons. I didn't jump out. I didn't say anything: not "Boo!", not "stick 'em up," or anything suggesing violence.
And for a fraction of a second--my colleagues were in fear for their lives. Only a fraction of a second, but that's the effect of doing something like that.
I can't begin to imagine the effects of a staged mock attack by adults on eleven-year-old-kids lasting for five minutes. That's not a short period of time to be in fear for one's life.
I wonder if those researchers ever saw a 1944 book entitled "The Educations of T. C. Mits," by Hugh and Miriam Lieber? Listings at Amazon,and at abebooks
It was intended to popularize mathematical concepts for laymen ("the celebrated man in the street," hence T. C. Mits), and it used exactly that style of formatting. As I recall, the introduction said something along the lines of
This is not
free verse
but is simply
an way to make reading easier.
It seems they were right.
Keep this book in mind as prior art if they try to patent the technique!
Yet another overreaction to social change. It's different, it's scary because... it involves computers. The problem has existed ever since the first Egyptian wrote a love letter on papyrus.
Nothing new here. People will worry about it a bit every time a new problem breaks, then they'll forget and start committing imprudent things to electronic storage just as they always committed them to paper.
Why, very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia deals with this very problem:
"Your Majesty, as I understand, became entangled with this young person, wrote her some compromising letters, and is now desirous of getting those letters back."
"Precisely so. But how--"
"Was there a secret marriage?"
"None."
"No legal papers or certificates?"
"None."
"Then I fail to follow your Majesty. If this young person should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity?"
"There is the writing."
"Pooh, pooh! Forgery."
"My private note-paper."
"Stolen."
"My own seal."
"Imitated."
"My photograph."
"Bought."
"We were both in the photograph."
"Oh, dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an indiscretion."
...of the very piece of CR-39 plastic that detected the atomic particles. And it even has a genuine Roosevelt dime next to it. What more proof could you want?
No, wait, it's only a piece of CR-39 plastic like the one that detected the atomic particles. Never mind.
That's the usual fly in the ointment with backups. Backups are difficult and expensive. Management always thinks they can make them easy and cheap by buying some automated solution. But the main cost of the backup is regularly testing the backups... which can only be done properly by doing a full restore... which requires available disk space equal to the size of the backup, and hours of operator time.
Story #1. Fortune 500 company. Lost some source. Big brouhaha. Edict went out: all files are to be backed up to diskettes and the diskettes sent to offsite storage which the management had contracted for with an outside firm. It took a lot of extra time, but people did it. After about two years, an important server with source code for a major product crashed. Developers tried to get the source back from offsite storage. It turns out that nobody at any point had taken any responsibility for cataloging, identifying, or indexing the diskettes. The diskettes might as well have not been labelled: the developers couldn't identify what diskettes were needed, and the offsite storage firm couldn't have retrieved them if they had.
Story #2. Medium-size scientific research organization with a Digital 11/70 running RSTS. Enlightened manager pays operator overtime pay to stay late three nights a week and do backups. Backups are performed with the "verify" option enabled. Tapes are placed in a fire-resistant tape vault every night. But no actual restores are performed. Database (Oracle, in the days when Oracle Corporation's name was still Relational Systems, Inc). is corrupted. A restore is attempted. It transpires that this version of Oracle uses the maximum record length for its files, which happens to be 65,536 bytes, and the Digital-supplied backup-restore utility... you guessed it... has a bug with records of that length. Yep. Writes 0 bytes, verifies 0 bytes.
Story #3. I worked at a place that recommended that individual developers perform individual backups using a cartridge tape system and some standard PC software. I set it up. There were two "verify" options. One used the cartridge system's read-after-write feature to read every block as it was written. The second performed the entire backup, then verified the entire backup in a second pass. Took twice as long, of course. I opted for the second method. The problem was: more than half the time, the verify would report one or two errors. And for some reason, probably efficiency of use of the tape, it didn't write file by file, it munged them into blocks. And it didn't even report the names of the files affected. Just "2 errors were encountered" or something like that. So, when that happened, I didn't see that a rational person had any alterative except to perform the whole backup again. And more than half the time, it would report a couple of errors the second time, and...
