I'm sure Motorola, et.al., have. They will be smarter with the introduction. They will not advertise the presence of the devices. This will not be a problem for most people, and the first few who complain will find a call to tech support will get them a replacement. Remember, most people don't know about country coding for DVDs now, because most people don't travel overseas very often. Only after the use of these devices have become very ingrained in business will Motorola open discuss what they are doing.
I always thought the American environmental regulations controlling toilet flow creating a black market in old toilets was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of
The funniest thing I find about it, is that it causes me to always flush twice!! That is, I use more water with the new 'water efficient' models than I did with the old 'use enough water to make sure it all goes down' types. Mark this down to the laws of unintended conseqences. Not only will the market for used A/V equipment open up, but people will be a lot more willing to buy an off brand TV made in some no-name Mexican plant using dated technology.
We are sorry you feel our prices are too high, and we are currently looking into a good high quality laptop unit in the $1,000 - $1,400 range.
Uhhmm...bargain laptops are now running in the $700 - $1,000 range. Linux is an efficient OS that runs on well on leaner hardware. Why would I spend money on a top of the line notebook? I've got the money, but why the hell would I choose to spend it on a white elephant piece of hardware like a $1400 notebook when I could spend it much better expanding/upgrading the other machines in my network?
Last we knew, the Emperor was about $300.00 less than the Dell Inspiron 5000e, (Both units are the Compal N38W2)
Which means...exactly!! That Dell can overprice commodity computer equipment because they are Dell. They have a reputation. A brand. I can count on them to be around and support what they sold me (or at least the PHB thinks so). QLITech is a no-name start up that may be gone next week. QLITech has to offer something much more than a 10% discount when going up against Dell's solid reputation.
But that still doesn't change the fact that there is no way that I would blow $2500 on a laptop. Not when I can get a Thinkpad AND build kick-ass server for the same cost. Yeah, yeah...'That Thinkpad is a lame configuration'...I've heard the argument., but it's a notebook. A 486 would work to display remote X apps and allow me to be mobile with a few less power hungry apps. I choose to put the power in a workstation where it is cheaper.
So, to sum up, you are selling high end equipment with marginal discounts compared to brand name vendors (a discount that should be covered by the fact that the OS is free). I don't see the value proposition that will keep you in business, other than, "Hey, look at us. We sell Linux!!"
there prices are way too high. I thought that one of the good points of hardware vendors using Linux was so that they could drop the price. From what I've seen so far, it always seems that a system with Linux pre-installed always cost more than a comparable system with Windows pre-installed. It's as if the vendors are saying, "Pay us extra, 'cause we 'support' Linux." No thanks.
I can put together a box myself from peices for less than what they're charging. So, their business plan is to enter a market composed of people capable and willing to building their own systems. They don't offer a considerable discount over the BigBrand guys, and their only distinguishable selling point is "IT HAS LINUX". My prediction is that they will follow TuxTops to the bottom of the heap before the year is out.
BTW, what happened to the idea of building a business out of providing custom distributions? Now that would be useful and a better business model than overpriced hardware.
There is no other way to explain the jerry-rigged nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development.
Scientific Creationism: The belief that a powerful being created the universe, the Earth and mankind through natural forces.
Evolution: A natural force for creating 'higher' beings from 'lower' beings.
How is anything proved/disproved here? This doesn't even proved Fundamentalist wrong. If a great power conciously created the world with dinosaur bones in the ground in such a way that they appear to be millions of years old, what to stop 'it' from funging some genetic data? At most, you can say that this is indirect data supporting the conclusion that mankind is a product of evolution (which is the only type of data we'll ever get until someone discovers time travel, BTW).
OTOH, don't argue with anyone who needs more evidence than what currently exist that evolution is the best explanation for why the Earth's biosphere is in its current condition. It's just not worth the pain and frustration.
Might there not be other reasons for not trying to pick-up and fix someone else's work? Have you not considered that trying to fix someone else's code is a lot more difficult that implementing a feature from scratch?
I code professionally, and the hardest part of the job is trying to understand the mindset of the programmer who wrote this code originally. Most commercial code is worked on by a lot of hands, and it shows. You see the same problem solved in different ways in different places. Some of this may be because programmer B didn't know that programmer A had already implemented a function to handle the problem. It may be that programmer B did not like programmer A's implementation. How many times have you heard a programmer proclaim 'this code' sucks, only to replace it with something that is marginalling 'different'.
