sat-radio would be a great shakup to the sh*tty commercial radio corps out there
I don't see this. As far as I understand, you have the same problem here you have with regular AM and FM radio stations -- a handful of companies own more than a majority of the stations in every market (e.g. ClearChannel). Here you have one or two companies controlling which stations have access to the satellite radio subscription audience. At least with ClearChannel you have local DJs (sometimes) who might add a little local color to a station.
Have you ever noticed how much cable TV sucks? Sure, there are a handful of cool programs out there, but easily 90% of all cable programming is utter crap. I would expect the same to happen with satellite radio.
As far as it shakeing up companies like ClearChannel, I seriously doubt it. In fact, I would expect a company like ClearChannel to look at this as a way of saving tons of money. With satellite radio you would only need to pay for one station and staff to broadcast the whole country. In fact, one staff could handle several channels of satellite content.
No, when it comes down to it, I think ClearChannel and their cronies will love this, and it will only mean a more homogenized listening experience for all of us.
The general concensus seems to be that spammers do their thing because there is at least a small percentage of recipients who actually send these people money.
Can this really be true that there are enough people out there who are so gullible as to make this profitable...!? or is it that the ones who are really making money in this game are those selling lists of e-mail addresses to spammers? I know that in the online porn industry, the real money to be made is not in the porn sites themselves, but in selling services to the people setting up porn sites. I would expect something similar is going on here, especially since I've gotten a great deal of spam lately telling me how lucrative a business 'mass e-mail marketing' is, and how I should act now to 'get in on the ground floor' by buying their CD-ROM's full of e-mail addresses 'for the low, reduced rate of $99.95.' It looks to me like spam mailing is just another get rich quick scheme.
I'm asking this as a legitimate question. Do people really make money by spamming or are the only ones making money those who are supporting this "industry?" I mean, if.025% of the population is stupid enough to send you money for something like fake Viagara work-alike pills at $25 a pop and you send e-mail to 1,000,000 addresses, that's $6,250 -- well, with those kinds of numbers I'm tempted to start spamming too. After all, if the idiots are willing to pay...
Disclaimer: Before you flame me for admitting to the same thing you've likely thought of yourself, rest assured. I am not about to start spamming anytime soon. However, I think the question is relevant. Is there anybody actually making money at this game?
While I agree with you that it is elitist to think that one should have to be a computer expert in order to use a computer to do their everyday job, just as it is ridiculous to think that everyone who drives a car should be an auto mechanic. However, if you drive a car you are expected to know some basic things such as to check your oil frequently, to have your oil replaced every 3,000 miles or so, make sure there is enough air in your tires, etc. Otherwise you run the risk of at the least expensively damageing your vehicle, at the most putting yourself in a life threatening situation. Similarly, one should have some basic knowledge about their computer, operating system, applications and a little general knowledge about things like basic security.
Yeah, here on Slashdot we all probably do come down too hard on Microsoft for the quality of their products. I can't believe that MS deliberately releases bug ridden software full of security holes, and I think one has to admit that quite a few of their products are really very good.
On the other hand, MS support is horrible. Heck, they don't even offer any kind of useful free support if your copy of Windows was purchased from an OEM (preinstalled on your computer when you bought it). There may be a lot of people in the Linux community who will shout RTFM when asked a question by a newbie, but in general you will find that most people in the community are genuinely helpful and supportive of those with less than expert knowledge.
Thank you. You quite nicely fleshed out and extended my rather sparse comment.
Quite frankly, I was rather shocked to see such a sentiment expressed on/. as well. Especially since it was/. that introduced me to Linux. I know that one of the facts that impressed me about Linux in the first place was the incredible community support in learning the OS through the numerous how-to's and other documents available online, and, as with yourself, it has led me to purchasing many Linux books.
Personally, I'd think that learning a new OS would be worth the cost of a book (which I note is out of print - does that mean a new edition is on the way?), but if you're too cheap to buy a book, well, here's a pretty decent guide to getting started with GNU/Linux.
There are many different people who are drawn to Linux and not all of them have the financial resources to lay down $30-$40 on a book. Think kids in not-so-wealthy school districts for one, or even adults who are currently stuck in low paying jobs who are trying to improve their situation.
