One in Ten Americans Thinks HTML is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection
To be fair, from an IT geeks perspective that is kind of true. To be precise, web pages written in HTML can be, and frequently are, carriers for a multitude of electronically transmitted infections.
Russia is in charge now of the entire ex-Soviet Union area.
Not quite. NATO isn't likely to roll over and accept aggression directed at Poland or the Baltic States (boy, I bet they're happy they got admitted now) and I suspect even the EU would grow a spine if Russia started pushing Finland around.
Finland is nothing but miles upon miles of easily defended terrain, the Finns are masters of using terrain as a weapon and they will give the Russians a very hard time if they start a war like they did last time. This time strike aircraft flying out of Norway, Sweden and aircraft carriers in the region will have a field day tearing up Russian divisions filing down those forest roads in-between the Finnish Lakes. I'd say Poland is a more likely target for Russian aggression. We might actually witness German Panzer divisions rolling over the Polish border and the Poles being glad to see them. In view of relatively recent history, that must be considered to be a pretty strange turn of events. If the Russians start a shooting war I fully trust the Poles to fight like a cornered tiger but they are going to need help. The Ukraine, however, is in the crappy position of being a 'buffer state' (to borrow a bit of Machiavellian 19th century political jargon) between NATO and Russia and I can't say I envy them of it. I certainly hope the western powers show some backbone and keep Putin's dirty paws out of the Ukraine and don't make the same mistake they made back in the 30s when they handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler in a futile attempt to save their own skins.
This is beginning to remind me of the annexation of Czechoslovakia, let's hope this time around the Western powers will have enough spine to stand up to the dictator in stead of encouraging him with appeasement. We are gettign to the point where threatenign to move a few NATO divisions to the Urainian border would seem appropriate, at least that was the only thing that seemed to work on Hitler.
Most Apple Maps issues were a side effect of an early launch.
Maybe, but as far as I can tell, they've never fixed the somewhat hilariously misplaced POIs near me. They appear to be untouched from when I first checked them back when iOS 6 was released. (Although I see that the power substation is now a Men's Wearhouse instead of a Nordstroms, so I guess something has been updated.)
The other Apple Maps issue is that they don't show the difference between "there's no traffic here" and "we don't collect data for this road" making their traffic reports entirely useless.
Combine the two, and no one I know with an iDevice bothers with Apple Maps for navigation, they stick with the Google Maps app. It's still better.
I know it borders on sacrilege to point this out but Google Maps conks out on you the moment you don't have network coverage and while it has a caching function I'll still put my trust in an old fashioned Garmin unit any time. I haven't tried the Garmin iPad app yet but if it's any good, combining it with the Garmin HUD looks like it would bee too good a nerd toy to pass up.
Which is, in itself, a beautiful thing. Back when Steve Jobs first hired him, it was big news in the business rags, about the first openly gay CxO of a Fortune Whatever corporation. Nowadays, nobody talks about it, because almost nobody cares, and lots of younger folks don't even know it. Which is exactly as it should be.
Agree with you completely other than that I don't it's god if people forget, it's the fact that they don't seems care that he is gay that is a sign of progress.
Perhaps he simply bullshitted them into thinking that he was dumb enough to actually do it?
Well if he did that good for him, Facebook kind deserves a kick in the nuts^H^H^H^H wallet. Judging from his Tweets, when Facebook turned him down for a job, he wasn't bummed out about it and when Twitter gave him the thumbs down too he was still sending out very optimistic tweets. He didn't let it get him down when most people would have, and being a pessimist myself I like people with that kind of incurable optimism. I bet Facebook is kicking itself for telling him to take a hike back then it would have cost them a lot less money to hire him.
No one is proposing hamstringing human civilization that I can see. We're talking about moving into the 21st century by shifting to energy production that is based on sources that will last far longer than fossil fuels will last. By reducing the amount of warming and ocean acidification, we're helping ensure future economic prosperity. I suppose change is just scary to some people.
The ongoing holocene extinction event (of which climate change is a part) is one of the few changes that scares the shit out of me. Strangely enough it seems to be the only change that does not scare the crap out of conservatives.