Regardless of the reason, being programmer N, I pick up this morass of code, and think that the whole thing needs to be thrown out and re-implemented.
With OS code, seeing as the programmers are volunteers, they get to work on what ever makes them feel good. What feels better, implementing a feature and actually making something work, or digging through someone else's obfuscated idea of code in order to fix an obscure bug?
In my opinion, new programmers would be willing to work on bug fixing if UNIX programmers would use real names for variables.
Is anyone else reminded of the concept of an 'impartial observer' from that sci-fi book about a child who was raised by martians. Sorry, can't remember the name of the book, but it was also the first time I heard the term 'grok'.
In this novel, specially trained people donned a white cloak and instantly became observers. While wearing the cloak, they could only report on exactly what they heard or saw without any interpretation or extrapolation. Their status as an observer held special legal status much like a notary public, and they could be used for much of the same functions, ie. providing witness to the signing of a contract.
I see this as a good idea, IFF the advisors are given strict training in how to be impartial, and that their status an advisor is maintained by stringent rules. An understanding would develope that status as an advisor would be a position of honor, and the honor of the position would be soiled by any misconduct that would reflect on the advisors as a group. The advisors would police themselves to maintain that honor. If they did not do a good job, they would not be believable (and therefore not used) in court.
Sounds good at first, but wait 'till you drop one in the car while headed down the interstate. I have enough trouble with pulling spare change from between the bucket seats now. My big fat fingers just can't handle such small items reliably when the other hand is occupied (no off color/. comments here, please).
No thank you. I'd much rather have a media that is easier to handle.
One more thing...
The courts will become much more efficient once loser pays is implemented. Most cases can be decided up front if both lawyers would just be honest. The problem is that they want to go to court in order to try to convince a judge to give them just a little bit more than they deserve (or to try to work the other side into bankruptcy). With loser pay, the side on the right has no reason to quit, the wrong side knows it, and will settle out of court before running up ridiculous legal fees.
The problem with "loser pays" is that it makes large companies untouchable.... If you sue Microsoft and lose, you're instantly six digits in debt because they put a team of fifteen highly paid corporate lawyers on the job.... And the beauty of it is that your hometown lawyer never had a chance against a mob of the best corporate lawyers in the country. They already stall as long as possible to drive up your legal expenses; a loser-pays system just makes it harder to get justice.
First of all, either 15 lawyers work on the case or they don't. You can't have it both ways.
Second, they can only sue me into bankruptcy once. The current system penalizes you no matter how good your case is. Under a loser pays system, I can convince some high-powered lawyers to work for me on a contigency basis when going after a rich, powerful entity such as Microsoft. The lawyer just wants to get paid. He knows that he can charge more to Microsoft and actually get it.
Third, loser pays dimishes the payoff of frivolous suits since more people would be willing to fight them. Instead of chasing class actions suits, powerful lawyers will be chasing the people that large companies did wrong. "Heh", the lawyers will say, "let me help you get what you deserve from that evil corporation."
The only thing that the current system does is insure that a wronged individual never gets his/her just deserts since any award they recieve in court immediately goes to pay off the lawyers (reference: Rodney King, that woman accusing Clinton of sexual harassment)
fairly new at the job and all hot and ready to go.
The HEIC (head engineer in charge) told me to run the test program with a specific command line format. I was 2nd shift, and a little later, when he was gone, I decided that it would be more efficient if I used a different syntax that could be entered more quickly.
My output went up and I felt 'oh-so-proud' of my ingenuity.
Until the HEIC asked me where his debug files had gone the next day. The program was setup to generate the files when the command was entered the way he had specified. The customer wanted those files, and now he had to explain that they were not created.
Was the program set up stupidly? Yes. Should the HEIC have informed me of why I needed to run the program in such a specific way? Maybe. It doesn't matter, though. It was my fault. I was told to do a job in a certain way, but being young and brash, I KNEW more than the old futz.
It's not until you get older that you realize how much you don't know. You spend a lot of time feeling regretful about all the 'smart' moves you made while younger.
We also get slammed with charges from banks to use atms. That part makes no sense to me.