This is one of the benefits of free software. People are able to bootstrap theirselves in a way that conservatives claim the great American capitalist meritocratic system makes possible. In reality, increasing your earning power often has a steep price tag. Free software helps allevitate some of that cost.
So while there are plenty of people who are too 'cheap' to buy a book, so what? Although those people start off as leaches, and may remain leaches forever, just the very basic fact that they are running Linux almost insures that in some small way they will return something to the community... Even if it is nothing other than just once showing a newbie how to mount a drive.
This week's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday on NPR (hosted by Ira Flatow -- does anyone else remember Ira as host of the great kid's science program Newton's Apple?) had a great retrospective on Mir in their first hour's segment. Among the guests were astronaut Norman Thagard (who did a stint aboard Mir), Russian space expert James Oberg and Brian Burrough, author of Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir.
I highly recommend listening to this program for anyone interested in Mir, it's history and contribution to space science.
Bob was Microsoft's attempt at making computer's easy to use for even those people with severe damage to the frontal lobes of their brain. Instead of a desktop with icons, users were presented with various user customizable "rooms" that mimicked real life rooms along with cute, fuzzy animated assistants.
The one I remember was a cartoon drawing of an office with a desk and file cabinets and a calendar on the back wall. The user clicked on various items in the office to accomplish their objectives. For instance, clicking on the calendar brought up a date book/PIM type of program.
You know, it's funny, but I did a quick search on Google in order to try to find an URL with a screenshot and I couldn't find a thing. The closest I found was a bunch of humor pieces and this article. I wonder how much Microsoft paid to expunge the memory of Bob from the net?
Also in contention for the distinction of being the first digital computer is the Atanasoff-Berry Computer built at Iowa State University between 1939 and 1942 by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. Supposedly, Atanasoff conceived the plan of the machine drinking bourbon in a roadhouse bar somewhere in Illinois in 1937.
In 1973, after a lengthy court trial, a federal judge declared the Eckert-Mauchly (Eniac) patent invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the first digital computer. It should also be noted that it was the first digital computer to use dynamic RAM. Lots of good information on the ABC and many more links can be found here and also here. Photos and diagrams can be found here.
If one closely examines this period of history, they find that it is a time that is just chock full with all kinds of convergences between mathematics, physical science, engineering and materials technologies that make the digital computer almost inevitable. After all, this is a device that had been conceived of, at least in part, as early as the Victorian age and the birth of the industrial revolution. Really, it was just a matter of time before somebody produced a working model, and as so often happens many people took different paths to the same end.
It isn't that people are necessarily just too lazy to set Outlook to only send plain text or HTML, but more likely that they just don't know the option even exists -- or even what TNEF, ASCII, or HTML are. For the vast majority of people, the default settings are all they will ever use. All they know is that they are sending 'e-mail' because that's what the button they clicked on said. Therefore, the default options that are enabled should be the most basic, widely used ones. Microsoft apparently feels that the more bloat is enabled at start-up, the more people will be impressed with their product. In fact, it is usually the opposite. Have you ever seen a new user stare in terror at all the little buttons MS Word?
Maybe Perl in Japanese would let you create its own characters out of existing ones, then use the new characters in the programs. And you think Perl is compact and hard to read now.
Hmm... Wouldn't this be a cross between Perl and Forth -- and maybe APL?
Thanks for the input. I had wholly forgotten about the "hidden" information on the cable pipe... I wonder what other stuff their is on my cable line that I don't know about.
Does anyone know if XDS is implemented for DirectTV?
I've wondered for a while about the possibility of creating an opensource Tivo type of system. After all, it isn't so much the hardware here, any old fast Pentium system with Linux, a video card that has composite or SVHS output and a big HD would be sufficient.
What makes Tivo special though is the software and the tv listing service that you need to subscribe to. I'm sure the software on the end-user side wouldn't be too hard to do, and might even be done better than Tivo or ReplayTV's.
The sticking point is the giant database of TV listings that these devices access in order to know what channel to record, when and for how long. I've thought about using exisiting free services such as TV Guide's or Zap2It's program listings and then using regexp's to convert them into a database but I'm sure that if thousands of geeks started accessing their servers everyday for listings that sooner or later lawsuits would start flying. Is there anyway of obtaining this data legally for free?
