If Intel made CD-ROM drives, we would start seeing the following in 95% of new PCs:
A giant fan aimed at a heat sink attached to the spindle that grips the CD
Pressurized CD-ROM drives
A sticker on the "5x-the-speed-of-sound" drive stating that by using this CD-ROM drive, you agree that the speed of sound is one-tenth the speed the rest of the world claims.
One of the above would be appended to what we know today as a 24x CD-ROM drive.
10.1% of 12-17s are actively downloading/not purchasing music.
Technically, this statement says 10.1% of 12-17-year-olds fall into one of the following two categories:
People who are actively downloading music (this doesn't necessarily mean they're not buying music, downloading music they already "own" or downloading indy music that has been made freely available by the artist)
People who are not purchasing music (like people who don't watch television, there's nothing criminal about not supporting the popular media)
The "or" operand (/) leaves open the possibility that the entire 10.1% consists of people from either group. However, the statement is designed to be open enough for you to reach your own conclusions based on your personal or corporate-sponsored biases.
In short, I think it's safe to say that anyone who cites the statement as "evidence" of anything is standing on very shaky ground.
No company is really going to use this, but a company will claim it does to gain your "trust." Have you ever heard a hardcore marketing goon talk about trust? It's really chilling.
I used to work for a company whose customers had to provide accurate information in order to sign up -- the service wouldn't work with false info -- but the problem was getting people to sign up.
One of the main selling points was that customer data was completely secure: no one will ever be able to read your data, only an aggregate report of all our users. The company went to a lot of trouble to make this point convincing, going so far as to suggest that users had legal protections against abuse. There were people in the building who spent all their time trying to think of ways to convince more people to drop their defenses so we could exploit their information -- cold, calculating, 24-7, like WOPR spends all its time playing World War Three.
I believed their claims until the day I saw a user's sensitive data on an engineer's screen. And then that engineer showed me another user's data, and another. "We've always had the ability to do this," he said, "for, ahem, quality control purposes."
If a company tells you it isn't collecting the valuable data you provide, you need to assume it is lying (unless you can personally verify the claim or you are positive that the law protects you against abuse).
Programs like this one could lead to greater truthfulness in the answers people volunteer on the Web, she said, provided that they were willing to replace some of their native caution with a bit of good will toward a company and its need for data-mining.
"Right now, the rate of falsification on Web surveys is extremely high," Dr. Cavoukian said. Conservative estimates are 42 percent, but anecdotally the rates are far higher, she added. "People are lying," she said, "and vendors don't know what is false and accurate, so the information is useless."
People are "lying" because corporations lie, as a matter of policy. This will never change because lies are more profitable than truth. Only corporations don't call their behavior "lying," they call it "marketing." So when I fill out an intrusive form with false information, I don't consider it lying either. I call it "standing up for my right to privacy." This system of "marketing" versus "standing up for my rights" is well-balanced, but this new masking technology is simply a marketing attempt to tip the scales in the corporations' favor by tricking consumers into volunteering information on false assumptions.
Why is the Canadian Crop Circle Research Network concerned about crop circles in America? If Disney makes crop circles in its own country, there's nothing alien about it. However, if the Canadians are searching for these American crop circles, the Canadians would be the aliens in our midst.
On the other hand, if Disney goes to Canada to make crop circles, we can reasonably claim the crop circles were made by aliens. But if Disney hires Canadians to make the crop circles in Canada, are the circles still considered to be the work of aliens? This is actually a very important topic of discussion, because crop circles have historically been produced by illegal aliens who are not only underpaid and overworked, they're not paying income tax. I don't know about Canada, but the IRS has a whole division devoted to hunting these tax evaders.
The only thing certain is that these circles will probably appear in threes -- two smaller circles sitting atop a larger circle -- and a pop musician will be performing in the center of each one.
Does the parental admonition "Close the door! I'm not paying to heat/air-condition the whole neighborhood!" ring a bell? How many parents are going to allow their kids to tie up a phone line or leave the console on 24-7 to allow complete strangers all over the world to use their PS3?
