wow. your comment made me realise how serious this could be for some people. If you have, say medical records on your machines, haven't you just lost control of where that sensitive data is referenced? Privacy is a huge deal for many companies (ie. regulated) and having a 'handy searchable database' local on every machine is just about the last thing many people will want...
of course, I'm an IT doofus, but it sounds like it could be painful for a lot of people.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on your facts, since you know South Africa. But in my book: "Since 1994, 10 million more people have access to clean water." (http://www.dfid.gov.uk/countries/africa/southafrica.asp)...is a good thing. I'm guessing this 10million people doesn't include your closest friends.
If the black government is helping the citizens of South Africa, they should be applauded, shouldn't they? If not (maybe you're right), they should be voted out, right? And they can be now, since everyone in the country has the right to vote, don't they?
Oh, RIGHT! That's the little difference between the Apartheid regime and now, isn't it? if you disagree, you (and everyone in SA) get to vote about it. Remember that that wonderful government you were talking about was an oppressive regime denying the vote to people based solely on the color of their skin.
Here's an even bigger continuity problem for you: how does Luke losing Chewbacca in a theater full of hand-puppets fit into the Canon? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMPdDa90pLY -maybe Lucas can pass Kermit off as a mutated Ewok?
Well, I guess it all depends if they reference historical information to serve those ads or not.
If I were google, I'd build up a statistical record of what words come up most often per user which would be real useful in deciding what "the doors" means in context: is an ad for a record shop relevant or Home Depot?
Then, of course, that statistical record would start to become an accurate record of who you are after a while. Anyone know the answer?
wow, that's a shockingly ignorant statement. Commenting on Slashdot on graphic cards when you no nothing about it is one thing, but on fatal diseases is a different kind of thing, dude.
A 'bit frustrating'? Most people are diagnosed a year or so into onset, but there's no real way of knowing when the disease starts. For many patients, there's literally (like, 5) years of knowing a) you have a disease that is 100% fatal and that you will gradually forget the names and faces of the people you love. b) you will eventually become a terrible burden on those same people, you will treat them badly and they will get to watch as you regress to less than a child. c) gradually losing all the mental faculties that you take for granted every day, knowing exactly why for several years.
It's terrible, frightening death sentence where the patient's personality is dismantled piece-by-piece, moving slowly to death, with their families watching helplessly on.
I've worked with patients with a number of chronic and fatal diseases (cancer, AIDS, etc...) and nothing would scare me more than a diagnosis of Alzheimer's.
I use the Kensington expert trackball too and I do light graphic work (InDesign, Photoshop), office tasks and some 3D design (Solidworks, mainly): I was forced off a mouse by tendinitis.
I had no choice but to use the thing for 6 months or so until my wrist became usuable again, but it's never been quite as good as using a mouse - I attribute it to the mental mapping of a mouse to the 2D space of a desktop is almost perfect, whereas a ball is less obvious and intuitive. There's also more inertia in the Kensington Expert, so precision on fast movements is compromized. Essentially, it slows me down a bit.
Every 3-4 months I find myself gravitating back to a mouse, until I aggravate the injury, and then I go back to the ball.
For graphic work, everyone I know swears by the tablets - Wacom being a favorite about here. Again, it's about intuitive mapping to the screen.
A commenter on the post said, "Unfortunately we are likely to see neither sense nor principle from the Democrats on this issue, as Hollywood is their biggest cash machine."
...you think that's bad? you should see some of the crap I've posted as comments here...
as someone who works with manufacturing, that pattern is not very unusual. You test your design validation units before release and find that they work. So you're ready to ship product, and the sample test of the first units seem ok too. So you ship.
If you start see a few problems early on, it's a warning sign...
Then, you start to see the 'expected' variations in components that you *hoped* you designed for - but most times you didn't test for, because it's hard to order components to be at the extremes of the allowable tolerances, but eventually they show up. Over time, your production units start to wander a little away from the 'nominal' that you started with and weirdness starts to show up. Eventually, nothing is at nominal any more: molding tools are getting old, fixtures are shifting, etc, etc.
You can deal with this stuff (six sigma, multiple sourcing, etc), but if you're trying to move as fast as MS were, I'm not that surprised that they got bit.
Take your mouse. Hold it the air for five minutes. For extra effect, wave it about. Now imagine doing this eight hours a day. And being accurate.
