It lies. It found 10 "problems" on my machine. 3 were merely programs that have optional spyware in the installer (which I declined and wasn't installed), and the other 7 were rated "high risk" and "critical" (nasty things like CoolWebSearch) but they were actually just a few harmless leftover registry entries from when AdAware and Spybot had previously cleaned my machine. It looked very nice and the warnings sounded very serious but I did not get any actual benefit from running the program, because it did not remove any actual spyware that was missed by AdAware or Spybot. I imagine the situation is much the same with the people you've talked with.
Exactly. Even on vulnerabilities that can execute arbitrary code, they always list a bunch of other silly little things they can do, like cross-site scripting or my personal favorite "view the content of arbitrary files in known locations".
If they reported the evening news the same way it would sound like this: "Today terrorists announced they have armed an atomic bomb in the middle of Los Angeles. They also announced that they have control of several hand grenades and also some water balloons and cap guns, and they're not afraid to use them!"
Obscurity is hardly useless, it just gets a bad name because people tend to try to use obscurity in place of real countermeasures. Obscurity is a valid part of an overall security strategy. When obscurity and real countermeasures are combined, they are much more effective than either alone, since attackers cannot know how to prepare to defeat the countermeasures.
I suppose half-assed and ultimately ineffective efforts at obscurity also give it a bad name, especially when obscurity is chosen for self-serving purposes rather than legitimate security reasons. In this case, it sounds like some officials are trying to protect a $900 per customer per year revenue stream; or perhaps some GIS company is trying to prevent the government from undercutting their business. In any case, as pointed out by a previous poster, the pictures provided by TerraServer are just as useful for terrorists and that's already out there for free. So much for the obscurity argument.
If they were available 4 years ago, they did a good job of hiding them until now. I never saw one in the store until last month and I can't find any reference to them on the Internet before last year. (And of course when I said "this year" I meant "last 365 days or so", you pedant.)
These days, patents don't seem to be about new ideas anymore, just new (and not necessarily novel) ways of combining old ideas. So are you really surprised that taking the idea of removing a shield and applying it to USB plugs is patentable?
Because until this year, nobody realized that you could make a thin plastic USB connector. If you think about a normal USB connector, it is actually much thicker than your average memory card, with its (relatively) giant metal rectangle. This year, a company called PQI realized that the metal part isn't actually necessary for the plug, and removed it. The result was this. Suddenly USB drives are actually smaller than and just as thin as regular memory cards! It's one of those great ideas that is obvious in retrospect. PQI has patented this design, and I imagine SanDisk has had to license it to create this super-awesome combined card.
Sounds like your LCD is old. When I first got my new LCD, I tested it with Quake III and UT2004. I couldn't see motion blur at all, ever, and my performance was the same.
I ran it on my system, and it detected 10 "spyware threats". Of the 10, three were simply programs that have optional adware in their installers (which I of course decline), such as edonkey2000. The other seven were each 1 or 2 harmless left-over registry entries from spyware previously removed by Ad-Aware and Spybot, but they were still presented as the full spyware program and rated "high" and "severe", saying "This is a very high risk threat and should be removed immediately as to prevent harm to your computer or your privacy." So running Microsoft Anti-Spyware on a clean system that has been previously infected (the majority of Slashdotters' computers I expect) will make a lot of noise about spyare, but provide no real benefit.
No, we don't, I have no idea why it belongs at CES anyway, seems like a pure software thing. To me, those new even tinier USB thumb drives are way cooler. If you haven't seen them yet, they've removed the standard metal jacket around the USB plug, leaving only the small plastic part with the contacts on the inside that you usually don't see. It doesn't even look like a USB plug but it still fits into a normal USB port, and the resulting drives are much thinner than a normal USB plug. And, they don't have those annoying little covers that USB drives always come with. They probably violate the USB standard, or something, but they're still a great idea.
BS. My 20 inch LCD monitor displays 60 FPS computer games with no perceptible motion blur. TV is less demanding than that as discussed earlier. I'm sure there is a tiny smidgeon of blur left, perhaps measureable with high-speed cameras, but it is completely imperceptible to the human eye. I can't stand video artifacts in general, and I totally agree with you about the ability of the general public to tell a good video signal from shit. But there is nothing wrong with the motion display capabilities of today's LCDs.