Seriously, either the author of the article doesn't know what he's talking about or Sony's been smoking something other than Xbox sales. I saw Dean Takahashi (the author) give a talk to promote his new Xbox book at the San Jose Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago. I was sitting in the cafe area, occasionally looking over to get an idea of whether the audience seemed interested in what he was saying... but they seemed so dead I didn't bother walking over.
At the end, he distributed free X-box games to random audience members, and I distinctly remember the look on each person's face as they accepted their prize: "what the fsck am I gonna do with this?"
The real question is: Who do you trust more, the chinese government or microsoft?
In the immortal words of the fictitious Soviet Ambassador DeSadeski, "Thank you, no. I do not support the work of imperialist stooges."
I think it's interesting that the "Commie stooges" are troubling themselves to develop their own clone of Windows rather than use Linux, which is freely available.
Are they hoping to undermine one of the most successful (ethics notwithstanding) examples of capitalism by violating intellectual property laws? Or are they so impressed by Microsoft's ability to force social conformity en masse through Windows that Beijing now looks to Redmond for inspiration?
Hey, photographer! You wanna take a good picture? Here man, take this.
This... is my bro.
CRAZY EARL the sysadmin lifts a dustcover to reveal a toasted server
This is his party. He's the guest of honor. Today... is his birthday.
Email Mother calls out from down the hall: "Happy Birthday, Code Red."
I will never forget this day. The day I came to IIS city and fought one million Code Red worms. I love the little Commie bastards, I really do. These enemy worms are as persistent as thick-headed CIOs.
These are great days we're living, bros! We are jolly caffeinated giants walking the earth, with Bawlz. These worms we wasted here today, contain the finest code we will ever see. After we start working with real servers again we're gonna miss not having any worms around worth killing!
(obligatory reference for those who've never seen Full Metal Jacket)
I wrote a shell script about a year ago that converts.XPM image files into intricate tables. I'm no programmer (I know nothing about working with data structures, etc.), but I always thought the script would be really useful if it could analyze the image to determine where rowspans and colspans were needed (i.e., if cell 4 of row 1 and cell 4 of row 2 are the same color, make the rowspan of the first cell 2 and don't print the second cell... it seems easy enough on the surface, but it has to also consider rowspans and colspans of values greater than 2) to create optimized code.
I'll post the script if I can find it, but basically XPM is just a text file bitmap and a key. A simplified example:
Red=A Black=B
BBB BAB BBB
Would represent a 3-pixel black square with a 1-pixel red dot in the middle.
I just looked at the statistics for that page... yahoo says it only got 14 page views... if 14 page views are all it takes to slashdot someone's low-bandwidth geocities site, that's REALLY sad...
In the source of the mirror file, you can delete everything after the tag. The only reason I have the xmp tag in there is because Yahoo automatically appends code to every file on geocities and I wanted to declaw their Javascript and cookies.
I guess Mac IE doesn't understand HTTP 1.1, because I often find that the browser will get stuck in the middle of loading a page with the status bar indicating that it's trying to download a spacer gif from the same server. It just sits there for 5 to 60 seconds. Clicking STOP and RELOAD is usually faster than allowing it to finish. The issue comes up at least once per browsing session, but never seems to occur in other browsers.
or at least reduce our dependency... If you have an HTML page that calls 30 little images, each client that views the page has to make 31 connections to your server. Wouldn't it be better to reduce it to one or two? It would probably speed up slow connections significantly.
It is possible to render images using intricate table coding in which each cell represents a pixel (use colspans and rowspans as necessary to optimize the table).
See my example here. It does use one tiny, two-color gif for the page background, but most of what appears to be images are actually table cells with bgcolors. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite properly in Mozilla, which absolutely refuses to render 1x1 table cells.
In reality, this isn't a total solution, but if image format lawsuits succeed this is what we'll end up doing to render graphics on the Web.
