Not to troll, but maybe technology has changed since '96-'97. It's entirely possible (and likely) that they've done more (and better?) research since then.
Possibly, but I doubt it. Even if they have though, the technology is fundamentally flawed. "Recognition" problems like have always had tremendous difficulty becoming workable, despite large economic incentives to make it work. Look at handwriting and voice recognition: they've come a long ways, but they're still useful only in limited situations; and they've probably gotten a lot more funding over the years than lie-recognition. On top of that, lie-recognition has a somewhat dubious psycho-phisological basis: how do you judge success during testing and development? It's not like handwriting, where it's relatively easy to collect legitimate test data from a wide variety of sources.
I may be wrong, but my speculation leads me to believe that this product is little more than snake oil.
The biggest problem I have with this is that humans are much better equipped to interpret the subtle visual and auditory cues that indicate a person is lying. It's bred into us from 100,000 years of cooperation and competition, alliance-making and backstabbing. You wouldn't give a police interrorgator a voice recognition device, would you? Not for a situation where they'll be standing there with their own two ears. Lying is the same thing: screw the fancy glasses and rely on human intution. If you've got money to splurge, spend it on developing tests to see who's better at lie-detecting and bias your hiring/personnel assignments accordingly.
It may be feasible, as the article suggests, for these glasses to aid the process, but they're more likely to distract the user from picking out the real cues.
Why is it that the PTT feature is always so loud? Is it simply a marketing gimic? If someone is using it anywhere in the vicinity, you can't help hearing it along with the signature beep that Nextel uses.
The large company I work for introduced their own PTT/cell phone combo years before Nextel started marketing them to the general public, mainly for use by its employees and contractors.
It used to be that whenever I heard that characteristic studder beep (presumably invented by the marketing guys at Motorola, not Nextel) in a public place, I would look around expecting to see a fellow employee. Now I glance around and inevitably end up looking at some kids and a soccer mom. Kinda threw me off-balance at first.
PTT is very useful in the office environment... especially when half your team is geographically dispersed. It kinda serves the same purpose as "peeking over the cubical wall". It's less formal than the telephone.
Some of PTT's abuses are rather amusing: I went out to lunch w/two guys in my group. Their team is in a common PTT talkgroup. Riding in the car, one of them would talk to the rest of the group, and it would echo from the other guy's unit ~150 ms later. All sort of reverb and ricochet effects.
An ordinary popup add wouldn't be more than 1Mb, but streaming video adds would range up to at least a douzen Mbs, so unless they have douzens more sales with it, they only are going to reduce their profit margin.
Presumably you can charge more for a full-motion video ad than a pop-up. Especially if delivery is "guaranteed" like they (quite falsely) claim.
Like you, I think their economics are somewhat dubious, but it's impossible to say w/o seeing the numbers.
The real problem here is that advertisers view consumers as passive particpants on whom ads can be forced. But it's not like that anymore. Viewers have more control over their information input and they will use it accordingly.
Everyone has their price, and it shouldn't be an act of "bad faith" to name it.
The logic is that opportunist can surround a "good" domain name with fake ones that presumably steal traffic going to the legitimate site. (E.g., just try misspelling "Motorola" and you'll see what I mean.)
If this is done as a satire or pun (like in this case?), then this behavior might be okay (legally) so long as certain aspects of trademark law are observed. However, if you're doing this in the hopes of blackmailing the company into buying your domain, then is predatory anti-social behavior. We as a society have a legimate intrest in preventing it.
Right or wrong, being quick to "name a price" is taken as evidence that you're trying to blackmail the company. In this case, Microsoft may be abusing the legal system in prosecuting a minor; hopefully the courts will take that into account.
On a side note: if you want to set up a satire site or do any other activity that walks the line, make sure you've got your ducks in a row legally. The law, while basically a good and necessary thing, is run and operated by your fellow humans... and most of them are all to willing to screw you over if it advances their politics/religion/career/pocketbooks.
