I appreciate that tyleremerson took the time to write a review, but honestly, after reading it, I feel I know exactly as much about the movie as before, just be seeing the preview in the movies. It was nice to get some trivia about the actors, but I barely saw any information in the write-up that I would expect from a review.
There are great reviews (and user comments on) IMDB - granted, they're not always spoiler-free, but extemely informative.
I backpacked in Asia a few years ago, and it was great to have Internet access at reasonable prices virtually everywhere. But I had an interesting experience in Thailand (not covered by the comparison chart). Rates were around $1/hour. But then I visited the island Samui, where rates were $5. It was clear that (1) the main market were tourists, and (2) due to the small size of the island, a price cartel had formed.
Just looking at the numbers, the article seems to capture non-tourist prices. But it's important not to forget that prices are often not based on real cost, but on the customer's willingness to pay.
I am constantly trying to improve the security of my home network, and the available tools are pretty powerful. My biggest problem has been to find powerful reporting tools. I use iptables as a firewall, tripwire for intrusion detection, etc. But it's not always easy to see what's going on in the system. Tripwire produces decent reports; but there is no easy way (afaik) to get a list of intrusion attempts, network traffic, port scans, etc. Sure, the information is in the logs - but the log information is hard to parse and often not as complete as it should be.
Joel had an interesting article recently entitled How Microsoft Lost the API War. He is arguing that a lot of Microsoft's past success had to do with there philosophy of never, ever breaking backward compatibility. However, recently they started to break backward compatibility (especially for developers), arguing that the new frameworks would be better, faster, more elegant, etc. Granted, most of the issues mentioned in the article relate to security (yes, I read it), but this may still be indicative for a new direction Microsoft is taking.
Alternative Email upload: Bounce with Mutt
on
Gmail in the News
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· Score: 1
There is another way of quickly uploading all your messages to Gmail (or any other service for that matter): The Mutt Email Client. Mutt has a feature that I haven't seen in any other email client, and that I wouldn't want to miss ever: Bouncing. That's similar to forwarding, except that the message stays completely unmodified - upon receiving, all the difference you see is an additional "Received:" entry in the mail header. Very cool, and extremely useful!
I am just guessing here, but maybe it's simply what will be "average" in 2008, rather than a "minimum requirement" for Longhorn. Even if Moore's law doesn't hold up completely, the hardware described could easily be standard four years from now.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if MS makes every effort to put that hardware somehow to use.
My biggest worry with filters is to accidentally filter important legitimate email. For a while, I looked through my Spam folder every so often to check for those. But with the current volume in Spam, that became unmanagable, too.
Eventually, I switched to Spambouncer, which can send auto-replies (I assume other filters can do that, too). SpamBouncer classifies mail in three buckets: Legitimate, Bulk (likely but not necessarily bad) and Spam. Now I delete both, Bulk and Spam, but every Bulk message triggers a response, informing the sender that the message didn't get read (and instructions on how to bypass the filter).
I know, this is against the old rule "never respond to spam, Spamers will pick it up and use it for spamming". But at this point, it feels it's too late anyway (and I use a special email address for this). At least I have the peace of mind that a legitimate recipient knows I didn't see the mail.
SpamBouncer had the capability to simulate a bounce (in the hope to fool Spammers into thinking that the email got disabled). But that feature got removed.
The difference is that the phone will create an aggregate image from the multiple frames of the movie with a resulting higher resolution. Also, the camera will NOT use OCR. That's different from what you describe (using one frame at regular resolution, and running OCR software on it).
... up to 900 million of birds a year - likely many more than the number stated in the article! Yes, it's unfortunate that birds get killed - but put it into perspective! I wonder how many birds get killed due to coal mining (if it happens on the ground, huge natural areas are destroyed) and coal burning (pollution). To be fair, the article acknowledges these facts (yup, I read it).
The article also states that a number of lessons about bird-killing were learned and will be applied to new wind farms that's great! But the damage done so far seems so neglectible, that it would be ridiculous to shut down the whole windfarm!
Engineering is the art of picking the right trade-off, and small, cutting edge devices like the IPod have a lot of shortcommings - the art is to balance them, and I think Apple did a great job.
You want a small form factor? Guess what, battery life will suffer. You want a lot of capacity? Well, you need a hard drive. And so on.
