Actually, this might be seriously unfunny in the near future.
Actually, it has been seriously unfunny for several years.
If you dig around for the earliest reviews of Windows Media Player, you'll find a number of reports that, after installing and testing it on their machine, the reviewers found that most or all of their other audio software was no longer working and had to be reinstalled. They also noted that, if they accidentally ran any of the pieces of WMP, the same thing would happen. And WMP couldn't be fully uninstalled.
I have a number of friends that are developing audio and/or video software. They have been getting more and more depressed about the situation on Windows. It seems that, if you want your softwsare to be usable, you have to "license" it (i.e., sign over all rights) to Microsoft. Then they'll add it to WMP's list of Good Guys, and when WMP triggers its search-and-destroy routine, your app will be spared.
This is really what DRM is all about. The intent is that you will only have the right to run approved software. If you have some silly idea that you can write and market your own software, well, just forget that. Hackers like you can't be trusted, y'know.
... Is there a single country in the world where one can do security research without being accosted by the Man?
Probably not.
It's normal human behavior to respond to reports of danger by getting upset. And those responsible for protection against danger invariably respond by attacking the reporter however they can. He has just shown that they weren't doing their job, after all. If he can't be silenced, he must be punished.
Before the advent of opensource/free software consumers had no alternatives so they had to deal with unethical deceitful entities.
Actually, it's a bit more complex than that. If by "open source" you mean software whose source is available for examination and tweaking, it has been around since the earliest days of the computing industry. To a great extent, Microsoft was the "innovator" that started selling software without making the code available.
Thus, I worked on a number of IBM mainframes, all of which ran VM. We always had full source to the VM OS. Actually, VM originated in academia, and IBM started distributing and supporting it after they realized that they couldn't ignore it because most of their customers were using it.
One place I worked, around 1980, we brought in Amdahl's UTS system, a unix that ran on VM. When we asked them about access to source, their reply was "Source isn't an option. You get it whether you want it or not." Part of their reason worked out quickly: I found a problem in the kernel's clock routine (caused by an idiot VM guru at our site, but that's another story;-). I quickly worked up a patch that fixed the problem. The kernel code was so clear that my patch worked the first time; I was impressed. I sent it to Amdahl's support folks. They thanked me, said I was now in their list of contributors, and it would be in future releases (for the benefit of other customers with idiots for VM gurus).
Amdahl's version of unix was proprietary (partly being derived from AT&T's unix). But it was open source. And this worked to everyone's benefit, as open source should.
As for "free", that only partly applied. We were free to read the source and modify it. We weren't free to sell our mods. But we didn't want to; that wasn't our business. Sharing our patch with Amdahl was just something we did because we were sensible people who liked to see the software improved.
(Well, I was partly motivated by the prospect of sharing a geekish chuckle with Amdahl's CS folks, at our VM guy's expense.;-)
Heh. You can find a thousand or so other online cameras by using "bird nest camera" as your search terms. There are an impressive number of cameras aimed at bird nests now. Most are nest boxes, but a few (such as a couple of eagle nests) are natural nests, with the camera in another tree. Of course, most are only active during breeding season, though in the tropics, this can be most of the year.
There was a fun example listed in cruel.com a couple of years ago. Their title was "Great Tits in Germany", and the link was to a site devoted to the great tit (Parus major), a small songbird. The folks that run the site apparently have a sense of humor about the double meaning in the English version of the site, though this doesn't carry over to the German pages. Anyway, their nest cams aren't active now, since it's winter and the tits have all flown south. But they do have some nice pictures of the tits in their nesting box.
I'd bet there are some other good search terms that will turn up lists of other kinds of online cameras.
Some years ago, I read a sci fi story whose plot was basically that Jesus did return within a century, and many more times in the following centuries. Every time, the same thing happened: He was killed. Finally, he gave up, and went on to other planets that were in need of his help.
The story was told from the viewpoint of a ship full of human space explorers, who kept coming across planets that were paradises, and the inhabitants attributed this to a holy man in the recent past who had taught them how to live right. But they couldn't find a planet with such a holy man; they kept arriving just after he had left.
Now if I could remember the story's title or author...
Have you ever tried to find anything on/. with the built in search engine?
I gave up on it long ago; I just use google. The/. search never returned anything on the topic. Often the "matches" didn't even contain any of the words that I typed.
I wonder how they got it so wrong? Oh, well; google indexes it all.
BTW, does anyone know what happened to the pointer to a logged-in user's personal page? It used to be at the top of the web page, but it seems to have disappeared some time in the past couple of weeks. Now, I know that it's "users.pl", but how would a new user find it?
I stupidly signed up with Verizon. When my contract expires, I'm gone.