Seriously. These are spy organizations. And here they are - spying. On foreign countries, no less. What were they thinking?
The Snowden leaks started out with things the public actually needed to know. The NSA spying on Americans is a gross overstep of the organization's charter. Spying on friendly nation's leaders is an embarrassment. This, however, seems to me like them doing their job.
At first, I thought that labeling Snowden as a spy was an overreaction. The US government trying to silence a whistle blower. However, were I a juror in a trial in which he released just this document, I'd convict.
Anyone who disagrees is kindly requested to answer two simple questions: 1. What should the NSA do? 2. Assuming this is not this, how can a country maintain military intelligence without doing this?
Shachar
There is the subtle way to do things and then there is the really clumsy and idiotic way to do them. I mean I can see how it is legitimate for the USA and Australia to spy on Indonesia with a bit more intensity than their close allies. However, is it really worth it to take the spying to a level that the target nation might construe as bordering on an act of war? What if the shit hits the fan in the region and a formerly cooperative Indonesia is so pissed off over this that they have moved into the Chinese camp? Would this spying still be worth it? Is it worth while to tap the telephones of the leaders of your closest allies (an operation that the NSA it self has admitted resulting in pretty much ZERO usable intelligence?) and risk spoiling a set of relationship that has been of vital strategic and economic importance to the USA since the end of WWII? Is the role of the NSA really to wreck every diplomatic relationship the USA has? How paranoid is the US leadership? Why isn't it enough for them to keep spying on their closest allies sufficient for the US leadership to have a good idea of what their closest allies are doing? Why must US intelligence operations be at a level that seems aimed at knowing what kind of underwear every single citizen of these nations is wearing down to the size, brand and color? *** WARNING: sarcasm ahead *** I think the USA can rest assured that none of its NATO allies is planning a sneak nuclear attack on the USA and we aren't secretly funding Al Quaeda either and if the US leadership needs to tap the telephones of Angela Merkel and François Hollande to discover that, then the US leadership need psychological help.
I am not a US citizen, I am however a citizen of a NATO allied nation and I value our strategic and economic relationship with the USA and from my point of view Snowden's revelations about the near Orwellian level of US spying on it's closest allies is a positive thing. This is especially true if Snowden's revelations result in the EU internet infrastructure being restructured so as to minimize the amount of traffic that goes through locations where the USA can intercept it because it may help to prevent the relationship between us Europeans and the USA from deteriorating even further despite the best efforts of the US security services to sabotage it with their excessive paranoia.
So you excuse her theft then blame it on THE MAN keeping everyone under bootheels?
You aren't part of the problem, you are the entire problem.
Troll, troll, troll... punishment should be in proportion to the crime and filing arrest warrants over DVD or video-tape theft is bloody ridiculous. If she really lost the movie or whatever, the owners of the movie rental shop should have taken her to small claims court, gotten her sentenced to compensate them for the loss of the movie end of story.
Nitpick, it was the Phoenicians who founded Carthage which in software parlance would make this first Carthage the Alpha version. It was the Alpha version that was destroyed by the Romans, not the Beta version. Carthage Beta came into existence when the Romans refactored the whole Carthage project after the fiery destruction of Carthage Alpha. Carthage Beta was eventually destroyed by the Arabs and what remained of it has today been absorbed by the still ongoing and highly successful Tunis project. Hope that cleared things up for everybody.
I've never bought an Apple product (and never will), but for pretty much anything else I might want that has a future release date I can pre-order it and get it on day of release. Do Apple not do this?
No, and that's why Apple gets a shitload of press when people line up for their products and while every other company hardly gets a mention when their new flagship product becomes available for pre-order on Amazon along with (***yawn***) a dozen others. Even if one passionately dislikes Apple, one must also grudgingly admit that it's a pretty clever marketing strategy that has worked wonders for Apple.
I am not a paleontologist and was surprised that 15 of the 55 species found were previously unknown. I really thought we knew more. Is it possible that a significant find could radically change the way we think of the past?
Well, if we find rabbit bones stuck between the teeth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex we'll have to give creationism a second though.
