I periodically look at my TMDA pending queue to see if there are messages from people who can't figure out how to respond to a challenge.
There aren't any.
Anyone who bothered enough to find my e-mail address and send me mail has no trouble replying to the confirmation request. It's politely worded and explains the situation very well.
TMDA's challenge-response system keeps 200+ spams a day from my inbox. No, it's not a perfect solution, because it still reaches my mail server, still eats bandwidth, and only deals with the final effects of spam, not the root cause. But if I had 200 junk messages in my mailbox every day, nobody would be able to reach me, because I would stop using e-mail.
This isn't rude. This is telling people you're being deluged and this is an easy way to make their message stand out from the junk.
Freely-available code is of unknown quality; auditing it takes time.
Freely-available code may not integrate into your application well; changing its API may be non-trivial.
Freely-available code may have security flaws.
Freely-available code may have licensing restrictions.
Most of these boil down to time, time taken to work around the issue. If the amount of time saved is bigger than the amount of time to make free code work, it's worth it.
Each programmer has to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether re-using code will work. This depends on the skill of the programmer, too; for some, time spent programming is far more productive than time spent trawling sourceforge for usable code.
If you've got no content, your site doesn't need to be dynamic. A static blank page will do.
On a more serious note, it depends on what the site does. Having built a fair number of sites--both for myself and, as part of my job, for big companies--I can say there are pros and cons to driving your site from a database.
Databases are primarily useful when you have a consistent structure to your content and you need to be able to update that content easily. When I built this site it was done from a database, but I used a script to build all the pages one time; it's a static site, because the content doesn't get updated. I'm in the process of rebuilding the main site now, and it really will be dynamic, because I want to be able to update the database with new content and have it automatically appear on the site.
But more importantly, there are advantages from a fully dynamic site that you just can't do with static HTML. Any kind of interactivity, be it searching, multi-step forms, or even checking on financial systems like I built with this site. You can't reasonably do that kind of thing without connecting with a database.
Sounds like this book is a good starter guide for folks looking to learn how to build dynamic web sites. It gets you to the point where you're ready to deal with establishing sessions, and once you're there, then you can really get the ideas flowing... you have to tools to do what you want, instead of being limited by what you know.
The difference is... when the inmates go to the school or the crippled smoker speaks, it's clear they've suffered a penalty for their actions and there's probably some remorse.
Microsoft is still busy churning out insecure software. Their big show last year about "getting security" was just that: a show. A token effort. Things like this are more of that token effort, an attempt to look like they're taking security seriously, because appearances are cheaper than the real thing.
...look at An Imaginary Tale: The Story of Sqrt(-1) by Paul Nahin. I thought the history behind the development of complex numbers was very fascinating; the people involved were very human, not noble god-like geniuses with no failings. A friend of mine bought this for me for my birthday, as I create fractal art and most of the mathematics I use involve complex numbers.
Re:Family Tree Tech support: Wood for the fire....
on
Family Tech Support
·
· Score: 1
I volunteer to help people move precisely so I don't have to help them with their computers.
A few people do ask me computer questions, but all my friends know that pretty much I don't do tech support. And my family... they're either all to proud to ask or they just assume nobody can make the damn things work.
We've got malware that now disables personal firewall software so as to avoid detection. This throttle might be an effective patch against current viruses, but the next round will simply work around the throttle, if it is applied locally.
Of course the article doesn't really say whether this is enforced on the local machines or is applied from outside (i.e. at a switch or router). However, by talking about it as an inoculation, it suggests it really enforced on the local machine.
It's a good idea, in general, but it has to be user-tweakable, and that means it's virus-tweakable too.
Last year someone gave me a little self-contained unit with a bunch of Activision games in it. It's about the size of a modern console controller, has two joypads, and a few extra buttons for starting, resetting, and powering off the unit--so it's not the same form factor as the classic Atari joystick shown on the Avon site.
One thing I noticed about the unit I have is that it's not a true 2600; it's clearly either ported or emulated on some different hardware. There are visual errors in the games and occasionally gameplay errors. Since most of the 2600 games actually used the hardware to handle collision detection, errors in simulating the hardware result in more than just visual differences.
