test launch of an AAMRAM air-to-ground missile from a Hummer
That's your first mistake. A Hummer is a ground vehicle, whereas an air-to-ground missle is usually launched from the air. No wonder the Hummer was destroyed so quickly.
My favorite demo-gone-bad comes courtesy of Computer Stupidities' Nice Try page:
My old boss spent some time writing statistical analysis packages for
the Archimedes. One of them got fairly popular for Archie software, and he
started a small business selling it. For those who don't know, Archie
software usually came as source code and was executed through an interpreter.
One day at a scientific meeting, he noticed that another company was showing
Archie software with remarkably similar functionality to his own, so he
wandered over. The longer he watched, the more familiar it looked. Eventually,
when the sales representative had gathered a good crowd, he asked in a loud
voice:
My Boss: "Are you using my copyrighted code for this?"
Sales Representative: "Of course not."
My Boss: "So what happens if you press [key combination]?"
Sales Representative: "Nothing."
My Boss: "Do it for me."
Sales Representative: "Ok sir, but I can assure you it does--"
The screen displayed my boss' copyright notice. All they'd done
was remove the front end.
It widely accepted as the biggest laugh of the show.
Well, if by "wireless" you mean 802.11b, the prices keep dropping on 802.11b cards. At $90 for a low-end wireless card, plus $50 for the PC Card sleeve, it's not that pricey to connect an iPaq. I've seen a few with such a configuration. The whole mass is pretty bulky, and I imagine battery life is atrocious, but it works.
As for CDPD (Ricochet, GoAmerica, et al) the prices are still pretty high. Give it a few years: the current state of CDPD is similar to the way cellular service was just a few years ago.
I've owned a Palm organizer for about three years now (first a PalmPilot Personal, then a Professional, and now a III) and I find it incredibly convenient. However, the screen resolution has remained stagnant at 160x160. Other organizers top out at 320x320 or 320x240; while that seems to be the limit of the density we can pack into such a small surface area, I sometimes need more.
My ideal PDA, which won't roll off the assembly line for a long time, would have an expandable display. I could leave it at the current Palm-like size to hold in one hand, fold it out to show wider information (for spreadsheets, week-at-a-glance views, etc) and fold it out again to read information newspaper-style. Given the recent advancements in paper-like display technology, I think that this could be done within the next 5-10 years. The shirt-pocket-sized form factor is still very appealing, even though most people don't carry organizers in their shirt pocket anyway. Still, it would be nice to have the option of display sizes.
Oh, and of course it would have WLAN support. There's no use in a big display if there's no live information for it.:)
I saw Prof. Kraut speak earlier this year at the Earthware symposium, where he spoke about this follow-up. He noted that in a survey of Pittsburghers, there was a correlation between heavy Internet use and wanting to get out of Pittsburgh. That got a nice laugh and applause from the crowd.:)
If the original's been slashdotted...
on
Adobe Backs Down
·
· Score: 2
Yahoo! has a mirror of the press release, from Business Wire. Let's see you try to slashdot THAT.
I've already discovered Vivisimo, which is a nice step up from the meta-search-engine garbage of yesteryear. (Disclaimer: I go to CMU, which developed much of the technology behind Vivisimo, but I personally didn't work with it.) Not only does it sort links by relevance, it also categorizes results. I found it very useful when doing a research project last year -- searching for "Japanese Women" on even the most finely tuned search engine turns up pages of results that can be diplomatically called "non-academic."
I doubt it's a replacement for Google, but I recommend it the next time you're searching for a topic that might have several different meanings.
JavaScript is not Java (a better name is ECMAScript), so Windows XP will still be able to handle popups out of the box. However, the lack of a VM will probably result in a great many more Flash ads, as Flash support is still included or readily available just about everywhere. With IE 6.0, there might even be one or two ActiveX ads, but the relatively low userbase will keep advertisers away until at least a few years down the road.
Seeing that Flash is being used to make some TV ads nowadays, it would not at all surprise me to see full-screen interstitial Flash advertisements. By building the link to the article into the Flash movie, you also prevent the user from skipping the movie entirely. (Watch a 30 second commercial, then click "TELL ME MORE ABOUT THIS AMAZING PRODUCT" or "show me article" to continue.)
I blame the media. Traditional media outlets often described Napster as a web-based service: "Users just have to go to Napster.com, enter the artist and song they're looking for, and then they can download all the songs they want." The best part is when they show viewers the Napster web site -- as viewed in AOL.
Not only that, but Apple stole the damn slogan "The Center of Your Digital World" from Intel. My digital world only has one center, thank you very much.