Tired arm much? Using a 2D mouse is about accuracy and long-term usage. OK, the mouse isn't perfect, but hanging it in space significantly deteriorates both these properties.
The Wii controller is a whole different ball of wax - it's for using for a couple of hours at most, and you don't try clicking on unfolding menus with it.
Hey people - I read TFA and there's no detail whatsoever attached.
Before y'all get real excited about insane patents:
1) This is a patent application, NOT a granted patent. Hence the serial number beginning 2003 - this means the application was submitted in 2003. It should have been processed now. I'll take a look if I get a spare moment.
2) This is a snippet from the patent abstract, I'd say. It doesn't mean much at all - abstracts are pretty irrelevant to the content of a patent. We have no idea what they are actually patenting from this: it could be an entirely new mechanism for doing this, new code, a genetically engineered cow with the capability of implementing breakpoints.
The abstract means NOTHING - it's often not supposed to. Don't have a cow, guys.
I can't help but agree with you. If they priced HD-DVD/BluRay disk players at $100, I think they'd sell at lot more than at $400. I can't think why they didn't think of that!
What's more, I heard they make all the internal components out of solid gold! That's crazy: I don't need gold transistor chips. Why don't they make them out of silicon like usual?
"The initial version was slow, not feature complete, and had very few applications available at the time of its launch, mostly from independent developers. Many critics suggested that while the OS was not ready for mainstream adoption, they recognized the importance of its initial launch as a base on which to improve." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSX
I also seem to remember a total absence of a DVD player...
ahh. The beautiful visual effects of the Slashdot reality distortion field.
so in the case of 2, what would we have to complain about? *If* people don't care and don't preferentially buy DRM-free, do you expect major labels to remove DRM restrictions despite the fact they would have proven that the market wasn't interested? They aren't sitting up in their offices working out how to make Slashdot-ters happy, y'know.
And even more telling, option 4 seems to define the word 'innovate' as 'do exactly what we want'. They sell music: they have relatively few options. With media, without. Without media options they've now tried: with copyright control, without and a subscription model. Even a micro-payment model assumes that they can measure and control the number of times you listen to a given track/file. Radio already exists: free access to music to 'test' (see Pandora, Last FM), which the labels noticeably haven't shut down (thanks to the DMCA, believe it or not).
How about proposing some new ideas? What innovation were you thinking of which isn't covered by what they are trying now? I'm genuinely curious...
A great point, if only it were true: http://www.bleep.com/ sell DRM-free mp3's, and cover a wide range of independent labels. also selling FLAC-encoded tunes for the audiophile crowd.
"Mindless dribble" = "Mindless drivel", people. please. I see this so often and it grieveth me so. -and, from previous Slashdot discussions... "a mute point" = "a moot point"
and my absolute favorite... "for all intensive purposes" (aaargh!) = "for all intents and purposes"
More like Woody Allen, who said the "eternity is a long time" quote first..... more importantly, how did that quote get into this article? Did he actually say that? It isn't in the linked article...
...Says an "Anonymous Coward". This is either Twain-level satire or the most self-defeating comment ever on Slashdot. And, heaven knows, there's some pretty stiff competition.
Those subs we're talking about are the mainstay of Britain's Trident nuclear defense system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_missile As Wiki confirms, these are made right up the street from me at: Contractor: Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Sunnyvale, California
It's an Amerian system that Britain coughed up 5% of the R&D costs. Britain has no independent nuclear systems.
Interesting that they would wheel out Mark Russinovich to paper over this crack: his Sysinternals operation was only bought by MS about six months ago, right? He seemed like he made a career working around bad design choices or omissions in Windows.
He even produced the famous joke-BSOD screensaver that perfectly mimics a b0rked windows installation...
Is he being forced out for street-cred purposes? "Hey, Mark thinks it was a good idea!" - I wonder what he'd say OFF the record about this....
Slashdot Mirror
Does this:
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/02/12/2114228.shtml
answer your question?
(Slashdot's most visited story of all time, btw)
wow. your comment made me realise how serious this could be for some people. If you have, say medical records on your machines, haven't you just lost control of where that sensitive data is referenced? Privacy is a huge deal for many companies (ie. regulated) and having a 'handy searchable database' local on every machine is just about the last thing many people will want...
of course, I'm an IT doofus, but it sounds like it could be painful for a lot of people.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on your facts, since you know South Africa. ...is a good thing. I'm guessing this 10million people doesn't include your closest friends.