No. The scary part is when you see people lined up outside the bank in order to pay to use the ATM, while there are idle tellers inside. If you are a banker it makes very good cents to charge $1.50 to give someone $20 of their own money. I'll never figure out why the people do it, though.
NOTE: WAY TO SAVE $1.50:
Go to the grocery store and buy a pack of gum with your ATM card and get $20 back. You still spent $.50, but at least your breath don't stink anymore 8*)
Anyone else here find themselves dodging their heads when playing video games like Doom? When watching others play?
My wife laughs at me when my boys wrestle. I'm twisting and feinting in what I think they should be doing. The bad part is that I don't even realize that I'm doing it.
But seriously, are there any/.er's that don't get a sinking feeling whenever a cop passes them on the road?
Good point, but let me counter. In North Carolina, the legislature passed a law granting each family a PFJ, prayer for judgement. Basically, the law says that everyone gets a pass on a traffic ticket every 2 years. IMHO, what the legislature said was, "Traffic tickets are our bullshit way of collecting revenue. The distribution of traffic tickets are fairly random with a weight to younger drivers. We've been handing out too many and now everyone beginning to see them for what they are. The people will revolt (by replacing us) if we don't do something, so lets make sure that people who follow the speed limit signs most of the time won't get too upset. We won't collect as much, but we also won't have to openly levy more taxes to cover our pet projects."
The point: people were starting to get upset about traffic law, and the legislature responded.
Just about any game can become a zero-sum game if the correct atmosphere is set. For instance, when playing basketball make sure that all players have had at least 5 shots of good liquor. A shot must be taken for every 10 points scored. Trust me, it doesn't take long before no one has any idea what the score is.
As for me, wrestling is a zero-sum game. I wrestle Stan, our clubs head coach, and he can beat me into the mat any time he chooses. But, every once in a while I score, or pull off some really slick move. He didn't lose, but I won.
If that didn't make sense, read it again until it does. Any game becomes zero-sum as soon as you choose to ignore the score and concentrate on the play and allow the score to worry about itself. Once you can reach that state, then regardless of whether you had more points or not, you rate yourself a winner/loser on how well you performed against your own criteria and you enjoy the game while it last.
You are creating a business with such a low barrier to entry that you wrote the software in one evening.
Why does a business have to have a high barrier to entry. All I need is a lawn mower and a set of hedge trimmers in order to do lawn maintainence like I did in high school. I want to use the program to do something that people are willing to pay for, i.e. I want to get paid for doing work not for being rich to begin with.
This has been tried several times before. Basically he is saying that we need console type systems that come pre-configured and are controlled by the company that sold you the thing. IBM tried it with the PC-Jr. Radio Shack had a PC out in the early days that pop up their own little shell when you turned it on and tried to reign the user into their own little arena.
They all fail for the same reason. Joe Blow gets the thing home and uses it for a week just like IBM et.al. intended. Then he heads over to CompUSA and sees how the $10 calendar program lets him put his own pictures on a calendar. "Why can't my computer do that?" he ask. Then he gets mad at whoever it was that sold him the computer in the first place, and starts looking to buy a real computer.
Computers are complex and get in the way, because people want to do complex things that go in so many different directions that no matter where the OS is it is bound to be in the way eventually.
It's the should part that I find scary. I've done some work with neural nets. Machine learning is not like other stuff you've worked with. It is not deterministic. You can't say with 100% accuracy that any non-trivial output is correct. Neural nets just don't work that way. Straight C code can at least be understood, even if exhaustive proof of correctness is beyond most Q&A department. Very few people can understand even the simplest neual net.
While you may not mean to be taken seriously, this does pose one of the problems with this technology. So what happens when they wire the fighter pilot up to the plane to get better performance and the pilot has to:
-sneeze
-scratch
-use the bathroom (extreme stress can cause electrical output to go all over the scale)
The main beef I have against MS is that they produce a system designed for a single user, but they try to promote it as a multiuser system. When they do this, all the assumptions that they built the system on are wrong and the thing is just impossible to get to work as advertise. Sort of like trying to use and Indy racecar as an off-road vehicle by putting big tires on it.
It appears that Linux is beginning to show the same cracks. It's designed as a server and is just not fitting into the 'home/SOHO' setting. This is just one example. A home/SOHO computer will sit idle for 12hrs a day, even if it is a server. This much downtime is bound to make up for any startup cost.