I remember that with some OS/2 Warp 3 fixpack (and Warp 4) there was a fix for the single input queue. By putting in the line "SINGLE_INPUT_QUEUE = FALSE" into your OS2.INI file, you could disable that feature and improve performance. It wasn't quite perfect, but it helped.
Now if only there were an option "CRASH = NEVER", I would have been set.
No... OS/2 merely started a VM containing DOS and Windows. This was called "Win-OS/2." The obvious advantage was that if the VM were to crash, OS/2 Crash Protection would make sure that the entire system wouldn't be brought down with it.
However, due to licensing issues, versions of OS/2 with Win-OS/2 support cost about $90 more than versions without. The reason? You actually had to buy a Windows license as well as an OS/2 licenseto use it.
Microsoft doesn't "Assist Ximian Produce Mono," they will "Help Ximian Produce Mono." If you're going to type anything at all, please be sure that it is approved by me first.
I still can't find an AMD Athlon T-bird 750mhz with a gig of RAM and all the fixings without building it myself for under 500. Pricewatch will be around for a long time hopefully, and as long as it is, I'll be ordering my stuff on there. Sepearately.
I've yet to see company offer a great price for prebuilding a system to my specifications.
That's all well and good, but there's a reason why Dell/Compaq/IBM/Gateway charge more money than Schmoikel's Back-of-the-Truck Extravaganza (MUST MENTION PRICEWATCH) Inc. They actually have to support the machines that they sell. They have to hire people to take calls from users to help with the system, and that includes issues ranging from "Where's the any key?" to hard drive crashes. Contracting 24-hour call centers is expensive stuff. Additionally, they have to hire people to design the web site, sell the products, advertise, etc.
I like building systems: I've built a few myself, and I've had my share of pitfalls. However, there have been times when I figured that it might have been better to buy a stock machine from a national beige-box maker, beef up the RAM, and have a support network ready to take it back when I break it.
And on the subject of your paranoid rant about "The Man won't let us build PC's anymore", lighten up. That's like saying that it's impossible to buy a PC without Genuine Microsoft Windows (see http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/howtotell/) today. Stop creating FUD. The government doesn't give two shits about small-time computer vendors. When Schmoikel's Back-of-the-Truck Extravaganza (MUST MENTION PRICEWATCH) Inc. starts to take market share away from Dell, then you can come back and rant some more.
Adobe has a trademark on "Illustrator" as it applies to computer software. You are not a computer program, so you cannot be sued if you called yourself an "Illustrator."
Open up your white pages and look at all the businesses that have names starting with "ABC" (ABC Plumbing, ABC Roof Repair, ABC Beverage Supply) and notice that they're all perfectly legal names. The American Broadcasting Company, American Bowling Congress, or Australian Broadcasting Company can't sue them for trademark dilution despite the fact that all three hold the trademark "ABC" in their respective jurisdictions and functions.
I am an American, or a "citizen of the United States of America." Please do not use the term "USian" (or the new, misspelled term "USAian") to describe citizens of the United States of America.
The United States of America is one of the most influential nations in the world, and as such it may be abbreviated to just "America." Canadians often feel that they are short-changed by the global press, whereas it is the truth that Canada is not a very influential country. Canadians are very good at hockey, and their woefully underpopulated country makes the UN's list of top places to live (in a vain attempt by the UN to get people to live there), but the true opportunities are in the United States of America.
At my university, I used to have the distributed.net client installed in my home directory. On login, I would start the client, and then I would shut it down on logout. On cluster machines where I was the only one using the machine at the time, this worked out just fine. However, I did not discriminate in my script; it also ran when I logged into one of the public Linux servers via SSH.
One night, I was taking care of some e-mail using Pine at around 12:30 AM. I closed my e-mail client, dinked around for a little in the shell, logged out, and went to bed at around 12:40 AM. (It was an early night for me.) The following morning, I checked my e-mail. I had in my inbox, eleven times, the following note. I paraphrase, but the tone is the same.
WHY ARE YOU TAKING UP 100% OF THE CPU????? THESE MACHINES ARE A SHARED RESOURCE! SHUT DOWN YOUR DISTRIBUTED.NET CLIENT *NOW!!!!!!!!!!*
The messages had all been sent right before I logged out and took my dnetc instances with me. However, I quickly put an end to that script right then and there. My roommate and I got a pretty good laugh out of it, too.:)
Technically, you could give Leonardo Da Vinci credit for the helicopter, as it appears in one of those books of his that Bill Gates bought. However, Sikorsky built his first helicopter around 1909 as well, according to this site. Granted, it's on the Sikorsky domain, but it still lends some credibility to the answer.