Still looks great -- I prefer it to this design and to Beta. Admins, please bring back the design used around 2000. There is little whitespace, so little wasted space, larger clearer fonts, and still a lot on each page, and little or no JavaScript cruft. Besides those significant improvements, it looks warmer and more classic.
BETA SUCKS. FUCK BETA.
Dear Slashdot management, Can we please get a button, located at the top of each thread next tot he 'Post' button, that filters out any posts with the word 'Beta' in them when you press it?
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet. (Copy-paste the html from here so links don't get mangled!)
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design. Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project. We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
All of you who don't like the Beta, just put 'I hate Slashdot Beta!' in your SIG and find something else to talk about. Just for god's sake stop hijacking threads with this off-topic whining. The rest of us have all long since noticed that you don't like the new site layout.
And there is the fact that US didn't capture a German Navy Enigma from a submarine as portrayed by Hollywood.
Sure the Brits owe a lot to the Polish who nicked an enigma but as has been said the advanced machine was a really different beast to crack. Also the German Navy changed their codes at a critical time of the war. Without the people at BP a lot more lives would have been lost, a great number of them US troops on their way to Europe. My Mother worked there for two years (1943-45). She never said anything about her work until the late 1970's so naturally I won't hear anything said against the people who did that almost impossible job.
It's been a while since I read about this so I may be shaky on details but I don't think the Poles nicked an Enigma but they did buy one. There were several variants of Enigma divided into two different classes, the commercial and the military units. You could buy a commercial grade unit quite without restrictions so the Poles did that just to get an idea of how it worked. Later on they bribed a Nazi customs official to get access to a military Enigma and inspect it because stealing it would have alerted the Nazis that the Enigma system had been compromised. The French also contributed data and that led to the construction of the 'Bomba'. When the Germans added more rotors to the Enigma in 1938 it massively increased the magnitude of the required decryption effort and the Poles didn't have the resources to construct the requisite machinery. That's where the British became involved.
Colossus, Alan Turing and the geniuses who helped design it, have been key to the development of subsequent fantastic advances in computer technology and marvels that have forever changed the face of the world, such as AOL CDs, Angry Birds and Facebook.
Alan Turing was a indeed a colossus but he didn't crack the enigma code. He didn't even lay a lot of of the ground work for designing this machine, it was a team of mathematicians working for Polish military intelligence after Polish and French spooks had gained access various data concerning Enigma that included inspecting a working copy of an enigma machine. Their names were Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Róycki and Henryk Zygalski and they reverse engineered the Enigma based on this material using mathematics and created what they called the 'bomba kryptologiczna'. The famous Colossus was a 'substantial develpment' from this device. What Alan Turing and Co. did was crack the improved enigma machines (still a daunting task) who had been upgraded in 1938-39, but he and and his team stood on the shoulders of those three polish mathematicians. The British are very keen to take sole credit for cracking Enigma but they got a whole helluva lot of help from Poland and France and as a German I'd like it to be crystal clear to the world who exactly it was that kicked our cryptographic ass:-)
I think the 20/40 GB of music vs the 64 mb that conventional MP3 players offered was the key. I hate itunes with a passion but i only have to deal with it to sync music.
I was in the market for a MP3 player at the time. In my neck of the woods the most common variety was the 32mb memory stick type. Other than that there was the NOMAD which was expensive and I had to look for quite a while until I found a shop that sold it, then there was the iPod. I picked the iPod because it was a nice compromise between small size, capacity and a UI that seemed to be designed for efficient one-handed use which was nice since I'm a keen cyclist. I didn't like iTunes either (still don't), but I decided I could live with it and while the 5Gb capacity was smaller than the NOMAD it was plenty more than I had music for at the time. This guy kind of summed it up for me. It's kind of interesting to take a look at the original slashdot thread: http://slashdot.org/story/01/1... It is full of recommendations to buy other players with more capacity and features but everybody still went out and bought an iPod. Judging from some of the posts in this current thread a sizeable portion of the Slashdot crowd still hasn't gotten over the shock of people preferring simplicity and portability over features.
I believe "nightsoil men" used to sell the human waste they carried away to tanners and farmers. In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one. The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon.