Self-plagarism? WTF? I suppose that you might need a policy like this if you have a poorly-constructed liberal arts curriculum where turning in the same essay over and over again really lets you get ahead, but this seems completely inappropriate for a normal college experience. Getting a CS degree, especially... if you can reuse code, *good* for you. Or if you can take a project you did for a CS class in Natural Language Processing and build on it to contribute something to your class in linguistics, *great*.
Heh... I've had profs get me the exact same assignment I had received in another class (this is especially tends to happen when you're taking the graduate version of a class you took as an undergrad). You can bet I pull that from the archives, polish it up, and turn it in.
About the article though: cheating is a big problem. As one of the "good students", it was quite upsetting to TA a graduate course and find that over half the students were copying off of each other.
The particular approach used by web-based turnin services does lack a certain finesse, especially when the student is required to turn in his own work. A better approach would be to have a academia-sponsored research service that would do this on a not-for-profit basis. The service could be more responsive to the needs of individual discpilines (checking code is different from checking english papers is different from checking legal briefs). It would also be nice to see a code of conduct here, just to solidify the obvious things: detected cases of cheating should be human-reviewed; the reviewers should be able to compare the cases of cheating to the works which are presumed to have been plagarized; proper documentation and judical process should be followed in penalizing the student; the student should have a right to provide a defense for himself before charges are formally filed [e.g., before anything gets put on his permanent record]; etc.
what was slashdot's philosophic argument against DRM anyway?
The philosophical reason:
For me, the computer is an extension of my brain. Giving me information and presuming you can control exactly what I do with it is like mind control.
The theoretical reason:
DRM is fundamentally flawed: information theory dictates that its just not possible to give someone information with them being able to copy it. To put it in lay terms: "God wants information to be free."
The business reason:
Widespread DRM usage will have annoying and costly ramifications for the business world: if people start writing documents or spreadsheets (or access databases) that employ these features, IT departments will be hit doubly hard by the "end-user development problem".
There are more, but these are some of the big ones, as I see it. And I'm sure that many have a "monetary" reason as well, though that one is highly questionable.;-)
Funny, all the old space probes had nuclear powerplants and that all worked out just fine.
Umm... actually not. There was a soviet satellite that crashed into Canada some decades ago. It was a lot like the Columbia disaster... debris was scattered over a large area. Except it was radioactive debris. The cleanup effort was extensive, and the event did little to ease cold war tensions. Had that satellite hit the U.S. bread belt instead of the vast expanse of Candian wilderness, things could have gotten ugly. Things did NOT "work out just fine".
I'm not a luddite, but space travel is dangerous and accidents will happen. Global-contamination scenarios need to be taken seriously. Perhaps we can engineer around them and/or make the risk acceptable... that would be neat.
Some environmentalists are too dogmatic about their cause, but then... aren't many open source advocates dogmatic about theirs? I'm seeing a lot of responses in this forum to the effect that we shouldn't even consider environmental arguments because some people take it too far. Nonsense: engineering problems should be evaluated on technical merits, with due consideration given to risks and (yes...) the input of the "poor misled" general public.
When the map is installed over all the territory (whether suspended or not), the territory of the empire has the characteristic of being a territory entirely covered by a map. The map does not take into account this characteristic, which would have to be presented on another map that depicted the territory plus the lower map. But such a process would be infinite.
Nonsense... a good introspection system can take into account its own existance. For instance, Java and C# both get it right w/their reflection mechanisms. Professor Eco should know better.
Re:Finally, the patch party is over (for now).
on
Kernel 2.6.1 Released
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· Score: 1
The kernel mailing list archive is probably online somewhere. Why not check it and research what people said about it?
You can also check out kernel traffic, which has weekly summaries of the major events and decisions that occur on the list. This is probably your best bet, not that you're going to like the answer.
Feel free to search msdn.com for the appropriate API calls. You won't find them. Microsoft doesn't have a vested intrest in writing this software (unlike Adobe, who might be warding off lawsuits or responding to a special request from the SS). Putting it in the OS libraries would be dumb. Putting it into the kernel would be so lame that even Microsoft could not make such a mistake.