One last thought -- TV tuner cards are cheap these days. Why not put three or four in our theoretical opensource Tivo and give the user the option of recording many shows at once? Someone please correct me if I am technologically ignorant on this point.
There is no open source project of this magnitude simply because the stated goal relies upon the development of new technologies; i.e., AI of a far greater magnitude than anything available now. Development of such technologies relies upon the investment of capital into pure research in dozens of different academic fields ranging from linguistics to experimental psychology to computer science. While Microsoft has long been acknowledged for having assembled a killer research arm, I seriously doubt that even Microsoft has the revenues to devote to natural language processing that will allow them alone to make the leap forward in AI that would make such a thing possible.
NLP will only come about as the result of the combined efforts of researchers in many different fields. Most of these are academics employed by universities and are funded either through private grants, funds and trusts, or through federal money earmarked for pure research -- this is of course your tax dollars. So while Microsoft may be playing a part (and spending money) in bringing NLP to the desktop, and should be commended for this, what they are really doing is buying access to the knowledge pool generated by all the researchers in this field. This gives Microsoft an advantage in that if they have the info first, then they can be the first to market an application for this new technology. Everything else Microsoft may do on this front is just buying image. The general public gains a favorable impression of Microsoft when they read in their paper (or more likely, hear Tom Brokaw pontificate about) how Microsoft is going to make their lives easier by making computers understand how they actually talk (or write).
So please, before you heap accolades on capitalistic enterprise, please remember that they do not operate in a vacuum and do receive much assistance from the public sector.
Hmm, last I knew, Travolta was deep into the ways of the Co$ and was the major reason this flick was made. Apparently, the script had been stinking up Hollywood for years until Travolta came along. Remember, this is the same guy who gave us a chain-smoking arch-angel.
I do a lot of work for some companies that use a specific vendor for filling all of their needs for a specific department, such as housekeeping. Before becoming a customer of these vendors, they require a written credit application that does ask for credit references from (usually) the three largest vendors the company does business with and a bank.
The advantage is that these vendors then extend complete credit to their customers who then have the privilege of ordering anything, anytime it is needed without worrying if the last order is paid off. While this works fine, it seems to me that this is a very nineteenth century way of doing business, and as someone else pointed out in this forum, it seems like a good venue for companies to swap information about individuals and other companies. Finally, while this might work for the kind of situation such as I detailed above it would seem to create a whole lot of overhead when applied to the individual person level.
Neither do solutions such as Amex's Blue card seem to be adequate. First of all, I find it insulting that I should be required to have a piece of plastic in my hands whenever I want to do some shopping. What is the advantage of this over money anyway? (Yes, I know -- digital money means never having to get a fresh supply of dead presidents from the holy money wall - ATM)
Secondly, what is to prevent a thief from simply stealing my blue card and using it? The thief would have the physical piece of plastic in their hands and that would seem all that matters. (Excuse any ignorance I'm showing with regard Amex's Blue Card, I am not at familiar with it's actual implementation)
It would instead seem to me that a public/private key signature is the only secure way of implementing credit cards in the online age, but then that brings up the matter of who verifies that a particular key is actually from the person it pretends to be?
I don't want to stir up the old capitalist/socialist bee's nest here, but situtations like this really make me think that problems like the one above are what will really be the undoing of capitalism.
Talk about science fiction! I'm in my mid-30's and remember having conversations with friends where we marvelled at having 64K RAM and a 4MHz processor.
Now Joe or Jane Consumer can easily go out and buy a supercomputer for their family. Yet, in the long run are they doing anything more with their home computer than they were doing 10 years ago (other than surfing the web)? It just seems that all that computing power hasn't really changed what most people do with their PC's -- which is pretty much use it as a glorified electric typewriter, surfing the web and e-mail.
Despite what Intel and Microsoft might say, a 1GHz Pentium III is not necessary, nor does it even enhance the experience of web browsing. It certainly isn't needed for the dreaded paperclip living inside Word.
Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I just don't see where all this computing power is of any practical benefit to the average user.
As a person who makes their living in part by doing web sites for small businesses I find it increasingly complicated to design pages for all possible viewers. When I started doing web sites in 1994 it was easy because only the most basic HTML was supported by browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer. It was all text and simple inline images.