I don't think most people would notice the differences in the unit I have, but I worked on some 2600 emulation stuff, so I know what I'm looking for.;-)
The selection of games in this unit is different from what I have. Ah, fond memories of waking up early Saturday morning so I could try to flip the score on Yars' Revenge before my brothers and sisters came in clamoring for cartoons...
We all agree that spammers are scum and should be expunged from the net. No argument.
Let's say I'm trying to set up shop somewhere where I don't really have my choice of ISPs. If I want to connect to the net, I have one or two real options. And that option happens to be with an ISP that isn't tough enough on spam for the liking of some of the more aggressive (belligerent?) blacklisters, so they not only block the spammer they don't like, but the spammer's upstream provider... which happens to be my upstream provider, too. The blacklisters are basically saying it's OK for them to DoS ME because someone else on the network did something they don't like.
Now let's kick it up a notch, because you're probably thinking that if it's just me setting up through a small, remote ISP, it's not a big deal. Let's say I'm in a small city where I have my choice of ISPs, but there are only one or two regional providers who connect those small ISPs to the larger net. When one of those regional ISPs gets blacklisted, you effectively DoS a large, large area. Yes, you put pressure on the ISP to remove the spammer... but in the meantime, you've DoSed a lot more people than the spammer did.
So: at what point does the collateral damage become too expensive to put up with?
This is an interesting point, but (as a Brit living in the US) let me flip the thought around: what does this say about the rest of the world telling the US how it should do things?
The US gets a lot of flak for telling the rest of the world they should do this or that. I've done a fair bit of traveling myself, and I can say that different currency always takes a bit of time to get used to. You have to train yourself to focus on the important differences. With US currency, it's the numbers (or the photos if you actually want to memorize those). With European currency it seems to be colors (which you must associate with numbers) as the numbers often have lots of distracting stuff around them that draws your eye AWAY from the number, arguably the most important information on the currency!
So yeah, Americans will resist change, but another way of looking at it is, why fix what isn't broken?
Most of my technical books contain vast quantities of useful information in charts, diagrams, and illustrations... which are far more of a challenge to OCR than mere printed text.
I suspect that even were this sort of thing really possible, it's a major time investment. I have several dozen technical books I'd like to scan, each with four hundred or so pages... and I'm not sure I want to spend a week's vacation time doing it.
And even were it done... there is just something comforting about having a nice printed book that I can set on the desk next to the computer and consult, without having to read it on the screen. Print still looks way better than monitors.
Sauce for the goose...
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've seen this on all sides of the debate.
I'm a religious person; I believe in a creator. Does that mean I agree with all the creationist wackos out there who don't know how to do good science? Nope. Does it mean I look skeptically at atheistic scientists who look at something they don't understand, can't explain, and pronounce there must be some mysterious non-divine explanation because they've already decided there's no God? Of course I expect them to back up their science.
Right now science doesn't have good explanations for exactly how macroevolution works. Religion doesn't have good explanations for the apparent age of the universe. Everybody should just fess up and admit they don't know the whole story, quit pushing dogma, and work on finding honest answers.
As a conservative Christian myself, I'd say you're right on the money, except that even censorware for small children isn't terribly effective. There's an awful lot of stuff that isn't necessarily porn that is still inappropriate for small children; rather than installing censorware and hoping that does the job, I'd just say that the younger the children are, the more important parental involvement is. That means more than just glancing over their shoulders every few minutes; it means actually spending time with them while they use the net.
The net is NOT like existing sources of information. If you take your kids to the video store, you can see what part of the video store they're in. If you take your kids to the library, you can see where they're at. When your kids surf the net, you can't necessarily see what part of the net they're using. The net puts all the information of the world right there in your PC. All of it, good, bad, and ugly. This is convenient but requires a lot more vigilance on the part of parents.
I think in a generation we'll have a much better handle on this, but right now it's so new parents are struggling to adapt.
Seems to me ATI hasn't really improved their software since I had the original Radeon All-in-Wonder. I had very, very similar problems with getting any of the TV features to work if I had a second video card installed and enabled. Turning off the second display was required to watch DVDs; to watch TV, I had to reboot and turn off the other video card with a BIOS switch.