Not entirely but the extent to which we fail to recycle human excrement and urine is quite new. Many ancient societies used human waste for fertiliser although that can be a health hazard. In Roman times tanners, people who dyed cloth and other such businesses actually had pissoires outside their shops and big signs inviting customers to please come over and relieve themselves. Apparently tanners and dyers processed the urine to get Ammonia rich solutions which they used to prepare their products. I remember a QI episode where Stephen Fry dropped this fact-bit about how the House of Lords in London used to reek of stale piss on rainy days because of the quantities of urine used to in the production of tweed fabric which was popular with the upper classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Its more like marketing. BTW the only MP3 player I ever bought was from Creative Labs and at least their bundled headphones weren't a complete POS. I plugged it in and i looked just like any other USB pen and I can drag and drop MP3 files into it easily. Much better than having to use iTunes.
And yet for some reason millions upon millions of people disagreed and bought the iPod, and don't tell me it was just marketing. There is always more to a blockbuster hit it than just marketing.
They are still testing something like this? Samsung's Galaxy Gear came out already. The capability to quickly bring attractive and reliable products to market is a key factor in modern electronics industry.
Why are they testing this iPod thing? I mean Creative Labs and others have come out with MP3 players already. The ability to quickly bring attractive and reliable products to market is a key factor in modern electronics industry (so there isn't a hope in hell this iPod thing will ever be a commercial success).
The thing is that first to market is not everything. You also have to design the stuff you bring to market well and Apple has a history of appealing to customers by successfully reinventing/redesigning stuff that others have implemented badly and Apple evidently believes they can do it again.
Slashdot Mirror
One in Ten Americans Thinks HTML is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection
To be fair, from an IT geeks perspective that is kind of true. To be precise, web pages written in HTML can be, and frequently are, carriers for a multitude of electronically transmitted infections.
Russia is in charge now of the entire ex-Soviet Union area.
Not quite. NATO isn't likely to roll over and accept aggression directed at Poland or the Baltic States (boy, I bet they're happy they got admitted now) and I suspect even the EU would grow a spine if Russia started pushing Finland around.
Finland is nothing but miles upon miles of easily defended terrain, the Finns are masters of using terrain as a weapon and they will give the Russians a very hard time if they start a war like they did last time. This time strike aircraft flying out of Norway, Sweden and aircraft carriers in the region will have a field day tearing up Russian divisions filing down those forest roads in-between the Finnish Lakes. I'd say Poland is a more likely target for Russian aggression. We might actually witness German Panzer divisions rolling over the Polish border and the Poles being glad to see them. In view of relatively recent history, that must be considered to be a pretty strange turn of events. If the Russians start a shooting war I fully trust the Poles to fight like a cornered tiger but they are going to need help. The Ukraine, however, is in the crappy position of being a 'buffer state' (to borrow a bit of Machiavellian 19th century political jargon) between NATO and Russia and I can't say I envy them of it. I certainly hope the western powers show some backbone and keep Putin's dirty paws out of the Ukraine and don't make the same mistake they made back in the 30s when they handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler in a futile attempt to save their own skins.
This is beginning to remind me of the annexation of Czechoslovakia, let's hope this time around the Western powers will have enough spine to stand up to the dictator in stead of encouraging him with appeasement. We are gettign to the point where threatenign to move a few NATO divisions to the Urainian border would seem appropriate, at least that was the only thing that seemed to work on Hitler.
Fuck this guy.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to decline that offer.
Most Apple Maps issues were a side effect of an early launch.
Maybe, but as far as I can tell, they've never fixed the somewhat hilariously misplaced POIs near me. They appear to be untouched from when I first checked them back when iOS 6 was released. (Although I see that the power substation is now a Men's Wearhouse instead of a Nordstroms, so I guess something has been updated.)
The other Apple Maps issue is that they don't show the difference between "there's no traffic here" and "we don't collect data for this road" making their traffic reports entirely useless.
Combine the two, and no one I know with an iDevice bothers with Apple Maps for navigation, they stick with the Google Maps app. It's still better.