They'll probably sock it to you then, too.
Several years ago, my wife got a cell phone through Verizon. We both used it, until it started getting a bit old and flakey. Then we each got our own cell phone, through two other providers, and cancelled the Verizon phone.
Verizon promptly added a $175 cancellation fee. It was long past the original two-year contract, and we hadn't signed any new contract. We just kept paying the bill, and the phone kept working. We should have been on their month-to-month service, though of course we never got any sort of paperwork (that we know of or signed) about this.
We've tried calling them to talk about it. Their response is to simply bounce us around between different people until the connection gets "accidentally" lost. Nobody at Verizon has shown any interest in discussing this charge. Their attitude is clearly "We put it on your bill, so you have to pay it."
Funny thing is, when we mention this to other people, a lot of them say "Yeah, they did the same to us."
So be prepared for charges that you weren't expecting, and which Verizon won't explain.
Discuss, discuss, I'd love to hear your inights on this,/.
Well, there is one major problem with an open/free "smartphone": How do you go about getting your packets through the cell-phone system? The frequencies are owned by corporations like Verizon, and you can only communicate if you use their approved equipment.
It's true that a PDA can contain a wifi card, but at least in North America, that only works in much less than 1% of the landscape, and in most places, you first have to negotiate access through an access point, and if you move 100 meters, you have to do it again, paying in full each time. If wifi access were universal, you could use VoIP on top of it and be done with the phone system. But not this year.
You can do IP across most cell-phone channels now, too, but you can only do it with equipment approved by whatever carrier owns that channel at the spot you're standing, and there's no way you'll get approval for your own toy.
A couple of decades ago, the US government ended the "no foreign attachments" rule of the phone companies. There was a huge explosion of new telephone gadgetry, to everyone's profit (including the phone companies who fought the change). We currently have a "no foreign attachments" rule in effect for cell phones, which means that we can't develop anything on our own. We have to wait breathlessly for the phone companies to tell us what we're allowed to use.
Maybe some day this will change, too, and we'll suddenly find the cell-phone system as useful as it should be. Or maybe the wifi system will expand to full coverage.
John Stewart -- The Most Powerful Comedian In News.
Now if he could just prevail on Comedy Central's web monkeys to make the Daily Show's web site work.
We've decided it's time to drop our cable service, because we've found so little that's worth watching on all those channels, so why pay for something that we aren't using? One major exception was the Daily Show, which was the best place to find accurate coverage of the recent American elections. For "straight" news, TV is now pretty much useless, and any sensible person has already switched to the Internet (and laboriously built a set of bookmarks that match their own personal biases;-).
In our house, we have a collection of computers, mostly OSX and linux, but also a couple of Windows boxes kept around for the few things they're good for. The Daily Show's web site doesn't work properly on any of the dozen or so browsers on any of them. It doesn't even work with IE (on Windows or OSX). Well, occasionally a video clip does work, but mostly we just get the "broken" icon, or a blank frame.
We do see some of the clips, since lots of political bloggers capture them and put them online as simple links. This shows that the video clips are actually ok. It's just the bizarre and overly complicated javascript in the Daily Show's pages that falls on its face nearly every time.
Now if there were a page somewhere of simple links to all their video clips...
(There's also the problem of their recent switch to only WMV. Why they would go with the lowest-quality video format would be a mystery, except for the common knowledge of the "business" tactics of WMV's owner. The Daily Show can't be arguing that they're just going with the most popular platform, because their video clips usually don't work for Windows+IE either.;-)
Post 9/11 stories abound with "terrorists using lasers to possibly down planes" whereas pre-9/11 stories are about mischief, poor planning, and training pilots not to stare at the beam.
Not entirely true. If you dig out news coverage of the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, you'll find a number of reports of lasers being used against military aircraft. This was invariably reported as a likely attempt to blind the pilot. I don't remember reading of any successful attempts, though.
There were also hypothetical discussions of the topic around the time that the first commercial lasers started appearing on the market. But it took a few years for actual reports to appear.
Why is trying to crash a plane loaded with civilians into the ground, where it will hurt civilians not terrorism? Just because a well-defined political motive is (apparently) missing?
Exactly. The term "terrorism" arose (in France) to describe acts of violence against civilians in order to put pressure on their government. It is widely used with other meanings these days, and of course the US government often uses it for "anyone who does violent acts that we don't like". But the original meaning was attacking civilians with a specific motive: influencing the government. It still has this meaning to most people with much historical knowledge.
Under this definition, the guys act may have been reckless endangerment, but it certainly wasn't terrorism. There has been no accusation that he (or his daughter) was attempting to influence anyone at all, much less any government.