However, now there is a proliferation of different browsers and devices accessing the web. In addition, the standards are not uniformly implemented by the various browsers. When you complicate this scenario by accounting for display resolutions that run the gamut from sub-VGA (less than 640X480X256) to greater than 1024X768X32 bits it seems impossible to design a site that has the high end visual appeal that my clients want and have the site look good on all possible display devices.
An example of this is with cascading style sheets and layers and positioning or even javascript. Netscape and Internet Explorer implement these features differently. It seems my only choice is to write code to detect the browser and then output the correct HTML or execute the proper subroutine for the give browser. Often my clients just do not have the resources to pay me to do this kind of customization.
While I would rather produce a web site that displays nicely under all circumstances, this is just a not a choice. Should I write seperate code for WebTV, cell phones, Palm Pilots, etc? How about people running Windows 3.1 and Netscape 2.0 at 640X480 resolution at 16 colors?
It seems that my only choice is to write for the majority of browsers in use at the current time and blatantly disregard the rest. Currently this means sites that display nicely at 800X600 at 256 colors and Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Although the point is well taken that a site should express at least some effort to be accessible to differently able individuals.
Maybe I'm way off base here. What are other professionals out there doing?
IMHO the big news story here is that Hubble is working exactly as planned. Instead of four out of six gyros failing and causing the spacecraft to start wobbling and potentially falling out of orbit (not quite sure what operating on only two gyros would cause the HST to do), the spacecraft just powers down non-essential systems and goes to sleep until NASA can put a shuttle up to fix it. HST was designed to be modular to facilitate repairs in an environment where it is impossible to anticipate every little problem. So in that sense the Hubble is working perfectly.
In my experience, most electronic cash drawers use a simple serial interface and open in command to something like 07h being sent. No real need for special devices here.
I wholly agree that the company owns the computers, but what you write belongs expressly to you. I know that in the US the laws don't reflect this opinion, but it is up to everyone to put a stop to invasions of privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see this. As far as I understand, you have the same problem here you have with regular AM and FM radio stations -- a handful of companies own more than a majority of the stations in every market (e.g. ClearChannel). Here you have one or two companies controlling which stations have access to the satellite radio subscription audience. At least with ClearChannel you have local DJs (sometimes) who might add a little local color to a station.
Have you ever noticed how much cable TV sucks? Sure, there are a handful of cool programs out there, but easily 90% of all cable programming is utter crap. I would expect the same to happen with satellite radio.
As far as it shakeing up companies like ClearChannel, I seriously doubt it. In fact, I would expect a company like ClearChannel to look at this as a way of saving tons of money. With satellite radio you would only need to pay for one station and staff to broadcast the whole country. In fact, one staff could handle several channels of satellite content.
No, when it comes down to it, I think ClearChannel and their cronies will love this, and it will only mean a more homogenized listening experience for all of us.
The general concensus seems to be that spammers do their thing because there is at least a small percentage of recipients who actually send these people money.
Can this really be true that there are enough people out there who are so gullible as to make this profitable...!? or is it that the ones who are really making money in this game are those selling lists of e-mail addresses to spammers? I know that in the online porn industry, the real money to be made is not in the porn sites themselves, but in selling services to the people setting up porn sites. I would expect something similar is going on here, especially since I've gotten a great deal of spam lately telling me how lucrative a business 'mass e-mail marketing' is, and how I should act now to 'get in on the ground floor' by buying their CD-ROM's full of e-mail addresses 'for the low, reduced rate of $99.95.' It looks to me like spam mailing is just another get rich quick scheme.
I'm asking this as a legitimate question. Do people really make money by spamming or are the only ones making money those who are supporting this "industry?" I mean, if .025% of the population is stupid enough to send you money for something like fake Viagara work-alike pills at $25 a pop and you send e-mail to 1,000,000 addresses, that's $6,250 -- well, with those kinds of numbers I'm tempted to start spamming too. After all, if the idiots are willing to pay...
Disclaimer: Before you flame me for admitting to the same thing you've likely thought of yourself, rest assured. I am not about to start spamming anytime soon. However, I think the question is relevant. Is there anybody actually making money at this game?