So the U.S. government is going to step in and provide us with the security patches Microsoft has missed? This seems to go against President Bush's repeatedly-stated intention to let corporations conduct their business with little or no interference from the government.
<SARCASM>It may also violate the EULA Bush agreed to by opening the shrinkwrap on Microsoft's campaign donations, so it probably won't be happening.</SARCASM>
Well, Albany is nicely located in NYS. Its also close enough to Canada that drawing people over the border to work there is feasible.
Sorry, I hear the judges buzzing in on this one. The two nearest major Canadian cities are Montreal (4-hour drive through the mountains, icy and dangerous in the winter) and Toronto (7-hour drive on the well-plowed, toll-based NYS Thruway). Suggesting that the consortium is going to Albany to be close to Canada less correct than suggesting companies move to Silicon Valley to be close to Los Angeles and San Diego. As for NYC, I don't think a prime factor in the decision was the prospect of being only three hours from a weekend in the Big Apple.
Add to that the fact that its not a terrible part of the country weather/climate wise. (We dont get earthquakes, typhoons, torrential flooding, mudslides, wildfires a-la the west, and damn few tornados) and you have a safe place for your busines.
NYS gets earthquakes (In the 2.5 years I've lived in California, we've had one earthquake strong enough to be felt, but it was milder than the the 5.1 that hit Plattsburgh on April 20?), hurricanes and snowstorms. I've lived in Syracuse, where the piles of plowed and shoveled snow can get so high you can't see the road from the sidewalk. The weather in New York can be just as bad as the weather elsewhere.
As for tornados, I can remember over a dozen tornado warnings during the years I lived on Long Island, though I don't recall any of them destroying anything. However, the northeast is not immune: less than a year ago a tornado in Washington, DC picked up a car and smashed it into the trees in front of the dorm where I used to live, killing both passengers.
Economically, upstate NY is so dead the state government is lending credence to a man who wants to build a $2 billion mall in Syracuse (next to the large Carousel mall he built several years ago) simply so his grandchildren will have a reason to not flee New York. No one knows where the money's going to come from, but Gov. Pataki and the Post-Standard treat the proposal as though it's just a matter of time.
As a NY native, I recognize that New York isn't a bad place to live. But I posed the question because the article says the consortium didn't even negotiate with any other U.S. cities, whereas last time they talked to 36. I was hoping someone might have some insight into what makes Albany so much more important than the rest of the country that it would preclude the consortium from considering anyone else.
In its 1987 search for a home for its first center, Sematech considered offers from 36 states -- New York was one of the finalists -- trying to top each other in financial sweeteners. In the end, the chip makers contributed $125 million and the federal government $100 million. Texas put up $62 million... and made low-interest mortgages available to Sematech employees. But money alone did not carry the day -- New York had offered $80 million and Massachusetts more than $200 million. This time, the consortium negotiated seriously with only New York and a few foreign governments.
Money was not the deciding factor when they chose Austin in the 80s (they're not even getting any tax breaks out of this, which would normally be a huge part of the incentive), so why didn't they talk to anyone else in the U.S. this time? It sounds like they had their mind made up before negotiating a price: it's either Albany or another country. What's so special about Albany that precluded consideration of every other U.S. location?
The technologies in Jaguar are great and all, but Apple announced them earlier, they weren't announced today. Apple just confirmed the date it will be available, which we had narrowed down to the month. I wasn't bashing them. I was simply pointing out that previous MacWorlds offered more of that "WOW" factor Jobs likes to spring on us.
I'm a bit surprised to see the moderation my post got: Insightful=1, Overrated=1, Underrated=1. I was really aiming for "Funny."
"doing cool things with technology on the frontier" -- cool is an understatement for the Antarctic winter
I made a show of deleting "ray of sunshine" because, as the quoted segment of the article points out, there is no sunshine in Antarctica right now.