I know it borders on sacrilege to point this out but Google Maps conks out on you the moment you don't have network coverage and while it has a caching function I'll still put my trust in an old fashioned Garmin unit any time. I haven't tried the Garmin iPad app yet but if it's any good, combining it with the Garmin HUD looks like it would bee too good a nerd toy to pass up.
Which is, in itself, a beautiful thing. Back when Steve Jobs first hired him, it was big news in the business rags, about the first openly gay CxO of a Fortune Whatever corporation. Nowadays, nobody talks about it, because almost nobody cares, and lots of younger folks don't even know it. Which is exactly as it should be.
Agree with you completely other than that I don't it's god if people forget, it's the fact that they don't seems care that he is gay that is a sign of progress.
Perhaps he simply bullshitted them into thinking that he was dumb enough to actually do it?
Well if he did that good for him, Facebook kind deserves a kick in the nuts^H^H^H^H wallet. Judging from his Tweets, when Facebook turned him down for a job, he wasn't bummed out about it and when Twitter gave him the thumbs down too he was still sending out very optimistic tweets. He didn't let it get him down when most people would have, and being a pessimist myself I like people with that kind of incurable optimism. I bet Facebook is kicking itself for telling him to take a hike back then it would have cost them a lot less money to hire him.
How can users protect themselves from sometimes life endangering software bugs?
Drive older non digital cars. Come to think of it I can get you a great deal on a factory standard model 1971 Ford Pinto.
In some cases, an organization used the same password for everything.'"
That's not negligence, it's just the Navy keeping up with the times and implementing Single-Sign-On.
No one is proposing hamstringing human civilization that I can see. We're talking about moving into the 21st century by shifting to energy production that is based on sources that will last far longer than fossil fuels will last. By reducing the amount of warming and ocean acidification, we're helping ensure future economic prosperity. I suppose change is just scary to some people.
The ongoing holocene extinction event (of which climate change is a part) is one of the few changes that scares the shit out of me. Strangely enough it seems to be the only change that does not scare the crap out of conservatives.
Seriously. These are spy organizations. And here they are - spying. On foreign countries, no less. What were they thinking?
The Snowden leaks started out with things the public actually needed to know. The NSA spying on Americans is a gross overstep of the organization's charter. Spying on friendly nation's leaders is an embarrassment. This, however, seems to me like them doing their job.
At first, I thought that labeling Snowden as a spy was an overreaction. The US government trying to silence a whistle blower. However, were I a juror in a trial in which he released just this document, I'd convict.
Anyone who disagrees is kindly requested to answer two simple questions:
1. What should the NSA do?
2. Assuming this is not this, how can a country maintain military intelligence without doing this?
Shachar
There is the subtle way to do things and then there is the really clumsy and idiotic way to do them. I mean I can see how it is legitimate for the USA and Australia to spy on Indonesia with a bit more intensity than their close allies. However, is it really worth it to take the spying to a level that the target nation might construe as bordering on an act of war? What if the shit hits the fan in the region and a formerly cooperative Indonesia is so pissed off over this that they have moved into the Chinese camp? Would this spying still be worth it? Is it worth while to tap the telephones of the leaders of your closest allies (an operation that the NSA it self has admitted resulting in pretty much ZERO usable intelligence?) and risk spoiling a set of relationship that has been of vital strategic and economic importance to the USA since the end of WWII? Is the role of the NSA really to wreck every diplomatic relationship the USA has? How paranoid is the US leadership? Why isn't it enough for them to keep spying on their closest allies sufficient for the US leadership to have a good idea of what their closest allies are doing? Why must US intelligence operations be at a level that seems aimed at knowing what kind of underwear every single citizen of these nations is wearing down to the size, brand and color? *** WARNING: sarcasm ahead *** I think the USA can rest assured that none of its NATO allies is planning a sneak nuclear attack on the USA and we aren't secretly funding Al Quaeda either and if the US leadership needs to tap the telephones of Angela Merkel and François Hollande to discover that, then the US leadership need psychological help.