And the casual way the article is written doesn't give it much credibility either:
Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that
Excuse me? So, your opinion weights more than expert assessments? At least quote some statistics, or some personal experience!
I don't mean to say this as flamebait, but this article didn't deserve to be posted in the first place.
From the article: "Ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol), and so it handles it the way it should."
I don't know what the numbers are, but this must be wrong! How about email (SMTP, POP, IMAP, etc.)? Telnet? FTP? SSH? just to name a few, but especially email traffic must be huge.
... because, honestly, there aren't that many goood cartoons out there, maybe a handful, and Illiad is still in the top 10 tech comics, IMHO.
But this is the problem with the review: The author does NOT put the strip into perspective, i.e. compares it with what's out there.
I read the strip online, and yes, the quality degraded somewhat over the past few years, but hey, it's free.
Okay, the book is not free, but then look at the 150th Dilbert or Garfield book. Illiard is still great bathroom reading, reason enough to get the book. Nobody expects Shakespeare.
First thing I wanted to know is the resolution - and I couldn't find it anywhere on the Handspring site. I finally found it in a third-party review: 160x160.
This is kind of disappointing. Honestly, I don't think this device is very innovative - Samsung had this design years ago (i300, followed by i330). In addition, I think that the flip design (Old Treo, Kyocera 7135, Samsung i500) is more appropriate for PDA/Phone devices, as it protects the necessarily bigger screen better.
School projects do not have to be maintainable, scalable, reliable, documented, etc. Real world project have requirements these kids have no idea about (yet).
When the time comes to design a little corporate web site, MySQL and PHP may just be fine. But if the problem involves millions of hits, and back-end connectivity to a legacy system through CORBA, another tool may be appropriate. I find it quite ignorant that Greenspan condems Java without even looking at the project requirements.
It won the 2002 Jolt Award
on
Effective Java
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· Score: 2, Informative
I bought the book last June because it got the 2002 Jolt award for Books. I rarely got disappointed by Jolt award winners (books and otherwise), and this book is no exception - it rocks!
If you're interested, you can get a free
subscription to the print edition of Software Development Magazine. It's one of the few high quality freebees (and no, I am not affiliated with them). Also, as Scott Myers got mentioned here a few times: He writes for SD Magazine once in a while.
Did you read the article? The first MIT research project described (Mark II Holographics Video) in fact renders a real hologram: "At its core are the basic steps of creating a standard hologram: A laser beam is split in two. [...]
Instead of light and mirrors, Benton and his team use specially developed computer algorithms. The algorithms calculate the kinds of microscopic lines necessary for a certain hologram, convert them into sound waves, and then send the waves into a stack of tellurium-oxide crystals that have the unique property of distorting temporarily when sound waves pass through them. That distortion forms the microscopic lines of the diffraction pattern that make up a hologram. A laser beam passing through that pattern conveys the image from the crystals to a view screen". The article has a diagram depicting this.
In the current Economic Journal, Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victor Lavy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem look at a scheme which put computers into many of Israel's primary and middle schools in the mid-1990s. Dr Angrist and Dr Lavy compare the test scores for maths and Hebrew achieved by children in the fourth and eighth grades (ie, aged about nine and 13) in schools with and without computers. They also asked the classes' teachers how they used various teaching materials, such as Xeroxed worksheets and, of course, computer programs.
In a nutshell, the study concludes that computers are of little help in the classroom, and sometimes even harmful (as students get easier distracted, etc.). It's interesting, however, that both, teachers and students, use computers heavily for homework and class preparation, where they are quite effective.
Software Development Magazine covers the Simputer in their "Deadline" section (unfortunately, the section is only in the print edition, not online). From the article: "For $2 and a nominal rental fee, each villager can buy a smart card that stores all his or her information, and allows Internet and e-mail access." Sounds quite feasible to me.
There was an article - I believe in MIT's Technology Review - explaining this (I looked for it, but couldn't find it online).
In a nutshell, you can't run a cell phone directly from an unwinding spring (for various technical reasons) - you will have to go through the battery which acts as a buffer. While the spring gives you a (more or less) constant torque, this is an advantage if you need a constant current (e.g. to power a radio), but not to charge a battery (cell phone). In addition, springs (and especially clockworks) are not that efficient - at least if you want them cheap. Plus, they take up space.
In fact, I believe the article said that the key for this device was to get rid of spring and clockwork in the forst place, for space reasons. It was key to find a mechanism that would allow the charging of the battery, no matter at what pace the user would wind.