When I asked colleagues about this, it turned out that I was the only one ever to have picked the second verify option. Everyone else had picked the read-after-write-verify option, "because it was faster."
And told me not to fuss because "if it was only a couple of errors, the chances they were on files you needed to recover was too small to worry about."
Others have commented about this but I haven't seen the point yet made this way. A two-image 3D effect is realistic only from one seat in the house. In practice, there is a fairly small "sweet spot." If you view from too close to the screen, the image doesn't have enough depth; too far away, it has too much. Off to the side, everything that should be square becomes skewed, rhomboidal.
Oddly enough, exactly the same problems exist in 2D, but they are nowhere near as disturbing, presumably because 2D does look like 3D in the first place.
The second issue is that the cinematographer is limited to a single focal length. In effect, the location of the "sweet spot" depends on the lens. With a long lens, the sweet spot is toward the back of the house; with a wide-angle lens, toward the front. In practice, only a normal lens gives the real "you-are-there" 3D effect. Anything else looks distorted. What this means is that to make a 3D film the filmmakers have to throw out most of their lenses and a century of film grammar.
A third issue is that 3D photography is unflattering to actresses, because with 3D you can see the actual three-dimensional contours of their faces, which in 3D cannot be hidden or concealed with makeup, at least not in a closeup. (I'm using sexist language because for the most part a smoothly contoured face is still considered much more important for actresses than for actors). For a good example of this, see the 1950s 3D movie "Kiss Me Kate."
These fatal flaws will continue to restrict two-image 3D to a limited set of special applications: animated features and movies in which spectacle is important.
All of this, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Cinerama in the 1950s. It was not a true 3D process but was spectacular, beautiful, and pleasant to view--superior to present-day 2D Imax. The fatal flaw was not the three-projector system, although that was a problem. The fatal flaws were exactly the ones that two-image 3D has: the real Cinerama experience was only to be had from seats in the center of the house; telephoto lenses couldn't be used; and it was a challenge to use it for film storytelling (of about ten films made in Cinerama, only two--How the West was Won and The Wonderful Tales of the Brothers Grimm--had real story lines, the others were basically travelogues. Of course, to call a Cinerama film "basically a travelogue" is like calling Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue "basically a medley.")
...If Microsoft talked for years about a "$100.mp3 player" they were working on, making a big point about its price itself being a breakthrough, and then said as the introduction approached that it was really going to cost $175, what would Slashdot's reaction be?
Shrug and say "it doesn't really matter, it's still cheap and the price will come down as economies of scale kick in?"
"The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway."
I didn't think they needed to? I thought that when the RIAA comes calling, what happens is that you get a notice saying you've already lost a court case some out-of-state court, because the judge rubberstamped their claim that this IP address is you, and now it's up to you to either a) pay a lawyer, go to court, and try to prove your innocence, or b) pay the nice RIAA their reasonable thirty-five-hundred dollars and get on with your life.
Another subtle problem is that it causes inflation to be underestimated, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics figure that a computer that is five times as "powerful" is worth more, even if you personally are not doing significantly more with it than the computer you bought five years ago.
I bet viewers thrilled by the exhilarating feeling of watching Spiderman swing hundreds of meters from skyscraper to skyscraper, from a near-first-person point of view in full 35mm definition on a huge cinema screen are going to love watching him hoisted by visible wires from the fly tower, while singing Broadway-pop paeans to adolescent angst.
--But, but, but, Mr. Whipple, you always squeeze the Charmin!
--Not any more! Now I only squeeze the New Improved Professional Charmin Plus! It's more squeezable than ever! And makes my butt smell even nicer than before! Same Charmin you've always loved only now it's different!...or whatever.
It's not news if HP is following a very common business model for one particular printer in their line, and it's not news if (in fact) they are using a standard (and annoying) advertising ploy.
And what, precisely, do you think HP will do the first time a competitor offers to sell a printer with similar characteristics?