Joel stresses internships because they increase your chances of getting a good job more than anything else you can do at college (besides graduating). Seriously. At an internship you get to know people at at least one company in your field, possibly more. When you're looking for a job, one friend in one company is worth at least a hundred resume e-mails spewed out to addresses you found on Monster.com. At a lot of places, you're practically guaranteed a job after you graduate if you had an internship there. The experience is good too, mostly so you can get an idea of what it's like to do actual work at that company (and see whether you like it or not), and partly because it beefs up your resume. You might learn some new skills also, but IHMO that is probably the least important reason to get an internship. If you really want to learn stuff, do research instead. Internships are about JOBS.
The motion artifacts aren't in the TVs, they're in the signal. HDTV is compressed too much, and with an outdated codec to boot (MPEG-2). As a result IMHO it looks like crap compared to uncompressed video, or even video compressed with MPEG-4 (DivX/xvid) or one of its modern competitors (which are getting to be quite good). It is still better than regular NTSC TV, but the compression artifacts have a way of distracting me while I'm trying to watch.
Yes, so any individual pixel only needs to show 30 FPS, because it is only updated once every other 60 FPS frame. Today's good LCDs have pixel response times of 16 ms or better, which is actually better than 60 FPS anyway. So LCD TVs are fine, and most people who claim otherwise are spouting gibberish they heard secondhand on some internet forum (other than Slashdot, of course;-). It's possible that some (cheapo) models of LCD TV use older LCDs with refresh rates worse than the baseline of 25 ms, but specific models are never cited by those who bash LCDs. To condemn all LCD TVs as worse than CRTs is just horseshit, in the words of the above Anonymous Coward. LCDs have so many advantages over CRTs it's not even funny.
Depends on how you define "better results". Obviously the achievement which is notable here (in the article) is not simply long distance but the extremely low power combined with the long distance. Low power is important too.
Also, your math is wrong. Omnidirectional signals degrade with distance cubed, not squared, and focused linear signals don't degrade at all, in theory (think perfect laser). In practice of course perfectly focused signals are impossible. Also obstacles in the signal's path (such as the atmosphere) degrade the signal, but not necessarily with a simple polynomial function of distance.
Furthermore, miles^2/watt would be measuring a different type of thing entirely. Miles/watt is distance per watt, miles^2/watt is area per watt and miles^3/watt would be volume per watt. Since this story is concerned with distance, not area or volume, miles/watt is the correct measurement unit to use.
Try putting quotes around that search ("fox news bias" vs "cnn bias") and you will see that your statistics are misleading. CNN is a more well-known service on the Internet at large, and it is simply mentioned on many more webpages than fox news (as confirmed by google searches for "cnn" and "fox news"), giving it a higher probability to be mentioned on the same page as the word "bias". When you take into account that CNN is almost five times as popular as Fox News on the Internet (as measured by google search numbers), the fact that there are actually more pages with "fox news bias" than "cnn bias" shows that Fox News is more controversial among people who know about it than CNN is among people who know about it. That is, as far as Google search numbers can go in proving this sort of thing, which isn't far. (they are really quite inaccurate, as you'll notice if you take the time to actually go to the last search result...)
You'd have to be pretty much dead-on with the lifetime estimate for that to work. His ailment would have to be utterly incurable and unfailingly fatal. Even if there is such a predictable disease, it would need to have no effect on him for the entire training and journey plus (most importantly) the few months on Mars at the end. Predicting death is not nearly exact enough, and what would happen is the guy would die on the way, not be healthy during his time on Mars, or outlast his supplies. If he died on the way, it would be a few hundred billion dollars down the drain. Not to mention that the entire world would be watching this guy die. If he outlasted his supplies, he would have to kill himself or die slowly from lack of some necessity. It would never be accepted by the public, especially as they watched his condition deteriorate on the inevitable incessant newscasts monitoring his condition. NASA would be cast in the public eye as the villans killing the couragous explorer, no matter how willing he was to spend his life in this way. And what if, during the lonely isolation of the months-long journey to Mars, he was to have second thoughts? The wrath of the public against NASA would be immense.