But in my book:
"Since 1994, 10 million more people have access to clean water." (http://www.dfid.gov.uk/countries/africa/southafrica.asp)
If the black government is helping the citizens of South Africa, they should be applauded, shouldn't they? If not (maybe you're right), they should be voted out, right? And they can be now, since everyone in the country has the right to vote, don't they?
Oh, RIGHT! That's the little difference between the Apartheid regime and now, isn't it? if you disagree, you (and everyone in SA) get to vote about it. Remember that that wonderful government you were talking about was an oppressive regime denying the vote to people based solely on the color of their skin.
Here's an even bigger continuity problem for you: how does Luke losing Chewbacca in a theater full of hand-puppets fit into the Canon?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMPdDa90pLY
-maybe Lucas can pass Kermit off as a mutated Ewok?
Well, I guess it all depends if they reference historical information to serve those ads or not.
If I were google, I'd build up a statistical record of what words come up most often per user which would be real useful in deciding what "the doors" means in context: is an ad for a record shop relevant or Home Depot?
Then, of course, that statistical record would start to become an accurate record of who you are after a while. Anyone know the answer?
I don't know how it will happen, but any money says that this will somehow descend into a flame-war about global warming. Not connected, people.
wow, that's a shockingly ignorant statement. Commenting on Slashdot on graphic cards when you no nothing about it is one thing, but on fatal diseases is a different kind of thing, dude.
A 'bit frustrating'? Most people are diagnosed a year or so into onset, but there's no real way of knowing when the disease starts. For many patients, there's literally (like, 5) years of knowing a) you have a disease that is 100% fatal and that you will gradually forget the names and faces of the people you love. b) you will eventually become a terrible burden on those same people, you will treat them badly and they will get to watch as you regress to less than a child. c) gradually losing all the mental faculties that you take for granted every day, knowing exactly why for several years.
It's terrible, frightening death sentence where the patient's personality is dismantled piece-by-piece, moving slowly to death, with their families watching helplessly on.
I've worked with patients with a number of chronic and fatal diseases (cancer, AIDS, etc...) and nothing would scare me more than a diagnosis of Alzheimer's.
I use the Kensington expert trackball too and I do light graphic work (InDesign, Photoshop), office tasks and some 3D design (Solidworks, mainly): I was forced off a mouse by tendinitis.
I had no choice but to use the thing for 6 months or so until my wrist became usuable again, but it's never been quite as good as using a mouse - I attribute it to the mental mapping of a mouse to the 2D space of a desktop is almost perfect, whereas a ball is less obvious and intuitive. There's also more inertia in the Kensington Expert, so precision on fast movements is compromized. Essentially, it slows me down a bit.
Every 3-4 months I find myself gravitating back to a mouse, until I aggravate the injury, and then I go back to the ball.
For graphic work, everyone I know swears by the tablets - Wacom being a favorite about here. Again, it's about intuitive mapping to the screen.
A commenter on the post said, "Unfortunately we are likely to see neither sense nor principle from the Democrats on this issue, as Hollywood is their biggest cash machine."
...you think that's bad? you should see some of the crap I've posted as comments here...
as someone who works with manufacturing, that pattern is not very unusual. You test your design validation units before release and find that they work. So you're ready to ship product, and the sample test of the first units seem ok too. So you ship.
If you start see a few problems early on, it's a warning sign...
Then, you start to see the 'expected' variations in components that you *hoped* you designed for - but most times you didn't test for, because it's hard to order components to be at the extremes of the allowable tolerances, but eventually they show up. Over time, your production units start to wander a little away from the 'nominal' that you started with and weirdness starts to show up. Eventually, nothing is at nominal any more: molding tools are getting old, fixtures are shifting, etc, etc.
You can deal with this stuff (six sigma, multiple sourcing, etc), but if you're trying to move as fast as MS were, I'm not that surprised that they got bit.
... I can debunk this one for you right away.
Take your mouse. Hold it the air for five minutes. For extra effect, wave it about. Now imagine doing this eight hours a day. And being accurate.
Tired arm much? Using a 2D mouse is about accuracy and long-term usage. OK, the mouse isn't perfect, but hanging it in space significantly deteriorates both these properties.
