I know the G-Forces aren't exactly the hottest video cards out there, but that doesn't mean you should use them to protect a table top from your drink. Anyone that wasteful deserves to be regulated.
When you're looking at Apple purchases, try and keep the MacWorld schedules in mind.
This used to be the standard, but Apple seems to be getting away from the "wow them at MacWorld/Apple Expo" model. Hardly anything new is is introduced there by Apple these last few shows...
The Apple Expo in Paris was held this week, but there was really nothing new there (in the past, Apple had used it as a supplemental stage to introduce new hardware in the fall between MacWorld NY and MacWorld SF -- and MacWorld Tokyo in the spring).
This summer's MacWorld NY introduced... what? Jaguar? Nope, it wasn't even ready until a month later, we knew it was coming before MacWorld began.
This last spring's MacWorld Tokyo gave us... (drumroll, please) a different size Apple LCD monitor? Woo-hoo...
When did Apple intro the all-dual-processor tower lineup? In between New York and Paris.
The updates come in between when Apple's ready to release them, which is really the way it should work.
Maybe this is just the strategy for navigating the stormy economy and we'll see Apple re-adhere to the old schedule at some point. But for now, don't pin any bets on MacWorld... it's more for the third parties than Apple these days. The latest crop of TiBooks was also introduced between shows.
I know a lot of people are talking about the mythical G5 ("It's going to be released at MacWorld SF in January"), but it's the same speculation before every show year after year. Don't believe any of it unless you happen to know that Motorola has finally gotten its rear in gear.
It wasn't part of "the Internet" until there were at least two nodes. Who's to say whether his computer or the other guy's was the first node? You can't claim that one was the first node and the other was second, because they both became nodes at the same time.
If he had said "my computer was one of the first two nodes on the Internet," I'd have no problem with the statement. But he's so busy blustering about his accomplishment that he makes this impossible claim to market himself.
his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet in September 1969.
The "first node of the Internet?" You can't have an Internet with only one node. A man who does not understand this basic concept claims to have invented packet-switching?
I don't know about your Ford, but my Merkur manual suggests that I check oil, tire pressure, transmission fluid, etc before starting my car or driving it. Come to think of it, my Nissan manual has the same thing.
They may say it in the manual because the lawyers told them to include it, but this is different. Let's say Ford discovers that the tires that came on many of their vehicles have a tendency to fail (which would never happen to Ford, of course). This would be like Ford saying, "We're not going to recall the tires. There's no need for that. Just check your tire pressure before each use. If you're going to the supermarket, check each tire before you get into the car. When you come out of the supermarket, check the tires again. If the supermarket is a great distance away, say, more than five miles, stop somewhere along the way and recheck your tires just to be sure. Oh, and owners of '97 models should just buy a new car. You're really taking a risk if you're driving a five-year-old car anyway."
Microsoft's flagship word processor has for years had a security flaw that could allow a criminal to steal computer files by "bugging" a document with a hidden code.
Oh good. My secrets are safe because I don't know any criminals. The only people after my documents are ambitious marketing managers, who may be similar to criminals, but are not.
The company said it will definitely repair the problem only for owners of the most recent versions of the software. That decision -- still left largely up in the air by Microsoft engineers -- may leave millions of users of Word 97 without a fix.
So are they "definitely" fixing it for owners of the most recent versions, or is it "up in the air?" Paging Copy Editor, aisle six. Cleanup in aisle six.
Incidentally, Microsoft isn't "leaving millions of users of Word 97 without a fix." The fix is to upgrade your five-year-old copy of Word, get all the "great" features Microsoft has included since 97, and put money into Microsoft's coffers so they can develop great new features for Word 2007. Of course, that's Microsoft's solution. The better solution is to wipe your hard disk and download the Red Hat ISO or buy a Mac before you become further entangled in Microsoft's web.
"They bought the package with full faith in Microsoft and its ability to protect them from this kind of exploit."