You actually can specify an article version in a link to Wikipedia, but I've never seen anyone actually do so. Perhaps it is because there is no obvious way to link to the current version; only past versions. I suspect this is a subtle hint by the Wikipedia developers that they don't want people linking to a static version because this disrupts the Wiki process of allowing random visitors to edit the page. Anyway, it is still possible; here is a sample link to the version of the Fox News article that is current as I am writing this (actually now somebody has already edited it).
In the specific case of this post, I browsed the page history briefly to see if recent major edits had removed what IO ERROR was talking about, but I didn't see anything. It is always a good idea to check the page history of a Wikipedia article anyway, to see if it is controversial or often vandalized.
As usual when people point out problems with Wikipedia, I have to ask "what is the problem with that?" What is wrong with the Fox News article? It contains loads of useful and accurate information. The "allegations of bias" section may be unnecessarily long (though 2/3 of the article is devoted to other, more useful information), but this simply reflects the fact that there is real controversy there. Everything is presented from very near a neutral point of view, and every criticism has a counter-point. You can't disagree with the article because it only states facts about what other people believe. Everything in the article is demonstrably true. Would you prefer the entire section was deleted and no record of the controversy over Fox News was kept in Wikipedia?
Another poster argued that the Fox News "allegations of bias" section is unfair because no similar section can be put on CNN's article. This simply shows that *there is less controversy over bias on CNN* which is undoubtedly true. CNN is generally percieved as no more or less biased than the general American media; whose percieved bias is already documented on Wikipedia. All Wikipedia can do is be a record of what is generally percieved; it cannot aspire to some higher standard of "genuine truth". Indeed, the nature of "genuine truth" is a philosophical question which can be debated at length. Despite this lack of "genuine truth", Wikipedia (including this "Fox News" article) is still an amazingly valuable resource.
Maybe people didn't need to search for election news because it was 24/7 election news on every news outlet in the entire US? OTOH, news on this carlo guy might have been difficult to find, hence the searches...
In this case, "your" refers to the user, not the copyright holder. So if the FSF releases a new version, each user can decide whether they want to use it. Imagine the FSF was taken over by space alien mind control rays and they released the BSD license as GPL v3. At that point, any user of GPLed software that includes this clause can choose the BSD license instead of the GPL. So it *is* automatically retroactive. Which is why not every project does include this clause (it's optional).
No, I believe the project is MegaMek, "an unofficial, online version of the classic BattleTech® board game." Unless McWizard at gmx dot com works on another GPL project.
This discussion is almost as old as Linux, and Linus's answer is the same: A stable driver ABI means closed-source binary drivers, and he doesn't want closed-source binary drivers, therefore he will not freeze the ABI. Plus he likes the freedom to change the ABI because it allows easier improvements to the core kernel. If you don't agree, it is pointless to complain here. Linus is not going to suddenly change his mind after over 10 years.
Projects like ndiswrapper prove that it is possible to maintain a driver compatibility layer outside the kernel. If you really want a stable driver ABI for linux, develop it yourself, because Linus isn't going to do it for you.
Slashdot Mirror
It lies. It found 10 "problems" on my machine. 3 were merely programs that have optional spyware in the installer (which I declined and wasn't installed), and the other 7 were rated "high risk" and "critical" (nasty things like CoolWebSearch) but they were actually just a few harmless leftover registry entries from when AdAware and Spybot had previously cleaned my machine. It looked very nice and the warnings sounded very serious but I did not get any actual benefit from running the program, because it did not remove any actual spyware that was missed by AdAware or Spybot. I imagine the situation is much the same with the people you've talked with.
If they reported the evening news the same way it would sound like this: "Today terrorists announced they have armed an atomic bomb in the middle of Los Angeles. They also announced that they have control of several hand grenades and also some water balloons and cap guns, and they're not afraid to use them!"
I suppose half-assed and ultimately ineffective efforts at obscurity also give it a bad name, especially when obscurity is chosen for self-serving purposes rather than legitimate security reasons. In this case, it sounds like some officials are trying to protect a $900 per customer per year revenue stream; or perhaps some GIS company is trying to prevent the government from undercutting their business. In any case, as pointed out by a previous poster, the pictures provided by TerraServer are just as useful for terrorists and that's already out there for free. So much for the obscurity argument.