Most likely, it's an in-house piece of software written by each vendor. If they were smart, they might be working from a common spec or sharing custom libraries that were funded by some government or industry initiative.
That aside, the grandparent poster is still correct: this technology slows performance because Photoshop (or the OS, if you insist) has to scan every image and reference it against a database. If they're smart, they do a few quick "disqualification" checks that look for obvious indications that the image is not currency.
Shouldn't people expect to be compensated for their work in creating something?
Knowledge artifacts, as we all know, are costly to produce but cheap to duplicate. What's more, information is very "leaky", and it impossible to prevent information from being replicated once you start selling it. There's an inherent contradiciton between this natural abundance and the scarcity of the marketplace. So we have kludges: copyright, patents, DRM, EULA's, NDA's, advertisments, etc.
While I agree with your premise ("people should be compensated for their work"), this is just one of many ideals that a society must manage. Here are a few more: the right to think. The right to think w/the assistance of a device. The right to compute. The right to share thoughts with others. This where patents become particularly grevious in my opinion: they give people a monopoly on an idea.
One of the original motivations of patents was to encourage the disclosure of how a new technology works so that others my learn from it. If the patent system wasn't so out of whack, perhaps this tradeoff (plus the reward to the inventors of the work) would make it worth the loss in individual freedom.
The MP3 patent is particularly bothersome: not only is it a patent that inhibits pure computation, it's something that would have been invented anyways, with or without a patent system. The economic motivation for wanting to compress music would have payed the way, even if we didn't have an army of information theorists, academians, and open source programmers working on the problem.
I use Ogg because Debian has packages that encode to it. I've been waiting for an ogg-equipped mp3 player, and I think 2004 will the year I finally get one. The new iRivers look pretty sweet...
if a site owner uses meta refresh=30 seconds (or whatever), does that contribute to overall page views for the page when site stat programs totals up the results?
If the browser respects the refresh and intervening proxies don't try to short-circuit it, the requsted page will be re-transmitted from the server. This event will be logged and it will show up a new page view if your log analyzer is dumb.
I don't actually play with web logs, but it should be easy enough to make them "smart" enough to filter out repeated requests from the same IP address. I imagine that most analyse software could handle this, but check your documentation... Also, depending on what information you want, there are smarter ways to get it than by analyzing the logs.
Hit counters and other graphics that get loaded with a page are a different story. I would imagine that most browsers don't reload these on a META-refresh request.
As a side note, most hit counters are not smart... you can hit the manual refresh and watch them increment.
why would you ask them to describe the future of XFree86
Out of politeness, it would be good if the press release outlined how XFree86 expects to move forward politically, not technically. A firm sentence like "this is expected to have no impact on the release schedule since the core team is not involved in development" might go far.
I didn't read the article, so the announcement may have covered this, but I w ouldn't be surprised if it was lacking... it sounds like some of XFree86's problems have stemmed from miscommunications.
Why is it that when these toolkits get ported to another other platform, be it Windows, MacOS, BeOS or what have you, they insist on looking and acting as GTK or Qt applications rather than native apps?
A few months ago, I did a lot of searching for a cross-platform GUI toolkit. Some toolkits try to use native widgets (a la Java's AWT), but most implement their own drawing, optionally with themeability (a la Java's Swing). Why this bias against native widgets? I'm going to take some wild guesses: (1) many of these cross-platform GUI toolkits were not intended to be cross-platform, but they got popular and somebody wanted a quick and dirty port of their application to windows... instead of reengineering the toolkit, it was easier to port it. (2) it's more appealing to build something new than to merely wrap existing toolkits... not always a good excuse, but commonly used, I would guess. (3) wrapping native widgets threatens to be a maintenance nightmare... if you were wrapping just one native GUI, it would be straightforward, but if you want to support several, it's going to be a painful mash of code that is constantly breaking due the intricate coupling b/t the toolkit and native code. Adding new platforms would take considerable effort. (4) It's much easier just to reduce coupling to a minimum by doing the barest amount of buffer swapping and event handling with the native windowing system... and this means drawing your own widgets. Also, (5) you sometimes might want to introduce architectural innovations that don't translate to the native API's well. (6) Finally, the toolkit can only properly support features which are in the intersection of all the native API's it supports... features that are not implemented by all native API's can be implemented by the toolkit, but then the toolkit must try to handle that case specially (or worse, the programmer has to know the ins and outs of how the toolkit behaves on different platforms).