The Ass and the Fox, having entered into partnership together for their mutual protection, went out into the forest to hunt. They had not proceeded far when they met a Lion. The Fox, seeing imminent danger, approached the Lion and promised to contrive for him the capture of the Ass if the Lion would pledge his word not to harm the Fox. Then, upon assuring the Ass that he would not be injured, the Fox led him to a deep pit and arranged that he should fall into it. The Lion, seeing that the Ass was secured, immediately clutched the Fox, and attacked the Ass at his leisure.
MORAL: Never trust your enemy.
Appropriate parameter assignments for ass, fox, and lion are left as an exercise for the reader.
These authentication images seem to be one of these ideas that is based on the assumption that you only deal with one company.
Within the last six months, three banks and two brokerage houses I use have all gone to the use of these authentication images. In each case, the only way to select the image is to go through slow-loading screen after slow-loading screen of apparently random images.
I can choose my own password, but it is virtually impossible to "choose" my image, so they're not very memorable to me. I certainly can't choose the same image at all five sites, which is what I'd like to do. (That's insecure for a password, but I don't think it's insecure for an authentication image; it's not as if one bank were going to try to pretend to be a different bank).
One of them also wants you to give them a little phrase that goes below the picture. Ah, I thought, I'll use my phrase to describe the picture, that way I'll know if the picture is incorrect. Wrong, I couldn't do it. I had to enter the phrase before I got to choose the picture. Well, I thought, OK, I'll just change it. The picture was of (let's say) soccer ball. So I went to the screen that lets you change your passwords and personal information, entered "soccer ball" as my phrase... and was then taken to a screen where I was required to select a picture, again. And the soccer ball wasn't one of the choices. I clicked through about ten screens of five-by-five pictures trying to find the soccer ball and couldn't find it. Was it just because they were randomly selecting from a huge collection of images? Or do they actually enforce changing the image? I don't know. All I know is that I now am supposed to remember my password AND the phrase "soccer ball" AND a picture of a kangaroo.
If the picture were wrong, would I notice? I might have a vague sense of unease, but I wouldn't be sure. Not unless I wrote them all down.
... are they able to refer to Pfizer's brand name for sildenafil, Lilly's name for tadalafil, or Bayer's brand name for vardenafil without getting caught in the spam filters?
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt, just as aircraft companies test the calculations on their plane by putting hydraulics jacks under the wings of a prototype and forcing them upward to see if they break when the calculations say they are supposed to.
And, yeah, a plane is a pretty good Faraday cage and it isn't grounded and so forth.
But if a plane isn't quite what it was when it was new (think Aloha Airlines Flight 243), or if the storm is a little stronger than the one the engineers planned for, or the pilots are more tired then they are supposed to be... well, the margin of safety has to be wider flying through clear weather than flying through a storm.
We've been here before.
The Audio Home Recording Act of 1991 gave consumers the right to copy CDs as long as they were copied onto specially-encoded blank media ("Music CD-Rs" or "Audio CD-Rs") whose price included a fee paid to the music industry.
I owned a home audio recorder (computerless CD copier) that fell within the scope of that act. I bought the prescribed media. It worked quite well for a number of years. It used a technical mechanism called SCCS which sounds very similar to this "managed copying." It allowed first-generation copies from original media, but would not copy the copies.
Then the music publishers came out with copy-protected CDs. My home audio recorder would not copy these CDs. Basically, the SCCS mechanism cut in, insisting that the copy limit had already been reached and that further copying was prohibited.
It was all well and good that the law gave me the right to copy them, and that I paid for every copy I ever made (in the form of the extra costs of the "music CD-Rs"). But there was basically no way I could take advantage of this right.
I made numerous calls, send emails, and letters to the CD publisher (UMI) and the recorder vendor (TEAC) trying to resolve the issue. I was never able to get satisfaction, beyond returning the CD for a refund.
It's the usual consumer problem. These guys were breaking the law, but it's awfully hard to stop a big company from cheating consumers if they only cheat each individual consumer by a small amount.