I replaced my sunshine comment with "breath of fresh air" because the article says "It also has some of the world's cleanest air"
As I typed it all just fit, so I figured "what the heck." Of course, now that I've explained that no insight was intended in my comment, I'll be modded down: "Stupid=1":o)
Because of its location high on the Polar Plateau and at the Earth's axis, Amundsen-Scott is a world-class astrophysical observatory. It also has some of the world's cleanest air... The 51 people spending the austral winter (February through November) at the station are unable to leave because extreme cold and darkness prevents aircraft landings.
Read Gore Vidal's The end of liberty. Vanity Fair commissioned a piece from him shortly before 9/11, and when he sent them this they refused to publish it.
He doesn't talk about technology specifically, but he makes some interesting observations about what 9/11 has done to accelerate our progression toward a 1984-like totalitarian state. That was a forbidden topic in rally-'round-the-flag media at the time. It has since been published in edited form in several different languages -- most recently in Spain's El Pais about two weeks ago (untranslated version).
He's the kind of author whose opinion is so highly valued that the networks will fly out to Italy to solicit it, but they pull the plug on him in mid-sentence when he says something "unpopular" on live television. If the name sounds familiar, here are some helpful tidbits:
You may remember his cameo in Gattaca -- he played the murderous director ("Jerome? Is this... the approach path we discussed? Quite right.")
He's Al Gore's cousin (their grandfather was the first Senator of Oklahoma)
He ran for Congress against JFK (and lost), but through some cosmic irony his mother later married Jackie Kennedy's stepfather
BSOD jokes are not funny. They serve an important role as obnoxious reminders
to users of the poor reliability Windows offers
to Microsoft that it still has much work to do
The protesters who show up at every World Bank meeting aren't funny either, but they remind us that the organization is not to everyone's benefit. They may be annoying, obnoxious and even dangerous, but I'd never advocate telling them to keep their opinions to themselves.
The day the BSOD jokes stop will be the day Microsoft considers the problem a non-issue, and we will have to live with it and other Redmond lapses. The only people who have an interest in seeing the end of BSOD jokes are Microsoft PR goons (having dealt with them personally on several occasions, I find this word appropriate).
This type of behavior repulses me. To counteract this vile practice, I'm going to begin advertising my new FPS with a life-affirming ad campaign: stickers stuck to the foreheads of newborn babies in hospitals. Our research shows that this offer will appeal to poorer families who can't afford their hospital bills. Why, they could invest the $5 we'll pay them and by the time the kid is 18 they can use it to purchase our video game.
We think hospitals will love this idea, so we've patented it. This signals a sea-change in American maternity wards. Five years from now all newborns will be sporting ads on their foreheads by default. If a parent is sufficiently opposed to the idea, they can pay $5 to deprive their child of this opportunity to participate in capitalism at its finest.
Intel won't market clockless chips. It will continue to market its overclocked Pentiums and run ad campaigns ridiculing AMD chips for running at 0 mhz.
"Dude! You don't want one of those Thunderchunks. Those things run at like zero megahertz. The heck with that... Dude, you're getting a Pentium."
Slashdot Mirror
- A giant fan aimed at a heat sink attached to the spindle that grips the CD
- Pressurized CD-ROM drives
- A sticker on the "5x-the-speed-of-sound" drive stating that by using this CD-ROM drive, you agree that the speed of sound is one-tenth the speed the rest of the world claims.
One of the above would be appended to what we know today as a 24x CD-ROM drive.- People who are actively downloading music (this doesn't necessarily mean they're not buying music, downloading music they already "own" or downloading indy music that has been made freely available by the artist)
- People who are not purchasing music (like people who don't watch television, there's nothing criminal about not supporting the popular media)
The "or" operand (/) leaves open the possibility that the entire 10.1% consists of people from either group. However, the statement is designed to be open enough for you to reach your own conclusions based on your personal or corporate-sponsored biases.In short, I think it's safe to say that anyone who cites the statement as "evidence" of anything is standing on very shaky ground.
I used to work for a company whose customers had to provide accurate information in order to sign up -- the service wouldn't work with false info -- but the problem was getting people to sign up.