Lasers have become increasingly cheap and commonplace in recent years. Thousands of inexpensive lasers used for home repair jobs were sold before Christmas, some for as little as $15.
I did notice a big display of laser-based home-contruction and repair equipment at the local Home Depot before Christmas. It seems that a likely scenario now is: Joe Smith is doing some repairs on his patio this spring, and is using that fancy new laser leveller that his wife got him for Christmas. He doesn't realize that the leveler's beam is aimed toward the airport 15 miles away. He blinds a pilot in the middle of a landing, and causes a crash.
If he spends enough time doing careful measuring, maybe he'll be caught. More likely, he'll finish the measuring in a few minutes, and nobody will ever know he was the culprit. Meanwhile, around suburbia, hundreds of others have also bought this fancy new equipment.
It'll be interesting to see how the courts assign blame here. Lots of people are going to be lured into such things, now that the equipment is cheap and is being pushed by retailers.
There's also a good chance that a lot of people just walking (or driving) down the street are going to be passing through this sort of laser beam now. So be careful where you glance if you're driving around on sunny weekends days...
Yeah; sometimes it's surprising how old some ideas are. I have that book, too.
But the real target of anger should be the legal system (US and others) that permits such cynical abuse by such as Microsoft.
Various people have also pointed out that it's not really the US Patent and Trademark Office that's to blame. What happened to them was that the patenting of software suddenly gave them a huge increase in their workload with something for which there was no expertise that they could hire. And then Congress cut their funding. So they basically threw up their hands, and just started approving nearly everything. This is all they can do, since doing a proper study of each application would give them a backlog of centuries. They're basically letting the courts sort it out. And hoping that Congress will come to their senses some day. Or maybe the courts will just toss out the whole idea of software patents. Or software development will end in the US.
You're certainly correct in this case. The slider in my browser's scrollbar is less than 10% of the way down from the top. So it appears that (so far) 90% of the comments have been after the invocation of Hitler.
And a brief spot check showed none that were about Hitler or Nazis. So This attempt to invoke Godwin's Law didn't even produce the usual effect of replacing the discussion with a discussion of Hitler and Nazis.
[T]the patent essentialy describes verbatim the pcode system GCC uses and which in turn was discussed in many works on compilers in the 1980s.
Uh, I think you mean the 1960s. Compiling into an intermediate language and then feeding that to a code generator in a separate pass was invented very early in the history of compilers. It's not just a way of compiling multiple languages; it's also a useful technique for compiling on the machines of < 64K bytes (which was a large machine back then). Right from the start, it was common for compilers to have many passes, with the job split up so that each pass would fit into memory.
I've also ready some of the history of the early Fortran compilers (1950s). One of their challenges was to convince people that a compiler could generate assembly code comparable to what a human could write. This meant that the first Fortran compilers did a fair amount of what came to be called "optimizing". Some of this was done in later passes, by munging the intermediate language. This made sense, because the intermediate language was generally more logical, consistent and orthogonal than the input language(s), making the task much easier.
Fact is, Microsoft is trying to get away with patenting one of the oldest of compiler techniques. Next we're going to read that they've patented the concept of a "lexical" pass that chops the input stream into tokens and replaces each token with an index into an internal symbol table.
The best answer to such idiocy is to just admit we made a big mistake, and eliminate software patents.
So many people here seem to want to reiterate that this is a site for "nerds". That we're supposed to make a difference. But in the same breath, they bash others for using "l33tsp34k" or net abbreviations....
Well, if the nerds and geeks here thought about it a bit, they just might decide that it's all a Good Thing that all the world's riff-raff are blogging up a storm.
I recall back in the late 70's and early 80's, when things like email and usenet were first becoming practical tools for us techies. There were lots of discussions about how we were going to overthrow the established order, by giving communication to the masses.
The sensible ones realized at the start that the masses aren't a lot of geeks. And some of those masses are rather, uh, illiterate, illogical, and everything else nasty you can say about them. But still, having people able to communicate is a lot better than keeping all but the richest silent, which is how things have usually worked. You just need the sense to look around for competing biases and do a bit of thoughtful comparing.
It used to be that freedom of the press belonged only to those with the money to buy and operate a printing press. Now it belongs to anyone with the money to run a blog. And all the folks here who helped build the internet can take full responsibility. We've successfully given a public voice to anyone (idiot or genius, ignorant or informed) who wants one. Not to mention the spammers (which some of us also predicted).
Now we just have to learn how to make sense of the cacophany.
But don't think for a minute that it was an accident. It was discussed to death 20 years ago. Lots of us techies suspected just what an ungodly mess the result would turn out to be. Still, it's looking to be a lot better than the world of corporate control of the news.