I am not a US citizen, I am however a citizen of a NATO allied nation and I value our strategic and economic relationship with the USA and from my point of view Snowden's revelations about the near Orwellian level of US spying on it's closest allies is a positive thing. This is especially true if Snowden's revelations result in the EU internet infrastructure being restructured so as to minimize the amount of traffic that goes through locations where the USA can intercept it because it may help to prevent the relationship between us Europeans and the USA from deteriorating even further despite the best efforts of the US security services to sabotage it with their excessive paranoia.
So you excuse her theft then blame it on THE MAN keeping everyone under bootheels?
You aren't part of the problem, you are the entire problem.
Troll, troll, troll... punishment should be in proportion to the crime and filing arrest warrants over DVD or video-tape theft is bloody ridiculous. If she really lost the movie or whatever, the owners of the movie rental shop should have taken her to small claims court, gotten her sentenced to compensate them for the loss of the movie end of story.
Beta must die...
Nitpick, it was the Phoenicians who founded Carthage which in software parlance would make this first Carthage the Alpha version. It was the Alpha version that was destroyed by the Romans, not the Beta version. Carthage Beta came into existence when the Romans refactored the whole Carthage project after the fiery destruction of Carthage Alpha. Carthage Beta was eventually destroyed by the Arabs and what remained of it has today been absorbed by the still ongoing and highly successful Tunis project. Hope that cleared things up for everybody.
I've never bought an Apple product (and never will), but for pretty much anything else I might want that has a future release date I can pre-order it and get it on day of release. Do Apple not do this?
No, and that's why Apple gets a shitload of press when people line up for their products and while every other company hardly gets a mention when their new flagship product becomes available for pre-order on Amazon along with (***yawn***) a dozen others. Even if one passionately dislikes Apple, one must also grudgingly admit that it's a pretty clever marketing strategy that has worked wonders for Apple.
I am not a paleontologist and was surprised that 15 of the 55 species found were previously unknown. I really thought we knew more. Is it possible that a significant find could radically change the way we think of the past?
Well, if we find rabbit bones stuck between the teeth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex we'll have to give creationism a second though.
There's a perfectly valid alternate design for Slashdot already:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000305021033/http://slashdot.org/
Still looks great -- I prefer it to this design and to Beta. Admins, please bring back the design used around 2000. There is little whitespace, so little wasted space, larger clearer fonts, and still a lot on each page, and little or no JavaScript cruft. Besides those significant improvements, it looks warmer and more classic.
BETA SUCKS. FUCK BETA.
Dear Slashdot management,
Can we please get a button, located at the top of each thread next tot he 'Post' button, that filters out any posts with the word 'Beta' in them when you press it?
Sincerely,
Those rest of us.
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet. (Copy-paste the html from here so links don't get mangled!)
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design. Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
-----=====##### LINKS #####=====-----
Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=56395415
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=3321441
Alternative Slashdot: http://altslashdot.org (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))
All of you who don't like the Beta, just put 'I hate Slashdot Beta!' in your SIG and find something else to talk about. Just for god's sake stop hijacking threads with this off-topic whining. The rest of us have all long since noticed that you don't like the new site layout.
And there is the fact that US didn't capture a German Navy Enigma from a submarine as portrayed by Hollywood.
Sure the Brits owe a lot to the Polish who nicked an enigma but as has been said the advanced machine was a really different beast to crack. Also the German Navy changed their codes at a critical time of the war. Without the people at BP a lot more lives would have been lost, a great number of them US troops on their way to Europe.
My Mother worked there for two years (1943-45). She never said anything about her work until the late 1970's so naturally I won't hear anything said against the people who did that almost impossible job.
It's been a while since I read about this so I may be shaky on details but I don't think the Poles nicked an Enigma but they did buy one. There were several variants of Enigma divided into two different classes, the commercial and the military units. You could buy a commercial grade unit quite without restrictions so the Poles did that just to get an idea of how it worked. Later on they bribed a Nazi customs official to get access to a military Enigma and inspect it because stealing it would have alerted the Nazis that the Enigma system had been compromised. The French also contributed data and that led to the construction of the 'Bomba'. When the Germans added more rotors to the Enigma in 1938 it massively increased the magnitude of the required decryption effort and the Poles didn't have the resources to construct the requisite machinery. That's where the British became involved.