I've since replaced the Radeon All-in-Wonder with a Radeon 8500, because I wanted better dual-monitor support. Silly me. DVDs can't play full-screen at all with two monitors enabled, the dual-display support is horribly quirky, and when I attempted to add an ATI TV-Wonder board to get back the TV stuff not available on the 8500, I discover the two just plain don't work together, locking the entire system in seconds. The few seconds I did manage to get the TV going (only once) the quality was distinctly inferior to the All-in-Wonder.
I've got too much money sunk into this stuff to go replace it right now, but I seriously doubt I'll be purchasing another ATI product in the future. Their drivers just plain suck, and their tech support (when they even bothered to answer my e-mail inquiries) assumed I was an idiot and gave me standard suggestions that I'd already tried (and I'd told them I'd tried, had they bothered to read the e-mail I sent).
Dan Bernstein has some information about this project on his page. Part of the problem is persuading the entire net to scrap their existing mail infrastructure, something I think is likely to happen soon after the first honest politician gets elected.
1400 per year is absolutely nothing. I'm pushing 4000 per year, and that's AFTER the things that make it through the blocks I have.
All it takes is one pissed-off person with your e-mail address to submit to every porn site and newsgroup they can think of... you'll never end the spam then.
One piece of spam I investigated for a friend turned out to be a way of scamming people's credit card numbers. The actual item they were selling was only $50, but once they have a card number, they can commit credit card fraud and help themselves to a lot more money.
Spammers are low-lifes. They are already quite content to send the vilest, most unwelcome tripe into your mailbox and hide where they're coming from so you can't track them down. Given the lengths that they're going to to obscure their origins, do you REALLY think they're going to deal honestly with their customers?
Dual Heading LCDs is good and bad
on
Panasonic Dual-LCD PC
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've got dual 17" LCD monitors and, frankly, it's been a rough ride.
I started with an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder and Rage something-or-other as the secondary card. This worked fairly well, except the TV on the AIW wouldn't work unless I rebooted Win2K with just one video card. To play games I at least had to disable the second display (didn't have to reboot, though). But for regular Windows apps, this worked great; apps maximize to just one monitor, popups don't cross monitor boundaries, most things just worked better.
Not happy with the performance on the second display (PCI instead of AGP) I splurged and got a Radeon 8500 with built-in dual-head. And yeah, the performance is great... but the dual-head support is utter crap. The DVD playback can't full-screen properly, apps get confused about which monitor (or both) they should maximize to, the mouse pointer behaves erratically near the monitor break, and you can't set the two monitors to different resolutions. Oh, and the software gets confused about how to use both monitors across reboots; sometimes forgetting the bit depth, always forgetting that a 2560x1024 display should span two monitors, not be constrained to one. ATI has yet to patch any of these problems.
The LCDs themselves... well I use flat CRTs at work, and I prefer the LCDs, even for graphics work. The sharpness of LCDs is extraordinary; it's especially unforgiving of JPEGs, as I can see a lot more distortion on these than I can on a CRT. It did take me a while to get the color balance decent, though--and even longer to get both monitors to match each other. But I can fit two of these on my desk without having to use industrial-strength support. The two together weigh less than a single 21" monitor.
The Panasonic unit looks interesting but it's probably going to be a very niche item. Most people can't justify two monitors in their minds, even though once you use one seriously for work, you end up liking it quite a bit. (You can pry my second monitor from my cold, dead fingers.)
The biggest reason I see for not doing this is cargo capacity. With a Segway, my cargo capacity is limited to what I can comfortably carry; a backpack or a briefcase.
The ULTra, on the other hand, can carry a dozen grocery bags quite easily, I just need to load and unload them. So I can walk out of the supermarket, load up the ULTra, it drives me home, I unload at my curb or doorstep. Easy.
Yes I noticed on a recent trip to New York that the subway cards are mag-stripe. Of course I bought mine with cash (the US doesn't have coins quite as obnoxious as those £1 monsters) so it was far less traceable than if I'd used a credit card.
The difference is in how quickly you obsolete old technology, and how necessary it is to upgrade that technology.
Interfaces between audio components have been stable for a long, long time. Connecting old audio equipment to new audio equipment usually isn't a problem.
Try that with computers, and it's not always so simple. Software will get obsoleted much faster than hardware, and it's a lot more convenient for the content publishers to refuse to update the software or change the format, rendering your previously-purchased content unusable on new systems. So you COULD refuse to update your system... but then you end up fighting the MS upgrade-or-die machine, and you run the risk of having to keep a buggy, insecure system running instead of switching to a new, buggy, insecure (but not necessarily as widely-exploited) system.