These days, patents don't seem to be about new ideas anymore, just new (and not necessarily novel) ways of combining old ideas. So are you really surprised that taking the idea of removing a shield and applying it to USB plugs is patentable?
Because until this year, nobody realized that you could make a thin plastic USB connector. If you think about a normal USB connector, it is actually much thicker than your average memory card, with its (relatively) giant metal rectangle. This year, a company called PQI realized that the metal part isn't actually necessary for the plug, and removed it. The result was this. Suddenly USB drives are actually smaller than and just as thin as regular memory cards! It's one of those great ideas that is obvious in retrospect. PQI has patented this design, and I imagine SanDisk has had to license it to create this super-awesome combined card.
Sounds like your LCD is old. When I first got my new LCD, I tested it with Quake III and UT2004. I couldn't see motion blur at all, ever, and my performance was the same.
I ran it on my system, and it detected 10 "spyware threats". Of the 10, three were simply programs that have optional adware in their installers (which I of course decline), such as edonkey2000. The other seven were each 1 or 2 harmless left-over registry entries from spyware previously removed by Ad-Aware and Spybot, but they were still presented as the full spyware program and rated "high" and "severe", saying "This is a very high risk threat and should be removed immediately as to prevent harm to your computer or your privacy." So running Microsoft Anti-Spyware on a clean system that has been previously infected (the majority of Slashdotters' computers I expect) will make a lot of noise about spyare, but provide no real benefit.
smaller than a memory stick!
One of those ideas that is obvious in hindsight. Why did they even make all those crazy memory card formats in the first place? All we needed was USB.
No, we don't, I have no idea why it belongs at CES anyway, seems like a pure software thing. To me, those new even tinier USB thumb drives are way cooler. If you haven't seen them yet, they've removed the standard metal jacket around the USB plug, leaving only the small plastic part with the contacts on the inside that you usually don't see. It doesn't even look like a USB plug but it still fits into a normal USB port, and the resulting drives are much thinner than a normal USB plug. And, they don't have those annoying little covers that USB drives always come with. They probably violate the USB standard, or something, but they're still a great idea.
BS. My 20 inch LCD monitor displays 60 FPS computer games with no perceptible motion blur. TV is less demanding than that as discussed earlier. I'm sure there is a tiny smidgeon of blur left, perhaps measureable with high-speed cameras, but it is completely imperceptible to the human eye. I can't stand video artifacts in general, and I totally agree with you about the ability of the general public to tell a good video signal from shit. But there is nothing wrong with the motion display capabilities of today's LCDs.
Joel stresses internships because they increase your chances of getting a good job more than anything else you can do at college (besides graduating). Seriously. At an internship you get to know people at at least one company in your field, possibly more. When you're looking for a job, one friend in one company is worth at least a hundred resume e-mails spewed out to addresses you found on Monster.com. At a lot of places, you're practically guaranteed a job after you graduate if you had an internship there. The experience is good too, mostly so you can get an idea of what it's like to do actual work at that company (and see whether you like it or not), and partly because it beefs up your resume. You might learn some new skills also, but IHMO that is probably the least important reason to get an internship. If you really want to learn stuff, do research instead. Internships are about JOBS.
The motion artifacts aren't in the TVs, they're in the signal. HDTV is compressed too much, and with an outdated codec to boot (MPEG-2). As a result IMHO it looks like crap compared to uncompressed video, or even video compressed with MPEG-4 (DivX/xvid) or one of its modern competitors (which are getting to be quite good). It is still better than regular NTSC TV, but the compression artifacts have a way of distracting me while I'm trying to watch.
Yes, so any individual pixel only needs to show 30 FPS, because it is only updated once every other 60 FPS frame. Today's good LCDs have pixel response times of 16 ms or better, which is actually better than 60 FPS anyway. So LCD TVs are fine, and most people who claim otherwise are spouting gibberish they heard secondhand on some internet forum (other than Slashdot, of course ;-). It's possible that some (cheapo) models of LCD TV use older LCDs with refresh rates worse than the baseline of 25 ms, but specific models are never cited by those who bash LCDs. To condemn all LCD TVs as worse than CRTs is just horseshit, in the words of the above Anonymous Coward. LCDs have so many advantages over CRTs it's not even funny.