So, what would be the assumptions for a good multi-user OS for the home and small office? Would Linux require a fork to fit that niche?
I'm sorry, but I let my frustration with a system that has corrupted a lot of optimistic dreams lead me to post off topic. This relates to the subject in that everyone who is trying to do anything is being frustrated by ridiculously obvious ideas being patented. The patent that blocks me took 3 years to get through, and simply uses a lot of big words to say something simple. It doesn't do anything that even someone not versed in the art could do in one evening. How is any industry to progress when someone holds a patent on a basic idea?
So, the question becomes: Do we as a society veto 'the government' and choose to ignore the whole patent system once it becomes obvious that it inhibits everyone except the lucky few? At what point will the law abiding citizens of this country come to find enforcement of the law reprehensible?
Woe!! A stray less than sign got my original post trashed. Shoulda previewed.
I wrote a small application ( less than 300 lines) that would create a mosaic. A list of pictures was used to simulate a master picture. I wrote it one evening and it doesn't do anything spectacular. It looks at a region on the master image and finds which of the small images match that region the best, then fills in the corresponding area on the output image. The exact same thing a person would do with a shoebox full of prints. I did this because I didn't know what to get my rich brother-in-law for Christmas. So, I got him something he already had...his own pictures in a different format.
Guess what? It's the process is patented. Something I, just an average Joe with no work experience in the graphics industry and only minimal hobbiest experience, can design and write an application for in one eventing is patentable. Hell, if the patent had mentioned an obscure matching algorithm I would have been impressed. Instead the algorithm used a distance-vector to find the closest match.
determine the best available matching source image by computing red, green and blue channel root-mean square error. Well, no shit, Sherlock. How else do you find the distance between two points.
What's more, I had the brilliant ideas of storing the digital image on a hard disk and producing output with a printer. I even displayed the image on my screen, but the patent covers all that too.
I've had several ideas how to make money with the program selling a service (ie, actually doing something that contributes to society), but it would appear that I'm blocked by a patent that has bogus claims. Tell me again how this benefits society.
My question to/.:
Do I proceed with my business plans, and explain to the court that doing something with a computer in the same way that it is done in real life is not novel when the lawsuit comes in? Or do I meekly walk away, ignoring the possibility of creating jobs and wealth and generally expanding the economy? What happens when the system gets so out of whack that no one pays attention to it, like those laws against sodomy and extra-marital sex?
I wrote a small application (determine the best available matching source image by computing red, green and blue channel root-mean square error.
Well, no shit, Sherlock. How else do you find the distance between two points.
What's more, I had the brilliant ideas of storing the digital image on a hard disk and producing output with a printer. I even displayed the image on my screen, but the patent covers that too.
I've had several ideas how to make money with the program selling a service (ie, actually doing something that contributes to society), but it would appear that I'm blocked by a patent that has bogus claims. Tell me again how this benefits society.
My question to/.:
Do I proceed with my business plans, and explain to the court that doing something with a computer in the same way that it is done in real life is not novel when the lawsuit comes in? What happens when the system gets so out of whack that no one pays attention to it, like those laws against sodomy and extra-marital sex?
everyone here is knocking voice recognition as useless. Well, I'm here to say that it is not.
I used OS/2. Version 4 came with a version of voice recognition, and I ran it on a 100MHz Pentium with only 32Meg RAM. It ruled in the proper place.
First, the system is good for first drafts of text documents like long reports. Don't expect to get a perfect copy the first time through. The output from the voice input will require some cleanup. But guess what, so does anything I type.
Very few people type anything close to 80wpm. I only get around 40. Voice type allowed around 100wpm. For those l337 haX0rz that can type and think that everyone should be able to...go out and see the sun every now and then!!
I would write up my report in note form, basically just outlining what I wanted to say. Anything that I had to quote got a reference to the text I would quote from. Then I locked the bedroom door to keep out noise from wife and kids, gathered my notes and references around and started talking. An hour later I had the first draft of a ten page report. I've spent 4 doing it manually.
You may not have a need for it, but if you're in school or any other place where you have to produce long reports and you don't type with flaming fingers, then voice input can be a real boost to productivity.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's look at DIVX.