If they were that gullible, this is the least worrisome of their problems.
Analyst Laura DiDio of the Yankee Group said companies are taking a risk by using such old software...
FUD in an AP article? I am shocked!
Microsoft suggests users view hidden codes in every document they open.
I hope that's not the fix. "Ford suggests drivers check their oil and tire pressure before each time they start their cars."
Given the latest fiasco in Florida's continuing attempts to implement a decent voting system, I thought it would be appropriate to alert Slashdot readers to the work of Mr. Dave Barry. He's been studying voting systems for many years, and has developed some well-considered positions.
Amazon must have been testing those new autonomous daemons. When they start notifiying your customers that you won't be able to ship their order before you know you won't be able to ship their order, it's time to sack your robot.
The problem with having various autonomous systems performing maintenance and adjustments is that they don't look at the big picture to see what their changes will affect.
Take the human body's allergic reactions, for instance. Your body may react to something that's really not harmful, but it thinks it's protecting you. The unintended effect of the reaction can range from a mild annoyance to death.
In nature, other life forms have evolved to take advantage of your autonomous reactions, and I'm sure we will see this in the computer world as well. Wait until some script kiddie figures out that he can crash your server (or at least eat up CPU cycles) by sending it a signal that makes an autonomous daemon overreact in trying to do its job. The problem will be discovered, exploited, patched (but not on MS boxes) and a new exploit will be found. Circle of life and all that, I suppose.
Still, I think borrowing ideas from mother nature for the evolution of computers is the right way to go. After all, she's had millions of years to work on the problem through trial and error. We can build on that research and perhaps improve upon it, at which point we'll probably start looking at how to control our own evolution. Just remember to never write a daemon that prevents you from pulling the plug.
The middle of the information age? Says who?
on
When Users Attack
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Pretty amazing what people can do to computers in the middle of the information age.
Saying we're in the "middle" implies you know when the end is coming.
Is there something you want to tell us about the interesting angles of Mars and Jupiter? Are the lights on your DSL modem blinking messages to you in Morse code again?
Personally, I think we're still very close to the beginning in the scheme of things.
Influence is an understatement. Saudi Arabia funds Big Terror.
Ashcroft is still shredding the constitution
Technically, no. He paid Andersen to take care of the shredding. He got a great bulk deal on the Constitution and the notes of his meetings with corporate execs.
Bush the lesser is still an idiot
It gets worse. He's an idiot who's found his father's nuclear-missile-launching suitcase.
The Clintons are still being slandered
That's because Hillary's prancing around the Senate calling for the abolishment of the Electoral College. Being the target of slander is one of the perks of being a public official.
Gore is still being demonized
By who? The last time I heard anything about Gore, he had an opinion piece in the NYTimes demonizing Bush.
The economy is still going south
At this rate, we'll come out on the other side and start heading North soon... no point turning back now.
The religious right are still insane
No, they're officially American mainstream now. It's the people who have a problem with certain words in the pledge who are officially categorized as insane. I liked it better the old way, though.
Drug companies are still raping the elderly and disabled
They're not so discriminating. They rape all taxpayers who pay for government-subsidized drugs.
Star Wars is still a Bad Idea
No, it's now a quintet of Bad Ideas looking for a sixth member.
Mother Nature is still NOT HAPPY
She may be a crotchety biddy, but at least she's not as angry at us as she was at Pompeii.
Mass media is still supine
It's not lying on its back, it's just bending over to show us the new boxer shorts it bought at Target, complete with the Target logo on the seat.
Short list of non-games that won't run under Classic:
Norton Disk Doctor (I shouldn't have to buy the new version to repair an external drive that was formatted by OS 9, especially since every new version of NDD seems to destroy data for the first few months after its release)
After 5-10 viewings, I'm better off having bought the DVD...