FWIW, I don't think the question was just "Who invented the helicopter?", but rather something like "Who started mass-producing the modern helicopter in year xxxx?" I wonder if there's a Millionaire question archive somewhere...
Newspapers aren't as guilty as this, but magazines have been doing this for a very long time. The "blow-in" subscription cards fall out of the magazine as you open it. Many advertisers pay extra to use super-thick paper or card stock, making the ad more likely to stick up and harder to avoid. Of course, I'll stop reading magazines the day I have to peel an ad sticker away from an article I want to read.
Well, I imagine that it's from selling software. The "download version" of Kapital is $24.95, while the final version will cost $39.95 to download. Those prices are pretty comparable to what Intuit charges for Quicken (basic).
However, one has to wonder whether he'll take Intuit's lead and charge folks $20 for an annual incremental upgrade.
Bingo. The $1 million question was "On 'The Brady Bunch,' what was Carol Brady's maiden name?" That threw even the most avid TV trivia buffs, and was pretty hard even for a jackpot-level question. Past questions have included "Who invented the helicopter?" and "Which celebrity appeared on Laugh-In?" There was even a question about computer history: "Which insect, found in a 1945 Mark II computer, is considered the first computer 'bug'?"
Given the length of time people spend thinking about these questions on the show, it's very easy to get on Google and look up the answers. Sometimes, a phone-a-friend lifeline will try to Google the question, resulting in awkward silence as he waits for his results to download.
How dare you run a story about sci-fi legends without mentioning William "Iron Chef" Shatner. I don't think you understand the severity of what I'm talking about here.
Think of it this way: if someone made a mass mailing detailing human rights abuses in China, would you consider it spam?
I occasionally receive mass mailings about human rights abuses and stop-this and stop-that and so forth. When I was the news director for my campus radio station briefly, my inbox was *FLOODED* with anti-Bush, anti-Gore, anti-Nader, anti-everyone rants that people were trying to pass off as news. Even though I'm no longer on those lists, I still receive the occasional human-rights message from some country somewhere. While not commercial, it is still unsolicited, and quite frankly (speaking as an Ugly American) is of little interest to me.
I define "Spam" as any mass-mailing that is sent to me without my explicit permission. I only wish everything were "opt-in," rather than the click-here-to-remove-yourself this-is-not-spam nyah-nyah "opt out" bullshit we have now.
Slashdot Mirror
test launch of an AAMRAM air-to-ground missile from a Hummer
That's your first mistake. A Hummer is a ground vehicle, whereas an air-to-ground missle is usually launched from the air. No wonder the Hummer was destroyed so quickly.
My favorite demo-gone-bad comes courtesy of Computer Stupidities' Nice Try page:
My old boss spent some time writing statistical analysis packages for the Archimedes. One of them got fairly popular for Archie software, and he started a small business selling it. For those who don't know, Archie software usually came as source code and was executed through an interpreter.One day at a scientific meeting, he noticed that another company was showing Archie software with remarkably similar functionality to his own, so he wandered over. The longer he watched, the more familiar it looked. Eventually, when the sales representative had gathered a good crowd, he asked in a loud voice:
The screen displayed my boss' copyright notice. All they'd done was remove the front end.
It widely accepted as the biggest laugh of the show.
In Windows 98, run "msconfig" and go to the "Startup" tab. Uncheck anything you don't recognize.
Well, if by "wireless" you mean 802.11b, the prices keep dropping on 802.11b cards. At $90 for a low-end wireless card, plus $50 for the PC Card sleeve, it's not that pricey to connect an iPaq. I've seen a few with such a configuration. The whole mass is pretty bulky, and I imagine battery life is atrocious, but it works.
As for CDPD (Ricochet, GoAmerica, et al) the prices are still pretty high. Give it a few years: the current state of CDPD is similar to the way cellular service was just a few years ago.
I've owned a Palm organizer for about three years now (first a PalmPilot Personal, then a Professional, and now a III) and I find it incredibly convenient. However, the screen resolution has remained stagnant at 160x160. Other organizers top out at 320x320 or 320x240; while that seems to be the limit of the density we can pack into such a small surface area, I sometimes need more.