Ah well. Just don't buy the CDs. They won't quit unless it hurts their bottom line too much.
So... you swipe a card, punch in a destination, and suddenly they have a very neat record of where you've gone using public transportation. Nice.
Aside from that, it's an interesting idea; you don't necessarily have the hassle of figuring out bus schedules. And you don't have to deal with a cab driver who barely speaks English and is quite willing to drive you around New York for two hours because you don't know that your destination is really only a fifteen-minute drive from the airport. So in that sense, it's nice.
I especially appreciated the photo that shows a bike will easily fit into these vehicles... good call! Heck, that means fitting a Segway in there would be pretty easy...
Not only that, but you would be tying sites to specific IP addresses, preventing them from being moved between service providers because the service providers generally keep the IPs. If I don't like my current host, having a domain name lets me choose another host and change where the name points, without invalidating all the addresses used to refer to my site.
This would apply not just to search engine links, but also links from other web sites. To eliminate DNS and just use search engine URLs would mean routing EVERY link on the web through a search engine, in order to centralize the index and allow changes to where sites are to affect all links at once. And if you consider multiple search engines (to provide the competition that is good and keeps one search engine from being an unfair gatekeeper) then the advantages of a DNS-like system become clearer.
Yes DNS (well, BIND) has security issues. But we need something like DNS to keep the net flexible.
At the same time that book was being burned, there were protesters protesting that protest, chanting "stop burning books". The same group burning Harry Potter were also burning works by Shakespeare and AC-DC music.
Had this been government burning books, that would have been one thing, but it was a private group, and another private group protested their act. I do not agree with the book-burning group (if they think Harry Potter is Satanic they need to get out more) but I'll defend their right to burn as many books as they've paid for. The publisher doesn't care, they got their money.
The difference comes when the government gets involved. If a group says some material is bad, it's certainly within their rights to persuade other members of the public to agree with them; that's discussion. For one group to coerce the government into legislating their viewpoint on others is the problem, and that appears to be what is happening in Australia.
But hey, politicians are pretty much the same the world over: they'd rather LOOK like they're doing something than actually DO something useful.
Slashdot Mirror
I periodically look at my TMDA pending queue to see if there are messages from people who can't figure out how to respond to a challenge.
There aren't any.
Anyone who bothered enough to find my e-mail address and send me mail has no trouble replying to the confirmation request. It's politely worded and explains the situation very well.
TMDA's challenge-response system keeps 200+ spams a day from my inbox. No, it's not a perfect solution, because it still reaches my mail server, still eats bandwidth, and only deals with the final effects of spam, not the root cause. But if I had 200 junk messages in my mailbox every day, nobody would be able to reach me, because I would stop using e-mail.
This isn't rude. This is telling people you're being deluged and this is an easy way to make their message stand out from the junk.
Most of these boil down to time, time taken to work around the issue. If the amount of time saved is bigger than the amount of time to make free code work, it's worth it.
Each programmer has to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether re-using code will work. This depends on the skill of the programmer, too; for some, time spent programming is far more productive than time spent trawling sourceforge for usable code.
Don't you mean a 2GB Word .DOC file? That's much easier; a standard one-page resume will do it.
If you've got no content, your site doesn't need to be dynamic. A static blank page will do.
On a more serious note, it depends on what the site does. Having built a fair number of sites--both for myself and, as part of my job, for big companies--I can say there are pros and cons to driving your site from a database.
Databases are primarily useful when you have a consistent structure to your content and you need to be able to update that content easily. When I built this site it was done from a database, but I used a script to build all the pages one time; it's a static site, because the content doesn't get updated. I'm in the process of rebuilding the main site now, and it really will be dynamic, because I want to be able to update the database with new content and have it automatically appear on the site.
But more importantly, there are advantages from a fully dynamic site that you just can't do with static HTML. Any kind of interactivity, be it searching, multi-step forms, or even checking on financial systems like I built with this site. You can't reasonably do that kind of thing without connecting with a database.
Sounds like this book is a good starter guide for folks looking to learn how to build dynamic web sites. It gets you to the point where you're ready to deal with establishing sessions, and once you're there, then you can really get the ideas flowing... you have to tools to do what you want, instead of being limited by what you know.