While I agree with you that it is elitist to think that one should have to be a computer expert in order to use a computer to do their everyday job, just as it is ridiculous to think that everyone who drives a car should be an auto mechanic. However, if you drive a car you are expected to know some basic things such as to check your oil frequently, to have your oil replaced every 3,000 miles or so, make sure there is enough air in your tires, etc. Otherwise you run the risk of at the least expensively damageing your vehicle, at the most putting yourself in a life threatening situation. Similarly, one should have some basic knowledge about their computer, operating system, applications and a little general knowledge about things like basic security.
Yeah, here on Slashdot we all probably do come down too hard on Microsoft for the quality of their products. I can't believe that MS deliberately releases bug ridden software full of security holes, and I think one has to admit that quite a few of their products are really very good.
On the other hand, MS support is horrible. Heck, they don't even offer any kind of useful free support if your copy of Windows was purchased from an OEM (preinstalled on your computer when you bought it). There may be a lot of people in the Linux community who will shout RTFM when asked a question by a newbie, but in general you will find that most people in the community are genuinely helpful and supportive of those with less than expert knowledge.
Dude. His name is Reichard. Slashdot and almost everyone here seems to be mis-spelling it.
His e-mail address taken from the signature of his apology: kreichard@internet.com. See? Reichard not Richard.Thank you. You quite nicely fleshed out and extended my rather sparse comment.
Quite frankly, I was rather shocked to see such a sentiment expressed on /. as well. Especially since it was /. that introduced me to Linux. I know that one of the facts that impressed me about Linux in the first place was the incredible community support in learning the OS through the numerous how-to's and other documents available online, and, as with yourself, it has led me to purchasing many Linux books.
There are many different people who are drawn to Linux and not all of them have the financial resources to lay down $30-$40 on a book. Think kids in not-so-wealthy school districts for one, or even adults who are currently stuck in low paying jobs who are trying to improve their situation.
This is one of the benefits of free software. People are able to bootstrap theirselves in a way that conservatives claim the great American capitalist meritocratic system makes possible. In reality, increasing your earning power often has a steep price tag. Free software helps allevitate some of that cost.
So while there are plenty of people who are too 'cheap' to buy a book, so what? Although those people start off as leaches, and may remain leaches forever, just the very basic fact that they are running Linux almost insures that in some small way they will return something to the community... Even if it is nothing other than just once showing a newbie how to mount a drive.
This week's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday on NPR (hosted by Ira Flatow -- does anyone else remember Ira as host of the great kid's science program Newton's Apple?) had a great retrospective on Mir in their first hour's segment. Among the guests were astronaut Norman Thagard (who did a stint aboard Mir), Russian space expert James Oberg and Brian Burrough, author of Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir.
I highly recommend listening to this program for anyone interested in Mir, it's history and contribution to space science.
The senator.
Bob was Microsoft's attempt at making computer's easy to use for even those people with severe damage to the frontal lobes of their brain. Instead of a desktop with icons, users were presented with various user customizable "rooms" that mimicked real life rooms along with cute, fuzzy animated assistants.
The one I remember was a cartoon drawing of an office with a desk and file cabinets and a calendar on the back wall. The user clicked on various items in the office to accomplish their objectives. For instance, clicking on the calendar brought up a date book/PIM type of program.
You know, it's funny, but I did a quick search on Google in order to try to find an URL with a screenshot and I couldn't find a thing. The closest I found was a bunch of humor pieces and this article. I wonder how much Microsoft paid to expunge the memory of Bob from the net?
Ha! LOL! Well, Atanasoff was never a tee-totaler, so why should his machine be either!
Why clutter up one's sentences with all that punctuation stuff anyway?
Also in contention for the distinction of being the first digital computer is the Atanasoff-Berry Computer built at Iowa State University between 1939 and 1942 by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. Supposedly, Atanasoff conceived the plan of the machine drinking bourbon in a roadhouse bar somewhere in Illinois in 1937.
In 1973, after a lengthy court trial, a federal judge declared the Eckert-Mauchly (Eniac) patent invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the first digital computer. It should also be noted that it was the first digital computer to use dynamic RAM. Lots of good information on the ABC and many more links can be found here and also here. Photos and diagrams can be found here.