I'm sure Motorola, et.al., have. They will be smarter with the introduction. They will not advertise the presence of the devices. This will not be a problem for most people, and the first few who complain will find a call to tech support will get them a replacement. Remember, most people don't know about country coding for DVDs now, because most people don't travel overseas very often. Only after the use of these devices have become very ingrained in business will Motorola open discuss what they are doing.
I always thought the American environmental regulations controlling toilet flow creating a black market in old toilets was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of
The funniest thing I find about it, is that it causes me to always flush twice!! That is, I use more water with the new 'water efficient' models than I did with the old 'use enough water to make sure it all goes down' types. Mark this down to the laws of unintended conseqences. Not only will the market for used A/V equipment open up, but people will be a lot more willing to buy an off brand TV made in some no-name Mexican plant using dated technology.
We are sorry you feel our prices are too high, and we are currently looking into a good high quality laptop unit in the $1,000 - $1,400 range.
Uhhmm...bargain laptops are now running in the $700 - $1,000 range. Linux is an efficient OS that runs on well on leaner hardware. Why would I spend money on a top of the line notebook? I've got the money, but why the hell would I choose to spend it on a white elephant piece of hardware like a $1400 notebook when I could spend it much better expanding/upgrading the other machines in my network?
Last we knew, the Emperor was about $300.00 less than the Dell Inspiron 5000e, (Both units are the Compal N38W2)
Which means...exactly!! That Dell can overprice commodity computer equipment because they are Dell. They have a reputation. A brand. I can count on them to be around and support what they sold me (or at least the PHB thinks so). QLITech is a no-name start up that may be gone next week. QLITech has to offer something much more than a 10% discount when going up against Dell's solid reputation.
But that still doesn't change the fact that there is no way that I would blow $2500 on a laptop. Not when I can get a Thinkpad AND build kick-ass server for the same cost. Yeah, yeah...'That Thinkpad is a lame configuration'...I've heard the argument., but it's a notebook. A 486 would work to display remote X apps and allow me to be mobile with a few less power hungry apps. I choose to put the power in a workstation where it is cheaper.
So, to sum up, you are selling high end equipment with marginal discounts compared to brand name vendors (a discount that should be covered by the fact that the OS is free). I don't see the value proposition that will keep you in business, other than, "Hey, look at us. We sell Linux!!"
there prices are way too high. I thought that one of the good points of hardware vendors using Linux was so that they could drop the price. From what I've seen so far, it always seems that a system with Linux pre-installed always cost more than a comparable system with Windows pre-installed. It's as if the vendors are saying, "Pay us extra, 'cause we 'support' Linux." No thanks.
I can put together a box myself from peices for less than what they're charging. So, their business plan is to enter a market composed of people capable and willing to building their own systems. They don't offer a considerable discount over the BigBrand guys, and their only distinguishable selling point is "IT HAS LINUX". My prediction is that they will follow TuxTops to the bottom of the heap before the year is out.
BTW, what happened to the idea of building a business out of providing custom distributions? Now that would be useful and a better business model than overpriced hardware.
There is no other way to explain the jerry-rigged nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development.
Scientific Creationism: The belief that a powerful being created the universe, the Earth and mankind through natural forces.
Evolution: A natural force for creating 'higher' beings from 'lower' beings.
How is anything proved/disproved here? This doesn't even proved Fundamentalist wrong. If a great power conciously created the world with dinosaur bones in the ground in such a way that they appear to be millions of years old, what to stop 'it' from funging some genetic data? At most, you can say that this is indirect data supporting the conclusion that mankind is a product of evolution (which is the only type of data we'll ever get until someone discovers time travel, BTW).
OTOH, don't argue with anyone who needs more evidence than what currently exist that evolution is the best explanation for why the Earth's biosphere is in its current condition. It's just not worth the pain and frustration.
Sir, you are undubitably correct. Undubitably I say.
Might there not be other reasons for not trying to pick-up and fix someone else's work? Have you not considered that trying to fix someone else's code is a lot more difficult that implementing a feature from scratch?
/*doesn't mean shit */
I code professionally, and the hardest part of the job is trying to understand the mindset of the programmer who wrote this code originally. Most commercial code is worked on by a lot of hands, and it shows. You see the same problem solved in different ways in different places. Some of this may be because programmer B didn't know that programmer A had already implemented a function to handle the problem. It may be that programmer B did not like programmer A's implementation. How many times have you heard a programmer proclaim 'this code' sucks, only to replace it with something that is marginalling 'different'.