The difference is... when the inmates go to the school or the crippled smoker speaks, it's clear they've suffered a penalty for their actions and there's probably some remorse.
Microsoft is still busy churning out insecure software. Their big show last year about "getting security" was just that: a show. A token effort. Things like this are more of that token effort, an attempt to look like they're taking security seriously, because appearances are cheaper than the real thing.
...look at An Imaginary Tale: The Story of Sqrt(-1) by Paul Nahin. I thought the history behind the development of complex numbers was very fascinating; the people involved were very human, not noble god-like geniuses with no failings. A friend of mine bought this for me for my birthday, as I create fractal art and most of the mathematics I use involve complex numbers.
I volunteer to help people move precisely so I don't have to help them with their computers.
A few people do ask me computer questions, but all my friends know that pretty much I don't do tech support. And my family... they're either all to proud to ask or they just assume nobody can make the damn things work.
We've got malware that now disables personal firewall software so as to avoid detection. This throttle might be an effective patch against current viruses, but the next round will simply work around the throttle, if it is applied locally.
Of course the article doesn't really say whether this is enforced on the local machines or is applied from outside (i.e. at a switch or router). However, by talking about it as an inoculation, it suggests it really enforced on the local machine.
It's a good idea, in general, but it has to be user-tweakable, and that means it's virus-tweakable too.
Last year someone gave me a little self-contained unit with a bunch of Activision games in it. It's about the size of a modern console controller, has two joypads, and a few extra buttons for starting, resetting, and powering off the unit--so it's not the same form factor as the classic Atari joystick shown on the Avon site.
;-)
One thing I noticed about the unit I have is that it's not a true 2600; it's clearly either ported or emulated on some different hardware. There are visual errors in the games and occasionally gameplay errors. Since most of the 2600 games actually used the hardware to handle collision detection, errors in simulating the hardware result in more than just visual differences.
I don't think most people would notice the differences in the unit I have, but I worked on some 2600 emulation stuff, so I know what I'm looking for.
The selection of games in this unit is different from what I have. Ah, fond memories of waking up early Saturday morning so I could try to flip the score on Yars' Revenge before my brothers and sisters came in clamoring for cartoons...
We all agree that spammers are scum and should be expunged from the net. No argument.
Let's say I'm trying to set up shop somewhere where I don't really have my choice of ISPs. If I want to connect to the net, I have one or two real options. And that option happens to be with an ISP that isn't tough enough on spam for the liking of some of the more aggressive (belligerent?) blacklisters, so they not only block the spammer they don't like, but the spammer's upstream provider... which happens to be my upstream provider, too. The blacklisters are basically saying it's OK for them to DoS ME because someone else on the network did something they don't like.
Now let's kick it up a notch, because you're probably thinking that if it's just me setting up through a small, remote ISP, it's not a big deal. Let's say I'm in a small city where I have my choice of ISPs, but there are only one or two regional providers who connect those small ISPs to the larger net. When one of those regional ISPs gets blacklisted, you effectively DoS a large, large area. Yes, you put pressure on the ISP to remove the spammer... but in the meantime, you've DoSed a lot more people than the spammer did.
So: at what point does the collateral damage become too expensive to put up with?
This is an interesting point, but (as a Brit living in the US) let me flip the thought around: what does this say about the rest of the world telling the US how it should do things?
The US gets a lot of flak for telling the rest of the world they should do this or that. I've done a fair bit of traveling myself, and I can say that different currency always takes a bit of time to get used to. You have to train yourself to focus on the important differences. With US currency, it's the numbers (or the photos if you actually want to memorize those). With European currency it seems to be colors (which you must associate with numbers) as the numbers often have lots of distracting stuff around them that draws your eye AWAY from the number, arguably the most important information on the currency!
So yeah, Americans will resist change, but another way of looking at it is, why fix what isn't broken?
Food for thought.
Most of my technical books contain vast quantities of useful information in charts, diagrams, and illustrations... which are far more of a challenge to OCR than mere printed text.
I suspect that even were this sort of thing really possible, it's a major time investment. I have several dozen technical books I'd like to scan, each with four hundred or so pages... and I'm not sure I want to spend a week's vacation time doing it.