That's the point. The industry doesn't want to do this because it believes it will lead to piracy/loss of revenue/pestilence, so it offers a format that is bound to fail. When it fails, it can point to the failure and then tell critics/Congress:
"See? Legitimate online distribution of media doesn't work? Any fool can see that consumers are better off paying $30 per ad-encrusted, region-encoded DVD. Clearly we need mandatory DRM on all computers because there is clearly no legitimate place for legitimate online distribution of media."
The best part is that consumers will never demand online distribution of videos because they'll "know" they're "better off" buying DVDs. So they'll continue paying way too much, getting too little, and happily thinking they've outsmarted the industry.
(Note: the word "clearly" is reserved for use by politicians, lobbyists, lawyers, used car salesmen, college students who don't know what the heck their term papers are about, and other people who don't have one shred of evidence to back up their bold statements. "Clearly" is a form of intellectual bullying: "Clearly, you must be stupid if you can't see the non-existent evidence I'm not showing you!")
This is obviously just a marketing ploy to sell more machines by the end of the year. Everyone's going to want to go out and buy a new Mac because there will *never* be a faster machine that will boots into OS 9... the Moore's Law holdouts no longer have anything to wait for.
Of course, at MacWorld SF in January 2003, Jobs will announce that Apple was just kidding; that the real date OS 9 will be discontinued is January 2004. Right? Right? Guys? He's kidding, right? (runs out to buy a new Mac).
In all seriousness, I can understand why Apple is making this apparently "stupid" move:
Apple wants to force the abandonment of OS 9. The entire Macintosh user base combined is already not large enough to entice a lot of software/hardware developers to support Macs. The challenge Apple currently faces is that if it fragments its user base further, it may lose some of the developers who do support Macs but can't afford to spend the time/money coding for both OS X and OS 9.
That would lead to fewer programs available for the Mac, which would lead to fewer incentives for the masses to use Macs, which would shrink the already-tiny user base (by Microsoft standards, it's tiny) further, which gives developers less incentive to support Macs, etc. It kicks off a vicious cycle that would ultimately kill the Macintosh. As Macintosh users, you and I bear the weight of this decision in the short term, but in the long term it ensures that the Macintosh will still be alive and kicking five years from now.
There are no people on Mars yet. We haven't figured out how to get them there (in terms of ensuring their health and safety; in terms of how we're going to bring them back; in terms of financing the project). There's no timetable for sending people to Mars, so one can neither say "we'd better prepare for this" nor "we're nowhere near needing to prepare for this."
Less than one percent of the people on this planet have Internet access, yet we're talking about plugging in a place where man probably won't set foot in the next 50 years?
I'm not saying it's not worth discussing the theoretical implications of an interplanetary Internet, especially since it probably won't be built in the lifetime of pioneers like Vint Cerf, and then we'll be saying "if only we could go back and ask Cerf what he thought about this." However, I think we need to note that for the forseeable future, this is just theory.
One of the problems of running for office is that you have to represent all of the people, not just a single issue
A Congressperson should represent all the issues in theory, but that's not the way it works in practice. Look at Carolyn McCarthy of the 4th New York District:
She was a nurse and card-carrying Republican with political aspirations who had lost the Republican primary. Then her son was injured and her husband killed by a gunman on the Long Island Rail Road. After tending to her son's recovery, she decided to run again, but Nassau County's legendary Republican political machine backed eight-year state assembly veteran Dan Frisa, who went on the win the election.
Two years later she switched parties, and ran as a Democrat, painting herself as a widowed housewife calling upon the voters to send her to Washington to bring about gun control. The voters responded overwhelmingly to her single-issue campaign, so much so that her incumbent opponent gave up in the days before the election -- he stopped answering reporter's calls and making public appearances. Six years after her election as a democrat, she is still in Congress and still a registered Republican who calls herself as a Democrat, though she has now branched out to two issues: gun control and health care.
It's all in the delivery.
A congress person's job is pretty unpleasant, and Valerie hates the DC weather (she's comparing it to Northern California).