:)
My ideal PDA, which won't roll off the assembly line for a long time, would have an expandable display. I could leave it at the current Palm-like size to hold in one hand, fold it out to show wider information (for spreadsheets, week-at-a-glance views, etc) and fold it out again to read information newspaper-style. Given the recent advancements in paper-like display technology, I think that this could be done within the next 5-10 years. The shirt-pocket-sized form factor is still very appealing, even though most people don't carry organizers in their shirt pocket anyway. Still, it would be nice to have the option of display sizes.
Oh, and of course it would have WLAN support. There's no use in a big display if there's no live information for it.
I saw Prof. Kraut speak earlier this year at the Earthware symposium, where he spoke about this follow-up. He noted that in a survey of Pittsburghers, there was a correlation between heavy Internet use and wanting to get out of Pittsburgh. That got a nice laugh and applause from the crowd. :)
Yahoo! has a mirror of the press release, from Business Wire. Let's see you try to slashdot THAT.
I've already discovered Vivisimo, which is a nice step up from the meta-search-engine garbage of yesteryear. (Disclaimer: I go to CMU, which developed much of the technology behind Vivisimo, but I personally didn't work with it.) Not only does it sort links by relevance, it also categorizes results. I found it very useful when doing a research project last year -- searching for "Japanese Women" on even the most finely tuned search engine turns up pages of results that can be diplomatically called "non-academic."
I doubt it's a replacement for Google, but I recommend it the next time you're searching for a topic that might have several different meanings.
JavaScript is not Java (a better name is ECMAScript), so Windows XP will still be able to handle popups out of the box. However, the lack of a VM will probably result in a great many more Flash ads, as Flash support is still included or readily available just about everywhere. With IE 6.0, there might even be one or two ActiveX ads, but the relatively low userbase will keep advertisers away until at least a few years down the road.
Seeing that Flash is being used to make some TV ads nowadays, it would not at all surprise me to see full-screen interstitial Flash advertisements. By building the link to the article into the Flash movie, you also prevent the user from skipping the movie entirely. (Watch a 30 second commercial, then click "TELL ME MORE ABOUT THIS AMAZING PRODUCT" or "show me article" to continue.)
I blame the media. Traditional media outlets often described Napster as a web-based service: "Users just have to go to Napster.com, enter the artist and song they're looking for, and then they can download all the songs they want." The best part is when they show viewers the Napster web site -- as viewed in AOL.
Not only that, but Apple stole the damn slogan "The Center of Your Digital World" from Intel. My digital world only has one center, thank you very much.
I remember that with some OS/2 Warp 3 fixpack (and Warp 4) there was a fix for the single input queue. By putting in the line "SINGLE_INPUT_QUEUE = FALSE" into your OS2.INI file, you could disable that feature and improve performance. It wasn't quite perfect, but it helped.
Now if only there were an option "CRASH = NEVER", I would have been set.
No... OS/2 merely started a VM containing DOS and Windows. This was called "Win-OS/2." The obvious advantage was that if the VM were to crash, OS/2 Crash Protection would make sure that the entire system wouldn't be brought down with it.
However, due to licensing issues, versions of OS/2 with Win-OS/2 support cost about $90 more than versions without. The reason? You actually had to buy a Windows license as well as an OS/2 licenseto use it.
Microsoft doesn't "Assist Ximian Produce Mono," they will "Help Ximian Produce Mono." If you're going to type anything at all, please be sure that it is approved by me first.
I still can't find an AMD Athlon T-bird 750mhz with a gig of RAM and all the fixings without building it myself for under 500. Pricewatch will be around for a long time hopefully, and as long as it is, I'll be ordering my stuff on there. Sepearately.
I've yet to see company offer a great price for prebuilding a system to my specifications.
That's all well and good, but there's a reason why Dell/Compaq/IBM/Gateway charge more money than Schmoikel's Back-of-the-Truck Extravaganza (MUST MENTION PRICEWATCH) Inc. They actually have to support the machines that they sell. They have to hire people to take calls from users to help with the system, and that includes issues ranging from "Where's the any key?" to hard drive crashes. Contracting 24-hour call centers is expensive stuff. Additionally, they have to hire people to design the web site, sell the products, advertise, etc.
I like building systems: I've built a few myself, and I've had my share of pitfalls. However, there have been times when I figured that it might have been better to buy a stock machine from a national beige-box maker, beef up the RAM, and have a support network ready to take it back when I break it.
And on the subject of your paranoid rant about "The Man won't let us build PC's anymore", lighten up. That's like saying that it's impossible to buy a PC without Genuine Microsoft Windows (see http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/howtotell/) today. Stop creating FUD. The government doesn't give two shits about small-time computer vendors. When Schmoikel's Back-of-the-Truck Extravaganza (MUST MENTION PRICEWATCH) Inc. starts to take market share away from Dell, then you can come back and rant some more.