One of the main selling points was that customer data was completely secure: no one will ever be able to read your data, only an aggregate report of all our users. The company went to a lot of trouble to make this point convincing, going so far as to suggest that users had legal protections against abuse. There were people in the building who spent all their time trying to think of ways to convince more people to drop their defenses so we could exploit their information -- cold, calculating, 24-7, like WOPR spends all its time playing World War Three.
I believed their claims until the day I saw a user's sensitive data on an engineer's screen. And then that engineer showed me another user's data, and another. "We've always had the ability to do this," he said, "for, ahem, quality control purposes."
If a company tells you it isn't collecting the valuable data you provide, you need to assume it is lying (unless you can personally verify the claim or you are positive that the law protects you against abuse).
People are "lying" because corporations lie, as a matter of policy. This will never change because lies are more profitable than truth. Only corporations don't call their behavior "lying," they call it "marketing." So when I fill out an intrusive form with false information, I don't consider it lying either. I call it "standing up for my right to privacy." This system of "marketing" versus "standing up for my rights" is well-balanced, but this new masking technology is simply a marketing attempt to tip the scales in the corporations' favor by tricking consumers into volunteering information on false assumptions.On the other hand, if Disney goes to Canada to make crop circles, we can reasonably claim the crop circles were made by aliens. But if Disney hires Canadians to make the crop circles in Canada, are the circles still considered to be the work of aliens? This is actually a very important topic of discussion, because crop circles have historically been produced by illegal aliens who are not only underpaid and overworked, they're not paying income tax. I don't know about Canada, but the IRS has a whole division devoted to hunting these tax evaders.
The only thing certain is that these circles will probably appear in threes -- two smaller circles sitting atop a larger circle -- and a pop musician will be performing in the center of each one.
Seriously, either the author of the article doesn't know what he's talking about or Sony's been smoking something other than Xbox sales. I saw Dean Takahashi (the author) give a talk to promote his new Xbox book at the San Jose Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago. I was sitting in the cafe area, occasionally looking over to get an idea of whether the audience seemed interested in what he was saying... but they seemed so dead I didn't bother walking over.
At the end, he distributed free X-box games to random audience members, and I distinctly remember the look on each person's face as they accepted their prize: "what the fsck am I gonna do with this?"
- Keep the machines
- Replace them with new machines from another company
- Replace them with new machines from the same company
Guess which one the voters keep unanimously choosing? Pure democracy at its finest.I think it's interesting that the "Commie stooges" are troubling themselves to develop their own clone of Windows rather than use Linux, which is freely available.
Are they hoping to undermine one of the most successful (ethics notwithstanding) examples of capitalism by violating intellectual property laws? Or are they so impressed by Microsoft's ability to force social conformity en masse through Windows that Beijing now looks to Redmond for inspiration?
This... is my bro.
CRAZY EARL the sysadmin lifts a dustcover to reveal a toasted server
This is his party. He's the guest of honor. Today... is his birthday.
Email Mother calls out from down the hall: "Happy Birthday, Code Red."
I will never forget this day. The day I came to IIS city and fought one million Code Red worms. I love the little Commie bastards, I really do. These enemy worms are as persistent as thick-headed CIOs.
These are great days we're living, bros! We are jolly caffeinated giants walking the earth, with Bawlz. These worms we wasted here today, contain the finest code we will ever see. After we start working with real servers again we're gonna miss not having any worms around worth killing!
(obligatory reference for those who've never seen Full Metal Jacket)
I'll post the script if I can find it, but basically XPM is just a text file bitmap and a key. A simplified example:
Would represent a 3-pixel black square with a 1-pixel red dot in the middle.I just looked at the statistics for that page... yahoo says it only got 14 page views... if 14 page views are all it takes to slashdot someone's low-bandwidth geocities site, that's REALLY sad...
In the source of the mirror file, you can delete everything after the tag. The only reason I have the xmp tag in there is because Yahoo automatically appends code to every file on geocities and I wanted to declaw their Javascript and cookies.