Regardless of the reason, being programmer N, I pick up this morass of code, and think that the whole thing needs to be thrown out and re-implemented.
With OS code, seeing as the programmers are volunteers, they get to work on what ever makes them feel good. What feels better, implementing a feature and actually making something work, or digging through someone else's obfuscated idea of code in order to fix an obscure bug?
In my opinion, new programmers would be willing to work on bug fixing if UNIX programmers would use real names for variables.
void *p =
Is anyone else reminded of the concept of an 'impartial observer' from that sci-fi book about a child who was raised by martians. Sorry, can't remember the name of the book, but it was also the first time I heard the term 'grok'.
In this novel, specially trained people donned a white cloak and instantly became observers. While wearing the cloak, they could only report on exactly what they heard or saw without any interpretation or extrapolation. Their status as an observer held special legal status much like a notary public, and they could be used for much of the same functions, ie. providing witness to the signing of a contract.
I see this as a good idea, IFF the advisors are given strict training in how to be impartial, and that their status an advisor is maintained by stringent rules. An understanding would develope that status as an advisor would be a position of honor, and the honor of the position would be soiled by any misconduct that would reflect on the advisors as a group. The advisors would police themselves to maintain that honor. If they did not do a good job, they would not be believable (and therefore not used) in court.
Fuck that.
/. comments here, please).
Sounds good at first, but wait 'till you drop one in the car while headed down the interstate. I have enough trouble with pulling spare change from between the bucket seats now. My big fat fingers just can't handle such small items reliably when the other hand is occupied (no off color
No thank you. I'd much rather have a media that is easier to handle.
One more thing...
The courts will become much more efficient once loser pays is implemented. Most cases can be decided up front if both lawyers would just be honest. The problem is that they want to go to court in order to try to convince a judge to give them just a little bit more than they deserve (or to try to work the other side into bankruptcy). With loser pay, the side on the right has no reason to quit, the wrong side knows it, and will settle out of court before running up ridiculous legal fees.
The problem with "loser pays" is that it makes large companies untouchable. ... If you sue Microsoft and lose, you're instantly six digits in debt because they put a team of fifteen highly paid corporate lawyers on the job. ... And the beauty of it is that your hometown lawyer never had a chance against a mob of the best corporate lawyers in the country. They already stall as long as possible to drive up your legal expenses; a loser-pays system just makes it harder to get justice.
First of all, either 15 lawyers work on the case or they don't. You can't have it both ways.
Second, they can only sue me into bankruptcy once. The current system penalizes you no matter how good your case is. Under a loser pays system, I can convince some high-powered lawyers to work for me on a contigency basis when going after a rich, powerful entity such as Microsoft. The lawyer just wants to get paid. He knows that he can charge more to Microsoft and actually get it.
Third, loser pays dimishes the payoff of frivolous suits since more people would be willing to fight them. Instead of chasing class actions suits, powerful lawyers will be chasing the people that large companies did wrong. "Heh", the lawyers will say, "let me help you get what you deserve from that evil corporation."
The only thing that the current system does is insure that a wronged individual never gets his/her just deserts since any award they recieve in court immediately goes to pay off the lawyers (reference: Rodney King, that woman accusing Clinton of sexual harassment)
fairly new at the job and all hot and ready to go.
The HEIC (head engineer in charge) told me to run the test program with a specific command line format. I was 2nd shift, and a little later, when he was gone, I decided that it would be more efficient if I used a different syntax that could be entered more quickly.
My output went up and I felt 'oh-so-proud' of my ingenuity.
Until the HEIC asked me where his debug files had gone the next day. The program was setup to generate the files when the command was entered the way he had specified. The customer wanted those files, and now he had to explain that they were not created.
Was the program set up stupidly? Yes. Should the HEIC have informed me of why I needed to run the program in such a specific way? Maybe. It doesn't matter, though. It was my fault. I was told to do a job in a certain way, but being young and brash, I KNEW more than the old futz.
It's not until you get older that you realize how much you don't know. You spend a lot of time feeling regretful about all the 'smart' moves you made while younger.
We also get slammed with charges from banks to use atms. That part makes no sense to me.
No. The scary part is when you see people lined up outside the bank in order to pay to use the ATM, while there are idle tellers inside. If you are a banker it makes very good cents to charge $1.50 to give someone $20 of their own money. I'll never figure out why the people do it, though.