If one closely examines this period of history, they find that it is a time that is just chock full with all kinds of convergences between mathematics, physical science, engineering and materials technologies that make the digital computer almost inevitable. After all, this is a device that had been conceived of, at least in part, as early as the Victorian age and the birth of the industrial revolution. Really, it was just a matter of time before somebody produced a working model, and as so often happens many people took different paths to the same end.
It isn't that people are necessarily just too lazy to set Outlook to only send plain text or HTML, but more likely that they just don't know the option even exists -- or even what TNEF, ASCII, or HTML are. For the vast majority of people, the default settings are all they will ever use. All they know is that they are sending 'e-mail' because that's what the button they clicked on said.
Therefore, the default options that are enabled should be the most basic, widely used ones. Microsoft apparently feels that the more bloat is enabled at start-up, the more people will be impressed with their product. In fact, it is usually the opposite. Have you ever seen a new user stare in terror at all the little buttons MS Word?
Maybe Perl in Japanese would let you create its own characters out of existing ones, then use the new characters in the programs. And you think Perl is compact and hard to read now.
Hmm... Wouldn't this be a cross between Perl and Forth -- and maybe APL?
Thanks for the input. I had wholly forgotten about the "hidden" information on the cable pipe... I wonder what other stuff their is on my cable line that I don't know about.
Does anyone know if XDS is implemented for DirectTV?
I've wondered for a while about the possibility of creating an opensource Tivo type of system. After all, it isn't so much the hardware here, any old fast Pentium system with Linux, a video card that has composite or SVHS output and a big HD would be sufficient.
What makes Tivo special though is the software and the tv listing service that you need to subscribe to. I'm sure the software on the end-user side wouldn't be too hard to do, and might even be done better than Tivo or ReplayTV's.
The sticking point is the giant database of TV listings that these devices access in order to know what channel to record, when and for how long. I've thought about using exisiting free services such as TV Guide's or Zap2It's program listings and then using regexp's to convert them into a database but I'm sure that if thousands of geeks started accessing their servers everyday for listings that sooner or later lawsuits would start flying. Is there anyway of obtaining this data legally for free?
One last thought -- TV tuner cards are cheap these days. Why not put three or four in our theoretical opensource Tivo and give the user the option of recording many shows at once? Someone please correct me if I am technologically ignorant on this point.
What does everyone else think about this idea?
There is no open source project of this magnitude simply because the stated goal relies upon the development of new technologies; i.e., AI of a far greater magnitude than anything available now. Development of such technologies relies upon the investment of capital into pure research in dozens of different academic fields ranging from linguistics to experimental psychology to computer science. While Microsoft has long been acknowledged for having assembled a killer research arm, I seriously doubt that even Microsoft has the revenues to devote to natural language processing that will allow them alone to make the leap forward in AI that would make such a thing possible.
NLP will only come about as the result of the combined efforts of researchers in many different fields. Most of these are academics employed by universities and are funded either through private grants, funds and trusts, or through federal money earmarked for pure research -- this is of course your tax dollars. So while Microsoft may
be playing a part (and spending money) in bringing NLP to the desktop, and should be commended for this, what they are really doing is buying access to the knowledge pool generated by all the researchers in this field. This gives Microsoft an advantage in that if they have the info first, then they can be the first to market an application for this new technology. Everything else Microsoft may do on this front is just buying image. The general public gains a favorable impression of Microsoft when they read in their paper (or more likely, hear Tom Brokaw pontificate about) how Microsoft is going to make their lives easier by making computers understand how they actually talk (or write).
So please, before you heap accolades on capitalistic enterprise, please remember that they do not operate in a vacuum and do receive much assistance from the public sector.
Hmm, last I knew, Travolta was deep into the ways of the Co$ and was the major reason this flick was made. Apparently, the script had been stinking up Hollywood for years until Travolta came along. Remember, this is the same guy who gave us a chain-smoking arch-angel.
I do a lot of work for some companies that use a specific vendor for filling all of their needs for a specific department, such as housekeeping. Before becoming a customer of these vendors, they require a written credit application that does ask for credit references from (usually) the three largest vendors the company does business with and a bank.