What's to stop the DVD publishers from making this "managed copying" available for a while, then using technical means to renege on the terms a few years later?
What's the good of a reasonably fair-sounding deal if David has no way to hold Goliath to the terms of the deal?
I do not like the idea of anything that give airlines an incentive to fly through storms.
There is a certain amount of hubris in the idea that we have tamed nature to that extent. It is not always obvious where the downdrafts are. Tornadoes, after all, begin inside clouds and are invisible until they start to pick up moisture, dirt, houses, etc.
On several occasions I've been on commercial flights that were hit by lightning while in flight. The times it happened, it was no big deal... but it shouldn't be taken for granted that it is never a big deal. Particularly with the increasing dependence of basic aircraft flight systems on electronics.
Strictly ignorant lay opinion here, but I'd think it would be OK according to the informal fair-use guidelines widely referenced by universities and libraries, e.g. the University of Texas system.
"Factor 1: Character of the use:" seems to me that in their first column it's nonprofit, and arguably educational. In the middle, it's criticism, commentary, and most bodaciously "transformative."
"Factor 2: What is the nature of the work to be used?": Imaginative and published, somewhere in the "doesn't tip the balance" part of University of Texas' scale.
"Factor 3: How much of the work will you use?" Only a small amount is being used for each work. I'm not sure what the total amount used from any individual work is, but it's tiny.
"Factor 4: If this kind of use were widespread, what effect would it have on the market for the original or for permissions?" I find it impossible to believe that a person with a copy of this video would show it to their kids in lieu of any of the Disney films from which the clips were taken. And I don't believe the Disney organization is currently making any money at all licensing clips for use in videos like this one.
...he might have married Joshua Speed instead of Mary Todd. And, as a result, he might have been unelectable in 1860 or 2008. And might not have had a political career. And might not have been assassinated.
But if HIV had been available, he might have gotten AIDS.
But if acyclovir had been available, he might not have died from it.
But if nuclear weapons had been available, the Civil War might have turned into a nuclear holocaust and he might had died from that.
But if global warming had been available, the United States might have been uninhabitable and he might have been an Englishman.
...the risk* of finding embarrassing, hidden information by using Word's "track changes" feature wasn't widely known until 2000.
They've only had seven years to address it.
----
*Search on string "nego" for Avi Rubin's posting, "The scary MSWord residue feature"
"If the devices can be engineered to conveniently and robustly support multiple functions, what rational reason would you have to oppose it?" OK, serious answer:
I wouldn't. But it's a heck of a big "if." And I don't believe for a nanosecond that Microsoft's proposal stems from someone waking up at 3 a.m. saying "Aha!" with some brilliant human factors or industrial design innovation. It stems from Microsoft making all their money from Windows and trying to use it for everything.
The big thing to notice in the article is that Mundie said that "software needs to be designed in context, with a knowledge of the devices around them. Data must be scaled to the server or phone, while the data must be able to be interacted with via keynoard, pen or even gestures." He didn't say Microsoft has done this. He didn't say Microsoft knows how to do this. He saids it needs to be done before Fone+ is practical. Absolutely right. And I can have my helicar as soon as someone invents Furloy, too.
Nobody has come close to solving the cognitive problems of multifunction devices yet. Last time I looked, Staples was selling plenty of calculators.
Nobody has solved the engineering tradeoff problems yet. Would you use the camera in your cell phone for your vacation pictures? Can you imagine hiring a wedding photographer showing up to take the pictures with a cell phone?
Can you imagine an operating room with nothing in the instrument tray but a Leatherman tool with 250 different, sterile blades?
Even the Swiss Army knife has issues. All the tools in it really work. But even there, though, I can't apply as much force to a Phillips head screw as I can with a real screwdriver, because the screwdriver blade is offcenter and the knife body isn't a very comfortable handle. And I sometimes open the wrong tool, because it's difficult to tell one shiny edge from another. How about you?
Why not use your tweezers as a wrench?
Why not use your oboe as a bassoon?
Why not use your sleeve as a handkerchief?
Why not use your car as a truck?