NOTE: WAY TO SAVE $1.50:
Go to the grocery store and buy a pack of gum with your ATM card and get $20 back. You still spent $.50, but at least your breath don't stink anymore 8*)
Anyone else here find themselves dodging their heads when playing video games like Doom? When watching others play?
My wife laughs at me when my boys wrestle. I'm twisting and feinting in what I think they should be doing. The bad part is that I don't even realize that I'm doing it.
But seriously, are there any /.er's that don't get a sinking feeling whenever a cop passes them on the road?
Good point, but let me counter. In North Carolina, the legislature passed a law granting each family a PFJ, prayer for judgement. Basically, the law says that everyone gets a pass on a traffic ticket every 2 years. IMHO, what the legislature said was, "Traffic tickets are our bullshit way of collecting revenue. The distribution of traffic tickets are fairly random with a weight to younger drivers. We've been handing out too many and now everyone beginning to see them for what they are. The people will revolt (by replacing us) if we don't do something, so lets make sure that people who follow the speed limit signs most of the time won't get too upset. We won't collect as much, but we also won't have to openly levy more taxes to cover our pet projects."
The point: people were starting to get upset about traffic law, and the legislature responded.
Just about any game can become a zero-sum game if the correct atmosphere is set. For instance, when playing basketball make sure that all players have had at least 5 shots of good liquor. A shot must be taken for every 10 points scored. Trust me, it doesn't take long before no one has any idea what the score is.
As for me, wrestling is a zero-sum game. I wrestle Stan, our clubs head coach, and he can beat me into the mat any time he chooses. But, every once in a while I score, or pull off some really slick move. He didn't lose, but I won.
If that didn't make sense, read it again until it does. Any game becomes zero-sum as soon as you choose to ignore the score and concentrate on the play and allow the score to worry about itself. Once you can reach that state, then regardless of whether you had more points or not, you rate yourself a winner/loser on how well you performed against your own criteria and you enjoy the game while it last.
You are creating a business with such a low barrier to entry that you wrote the software in one evening.
Why does a business have to have a high barrier to entry. All I need is a lawn mower and a set of hedge trimmers in order to do lawn maintainence like I did in high school. I want to use the program to do something that people are willing to pay for, i.e. I want to get paid for doing work not for being rich to begin with.
And Jesus said:
"The poor will always be with us."
This has been tried several times before. Basically he is saying that we need console type systems that come pre-configured and are controlled by the company that sold you the thing. IBM tried it with the PC-Jr. Radio Shack had a PC out in the early days that pop up their own little shell when you turned it on and tried to reign the user into their own little arena.
They all fail for the same reason. Joe Blow gets the thing home and uses it for a week just like IBM et.al. intended. Then he heads over to CompUSA and sees how the $10 calendar program lets him put his own pictures on a calendar. "Why can't my computer do that?" he ask. Then he gets mad at whoever it was that sold him the computer in the first place, and starts looking to buy a real computer.
Computers are complex and get in the way, because people want to do complex things that go in so many different directions that no matter where the OS is it is bound to be in the way eventually.
neural net should be able to distinguish.
It's the should part that I find scary. I've done some work with neural nets. Machine learning is not like other stuff you've worked with. It is not deterministic. You can't say with 100% accuracy that any non-trivial output is correct. Neural nets just don't work that way. Straight C code can at least be understood, even if exhaustive proof of correctness is beyond most Q&A department. Very few people can understand even the simplest neual net.
While you may not mean to be taken seriously, this does pose one of the problems with this technology. So what happens when they wire the fighter pilot up to the plane to get better performance and the pilot has to:
-sneeze
-scratch
-use the bathroom (extreme stress can cause electrical output to go all over the scale)
I'm sorry to say that I agree with you.
The main beef I have against MS is that they produce a system designed for a single user, but they try to promote it as a multiuser system. When they do this, all the assumptions that they built the system on are wrong and the thing is just impossible to get to work as advertise. Sort of like trying to use and Indy racecar as an off-road vehicle by putting big tires on it.
It appears that Linux is beginning to show the same cracks. It's designed as a server and is just not fitting into the 'home/SOHO' setting. This is just one example. A home/SOHO computer will sit idle for 12hrs a day, even if it is a server. This much downtime is bound to make up for any startup cost.