If you want to see the form factor of the result, go to a modern office building and ride the elevator. They're installing more and more screens in elevators. The top 75% of the screen shows content (news blurbs, quotes, weather, etc.), while the bottom 25% features an add.
The annoying thing: The content is very calm, and the ad is very animated and busy, so it's hard not to look into the ad. At least the whole thing is quiete (at least until now).
I've been contemplating to visit at night and to place duck tape over the ad section - but considering how job security looks like, maybe not the best idea;-)
Interestingly, following your idea, The United Arab Emirates (UAB) try very hard to attract foreigners to work there in high tech.
There is an article about this in the Economist called "Time travelers" (3/23/02). Unfortunately, you have to pay if you want to read the article online.
You should be "save" as long as you don't conduct any business in the US. But as soon as you do (US based add banners, credit card processing, etc.), you are in trouble.
Keep in mind that they would never go after a personal homepage with 100 hits a week...
Slashdot Mirror
There are great reviews (and user comments on) IMDB - granted, they're not always spoiler-free, but extemely informative.
Just looking at the numbers, the article seems to capture non-tourist prices. But it's important not to forget that prices are often not based on real cost, but on the customer's willingness to pay.
I am constantly trying to improve the security of my home network, and the available tools are pretty powerful. My biggest problem has been to find powerful reporting tools. I use iptables as a firewall, tripwire for intrusion detection, etc. But it's not always easy to see what's going on in the system. Tripwire produces decent reports; but there is no easy way (afaik) to get a list of intrusion attempts, network traffic, port scans, etc. Sure, the information is in the logs - but the log information is hard to parse and often not as complete as it should be.
Joel had an interesting article recently entitled How Microsoft Lost the API War. He is arguing that a lot of Microsoft's past success had to do with there philosophy of never, ever breaking backward compatibility. However, recently they started to break backward compatibility (especially for developers), arguing that the new frameworks would be better, faster, more elegant, etc. Granted, most of the issues mentioned in the article relate to security (yes, I read it), but this may still be indicative for a new direction Microsoft is taking.
There is another way of quickly uploading all your messages to Gmail (or any other service for that matter): The Mutt Email Client. Mutt has a feature that I haven't seen in any other email client, and that I wouldn't want to miss ever: Bouncing. That's similar to forwarding, except that the message stays completely unmodified - upon receiving, all the difference you see is an additional "Received:" entry in the mail header. Very cool, and extremely useful!
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if MS makes every effort to put that hardware somehow to use.
Eventually, I switched to Spambouncer, which can send auto-replies (I assume other filters can do that, too). SpamBouncer classifies mail in three buckets: Legitimate, Bulk (likely but not necessarily bad) and Spam. Now I delete both, Bulk and Spam, but every Bulk message triggers a response, informing the sender that the message didn't get read (and instructions on how to bypass the filter).
I know, this is against the old rule "never respond to spam, Spamers will pick it up and use it for spamming". But at this point, it feels it's too late anyway (and I use a special email address for this). At least I have the peace of mind that a legitimate recipient knows I didn't see the mail.
SpamBouncer had the capability to simulate a bounce (in the hope to fool Spammers into thinking that the email got disabled). But that feature got removed.
The difference is that the phone will create an aggregate image from the multiple frames of the movie with a resulting higher resolution. Also, the camera will NOT use OCR. That's different from what you describe (using one frame at regular resolution, and running OCR software on it).
The article also states that a number of lessons about bird-killing were learned and will be applied to new wind farms that's great! But the damage done so far seems so neglectible, that it would be ridiculous to shut down the whole windfarm!
You want a small form factor? Guess what, battery life will suffer. You want a lot of capacity? Well, you need a hard drive. And so on.
And the casual way the article is written doesn't give it much credibility either:
Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that
Excuse me? So, your opinion weights more than expert assessments? At least quote some statistics, or some personal experience!
I don't mean to say this as flamebait, but this article didn't deserve to be posted in the first place.
I don't know what the numbers are, but this must be wrong! How about email (SMTP, POP, IMAP, etc.)? Telnet? FTP? SSH? just to name a few, but especially email traffic must be huge.
... because, honestly, there aren't that many goood cartoons out there, maybe a handful, and Illiad is still in the top 10 tech comics, IMHO.
But this is the problem with the review: The author does NOT put the strip into perspective, i.e. compares it with what's out there.