Myself, I sorta like the Wonkette, BlondeSense and Majikthise. And Dave Barry, who has sadly taken a leave of absence.
Now if Jon Stewart could just get his web site to work sanely with our browsers...
One thing I noticed in the article was the mention of "buoys, from 9 to 39 feet across". Some of those are good-sized platforms. If they're really iinterested in using them to save lives, they should make it easy for a boater in distress to quickly locate the buoy, and they should have a small house on-board. Then, if your boat is still steerable, you might stand a chance of taking shelter in the buoy until help arrives. This is assuming that they're serious about saving lives, of course.
An interesting case of banned onboard electronics in "primitive" craft is with the revival of the Polynesian ocean-going canoes. While the teams building and sailing them have generally refused to use anything but traditional navigation techniques, they have usually carried satellite-comm gear. This is for two reasons. The obvious is emergence use. The other is that they want accurate tracking, so that after a voyage they can compare their actual path with where they thought they were.
The most-described of these is the Hokule'a, the first such built by a Hawaiian team. Google will find you lots of info about it. National Geographic has published several stories on the topic, including one about their maiden voyage to Tahiti. It's impressive how closely their calculated track has usually agreed with the satellite data.
(They have also said that, due to the lack of large trees, they were forced to make hulls of modern material, which made the craft too light to perform correctly. They needed some extra mass to make up for the missing wood, and electronics that they don't use seemed like a good source of that mass, as did an emergency outboard motor and fuel carefully stowed below.;-)
I do regularly communicate with people in several other countries, but it's mostly technical stuff, so email is a lot more practical than the phone.
Come to think of it, I don't make many local calls, either. My cell-phone PDA has a per-call deal, because I don't use it enough as a phone to even reach half the minimal cost of the lowest minutes-per-month service. But it has unlimited Net access, because I use that quite a lot.
There are still a few situations where a voice call is best. But rarely when what you want is to get information across. The few remaining uses are mostly when the other party is known not to be a competent user of email or IM.
Meanwhile, I was trying to find a more awkward way of saying "spectacularly awkward bit of phraseology", but nothing I could think of came near the awkwardness of the original post.
And I wouldn't worry too much about posting under your username. Really, what does it matter? Especially when you're having pedantic fun...
Just remember the old Soviet expression: "Pravda nyet Isvestia, Isvestia nyet Pravda"
s/nyet/nye/g
While I don't consider myself fluent in Russian, even I was made uncomfortable by this one. It's a lot like if you were to say in English "Truth is no News, News is no Truth". A lot of native speakers would at first be puzzled at what you're trying to say. But if you had a strong enough accent, they'd probably figure it out.
(We have a cockatiel that my wife named Milo, "po-chemu on takaya milaya ptitsa." And she also claims to not speak Russian.;-)
Part of the fun of such stories is wondering whether someone doing a totally unrelated search might be entrapped into downloading a copyrighted file. In this case, it's fairly easy.
Suppose I'm studying the issue of poison-tipped weapons, and one of the google searches I try is for "toxic spears" (after having tried "poison arrow" and other combinations. Google shows about 467,000 matches for this. A quick glance shows that a lot are about this "Brinttney" person, whoever he might be. Checking a few shows that he's actually a she, it's not very interesting music, and the spelling is "Britney".
So I try "toxic spears -britney". This cuts it down to 107,000. Some are for mispelings of the name, and most of the rest are law firms and/or professors named Spears that work with toxic waste. Now I need to find a few keywords to exclude those.
But it's too late. In discovering why I want "-britney" in my search keys, I've inadvertently downloaded an illegal copyrighted file. If the MPAA/RIAA are watching, I'm caught. And there's really no way I could havee defended myself against such entrapment.
This might just be funny, if a number of people hadn't already spent a lot of time and money defending themselved against such things.
And remember the Prof Usher case, where he made MP3s of his classroom lectures and put them online in files starting with "Usher".
Yeah, but note the comments that Pocket PC (i.e., MS Windows) has passed PalmOS in sales. So the plan is: Make the hardware and OS free. Then charge good money for everything you need to make it actually useful. And charge even more for the software that removes viruses and spyware (which will be downloaded and reinstalled on an hourly basis).
Sounds like a business plan...
Oh, and make sure that the BIOS prevents anyone from installing a quality system, whether it be based on PalmOS, linux or iTron. Some strong DRM should block those threats.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this might be seriously unfunny in the near future.
Actually, it has been seriously unfunny for several years.
If you dig around for the earliest reviews of Windows Media Player, you'll find a number of reports that, after installing and testing it on their machine, the reviewers found that most or all of their other audio software was no longer working and had to be reinstalled. They also noted that, if they accidentally ran any of the pieces of WMP, the same thing would happen. And WMP couldn't be fully uninstalled.