Why not use your PC as a doorstop?
Yes, I was.
Now, what would be an appropriate description of those teachers?
Arrange for some convincing actors armed with high-quality toy weapons to threaten the idiot teachers who did this, in some time and place where they aren't expecting it. See how "educational" they find it.
You know, some decades ago... before Columbine, before the year 2000 incident when what's his name shot coworkers at Edgewater Technology, and I believe before incidents in post offices made the phrase "going postal" part of the language... on one Halloween I thought it would be funny to wear a Halloween mask at work. It was a corpse-like mask that fit over my head. Apart from the mask, I was wearing my ordinary work clothes. I sort of scrooged down behind my computer monitor. I waited for a couple of coworkers to walk buy, then slowly stood up, saying nothing.
Let me tell you, I was completely taken aback by the intensity of the moment of terror that evoked in my coworkers. The unspoken thought was that people don't wear masks unless they're robbing a bank, or something. I immediately took of the mask, apologized profusely, never did it again. I wasn't fired, lectured, or disciplined, but those coworkers were cool toward me for some time. I realized I'd made a serious goof.
They were adults. It was Halloween. I did not have any weapons. I didn't jump out. I didn't say anything: not "Boo!", not "stick 'em up," or anything suggesing violence.
And for a fraction of a second--my colleagues were in fear for their lives. Only a fraction of a second, but that's the effect of doing something like that.
I can't begin to imagine the effects of a staged mock attack by adults on eleven-year-old-kids lasting for five minutes. That's not a short period of time to be in fear for one's life.
I wonder if those researchers ever saw a 1944 book entitled "The Educations of T. C. Mits," by Hugh and Miriam Lieber? Listings at Amazon, and at abebooks
It was intended to popularize mathematical concepts for laymen ("the celebrated man in the street," hence T. C. Mits), and it used exactly that style of formatting. As I recall, the introduction said something along the lines of
This is not
free verse
but is simply
an way to
make reading easier.
It seems they were right.
Keep this book in mind as prior art if they try to patent the technique!
Yet another overreaction to social change. It's different, it's scary because... it involves computers. The problem has existed ever since the first Egyptian wrote a love letter on papyrus.
Nothing new here. People will worry about it a bit every time a new problem breaks, then they'll forget and start committing imprudent things to electronic storage just as they always committed them to paper.
Why, very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia deals with this very problem:
"Your Majesty, as I understand, became entangled with this young person, wrote her some compromising letters, and is now desirous of getting those letters back."
"Precisely so. But how--"
"Was there a secret marriage?"
"None."
"No legal papers or certificates?"
"None."
"Then I fail to follow your Majesty. If this young person should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity?"
"There is the writing."
"Pooh, pooh! Forgery."
"My private note-paper."
"Stolen."
"My own seal."
"Imitated."
"My photograph."
"Bought."
"We were both in the photograph."
"Oh, dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an indiscretion."
...of the very piece of CR-39 plastic that detected the atomic particles. And it even has a genuine Roosevelt dime next to it. What more proof could you want?
No, wait, it's only a piece of CR-39 plastic like the one that detected the atomic particles. Never mind.
That's the usual fly in the ointment with backups. Backups are difficult and expensive. Management always thinks they can make them easy and cheap by buying some automated solution. But the main cost of the backup is regularly testing the backups... which can only be done properly by doing a full restore... which requires available disk space equal to the size of the backup, and hours of operator time.
Story #1. Fortune 500 company. Lost some source. Big brouhaha. Edict went out: all files are to be backed up to diskettes and the diskettes sent to offsite storage which the management had contracted for with an outside firm. It took a lot of extra time, but people did it. After about two years, an important server with source code for a major product crashed. Developers tried to get the source back from offsite storage. It turns out that nobody at any point had taken any responsibility for cataloging, identifying, or indexing the diskettes. The diskettes might as well have not been labelled: the developers couldn't identify what diskettes were needed, and the offsite storage firm couldn't have retrieved them if they had.