I read the strip online, and yes, the quality degraded somewhat over the past few years, but hey, it's free.
Okay, the book is not free, but then look at the 150th Dilbert or Garfield book. Illiard is still great bathroom reading, reason enough to get the book. Nobody expects Shakespeare.
First thing I wanted to know is the resolution - and I couldn't find it anywhere on the Handspring site. I finally found it in a third-party review: 160x160.
This is kind of disappointing. Honestly, I don't think this device is very innovative - Samsung had this design years ago (i300, followed by i330). In addition, I think that the flip design (Old Treo, Kyocera 7135, Samsung i500) is more appropriate for PDA/Phone devices, as it protects the necessarily bigger screen better.
School projects do not have to be maintainable, scalable, reliable, documented, etc. Real world project have requirements these kids have no idea about (yet).
When the time comes to design a little corporate web site, MySQL and PHP may just be fine. But if the problem involves millions of hits, and back-end connectivity to a legacy system through CORBA, another tool may be appropriate. I find it quite ignorant that Greenspan condems Java without even looking at the project requirements.
If you're interested, you can get a free subscription to the print edition of Software Development Magazine. It's one of the few high quality freebees (and no, I am not affiliated with them). Also, as Scott Myers got mentioned here a few times: He writes for SD Magazine once in a while.
Did you read the article? The first MIT research project described (Mark II Holographics Video) in fact renders a real hologram: "At its core are the basic steps of creating a standard hologram: A laser beam is split in two. [...] Instead of light and mirrors, Benton and his team use specially developed computer algorithms. The algorithms calculate the kinds of microscopic lines necessary for a certain hologram, convert them into sound waves, and then send the waves into a stack of tellurium-oxide crystals that have the unique property of distorting temporarily when sound waves pass through them. That distortion forms the microscopic lines of the diffraction pattern that make up a hologram. A laser beam passing through that pattern conveys the image from the crystals to a view screen". The article has a diagram depicting this.
This week's Economist runs a story titled "No real help, and sometimes harmful" (unfortunately, only available with a paid subscription). It comments on a study that got just relased. From the article:
In the current Economic Journal, Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victor Lavy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem look at a scheme which put computers into many of Israel's primary and middle schools in the mid-1990s. Dr Angrist and Dr Lavy compare the test scores for maths and Hebrew achieved by children in the fourth and eighth grades (ie, aged about nine and 13) in schools with and without computers. They also asked the classes' teachers how they used various teaching materials, such as Xeroxed worksheets and, of course, computer programs.
In a nutshell, the study concludes that computers are of little help in the classroom, and sometimes even harmful (as students get easier distracted, etc.). It's interesting, however, that both, teachers and students, use computers heavily for homework and class preparation, where they are quite effective.
Software Development Magazine covers the Simputer in their "Deadline" section (unfortunately, the section is only in the print edition, not online). From the article: "For $2 and a nominal rental fee, each villager can buy a smart card that stores all his or her information, and allows Internet and e-mail access." Sounds quite feasible to me.
There was an article - I believe in MIT's Technology Review - explaining this (I looked for it, but couldn't find it online).
In a nutshell, you can't run a cell phone directly from an unwinding spring (for various technical reasons) - you will have to go through the battery which acts as a buffer. While the spring gives you a (more or less) constant torque, this is an advantage if you need a constant current (e.g. to power a radio), but not to charge a battery (cell phone). In addition, springs (and especially clockworks) are not that efficient - at least if you want them cheap. Plus, they take up space.
In fact, I believe the article said that the key for this device was to get rid of spring and clockwork in the forst place, for space reasons. It was key to find a mechanism that would allow the charging of the battery, no matter at what pace the user would wind.
The annoying thing: The content is very calm, and the ad is very animated and busy, so it's hard not to look into the ad. At least the whole thing is quiete (at least until now).
I've been contemplating to visit at night and to place duck tape over the ad section - but considering how job security looks like, maybe not the best idea ;-)
There is an article about this in the Economist called "Time travelers" (3/23/02). Unfortunately, you have to pay if you want to read the article online.
You should be "save" as long as you don't conduct any business in the US. But as soon as you do (US based add banners, credit card processing, etc.), you are in trouble.
Keep in mind that they would never go after a personal homepage with 100 hits a week...
In fact, people in England around 200 AD were as tall as people today.