I have a number of friends that are developing audio and/or video software. They have been getting more and more depressed about the situation on Windows. It seems that, if you want your softwsare to be usable, you have to "license" it (i.e., sign over all rights) to Microsoft. Then they'll add it to WMP's list of Good Guys, and when WMP triggers its search-and-destroy routine, your app will be spared.
This is really what DRM is all about. The intent is that you will only have the right to run approved software. If you have some silly idea that you can write and market your own software, well, just forget that. Hackers like you can't be trusted, y'know.
... Is there a single country in the world where one can do security research without being accosted by the Man?
Probably not.
It's normal human behavior to respond to reports of danger by getting upset. And those responsible for protection against danger invariably respond by attacking the reporter however they can. He has just shown that they weren't doing their job, after all. If he can't be silenced, he must be punished.
Before the advent of opensource/free software consumers had no alternatives so they had to deal with unethical deceitful entities.
;-). I quickly worked up a patch that fixed the problem. The kernel code was so clear that my patch worked the first time; I was impressed. I sent it to Amdahl's support folks. They thanked me, said I was now in their list of contributors, and it would be in future releases (for the benefit of other customers with idiots for VM gurus).
;-)
Actually, it's a bit more complex than that. If by "open source" you mean software whose source is available for examination and tweaking, it has been around since the earliest days of the computing industry. To a great extent, Microsoft was the "innovator" that started selling software without making the code available.
Thus, I worked on a number of IBM mainframes, all of which ran VM. We always had full source to the VM OS. Actually, VM originated in academia, and IBM started distributing and supporting it after they realized that they couldn't ignore it because most of their customers were using it.
One place I worked, around 1980, we brought in Amdahl's UTS system, a unix that ran on VM. When we asked them about access to source, their reply was "Source isn't an option. You get it whether you want it or not." Part of their reason worked out quickly: I found a problem in the kernel's clock routine (caused by an idiot VM guru at our site, but that's another story
Amdahl's version of unix was proprietary (partly being derived from AT&T's unix). But it was open source. And this worked to everyone's benefit, as open source should.
As for "free", that only partly applied. We were free to read the source and modify it. We weren't free to sell our mods. But we didn't want to; that wasn't our business. Sharing our patch with Amdahl was just something we did because we were sensible people who liked to see the software improved.
(Well, I was partly motivated by the prospect of sharing a geekish chuckle with Amdahl's CS folks, at our VM guy's expense.
Heh. You can find a thousand or so other online cameras by using "bird nest camera" as your search terms. There are an impressive number of cameras aimed at bird nests now. Most are nest boxes, but a few (such as a couple of eagle nests) are natural nests, with the camera in another tree. Of course, most are only active during breeding season, though in the tropics, this can be most of the year.
There was a fun example listed in cruel.com a couple of years ago. Their title was "Great Tits in Germany", and the link was to a site devoted to the great tit (Parus major), a small songbird. The folks that run the site apparently have a sense of humor about the double meaning in the English version of the site, though this doesn't carry over to the German pages. Anyway, their nest cams aren't active now, since it's winter and the tits have all flown south. But they do have some nice pictures of the tits in their nesting box.
I'd bet there are some other good search terms that will turn up lists of other kinds of online cameras.
Some years ago, I read a sci fi story whose plot was basically that Jesus did return within a century, and many more times in the following centuries. Every time, the same thing happened: He was killed. Finally, he gave up, and went on to other planets that were in need of his help.
...
The story was told from the viewpoint of a ship full of human space explorers, who kept coming across planets that were paradises, and the inhabitants attributed this to a holy man in the recent past who had taught them how to live right. But they couldn't find a planet with such a holy man; they kept arriving just after he had left.
Now if I could remember the story's title or author
Hey, that's cheating! It's comprehensible now.
When I looked at the code, my first thought was to wonder whether it was an entry in the next Obfuscated Python Contest. If not, it should be.
Have you ever tried to find anything on /. with the built in search engine?
/. search never returned anything on the topic. Often the "matches" didn't even contain any of the words that I typed.
...
I gave up on it long ago; I just use google. The
I wonder how they got it so wrong? Oh, well; google indexes it all.
BTW, does anyone know what happened to the pointer to a logged-in user's personal page? It used to be at the top of the web page, but it seems to have disappeared some time in the past couple of weeks. Now, I know that it's "users.pl", but how would a new user find it?
There seems to be some entropy hereabouts
I stupidly signed up with Verizon. When my contract expires, I'm gone.
They'll probably sock it to you then, too.
Several years ago, my wife got a cell phone through Verizon. We both used it, until it started getting a bit old and flakey. Then we each got our own cell phone, through two other providers, and cancelled the Verizon phone.