Story #2. Medium-size scientific research organization with a Digital 11/70 running RSTS. Enlightened manager pays operator overtime pay to stay late three nights a week and do backups. Backups are performed with the "verify" option enabled. Tapes are placed in a fire-resistant tape vault every night. But no actual restores are performed. Database (Oracle, in the days when Oracle Corporation's name was still Relational Systems, Inc). is corrupted. A restore is attempted. It transpires that this version of Oracle uses the maximum record length for its files, which happens to be 65,536 bytes, and the Digital-supplied backup-restore utility... you guessed it... has a bug with records of that length. Yep. Writes 0 bytes, verifies 0 bytes.
Story #3. I worked at a place that recommended that individual developers perform individual backups using a cartridge tape system and some standard PC software. I set it up. There were two "verify" options. One used the cartridge system's read-after-write feature to read every block as it was written. The second performed the entire backup, then verified the entire backup in a second pass. Took twice as long, of course. I opted for the second method. The problem was: more than half the time, the verify would report one or two errors. And for some reason, probably efficiency of use of the tape, it didn't write file by file, it munged them into blocks. And it didn't even report the names of the files affected. Just "2 errors were encountered" or something like that. So, when that happened, I didn't see that a rational person had any alterative except to perform the whole backup again. And more than half the time, it would report a couple of errors the second time, and...
When I asked colleagues about this, it turned out that I was the only one ever to have picked the second verify option. Everyone else had picked the read-after-write-verify option, "because it was faster."
And told me not to fuss because "if it was only a couple of errors, the chances they were on files you needed to recover was too small to worry about."
Others have commented about this but I haven't seen the point yet made this way. A two-image 3D effect is realistic only from one seat in the house. In practice, there is a fairly small "sweet spot." If you view from too close to the screen, the image doesn't have enough depth; too far away, it has too much. Off to the side, everything that should be square becomes skewed, rhomboidal.
Oddly enough, exactly the same problems exist in 2D, but they are nowhere near as disturbing, presumably because 2D does look like 3D in the first place.
The second issue is that the cinematographer is limited to a single focal length. In effect, the location of the "sweet spot" depends on the lens. With a long lens, the sweet spot is toward the back of the house; with a wide-angle lens, toward the front. In practice, only a normal lens gives the real "you-are-there" 3D effect. Anything else looks distorted. What this means is that to make a 3D film the filmmakers have to throw out most of their lenses and a century of film grammar.
A third issue is that 3D photography is unflattering to actresses, because with 3D you can see the actual three-dimensional contours of their faces, which in 3D cannot be hidden or concealed with makeup, at least not in a closeup. (I'm using sexist language because for the most part a smoothly contoured face is still considered much more important for actresses than for actors). For a good example of this, see the 1950s 3D movie "Kiss Me Kate."
These fatal flaws will continue to restrict two-image 3D to a limited set of special applications: animated features and movies in which spectacle is important.
All of this, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Cinerama in the 1950s. It was not a true 3D process but was spectacular, beautiful, and pleasant to view--superior to present-day 2D Imax. The fatal flaw was not the three-projector system, although that was a problem. The fatal flaws were exactly the ones that two-image 3D has: the real Cinerama experience was only to be had from seats in the center of the house; telephoto lenses couldn't be used; and it was a challenge to use it for film storytelling (of about ten films made in Cinerama, only two--How the West was Won and The Wonderful Tales of the Brothers Grimm--had real story lines, the others were basically travelogues. Of course, to call a Cinerama film "basically a travelogue" is like calling Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue "basically a medley.")
...If Microsoft talked for years about a "$100 .mp3 player" they were working on, making a big point about its price itself being a breakthrough, and then said as the introduction approached that it was really going to cost $175, what would Slashdot's reaction be?
Shrug and say "it doesn't really matter, it's still cheap and the price will come down as economies of scale kick in?"
"The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway."
I didn't think they needed to? I thought that when the RIAA comes calling, what happens is that you get a notice saying you've already lost a court case some out-of-state court, because the judge rubberstamped their claim that this IP address is you, and now it's up to you to either a) pay a lawyer, go to court, and try to prove your innocence, or b) pay the nice RIAA their reasonable thirty-five-hundred dollars and get on with your life.