Funny; I prefer DC's weather to Northern California's. It never rains during the summer and never stops raining during the winter -- we have bipolar weather. Where's the variety? And don't you miss New York's snow? (I grew up in Westbury)
Slashdot Mirror
Intel plans to blame their sales on online file sharing.
- The Apple Expo in Paris was held this week, but there was really nothing new there (in the past, Apple had used it as a supplemental stage to introduce new hardware in the fall between MacWorld NY and MacWorld SF -- and MacWorld Tokyo in the spring).
- This summer's MacWorld NY introduced... what? Jaguar? Nope, it wasn't even ready until a month later, we knew it was coming before MacWorld began.
- This last spring's MacWorld Tokyo gave us... (drumroll, please) a different size Apple LCD monitor? Woo-hoo...
- When did Apple intro the all-dual-processor tower lineup? In between New York and Paris.
The updates come in between when Apple's ready to release them, which is really the way it should work.Maybe this is just the strategy for navigating the stormy economy and we'll see Apple re-adhere to the old schedule at some point. But for now, don't pin any bets on MacWorld... it's more for the third parties than Apple these days. The latest crop of TiBooks was also introduced between shows.
I know a lot of people are talking about the mythical G5 ("It's going to be released at MacWorld SF in January"), but it's the same speculation before every show year after year. Don't believe any of it unless you happen to know that Motorola has finally gotten its rear in gear.
Two nodes: a network.
It wasn't part of "the Internet" until there were at least two nodes. Who's to say whether his computer or the other guy's was the first node? You can't claim that one was the first node and the other was second, because they both became nodes at the same time.
If he had said "my computer was one of the first two nodes on the Internet," I'd have no problem with the statement. But he's so busy blustering about his accomplishment that he makes this impossible claim to market himself.
Slashdot story: Leonard Kleinrock On The Origins of Packet Switching
The Web page that story links to has since moved here.
(Note the press release's misuse the word "said." Public relations people are so arrogant they make up language as they go along.)
The ability to ping yourself does not prove you're on the Internet. That's just incestuous narcissism.
Incidentally, Microsoft isn't "leaving millions of users of Word 97 without a fix." The fix is to upgrade your five-year-old copy of Word, get all the "great" features Microsoft has included since 97, and put money into Microsoft's coffers so they can develop great new features for Word 2007. Of course, that's Microsoft's solution. The better solution is to wipe your hard disk and download the Red Hat ISO or buy a Mac before you become further entangled in Microsoft's web.
If they were that gullible, this is the least worrisome of their problems. FUD in an AP article? I am shocked! I hope that's not the fix. "Ford suggests drivers check their oil and tire pressure before each time they start their cars."Given the latest fiasco in Florida's continuing attempts to implement a decent voting system, I thought it would be appropriate to alert Slashdot readers to the work of Mr. Dave Barry. He's been studying voting systems for many years, and has developed some well-considered positions.
Scores so far:
Strapped to the Space Shuttle: 9.7
Sitting in a British museum: 4.2
Take the human body's allergic reactions, for instance. Your body may react to something that's really not harmful, but it thinks it's protecting you. The unintended effect of the reaction can range from a mild annoyance to death.
In nature, other life forms have evolved to take advantage of your autonomous reactions, and I'm sure we will see this in the computer world as well. Wait until some script kiddie figures out that he can crash your server (or at least eat up CPU cycles) by sending it a signal that makes an autonomous daemon overreact in trying to do its job. The problem will be discovered, exploited, patched (but not on MS boxes) and a new exploit will be found. Circle of life and all that, I suppose.
Still, I think borrowing ideas from mother nature for the evolution of computers is the right way to go. After all, she's had millions of years to work on the problem through trial and error. We can build on that research and perhaps improve upon it, at which point we'll probably start looking at how to control our own evolution. Just remember to never write a daemon that prevents you from pulling the plug.