Verizon promptly added a $175 cancellation fee. It was long past the original two-year contract, and we hadn't signed any new contract. We just kept paying the bill, and the phone kept working. We should have been on their month-to-month service, though of course we never got any sort of paperwork (that we know of or signed) about this.
We've tried calling them to talk about it. Their response is to simply bounce us around between different people until the connection gets "accidentally" lost. Nobody at Verizon has shown any interest in discussing this charge. Their attitude is clearly "We put it on your bill, so you have to pay it."
Funny thing is, when we mention this to other people, a lot of them say "Yeah, they did the same to us."
So be prepared for charges that you weren't expecting, and which Verizon won't explain.
Discuss, discuss, I'd love to hear your inights on this, /.
Well, there is one major problem with an open/free "smartphone": How do you go about getting your packets through the cell-phone system? The frequencies are owned by corporations like Verizon, and you can only communicate if you use their approved equipment.
It's true that a PDA can contain a wifi card, but at least in North America, that only works in much less than 1% of the landscape, and in most places, you first have to negotiate access through an access point, and if you move 100 meters, you have to do it again, paying in full each time. If wifi access were universal, you could use VoIP on top of it and be done with the phone system. But not this year.
You can do IP across most cell-phone channels now, too, but you can only do it with equipment approved by whatever carrier owns that channel at the spot you're standing, and there's no way you'll get approval for your own toy.
A couple of decades ago, the US government ended the "no foreign attachments" rule of the phone companies. There was a huge explosion of new telephone gadgetry, to everyone's profit (including the phone companies who fought the change). We currently have a "no foreign attachments" rule in effect for cell phones, which means that we can't develop anything on our own. We have to wait breathlessly for the phone companies to tell us what we're allowed to use.
Maybe some day this will change, too, and we'll suddenly find the cell-phone system as useful as it should be. Or maybe the wifi system will expand to full coverage.
But it probably won't happen this year.
It might be worthwhile to note the Wonkette summarized the story as:
CNN said to be canning the show, replacing it with monkeys throwing their own shit at each other.
John Stewart -- The Most Powerful Comedian In News.
;-).
...
;-)
Now if he could just prevail on Comedy Central's web monkeys to make the Daily Show's web site work.
We've decided it's time to drop our cable service, because we've found so little that's worth watching on all those channels, so why pay for something that we aren't using? One major exception was the Daily Show, which was the best place to find accurate coverage of the recent American elections. For "straight" news, TV is now pretty much useless, and any sensible person has already switched to the Internet (and laboriously built a set of bookmarks that match their own personal biases
In our house, we have a collection of computers, mostly OSX and linux, but also a couple of Windows boxes kept around for the few things they're good for. The Daily Show's web site doesn't work properly on any of the dozen or so browsers on any of them. It doesn't even work with IE (on Windows or OSX). Well, occasionally a video clip does work, but mostly we just get the "broken" icon, or a blank frame.
We do see some of the clips, since lots of political bloggers capture them and put them online as simple links. This shows that the video clips are actually ok. It's just the bizarre and overly complicated javascript in the Daily Show's pages that falls on its face nearly every time.
Now if there were a page somewhere of simple links to all their video clips
(There's also the problem of their recent switch to only WMV. Why they would go with the lowest-quality video format would be a mystery, except for the common knowledge of the "business" tactics of WMV's owner. The Daily Show can't be arguing that they're just going with the most popular platform, because their video clips usually don't work for Windows+IE either.
Post 9/11 stories abound with "terrorists using lasers to possibly down planes" whereas pre-9/11 stories are about mischief, poor planning, and training pilots not to stare at the beam.
Not entirely true. If you dig out news coverage of the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, you'll find a number of reports of lasers being used against military aircraft. This was invariably reported as a likely attempt to blind the pilot. I don't remember reading of any successful attempts, though.
There were also hypothetical discussions of the topic around the time that the first commercial lasers started appearing on the market. But it took a few years for actual reports to appear.
Why is trying to crash a plane loaded with civilians into the ground, where it will hurt civilians not terrorism? Just because a well-defined political motive is (apparently) missing?
Exactly. The term "terrorism" arose (in France) to describe acts of violence against civilians in order to put pressure on their government. It is widely used with other meanings these days, and of course the US government often uses it for "anyone who does violent acts that we don't like". But the original meaning was attacking civilians with a specific motive: influencing the government. It still has this meaning to most people with much historical knowledge.
Under this definition, the guys act may have been reckless endangerment, but it certainly wasn't terrorism. There has been no accusation that he (or his daughter) was attempting to influence anyone at all, much less any government.