In a word, I think many programmers are content to screw the users (or put the burden on the UI artists who have to make themable toolkits look like the real thing). It's not user-friendly, but it is expedient.
The solution is not to make better toolkits (dang we have enough of those already)... the solution is to decouple the UI from the application logic where possible. Standard file formats and network protocals, proper seperation logic into shared library components, proper use of remoting technology (CORBA, RPC, web services, etc.) all work to make this possible. Case in point: I run an imap server on my network and store all of my mail on it. I can access it via a web interface (squirrelmail), a GUI interface (kmail, mozilla, perhaps even Outlook), and a curses interface (mutt)... whichever happens to most convienient and closest at hand. This is not a solution for every problem, but it should work for your example (an IM application).
I worked it out with `bc`, but the lameness filter wouldn't let me post the message. There are about 8.667561 * 10^22 atoms in an ounce of pure gold. To get one ounce of gold from sea water, you'd have to process 1.7 trillion "drops"... whatever that means. Sounds like a lot.
I'm not a chemist, but it was a required subject in school.
Once he has something good, you can take what he did, fork it, and add/insert KDE. Huzzah. In the meantime, who cares?
Your post is convincingly written, yet deceptive. Yes, I can "take it and fork it", but if I'm a KDE-fan (and I am), I miss out on all the software that was written to target Gnome instead of KDE (especially stuff like taskbar extensions and themes that must run in their native desktop environment).
The fact is, this is a substantial loss for people who prefer KDE (assuming that UserLinux accomplishes its goals). It's not trivial as you imply.
Note: even though I exclusively use KDE, I support Bruce's decision to standardize on one desktop environment. It will hurt KDE, but it will probably help Linux.
Can someone please explain all the effort being put into this completely useless feature?
Wow... I love how you can encounter a bad usage of a technique and dismiss it forever with one sweeping declarative statement.
Translucency deserves to be a fundamental part of the modern windowing system. It's not a "version 1" feature, but it is important. Here's why:
Reason 1: Eye Candy
A good designer can get a lot of eye-candy mileage out of translucency. Agreed... there's a lot of stupid stuff that designers can do with the effect, but on the whole, it can add some remarkably classy effects to a basic GUI design. Apple OS X uses this strategically, as does some themes I've seen for KDE.
Good, clean aesthetic design makes Linux more attractive to newbies... and, confess it, we hardcore geeks kinda like it too. Obviously, I am NOT talking about the gratitious use of hyperactive Flash animations and dorky custom GUI's for business tools (a la Kai's Powertools)... those things should crawl back to the marketing department that spawned them.
Reason 2: Usability
Beyond aesthetics, the appropriate use of translucency can help you convey more information to your users. One example: antialiased text. Other, better examples are waiting to be found as transparency creeps into more and more windowing systems/applicaitions.
Reason 3: Completeness
Deciding which features should or should not go into a toolset API can sometimes be a challenge. However, there tends to be a natural "stratification" to a lot of these features those... for instance, if you have an appliance with a "volume" feature, you generally expect it to have a "mute" feature too (even though it used to be absent in older TV sets, stereos, etc.). Likewise, if an app lets you "copy" and "delete" an object, you expect it to also give you a "cut" option, even though this is redundant. Graphics programmers must work with Red, Green, and Blue... since they are having to do a lot of work building up a raster image, they kind of expect to see Alpha there as well. If the graphics API doesn't put it there, they will have to go off and write it themselves. If the windowing system implements this, it just makes life that much easier and helps avoid some duplicate code.