Colossus, Alan Turing and the geniuses who helped design it, have been key to the development of subsequent fantastic advances in computer technology and marvels that have forever changed the face of the world, such as AOL CDs, Angry Birds and Facebook.
Alan Turing was a indeed a colossus but he didn't crack the enigma code. He didn't even lay a lot of of the ground work for designing this machine, it was a team of mathematicians working for Polish military intelligence after Polish and French spooks had gained access various data concerning Enigma that included inspecting a working copy of an enigma machine. Their names were Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Róycki and Henryk Zygalski and they reverse engineered the Enigma based on this material using mathematics and created what they called the 'bomba kryptologiczna'. The famous Colossus was a 'substantial develpment' from this device. What Alan Turing and Co. did was crack the improved enigma machines (still a daunting task) who had been upgraded in 1938-39, but he and and his team stood on the shoulders of those three polish mathematicians. The British are very keen to take sole credit for cracking Enigma but they got a whole helluva lot of help from Poland and France and as a German I'd like it to be crystal clear to the world who exactly it was that kicked our cryptographic ass :-)
The fandroids are going to have a field day with this one.
I think the 20/40 GB of music vs the 64 mb that conventional MP3 players offered was the key. I hate itunes with a passion but i only have to deal with it to sync music.
I was in the market for a MP3 player at the time. In my neck of the woods the most common variety was the 32mb memory stick type. Other than that there was the NOMAD which was expensive and I had to look for quite a while until I found a shop that sold it, then there was the iPod. I picked the iPod because it was a nice compromise between small size, capacity and a UI that seemed to be designed for efficient one-handed use which was nice since I'm a keen cyclist. I didn't like iTunes either (still don't), but I decided I could live with it and while the 5Gb capacity was smaller than the NOMAD it was plenty more than I had music for at the time. This guy kind of summed it up for me. It's kind of interesting to take a look at the original slashdot thread:
http://slashdot.org/story/01/1...
It is full of recommendations to buy other players with more capacity and features but everybody still went out and bought an iPod. Judging from some of the posts in this current thread a sizeable portion of the Slashdot crowd still hasn't gotten over the shock of people preferring simplicity and portability over features.
I believe "nightsoil men" used to sell the human waste they carried away to tanners and farmers. In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one. The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon.
Not entirely but the extent to which we fail to recycle human excrement and urine is quite new. Many ancient societies used human waste for fertiliser although that can be a health hazard. In Roman times tanners, people who dyed cloth and other such businesses actually had pissoires outside their shops and big signs inviting customers to please come over and relieve themselves. Apparently tanners and dyers processed the urine to get Ammonia rich solutions which they used to prepare their products. I remember a QI episode where Stephen Fry dropped this fact-bit about how the House of Lords in London used to reek of stale piss on rainy days because of the quantities of urine used to in the production of tweed fabric which was popular with the upper classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Its more like marketing. BTW the only MP3 player I ever bought was from Creative Labs and at least their bundled headphones weren't a complete POS. I plugged it in and i looked just like any other USB pen and I can drag and drop MP3 files into it easily. Much better than having to use iTunes.
And yet for some reason millions upon millions of people disagreed and bought the iPod, and don't tell me it was just marketing. There is always more to a blockbuster hit it than just marketing.
***It's usually a good rule do thumb to never buy the first iteration of any computer software or hardware product at all, especially software.***
Not hardware -- only the Apple fanboys make such statements about hardware, because Apple has such a terrible history of problems.
By the way, you're holding it wrong!
Ok, I revise my previous statement, you are not trolling, you clearly need therapy.
They are still testing something like this? Samsung's Galaxy Gear came out already. The capability to quickly bring attractive and reliable products to market is a key factor in modern electronics industry.
Why are they testing this iPod thing? I mean Creative Labs and others have come out with MP3 players already. The ability to quickly bring attractive and reliable products to market is a key factor in modern electronics industry (so there isn't a hope in hell this iPod thing will ever be a commercial success).
The thing is that first to market is not everything. You also have to design the stuff you bring to market well and Apple has a history of appealing to customers by successfully reinventing/redesigning stuff that others have implemented badly and Apple evidently believes they can do it again.