Have you seen The 5k? My all-time favorite entries are:
I guess Mac IE doesn't understand HTTP 1.1, because I often find that the browser will get stuck in the middle of loading a page with the status bar indicating that it's trying to download a spacer gif from the same server. It just sits there for 5 to 60 seconds. Clicking STOP and RELOAD is usually faster than allowing it to finish. The issue comes up at least once per browsing session, but never seems to occur in other browsers.
It is possible to render images using intricate table coding in which each cell represents a pixel (use colspans and rowspans as necessary to optimize the table).
See my example here. It does use one tiny, two-color gif for the page background, but most of what appears to be images are actually table cells with bgcolors. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite properly in Mozilla, which absolutely refuses to render 1x1 table cells.
In reality, this isn't a total solution, but if image format lawsuits succeed this is what we'll end up doing to render graphics on the Web.
<SARCASM>It may also violate the EULA Bush agreed to by opening the shrinkwrap on Microsoft's campaign donations, so it probably won't be happening.</SARCASM>
As for tornados, I can remember over a dozen tornado warnings during the years I lived on Long Island, though I don't recall any of them destroying anything. However, the northeast is not immune: less than a year ago a tornado in Washington, DC picked up a car and smashed it into the trees in front of the dorm where I used to live, killing both passengers.
Economically, upstate NY is so dead the state government is lending credence to a man who wants to build a $2 billion mall in Syracuse (next to the large Carousel mall he built several years ago) simply so his grandchildren will have a reason to not flee New York. No one knows where the money's going to come from, but Gov. Pataki and the Post-Standard treat the proposal as though it's just a matter of time.
As a NY native, I recognize that New York isn't a bad place to live. But I posed the question because the article says the consortium didn't even negotiate with any other U.S. cities, whereas last time they talked to 36. I was hoping someone might have some insight into what makes Albany so much more important than the rest of the country that it would preclude the consortium from considering anyone else.
I'm a bit surprised to see the moderation my post got: Insightful=1, Overrated=1, Underrated=1. I was really aiming for "Funny."
- "doing cool things with technology on the frontier" -- cool is an understatement for the Antarctic winter
- I made a show of deleting "ray of sunshine" because, as the quoted segment of the article points out, there is no sunshine in Antarctica right now.
- I replaced my sunshine comment with "breath of fresh air" because the article says "It also has some of the world's cleanest air"
As I typed it all just fit, so I figured "what the heck." Of course, now that I've explained that no insight was intended in my comment, I'll be modded down: "Stupid=1"He doesn't talk about technology specifically, but he makes some interesting observations about what 9/11 has done to accelerate our progression toward a 1984-like totalitarian state. That was a forbidden topic in rally-'round-the-flag media at the time. It has since been published in edited form in several different languages -- most recently in Spain's El Pais about two weeks ago (untranslated version).
He's the kind of author whose opinion is so highly valued that the networks will fly out to Italy to solicit it, but they pull the plug on him in mid-sentence when he says something "unpopular" on live television. If the name sounds familiar, here are some helpful tidbits:
- to users of the poor reliability Windows offers
- to Microsoft that it still has much work to do
The protesters who show up at every World Bank meeting aren't funny either, but they remind us that the organization is not to everyone's benefit. They may be annoying, obnoxious and even dangerous, but I'd never advocate telling them to keep their opinions to themselves.The day the BSOD jokes stop will be the day Microsoft considers the problem a non-issue, and we will have to live with it and other Redmond lapses. The only people who have an interest in seeing the end of BSOD jokes are Microsoft PR goons (having dealt with them personally on several occasions, I find this word appropriate).
You know, it's OK for the British to ridicule Americans for our butchering of the language they invented, but when they butcher it it's just sad.
We think hospitals will love this idea, so we've patented it. This signals a sea-change in American maternity wards. Five years from now all newborns will be sporting ads on their foreheads by default. If a parent is sufficiently opposed to the idea, they can pay $5 to deprive their child of this opportunity to participate in capitalism at its finest.