The advantage is that these vendors then extend complete credit to their customers who then have the privilege of ordering anything, anytime it is needed without worrying if the last order is paid off. While this works fine, it seems to me that this is a very nineteenth century way of doing business, and as someone else pointed out in this forum, it seems like a good venue for companies to swap information about individuals and other companies. Finally, while this might work for the kind of situation such as I detailed above it would seem to create a whole lot of overhead when applied to the individual person level.
Neither do solutions such as Amex's Blue card seem to be adequate. First of all, I find it insulting that I should be required to have a piece of plastic in my hands whenever I want to do some shopping. What is the advantage of this over money anyway? (Yes, I know -- digital money means never having to get a fresh supply of dead presidents from the holy money wall - ATM)
Secondly, what is to prevent a thief from simply stealing my blue card and using it? The thief would have the physical piece of plastic in their hands and that would seem all that matters. (Excuse any ignorance I'm showing with regard Amex's Blue Card, I am not at familiar with it's actual implementation)
It would instead seem to me that a public/private key signature is the only secure way of implementing credit cards in the online age, but then that brings up the matter of who verifies that a particular key is actually from the person it pretends to be?
I don't want to stir up the old capitalist/socialist bee's nest here, but situtations like this really make me think that problems like the one above are what will really be the undoing of capitalism.
Talk about science fiction! I'm in my mid-30's and remember having conversations with friends where we marvelled at having 64K RAM and a 4MHz processor.
Now Joe or Jane Consumer can easily go out and buy a supercomputer for their family. Yet, in the long run are they doing anything more with their home computer than they were doing 10 years ago (other than surfing the web)? It just seems that all that computing power hasn't really changed what most people do with their PC's -- which is pretty much use it as a glorified electric typewriter, surfing the web and e-mail.
Despite what Intel and Microsoft might say, a 1GHz Pentium III is not necessary, nor does it even enhance the experience of web browsing. It certainly isn't needed for the dreaded paperclip living inside Word.
Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I just don't see where all this computing power is of any practical benefit to the average user.
As a person who makes their living in part by doing web sites for small businesses I find it increasingly complicated to design pages for all possible viewers. When I started doing web sites in 1994 it was easy because only the most basic HTML was supported by browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer. It was all text and simple inline images.
However, now there is a proliferation of different browsers and devices accessing the web. In addition, the standards are not uniformly implemented by the various browsers. When you complicate this scenario by accounting for display resolutions that run the gamut from sub-VGA (less than 640X480X256) to greater than 1024X768X32 bits it seems impossible to design a site that has the high end visual appeal that my clients want and have the site look good on all possible display devices.
An example of this is with cascading style sheets and layers and positioning or even javascript. Netscape and Internet Explorer implement these features differently. It seems my only choice is to write code to detect the browser and then output the correct HTML or execute the proper subroutine for the give browser. Often my clients just do not have the resources to pay me to do this kind of customization.
While I would rather produce a web site that displays nicely under all circumstances, this is just a not a choice. Should I write seperate code for WebTV, cell phones, Palm Pilots, etc? How about people running Windows 3.1 and Netscape 2.0 at 640X480 resolution at 16 colors?
It seems that my only choice is to write for the majority of browsers in use at the current time and blatantly disregard the rest. Currently this means sites that display nicely at 800X600 at 256 colors and Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Although the point is well taken that a site should express at least some effort to be accessible to differently able individuals.
Maybe I'm way off base here. What are other professionals out there doing?
IMHO the big news story here is that Hubble is working exactly as planned. Instead of four out of six gyros failing and causing the spacecraft to start wobbling and potentially falling out of orbit (not quite sure what operating on only two gyros would cause the HST to do), the spacecraft just powers down non-essential systems and goes to sleep until NASA can put a shuttle up to fix it. HST was designed to be modular to facilitate repairs in an environment where it is impossible to anticipate every little problem. So in that sense the Hubble is working perfectly.
In my experience, most electronic cash drawers use a simple serial interface and open in command to something like 07h being sent. No real need for special devices here.
I wholly agree that the company owns the computers, but what you write belongs expressly to you. I know that in the US the laws don't reflect this opinion, but it is up to everyone to put a stop to invasions of privacy.