And even were it done... there is just something comforting about having a nice printed book that I can set on the desk next to the computer and consult, without having to read it on the screen. Print still looks way better than monitors.
I've seen this on all sides of the debate.
I'm a religious person; I believe in a creator. Does that mean I agree with all the creationist wackos out there who don't know how to do good science? Nope. Does it mean I look skeptically at atheistic scientists who look at something they don't understand, can't explain, and pronounce there must be some mysterious non-divine explanation because they've already decided there's no God? Of course I expect them to back up their science.
Right now science doesn't have good explanations for exactly how macroevolution works. Religion doesn't have good explanations for the apparent age of the universe. Everybody should just fess up and admit they don't know the whole story, quit pushing dogma, and work on finding honest answers.
But hey, I'm religious and therefore biased.
As a conservative Christian myself, I'd say you're right on the money, except that even censorware for small children isn't terribly effective. There's an awful lot of stuff that isn't necessarily porn that is still inappropriate for small children; rather than installing censorware and hoping that does the job, I'd just say that the younger the children are, the more important parental involvement is. That means more than just glancing over their shoulders every few minutes; it means actually spending time with them while they use the net.
The net is NOT like existing sources of information. If you take your kids to the video store, you can see what part of the video store they're in. If you take your kids to the library, you can see where they're at. When your kids surf the net, you can't necessarily see what part of the net they're using. The net puts all the information of the world right there in your PC. All of it, good, bad, and ugly. This is convenient but requires a lot more vigilance on the part of parents.
I think in a generation we'll have a much better handle on this, but right now it's so new parents are struggling to adapt.
Seems to me ATI hasn't really improved their software since I had the original Radeon All-in-Wonder. I had very, very similar problems with getting any of the TV features to work if I had a second video card installed and enabled. Turning off the second display was required to watch DVDs; to watch TV, I had to reboot and turn off the other video card with a BIOS switch.
I've since replaced the Radeon All-in-Wonder with a Radeon 8500, because I wanted better dual-monitor support. Silly me. DVDs can't play full-screen at all with two monitors enabled, the dual-display support is horribly quirky, and when I attempted to add an ATI TV-Wonder board to get back the TV stuff not available on the 8500, I discover the two just plain don't work together, locking the entire system in seconds. The few seconds I did manage to get the TV going (only once) the quality was distinctly inferior to the All-in-Wonder.
I've got too much money sunk into this stuff to go replace it right now, but I seriously doubt I'll be purchasing another ATI product in the future. Their drivers just plain suck, and their tech support (when they even bothered to answer my e-mail inquiries) assumed I was an idiot and gave me standard suggestions that I'd already tried (and I'd told them I'd tried, had they bothered to read the e-mail I sent).
Buyer beware.
Internet Mail 2000
Dan Bernstein has some information about this project on his page. Part of the problem is persuading the entire net to scrap their existing mail infrastructure, something I think is likely to happen soon after the first honest politician gets elected.
1400 per year is absolutely nothing. I'm pushing 4000 per year, and that's AFTER the things that make it through the blocks I have.
All it takes is one pissed-off person with your e-mail address to submit to every porn site and newsgroup they can think of... you'll never end the spam then.
One piece of spam I investigated for a friend turned out to be a way of scamming people's credit card numbers. The actual item they were selling was only $50, but once they have a card number, they can commit credit card fraud and help themselves to a lot more money.
Spammers are low-lifes. They are already quite content to send the vilest, most unwelcome tripe into your mailbox and hide where they're coming from so you can't track them down. Given the lengths that they're going to to obscure their origins, do you REALLY think they're going to deal honestly with their customers?
I started with an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder and Rage something-or-other as the secondary card. This worked fairly well, except the TV on the AIW wouldn't work unless I rebooted Win2K with just one video card. To play games I at least had to disable the second display (didn't have to reboot, though). But for regular Windows apps, this worked great; apps maximize to just one monitor, popups don't cross monitor boundaries, most things just worked better.