Also, your math is wrong. Omnidirectional signals degrade with distance cubed, not squared, and focused linear signals don't degrade at all, in theory (think perfect laser). In practice of course perfectly focused signals are impossible. Also obstacles in the signal's path (such as the atmosphere) degrade the signal, but not necessarily with a simple polynomial function of distance.
Furthermore, miles^2/watt would be measuring a different type of thing entirely. Miles/watt is distance per watt, miles^2/watt is area per watt and miles^3/watt would be volume per watt. Since this story is concerned with distance, not area or volume, miles/watt is the correct measurement unit to use.
He's outstanding in the field of kernels, even. Man I wish I had mod points. Mod parent up!
Also try "bias on fox news" vs "bias on cnn".
Try putting quotes around that search ("fox news bias" vs "cnn bias") and you will see that your statistics are misleading. CNN is a more well-known service on the Internet at large, and it is simply mentioned on many more webpages than fox news (as confirmed by google searches for "cnn" and "fox news"), giving it a higher probability to be mentioned on the same page as the word "bias". When you take into account that CNN is almost five times as popular as Fox News on the Internet (as measured by google search numbers), the fact that there are actually more pages with "fox news bias" than "cnn bias" shows that Fox News is more controversial among people who know about it than CNN is among people who know about it. That is, as far as Google search numbers can go in proving this sort of thing, which isn't far. (they are really quite inaccurate, as you'll notice if you take the time to actually go to the last search result...)
You'd have to be pretty much dead-on with the lifetime estimate for that to work. His ailment would have to be utterly incurable and unfailingly fatal. Even if there is such a predictable disease, it would need to have no effect on him for the entire training and journey plus (most importantly) the few months on Mars at the end. Predicting death is not nearly exact enough, and what would happen is the guy would die on the way, not be healthy during his time on Mars, or outlast his supplies. If he died on the way, it would be a few hundred billion dollars down the drain. Not to mention that the entire world would be watching this guy die. If he outlasted his supplies, he would have to kill himself or die slowly from lack of some necessity. It would never be accepted by the public, especially as they watched his condition deteriorate on the inevitable incessant newscasts monitoring his condition. NASA would be cast in the public eye as the villans killing the couragous explorer, no matter how willing he was to spend his life in this way. And what if, during the lonely isolation of the months-long journey to Mars, he was to have second thoughts? The wrath of the public against NASA would be immense.
In the specific case of this post, I browsed the page history briefly to see if recent major edits had removed what IO ERROR was talking about, but I didn't see anything. It is always a good idea to check the page history of a Wikipedia article anyway, to see if it is controversial or often vandalized.
Another poster argued that the Fox News "allegations of bias" section is unfair because no similar section can be put on CNN's article. This simply shows that *there is less controversy over bias on CNN* which is undoubtedly true. CNN is generally percieved as no more or less biased than the general American media; whose percieved bias is already documented on Wikipedia. All Wikipedia can do is be a record of what is generally percieved; it cannot aspire to some higher standard of "genuine truth". Indeed, the nature of "genuine truth" is a philosophical question which can be debated at length. Despite this lack of "genuine truth", Wikipedia (including this "Fox News" article) is still an amazingly valuable resource.
Maybe people didn't need to search for election news because it was 24/7 election news on every news outlet in the entire US? OTOH, news on this carlo guy might have been difficult to find, hence the searches...
In this case, "your" refers to the user, not the copyright holder. So if the FSF releases a new version, each user can decide whether they want to use it. Imagine the FSF was taken over by space alien mind control rays and they released the BSD license as GPL v3. At that point, any user of GPLed software that includes this clause can choose the BSD license instead of the GPL. So it *is* automatically retroactive. Which is why not every project does include this clause (it's optional).
Whoops, I mean gmx dot de, of course.
No, I believe the project is MegaMek, "an unofficial, online version of the classic BattleTech® board game." Unless McWizard at gmx dot com works on another GPL project.
Projects like ndiswrapper prove that it is possible to maintain a driver compatibility layer outside the kernel. If you really want a stable driver ABI for linux, develop it yourself, because Linus isn't going to do it for you.