So? People pay $7 million for pitchers who can't pitch anywhere near that consistently. Just look at the Mets. :)
Adobe has a trademark on "Illustrator" as it applies to computer software. You are not a computer program, so you cannot be sued if you called yourself an "Illustrator."
Open up your white pages and look at all the businesses that have names starting with "ABC" (ABC Plumbing, ABC Roof Repair, ABC Beverage Supply) and notice that they're all perfectly legal names. The American Broadcasting Company, American Bowling Congress, or Australian Broadcasting Company can't sue them for trademark dilution despite the fact that all three hold the trademark "ABC" in their respective jurisdictions and functions.
I am an American, or a "citizen of the United States of America." Please do not use the term "USian" (or the new, misspelled term "USAian") to describe citizens of the United States of America.
The United States of America is one of the most influential nations in the world, and as such it may be abbreviated to just "America." Canadians often feel that they are short-changed by the global press, whereas it is the truth that Canada is not a very influential country. Canadians are very good at hockey, and their woefully underpopulated country makes the UN's list of top places to live (in a vain attempt by the UN to get people to live there), but the true opportunities are in the United States of America.
Thank you, and have an excellent week.
One night, I was taking care of some e-mail using Pine at around 12:30 AM. I closed my e-mail client, dinked around for a little in the shell, logged out, and went to bed at around 12:40 AM. (It was an early night for me.) The following morning, I checked my e-mail. I had in my inbox, eleven times, the following note. I paraphrase, but the tone is the same.
The messages had all been sent right before I logged out and took my dnetc instances with me. However, I quickly put an end to that script right then and there. My roommate and I got a pretty good laugh out of it, too.
Technically, you could give Leonardo Da Vinci credit for the helicopter, as it appears in one of those books of his that Bill Gates bought. However, Sikorsky built his first helicopter around 1909 as well, according to this site. Granted, it's on the Sikorsky domain, but it still lends some credibility to the answer.
FWIW, I don't think the question was just "Who invented the helicopter?", but rather something like "Who started mass-producing the modern helicopter in year xxxx?" I wonder if there's a Millionaire question archive somewhere...
Newspapers aren't as guilty as this, but magazines have been doing this for a very long time. The "blow-in" subscription cards fall out of the magazine as you open it. Many advertisers pay extra to use super-thick paper or card stock, making the ad more likely to stick up and harder to avoid. Of course, I'll stop reading magazines the day I have to peel an ad sticker away from an article I want to read.
Well, I imagine that it's from selling software. The "download version" of Kapital is $24.95, while the final version will cost $39.95 to download. Those prices are pretty comparable to what Intuit charges for Quicken (basic).
However, one has to wonder whether he'll take Intuit's lead and charge folks $20 for an annual incremental upgrade.
Bingo. The $1 million question was "On 'The Brady Bunch,' what was Carol Brady's maiden name?" That threw even the most avid TV trivia buffs, and was pretty hard even for a jackpot-level question. Past questions have included "Who invented the helicopter?" and "Which celebrity appeared on Laugh-In?" There was even a question about computer history: "Which insect, found in a 1945 Mark II computer, is considered the first computer 'bug'?"
Given the length of time people spend thinking about these questions on the show, it's very easy to get on Google and look up the answers. Sometimes, a phone-a-friend lifeline will try to Google the question, resulting in awkward silence as he waits for his results to download.
How dare you run a story about sci-fi legends without mentioning William "Iron Chef" Shatner. I don't think you understand the severity of what I'm talking about here.
Think about it:
Captain Kirk,
TAKING A BITE OUT OF A PEPPER!
You may be seated now.
Think of it this way: if someone made a mass mailing detailing human rights abuses in China, would you consider it spam?
I occasionally receive mass mailings about human rights abuses and stop-this and stop-that and so forth. When I was the news director for my campus radio station briefly, my inbox was *FLOODED* with anti-Bush, anti-Gore, anti-Nader, anti-everyone rants that people were trying to pass off as news. Even though I'm no longer on those lists, I still receive the occasional human-rights message from some country somewhere. While not commercial, it is still unsolicited, and quite frankly (speaking as an Ugly American) is of little interest to me.
I define "Spam" as any mass-mailing that is sent to me without my explicit permission. I only wish everything were "opt-in," rather than the click-here-to-remove-yourself this-is-not-spam nyah-nyah "opt out" bullshit we have now.