A significant part of the story might be:
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Lasers have become increasingly cheap and commonplace in recent years. Thousands of inexpensive lasers used for home repair jobs were sold before Christmas, some for as little as $15.
I did notice a big display of laser-based home-contruction and repair equipment at the local Home Depot before Christmas. It seems that a likely scenario now is: Joe Smith is doing some repairs on his patio this spring, and is using that fancy new laser leveller that his wife got him for Christmas. He doesn't realize that the leveler's beam is aimed toward the airport 15 miles away. He blinds a pilot in the middle of a landing, and causes a crash.
If he spends enough time doing careful measuring, maybe he'll be caught. More likely, he'll finish the measuring in a few minutes, and nobody will ever know he was the culprit. Meanwhile, around suburbia, hundreds of others have also bought this fancy new equipment.
It'll be interesting to see how the courts assign blame here. Lots of people are going to be lured into such things, now that the equipment is cheap and is being pushed by retailers.
There's also a good chance that a lot of people just walking (or driving) down the street are going to be passing through this sort of laser beam now. So be careful where you glance if you're driving around on sunny weekends days
Yeah; sometimes it's surprising how old some ideas are. I have that book, too.
But the real target of anger should be the legal system (US and others) that permits such cynical abuse by such as Microsoft.
Various people have also pointed out that it's not really the US Patent and Trademark Office that's to blame. What happened to them was that the patenting of software suddenly gave them a huge increase in their workload with something for which there was no expertise that they could hire. And then Congress cut their funding. So they basically threw up their hands, and just started approving nearly everything. This is all they can do, since doing a proper study of each application would give them a backlog of centuries. They're basically letting the courts sort it out. And hoping that Congress will come to their senses some day. Or maybe the courts will just toss out the whole idea of software patents. Or software development will end in the US.
You're certainly correct in this case. The slider in my browser's scrollbar is less than 10% of the way down from the top. So it appears that (so far) 90% of the comments have been after the invocation of Hitler.
And a brief spot check showed none that were about Hitler or Nazis. So This attempt to invoke Godwin's Law didn't even produce the usual effect of replacing the discussion with a discussion of Hitler and Nazis.
[T]the patent essentialy describes verbatim the pcode system GCC uses and which in turn was discussed in many works on compilers in the 1980s.
Uh, I think you mean the 1960s. Compiling into an intermediate language and then feeding that to a code generator in a separate pass was invented very early in the history of compilers. It's not just a way of compiling multiple languages; it's also a useful technique for compiling on the machines of < 64K bytes (which was a large machine back then). Right from the start, it was common for compilers to have many passes, with the job split up so that each pass would fit into memory.
I've also ready some of the history of the early Fortran compilers (1950s). One of their challenges was to convince people that a compiler could generate assembly code comparable to what a human could write. This meant that the first Fortran compilers did a fair amount of what came to be called "optimizing". Some of this was done in later passes, by munging the intermediate language. This made sense, because the intermediate language was generally more logical, consistent and orthogonal than the input language(s), making the task much easier.
Fact is, Microsoft is trying to get away with patenting one of the oldest of compiler techniques. Next we're going to read that they've patented the concept of a "lexical" pass that chops the input stream into tokens and replaces each token with an index into an internal symbol table.
The best answer to such idiocy is to just admit we made a big mistake, and eliminate software patents.
So many people here seem to want to reiterate that this is a site for "nerds". That we're supposed to make a difference. But in the same breath, they bash others for using "l33tsp34k" or net abbreviations. ...
...
Well, if the nerds and geeks here thought about it a bit, they just might decide that it's all a Good Thing that all the world's riff-raff are blogging up a storm.
I recall back in the late 70's and early 80's, when things like email and usenet were first becoming practical tools for us techies. There were lots of discussions about how we were going to overthrow the established order, by giving communication to the masses.
The sensible ones realized at the start that the masses aren't a lot of geeks. And some of those masses are rather, uh, illiterate, illogical, and everything else nasty you can say about them. But still, having people able to communicate is a lot better than keeping all but the richest silent, which is how things have usually worked. You just need the sense to look around for competing biases and do a bit of thoughtful comparing.
It used to be that freedom of the press belonged only to those with the money to buy and operate a printing press. Now it belongs to anyone with the money to run a blog. And all the folks here who helped build the internet can take full responsibility. We've successfully given a public voice to anyone (idiot or genius, ignorant or informed) who wants one. Not to mention the spammers (which some of us also predicted).
Now we just have to learn how to make sense of the cacophany.
But don't think for a minute that it was an accident. It was discussed to death 20 years ago. Lots of us techies suspected just what an ungodly mess the result would turn out to be. Still, it's looking to be a lot better than the world of corporate control of the news.