So, what would be the assumptions for a good multi-user OS for the home and small office? Would Linux require a fork to fit that niche?
I'm sorry, but I let my frustration with a system that has corrupted a lot of optimistic dreams lead me to post off topic. This relates to the subject in that everyone who is trying to do anything is being frustrated by ridiculously obvious ideas being patented. The patent that blocks me took 3 years to get through, and simply uses a lot of big words to say something simple. It doesn't do anything that even someone not versed in the art could do in one evening. How is any industry to progress when someone holds a patent on a basic idea?
So, the question becomes: Do we as a society veto 'the government' and choose to ignore the whole patent system once it becomes obvious that it inhibits everyone except the lucky few? At what point will the law abiding citizens of this country come to find enforcement of the law reprehensible?
Woe!! A stray less than sign got my original post trashed. Shoulda previewed.
/.:
I wrote a small application ( less than 300 lines) that would create a mosaic. A list of pictures was used to simulate a master picture. I wrote it one evening and it doesn't do anything spectacular. It looks at a region on the master image and finds which of the small images match that region the best, then fills in the corresponding area on the output image. The exact same thing a person would do with a shoebox full of prints. I did this because I didn't know what to get my rich brother-in-law for Christmas. So, I got him something he already had...his own pictures in a different format.
Guess what? It's the process is patented. Something I, just an average Joe with no work experience in the graphics industry and only minimal hobbiest experience, can design and write an application for in one eventing is patentable. Hell, if the patent had mentioned an obscure matching algorithm I would have been impressed. Instead the algorithm used a distance-vector to find the closest match.
determine the best available matching source image by computing red, green and blue channel root-mean square error.
Well, no shit, Sherlock. How else do you find the distance between two points.
What's more, I had the brilliant ideas of storing the digital image on a hard disk and producing output with a printer. I even displayed the image on my screen, but the patent covers all that too.
I've had several ideas how to make money with the program selling a service (ie, actually doing something that contributes to society), but it would appear that I'm blocked by a patent that has bogus claims. Tell me again how this benefits society.
My question to
Do I proceed with my business plans, and explain to the court that doing something with a computer in the same way that it is done in real life is not novel when the lawsuit comes in? Or do I meekly walk away, ignoring the possibility of creating jobs and wealth and generally expanding the economy? What happens when the system gets so out of whack that no one pays attention to it, like those laws against sodomy and extra-marital sex?
For the curious, patent# 6,137,498
I wrote a small application (determine the best available matching source image by computing red, green and blue channel root-mean square error.
/.:
Well, no shit, Sherlock. How else do you find the distance between two points.
What's more, I had the brilliant ideas of storing the digital image on a hard disk and producing output with a printer. I even displayed the image on my screen, but the patent covers that too.
I've had several ideas how to make money with the program selling a service (ie, actually doing something that contributes to society), but it would appear that I'm blocked by a patent that has bogus claims. Tell me again how this benefits society.
My question to
Do I proceed with my business plans, and explain to the court that doing something with a computer in the same way that it is done in real life is not novel when the lawsuit comes in? What happens when the system gets so out of whack that no one pays attention to it, like those laws against sodomy and extra-marital sex?
For the curious, patent# 6,137,498
everyone here is knocking voice recognition as useless. Well, I'm here to say that it is not.
I used OS/2. Version 4 came with a version of voice recognition, and I ran it on a 100MHz Pentium with only 32Meg RAM. It ruled in the proper place.
First, the system is good for first drafts of text documents like long reports. Don't expect to get a perfect copy the first time through. The output from the voice input will require some cleanup. But guess what, so does anything I type.
Very few people type anything close to 80wpm. I only get around 40. Voice type allowed around 100wpm. For those l337 haX0rz that can type and think that everyone should be able to...go out and see the sun every now and then!!
I would write up my report in note form, basically just outlining what I wanted to say. Anything that I had to quote got a reference to the text I would quote from. Then I locked the bedroom door to keep out noise from wife and kids, gathered my notes and references around and started talking. An hour later I had the first draft of a ten page report. I've spent 4 doing it manually.
You may not have a need for it, but if you're in school or any other place where you have to produce long reports and you don't type with flaming fingers, then voice input can be a real boost to productivity.