Reason 4: Inevitablity/B>
Sometimes features have to be added to software because users demand it. You may think you've provided a good clean technical solution, but academic purity only oges so far in the real world.
The only way I can even speculate of calculating an absolute speed relative to the fabric of the universe would be to somehow use the speed of light.
The
Michelson Morley experiment attempted to do this over a hundred years ago, but it didn't work. Subsequent experimentation has confirmed that "velocity relative to the universe" is not a meaningful idea.
I will say that one thing that I have come to really like about Open source is that it is possible to fix things as an end user.
Ditto... One thing that I've been slow to appreciate about Open Source is that... when I start to wonder how a piece of software works, I can actually go examine the source. This becomes especially enlightening when I'm trying to solve a common design problem or I run into trouble using an API. For instance, I browsed the KDE archive to figure out how to create new kscreensavers...
The point to focus on is not that one name is almost the same as some other corporate name, it's that one person in Finland or Sweden or Shitholistan thinks that they can change the behavior of millions of people.
Um... no. The judges ruled that Lindows could not use that name in their countries. Just because you're a global corporation does not mean you can ignore local law. The judges do have the authority to enforce it, and this is a clear case where they should enforce trademark law.
Maybe it's just me, but purposely naming your product one-letter-off from your only significant competitor is just plain shady. What if Microsoft rolled out "Limux/BravoWolf Clustering Technology"? Phonetically, that's different from "Linux/Beowulf", but it's still unfair. Trademark law exists to prevent this bullshit.
"Lindows" is very obviously a slimey rip-off of Microsoft's flagship product. Lindows is something of a leech in many ways... from charging people a subscription to use a GUI apt interface against Debian's mirrors (e.g., instead of Lindow's setting up its own mirrors) to having everything run as root by default (which might tarnish Linux's security record). Be careful and objective before you jump to defend them.
you clearly don't care in the slightest about the old
Keep in mind that it's the old people who have all the money in this country. Of course, some of them have a lot more money than others. You can address this by "redistribution of wealth"... taxing richer and/or younger tax payers to cover the drugs and other medical expenses of the old.
There are no easy answers here... redistribution is unfair, but NOT redistributing causes problems too.
Once concern with providing medical care for the old is that there is unlimited upside potiential: We may be facing a lot of old versus young issues if technology start to significantly extend lifetimes during this century. Bruce Sterling's novels explore this issue a good bit (Holy Fire and Schismatrix).
It is percisely because you pay for debit card fraud that it is not put on a prominant spot on the news.
Umm... I don't have any stats on the ratio of CC fraud dollars to Debit fraud dollars. Nor do I have any stats on the ratio of CC fraud newscoverage to Debit fraud newscoverage. So I can't evaluate whether there's really a "conspiracy" here to focus newscoverage in a way that will reduce fraud for corporations. That aside, I suspect that local news stations would find something like ATM fraud very intresting... they make their bread and butter playing bad cop/good cop. That is, they love to trump out scary stories and then try to play the hero role by asking "tough questions", etc. (As a further aside... I think I understand Bill O'Reilly now. He's the up-sized version local news's personality ethic combined with a big-media god complex.)
But seriously... what I mainly wanted to say in response to your post is this: when a big-ass company gets hit by fraud, the cost mostly gets redistributed to shareholders and customers. So unless you've had your checking account wiped clean by one of these fake ATM's, credit card fraud has had a much bigger impact on the quality of your life. You pay for it, left and right, but the costs are hidden.
I think a more general question about how Linux is going to topple Microsoft on the desktop is also warrented. The answer has to be innovation.
Keep in mind that innovation is treacherous ground: most innovative software won't find a significant usage niche. Reality has a way of turning neat research ideas into stupid user frustrations. This is not to critize efforts like Dashboard and Gnome Storage, but it's a given that you have to go through a lot of bad ideas to get the really good ideas. Just take Microsoft Word: the product that gave us both Clippy [bad!], and background spellchecking [good!].