Another subtle problem is that it causes inflation to be underestimated, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics figure that a computer that is five times as "powerful" is worth more, even if you personally are not doing significantly more with it than the computer you bought five years ago.
Funny how it's all happy-talk before release, and it's only afterwards that they start to "lower expectations."
Remind me again, what was supposed to be so good about Vista? Oh, yeah, all the stuff like WinFS that somehow never happened.
And when people pointed that out, the answer was "but the really important thing is security, which Vista does have."
...Mary Martin in Peter Pan?.
I bet viewers thrilled by the exhilarating feeling of watching Spiderman swing hundreds of meters from skyscraper to skyscraper, from a near-first-person point of view in full 35mm definition on a huge cinema screen are going to love watching him hoisted by visible wires from the fly tower, while singing Broadway-pop paeans to adolescent angst.
--But, but, but, Mr. Whipple, you always squeeze the Charmin!
...or whatever.
--Not any more! Now I only squeeze the New Improved Professional Charmin Plus! It's more squeezable than ever! And makes my butt smell even nicer than before! Same Charmin you've always loved only now it's different!
It's not news if HP is following a very common business model for one particular printer in their line, and it's not news if (in fact) they are using a standard (and annoying) advertising ploy.
And what, precisely, do you think HP will do the first time a competitor offers to sell a printer with similar characteristics?
The Ass, the Fox, and the Lion
The Ass and the Fox, having entered into partnership together for their mutual protection, went out into the forest to hunt. They had not proceeded far when they met a Lion. The Fox, seeing imminent danger, approached the Lion and promised to contrive for him the capture of the Ass if the Lion would pledge his word not to harm the Fox. Then, upon assuring the Ass that he would not be injured, the Fox led him to a deep pit and arranged that he should fall into it. The Lion, seeing that the Ass was secured, immediately clutched the Fox, and attacked the Ass at his leisure.
MORAL: Never trust your enemy.
Appropriate parameter assignments for ass, fox, and lion are left as an exercise for the reader.
These authentication images seem to be one of these ideas that is based on the assumption that you only deal with one company.
Within the last six months, three banks and two brokerage houses I use have all gone to the use of these authentication images. In each case, the only way to select the image is to go through slow-loading screen after slow-loading screen of apparently random images.
I can choose my own password, but it is virtually impossible to "choose" my image, so they're not very memorable to me. I certainly can't choose the same image at all five sites, which is what I'd like to do. (That's insecure for a password, but I don't think it's insecure for an authentication image; it's not as if one bank were going to try to pretend to be a different bank).
One of them also wants you to give them a little phrase that goes below the picture. Ah, I thought, I'll use my phrase to describe the picture, that way I'll know if the picture is incorrect. Wrong, I couldn't do it. I had to enter the phrase before I got to choose the picture. Well, I thought, OK, I'll just change it. The picture was of (let's say) soccer ball. So I went to the screen that lets you change your passwords and personal information, entered "soccer ball" as my phrase... and was then taken to a screen where I was required to select a picture, again. And the soccer ball wasn't one of the choices. I clicked through about ten screens of five-by-five pictures trying to find the soccer ball and couldn't find it. Was it just because they were randomly selecting from a huge collection of images? Or do they actually enforce changing the image? I don't know. All I know is that I now am supposed to remember my password AND the phrase "soccer ball" AND a picture of a kangaroo.
If the picture were wrong, would I notice? I might have a vague sense of unease, but I wouldn't be sure. Not unless I wrote them all down.
... are they able to refer to Pfizer's brand name for sildenafil, Lilly's name for tadalafil, or Bayer's brand name for vardenafil without getting caught in the spam filters?
They always get it right by version 3.0.
They scoffed at Microsoft Bob, but look what happened with Microsoft Bob 3.0.
They laughed at PlaysForSure, but where are all the skeptics now?
They winced at WinCE, but can you name a single cell phone that doesn't use it today?