Is there something you want to tell us about the interesting angles of Mars and Jupiter? Are the lights on your DSL modem blinking messages to you in Morse code again?
Personally, I think we're still very close to the beginning in the scheme of things.
You mean that thing that keeps flying around our world without doing anything constructive? It's called a troll.
Every time I think it's safe to leave out the tags, someone reminds me that they're still necessary. Thank you.
"See? Legitimate online distribution of media doesn't work? Any fool can see that consumers are better off paying $30 per ad-encrusted, region-encoded DVD. Clearly we need mandatory DRM on all computers because there is clearly no legitimate place for legitimate online distribution of media."
The best part is that consumers will never demand online distribution of videos because they'll "know" they're "better off" buying DVDs. So they'll continue paying way too much, getting too little, and happily thinking they've outsmarted the industry.
(Note: the word "clearly" is reserved for use by politicians, lobbyists, lawyers, used car salesmen, college students who don't know what the heck their term papers are about, and other people who don't have one shred of evidence to back up their bold statements. "Clearly" is a form of intellectual bullying: "Clearly, you must be stupid if you can't see the non-existent evidence I'm not showing you!")
Of course, at MacWorld SF in January 2003, Jobs will announce that Apple was just kidding; that the real date OS 9 will be discontinued is January 2004. Right? Right? Guys? He's kidding, right? (runs out to buy a new Mac).
In all seriousness, I can understand why Apple is making this apparently "stupid" move:
Apple wants to force the abandonment of OS 9. The entire Macintosh user base combined is already not large enough to entice a lot of software/hardware developers to support Macs. The challenge Apple currently faces is that if it fragments its user base further, it may lose some of the developers who do support Macs but can't afford to spend the time/money coding for both OS X and OS 9.
That would lead to fewer programs available for the Mac, which would lead to fewer incentives for the masses to use Macs, which would shrink the already-tiny user base (by Microsoft standards, it's tiny) further, which gives developers less incentive to support Macs, etc. It kicks off a vicious cycle that would ultimately kill the Macintosh. As Macintosh users, you and I bear the weight of this decision in the short term, but in the long term it ensures that the Macintosh will still be alive and kicking five years from now.
- There are no people on Mars yet. We haven't figured out how to get them there (in terms of ensuring their health and safety; in terms of how we're going to bring them back; in terms of financing the project). There's no timetable for sending people to Mars, so one can neither say "we'd better prepare for this" nor "we're nowhere near needing to prepare for this."
- Less than one percent of the people on this planet have Internet access, yet we're talking about plugging in a place where man probably won't set foot in the next 50 years?
I'm not saying it's not worth discussing the theoretical implications of an interplanetary Internet, especially since it probably won't be built in the lifetime of pioneers like Vint Cerf, and then we'll be saying "if only we could go back and ask Cerf what he thought about this." However, I think we need to note that for the forseeable future, this is just theory."We're looking for people who are bright enough to use Windows, yet dense enough to use Windows. Everybody got that?"
She was a nurse and card-carrying Republican with political aspirations who had lost the Republican primary. Then her son was injured and her husband killed by a gunman on the Long Island Rail Road. After tending to her son's recovery, she decided to run again, but Nassau County's legendary Republican political machine backed eight-year state assembly veteran Dan Frisa, who went on the win the election.
Two years later she switched parties, and ran as a Democrat, painting herself as a widowed housewife calling upon the voters to send her to Washington to bring about gun control. The voters responded overwhelmingly to her single-issue campaign, so much so that her incumbent opponent gave up in the days before the election -- he stopped answering reporter's calls and making public appearances. Six years after her election as a democrat, she is still in Congress and still a registered Republican who calls herself as a Democrat, though she has now branched out to two issues: gun control and health care.
It's all in the delivery.
Funny; I prefer DC's weather to Northern California's. It never rains during the summer and never stops raining during the winter -- we have bipolar weather. Where's the variety? And don't you miss New York's snow? (I grew up in Westbury)