The dynamics of hype and fear are probably a tad more complicate than you suppose. Granted that humans can be dishonest and greedy, but sometimes there is a fine line b/t opportunism [deciding to write a book about Y2K to take advantange of the market] and outright evil.
We have a more fundamental problem with how society takes and processes information in masse.... I'm not trying to blame the media of ill-intent, but the way the pick and choose b/t newstories is geared towards sensationalism.
Per the dot-com bust (which had a much greater impact on the current IT depression): greed was responsible for overfunding the different ventures that were attempted. The greed of the entrepreneurs (many of who took real risk and did a lot of work) isn't as important from an economic perspective. The blind faith of the marketplace was the real problem, and that's a lesson we should have learned during the 1920's.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly, but I doubt it. Even if they have though, the technology is fundamentally flawed. "Recognition" problems like have always had tremendous difficulty becoming workable, despite large economic incentives to make it work. Look at handwriting and voice recognition: they've come a long ways, but they're still useful only in limited situations; and they've probably gotten a lot more funding over the years than lie-recognition. On top of that, lie-recognition has a somewhat dubious psycho-phisological basis: how do you judge success during testing and development? It's not like handwriting, where it's relatively easy to collect legitimate test data from a wide variety of sources.
I may be wrong, but my speculation leads me to believe that this product is little more than snake oil.
The biggest problem I have with this is that humans are much better equipped to interpret the subtle visual and auditory cues that indicate a person is lying. It's bred into us from 100,000 years of cooperation and competition, alliance-making and backstabbing. You wouldn't give a police interrorgator a voice recognition device, would you? Not for a situation where they'll be standing there with their own two ears. Lying is the same thing: screw the fancy glasses and rely on human intution. If you've got money to splurge, spend it on developing tests to see who's better at lie-detecting and bias your hiring/personnel assignments accordingly.
It may be feasible, as the article suggests, for these glasses to aid the process, but they're more likely to distract the user from picking out the real cues.
The large company I work for introduced their own PTT/cell phone combo years before Nextel started marketing them to the general public, mainly for use by its employees and contractors.
It used to be that whenever I heard that characteristic studder beep (presumably invented by the marketing guys at Motorola, not Nextel) in a public place, I would look around expecting to see a fellow employee. Now I glance around and inevitably end up looking at some kids and a soccer mom. Kinda threw me off-balance at first.
PTT is very useful in the office environment... especially when half your team is geographically dispersed. It kinda serves the same purpose as "peeking over the cubical wall". It's less formal than the telephone.
Some of PTT's abuses are rather amusing: I went out to lunch w/two guys in my group. Their team is in a common PTT talkgroup. Riding in the car, one of them would talk to the rest of the group, and it would echo from the other guy's unit ~150 ms later. All sort of reverb and ricochet effects.
Presumably you can charge more for a full-motion video ad than a pop-up. Especially if delivery is "guaranteed" like they (quite falsely) claim.
Like you, I think their economics are somewhat dubious, but it's impossible to say w/o seeing the numbers.
The real problem here is that advertisers view consumers as passive particpants on whom ads can be forced. But it's not like that anymore. Viewers have more control over their information input and they will use it accordingly.
The logic is that opportunist can surround a "good" domain name with fake ones that presumably steal traffic going to the legitimate site. (E.g., just try misspelling "Motorola" and you'll see what I mean.)
If this is done as a satire or pun (like in this case?), then this behavior might be okay (legally) so long as certain aspects of trademark law are observed. However, if you're doing this in the hopes of blackmailing the company into buying your domain, then is predatory anti-social behavior. We as a society have a legimate intrest in preventing it.
Right or wrong, being quick to "name a price" is taken as evidence that you're trying to blackmail the company. In this case, Microsoft may be abusing the legal system in prosecuting a minor; hopefully the courts will take that into account.