The Wii controller is a whole different ball of wax - it's for using for a couple of hours at most, and you don't try clicking on unfolding menus with it.
Hey people - I read TFA and there's no detail whatsoever attached.
Before y'all get real excited about insane patents:
1) This is a patent application, NOT a granted patent. Hence the serial number beginning 2003 - this means the application was submitted in 2003. It should have been processed now. I'll take a look if I get a spare moment.
2) This is a snippet from the patent abstract, I'd say. It doesn't mean much at all - abstracts are pretty irrelevant to the content of a patent. We have no idea what they are actually patenting from this: it could be an entirely new mechanism for doing this, new code, a genetically engineered cow with the capability of implementing breakpoints.
The abstract means NOTHING - it's often not supposed to. Don't have a cow, guys.
Jeese. Spend one minute doing some research why doncha?
http://www.experian.co.uk/
-and all the others I can't be bothered to find for you.
I can't help but agree with you. If they priced HD-DVD/BluRay disk players at $100, I think they'd sell at lot more than at $400. I can't think why they didn't think of that!
What's more, I heard they make all the internal components out of solid gold! That's crazy: I don't need gold transistor chips. Why don't they make them out of silicon like usual?
hmmm. remember OSX 10.0? Quoth Wiki:
"The initial version was slow, not feature complete, and had very few applications available at the time of its launch, mostly from independent developers. Many critics suggested that while the OS was not ready for mainstream adoption, they recognized the importance of its initial launch as a base on which to improve."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSX
I also seem to remember a total absence of a DVD player...
ahh. The beautiful visual effects of the Slashdot reality distortion field.
so in the case of 2, what would we have to complain about? *If* people don't care and don't preferentially buy DRM-free, do you expect major labels to remove DRM restrictions despite the fact they would have proven that the market wasn't interested? They aren't sitting up in their offices working out how to make Slashdot-ters happy, y'know.
And even more telling, option 4 seems to define the word 'innovate' as 'do exactly what we want'. They sell music: they have relatively few options. With media, without. Without media options they've now tried: with copyright control, without and a subscription model. Even a micro-payment model assumes that they can measure and control the number of times you listen to a given track/file. Radio already exists: free access to music to 'test' (see Pandora, Last FM), which the labels noticeably haven't shut down (thanks to the DMCA, believe it or not).
How about proposing some new ideas? What innovation were you thinking of which isn't covered by what they are trying now? I'm genuinely curious...
A great point, if only it were true:
http://www.bleep.com/ sell DRM-free mp3's, and cover a wide range of independent labels. also selling FLAC-encoded tunes for the audiophile crowd.
I must be bored... a handy reference card:
"Mindless dribble" = "Mindless drivel", people. please. I see this so often and it grieveth me so.
-and, from previous Slashdot discussions...
"a mute point" = "a moot point"
and my absolute favorite...
"for all intensive purposes" (aaargh!) = "for all intents and purposes"
ok? fixed? I can go back to work now?
More like Woody Allen, who said the "eternity is a long time" quote first... .. more importantly, how did that quote get into this article? Did he actually say that? It isn't in the linked article...
...Says an "Anonymous Coward".
This is either Twain-level satire or the most self-defeating comment ever on Slashdot. And, heaven knows, there's some pretty stiff competition.
"Competition is heating up between Google, the world's dominant search engine, and Microsoft, which recently entered the Web search market."
OUCH! That's gotta hurt...
Those subs we're talking about are the mainstay of Britain's Trident nuclear defense system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_missile
As Wiki confirms, these are made right up the street from me at:
Contractor: Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Sunnyvale, California
It's an Amerian system that Britain coughed up 5% of the R&D costs. Britain has no independent nuclear systems.
The birds are in on it too: this totally blew me away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYZnsO2ZgWo
looks like an animal crafting a tool to me.
More about this here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/
Cheers,
Rob
yup. Like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U
Venetian Snare playing back "Vache", composed on ReNoise.
Interesting that they would wheel out Mark Russinovich to paper over this crack: his Sysinternals operation was only bought by MS about six months ago, right? He seemed like he made a career working around bad design choices or omissions in Windows.
He even produced the famous joke-BSOD screensaver that perfectly mimics a b0rked windows installation...
Is he being forced out for street-cred purposes? "Hey, Mark thinks it was a good idea!" - I wonder what he'd say OFF the record about this....