Myself, I sorta like the Wonkette, BlondeSense and Majikthise. And Dave Barry, who has sadly taken a leave of absence.
Now if Jon Stewart could just get his web site to work sanely with our browsers
One thing I noticed in the article was the mention of "buoys, from 9 to 39 feet across". Some of those are good-sized platforms. If they're really iinterested in using them to save lives, they should make it easy for a boater in distress to quickly locate the buoy, and they should have a small house on-board. Then, if your boat is still steerable, you might stand a chance of taking shelter in the buoy until help arrives. This is assuming that they're serious about saving lives, of course.
;-)
An interesting case of banned onboard electronics in "primitive" craft is with the revival of the Polynesian ocean-going canoes. While the teams building and sailing them have generally refused to use anything but traditional navigation techniques, they have usually carried satellite-comm gear. This is for two reasons. The obvious is emergence use. The other is that they want accurate tracking, so that after a voyage they can compare their actual path with where they thought they were.
The most-described of these is the Hokule'a, the first such built by a Hawaiian team. Google will find you lots of info about it. National Geographic has published several stories on the topic, including one about their maiden voyage to Tahiti. It's impressive how closely their calculated track has usually agreed with the satellite data.
(They have also said that, due to the lack of large trees, they were forced to make hulls of modern material, which made the craft too light to perform correctly. They needed some extra mass to make up for the missing wood, and electronics that they don't use seemed like a good source of that mass, as did an emergency outboard motor and fuel carefully stowed below.
I'm an American!
Same here.
I do regularly communicate with people in several other countries, but it's mostly technical stuff, so email is a lot more practical than the phone.
Come to think of it, I don't make many local calls, either. My cell-phone PDA has a per-call deal, because I don't use it enough as a phone to even reach half the minimal cost of the lowest minutes-per-month service. But it has unlimited Net access, because I use that quite a lot.
There are still a few situations where a voice call is best. But rarely when what you want is to get information across. The few remaining uses are mostly when the other party is known not to be a competent user of email or IM.
Meanwhile, I was trying to find a more awkward way of saying "spectacularly awkward bit of phraseology", but nothing I could think of came near the awkwardness of the original post.
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And I wouldn't worry too much about posting under your username. Really, what does it matter? Especially when you're having pedantic fun
Just remember the old Soviet expression: "Pravda nyet Isvestia, Isvestia nyet Pravda"
;-)
s/nyet/nye/g
While I don't consider myself fluent in Russian, even I was made uncomfortable by this one. It's a lot like if you were to say in English "Truth is no News, News is no Truth". A lot of native speakers would at first be puzzled at what you're trying to say. But if you had a strong enough accent, they'd probably figure it out.
(We have a cockatiel that my wife named Milo, "po-chemu on takaya milaya ptitsa." And she also claims to not speak Russian.
... embarrassed by your spelling ...
Hey, c'mon; he was just following the old rule that any spelling or grammar flame will contain a mispeling or a grammer eror.
Of course; his really was neither; it was just commenting on a spectacularly awkward bit of phraseology. But the principle still applies.
Part of the fun of such stories is wondering whether someone doing a totally unrelated search might be entrapped into downloading a copyrighted file. In this case, it's fairly easy.
Suppose I'm studying the issue of poison-tipped weapons, and one of the google searches I try is for "toxic spears" (after having tried "poison arrow" and other combinations. Google shows about 467,000 matches for this. A quick glance shows that a lot are about this "Brinttney" person, whoever he might be. Checking a few shows that he's actually a she, it's not very interesting music, and the spelling is "Britney".
So I try "toxic spears -britney". This cuts it down to 107,000. Some are for mispelings of the name, and most of the rest are law firms and/or professors named Spears that work with toxic waste. Now I need to find a few keywords to exclude those.
But it's too late. In discovering why I want "-britney" in my search keys, I've inadvertently downloaded an illegal copyrighted file. If the MPAA/RIAA are watching, I'm caught. And there's really no way I could havee defended myself against such entrapment.
This might just be funny, if a number of people hadn't already spent a lot of time and money defending themselved against such things.
And remember the Prof Usher case, where he made MP3s of his classroom lectures and put them online in files starting with "Usher".
Yeah, but note the comments that Pocket PC (i.e., MS Windows) has passed PalmOS in sales. So the plan is: Make the hardware and OS free. Then charge good money for everything you need to make it actually useful. And charge even more for the software that removes viruses and spyware (which will be downloaded and reinstalled on an hourly basis).
...
;-)
Sounds like a business plan
Oh, and make sure that the BIOS prevents anyone from installing a quality system, whether it be based on PalmOS, linux or iTron. Some strong DRM should block those threats.
(What, me cynical?