Not happy with the performance on the second display (PCI instead of AGP) I splurged and got a Radeon 8500 with built-in dual-head. And yeah, the performance is great... but the dual-head support is utter crap. The DVD playback can't full-screen properly, apps get confused about which monitor (or both) they should maximize to, the mouse pointer behaves erratically near the monitor break, and you can't set the two monitors to different resolutions. Oh, and the software gets confused about how to use both monitors across reboots; sometimes forgetting the bit depth, always forgetting that a 2560x1024 display should span two monitors, not be constrained to one. ATI has yet to patch any of these problems.
The LCDs themselves... well I use flat CRTs at work, and I prefer the LCDs, even for graphics work. The sharpness of LCDs is extraordinary; it's especially unforgiving of JPEGs, as I can see a lot more distortion on these than I can on a CRT. It did take me a while to get the color balance decent, though--and even longer to get both monitors to match each other. But I can fit two of these on my desk without having to use industrial-strength support. The two together weigh less than a single 21" monitor.
The Panasonic unit looks interesting but it's probably going to be a very niche item. Most people can't justify two monitors in their minds, even though once you use one seriously for work, you end up liking it quite a bit. (You can pry my second monitor from my cold, dead fingers.)
The biggest reason I see for not doing this is cargo capacity. With a Segway, my cargo capacity is limited to what I can comfortably carry; a backpack or a briefcase.
The ULTra, on the other hand, can carry a dozen grocery bags quite easily, I just need to load and unload them. So I can walk out of the supermarket, load up the ULTra, it drives me home, I unload at my curb or doorstep. Easy.
Yes I noticed on a recent trip to New York that the subway cards are mag-stripe. Of course I bought mine with cash (the US doesn't have coins quite as obnoxious as those £1 monsters) so it was far less traceable than if I'd used a credit card.
The difference is in how quickly you obsolete old technology, and how necessary it is to upgrade that technology.
Interfaces between audio components have been stable for a long, long time. Connecting old audio equipment to new audio equipment usually isn't a problem.
Try that with computers, and it's not always so simple. Software will get obsoleted much faster than hardware, and it's a lot more convenient for the content publishers to refuse to update the software or change the format, rendering your previously-purchased content unusable on new systems. So you COULD refuse to update your system... but then you end up fighting the MS upgrade-or-die machine, and you run the risk of having to keep a buggy, insecure system running instead of switching to a new, buggy, insecure (but not necessarily as widely-exploited) system.
Ah well. Just don't buy the CDs. They won't quit unless it hurts their bottom line too much.
So... you swipe a card, punch in a destination, and suddenly they have a very neat record of where you've gone using public transportation. Nice.
Aside from that, it's an interesting idea; you don't necessarily have the hassle of figuring out bus schedules. And you don't have to deal with a cab driver who barely speaks English and is quite willing to drive you around New York for two hours because you don't know that your destination is really only a fifteen-minute drive from the airport. So in that sense, it's nice.
I especially appreciated the photo that shows a bike will easily fit into these vehicles... good call! Heck, that means fitting a Segway in there would be pretty easy...
Not only that, but you would be tying sites to specific IP addresses, preventing them from being moved between service providers because the service providers generally keep the IPs. If I don't like my current host, having a domain name lets me choose another host and change where the name points, without invalidating all the addresses used to refer to my site.
This would apply not just to search engine links, but also links from other web sites. To eliminate DNS and just use search engine URLs would mean routing EVERY link on the web through a search engine, in order to centralize the index and allow changes to where sites are to affect all links at once. And if you consider multiple search engines (to provide the competition that is good and keeps one search engine from being an unfair gatekeeper) then the advantages of a DNS-like system become clearer.
Yes DNS (well, BIND) has security issues. But we need something like DNS to keep the net flexible.
At the same time that book was being burned, there were protesters protesting that protest, chanting "stop burning books". The same group burning Harry Potter were also burning works by Shakespeare and AC-DC music.
Had this been government burning books, that would have been one thing, but it was a private group, and another private group protested their act. I do not agree with the book-burning group (if they think Harry Potter is Satanic they need to get out more) but I'll defend their right to burn as many books as they've paid for. The publisher doesn't care, they got their money.
The difference comes when the government gets involved. If a group says some material is bad, it's certainly within their rights to persuade other members of the public to agree with them; that's discussion. For one group to coerce the government into legislating their viewpoint on others is the problem, and that appears to be what is happening in Australia.
But hey, politicians are pretty much the same the world over: they'd rather LOOK like they're doing something than actually DO something useful.