On a side note: if you want to set up a satire site or do any other activity that walks the line, make sure you've got your ducks in a row legally. The law, while basically a good and necessary thing, is run and operated by your fellow humans... and most of them are all to willing to screw you over if it advances their politics/religion/career/pocketbooks.
Heh... I've had profs get me the exact same assignment I had received in another class (this is especially tends to happen when you're taking the graduate version of a class you took as an undergrad). You can bet I pull that from the archives, polish it up, and turn it in.
About the article though: cheating is a big problem. As one of the "good students", it was quite upsetting to TA a graduate course and find that over half the students were copying off of each other.
The particular approach used by web-based turnin services does lack a certain finesse, especially when the student is required to turn in his own work. A better approach would be to have a academia-sponsored research service that would do this on a not-for-profit basis. The service could be more responsive to the needs of individual discpilines (checking code is different from checking english papers is different from checking legal briefs). It would also be nice to see a code of conduct here, just to solidify the obvious things: detected cases of cheating should be human-reviewed; the reviewers should be able to compare the cases of cheating to the works which are presumed to have been plagarized; proper documentation and judical process should be followed in penalizing the student; the student should have a right to provide a defense for himself before charges are formally filed [e.g., before anything gets put on his permanent record]; etc.
The philosophical reason: For me, the computer is an extension of my brain. Giving me information and presuming you can control exactly what I do with it is like mind control.
The theoretical reason: DRM is fundamentally flawed: information theory dictates that its just not possible to give someone information with them being able to copy it. To put it in lay terms: "God wants information to be free."
The business reason: Widespread DRM usage will have annoying and costly ramifications for the business world: if people start writing documents or spreadsheets (or access databases) that employ these features, IT departments will be hit doubly hard by the "end-user development problem".
There are more, but these are some of the big ones, as I see it. And I'm sure that many have a "monetary" reason as well, though that one is highly questionable. ;-)
Umm... actually not. There was a soviet satellite that crashed into Canada some decades ago. It was a lot like the Columbia disaster... debris was scattered over a large area. Except it was radioactive debris. The cleanup effort was extensive, and the event did little to ease cold war tensions. Had that satellite hit the U.S. bread belt instead of the vast expanse of Candian wilderness, things could have gotten ugly. Things did NOT "work out just fine".
I'm not a luddite, but space travel is dangerous and accidents will happen. Global-contamination scenarios need to be taken seriously. Perhaps we can engineer around them and/or make the risk acceptable... that would be neat.
Some environmentalists are too dogmatic about their cause, but then... aren't many open source advocates dogmatic about theirs? I'm seeing a lot of responses in this forum to the effect that we shouldn't even consider environmental arguments because some people take it too far. Nonsense: engineering problems should be evaluated on technical merits, with due consideration given to risks and (yes...) the input of the "poor misled" general public.
Nonsense... a good introspection system can take into account its own existance. For instance, Java and C# both get it right w/their reflection mechanisms. Professor Eco should know better.
You can also check out kernel traffic, which has weekly summaries of the major events and decisions that occur on the list. This is probably your best bet, not that you're going to like the answer.
Most likely, it's an in-house piece of software written by each vendor. If they were smart, they might be working from a common spec or sharing custom libraries that were funded by some government or industry initiative.
That aside, the grandparent poster is still correct: this technology slows performance because Photoshop (or the OS, if you insist) has to scan every image and reference it against a database. If they're smart, they do a few quick "disqualification" checks that look for obvious indications that the image is not currency.
Knowledge artifacts, as we all know, are costly to produce but cheap to duplicate. What's more, information is very "leaky", and it impossible to prevent information from being replicated once you start selling it. There's an inherent contradiciton between this natural abundance and the scarcity of the marketplace. So we have kludges: copyright, patents, DRM, EULA's, NDA's, advertisments, etc.
While I agree with your premise ("people should be compensated for their work"), this is just one of many ideals that a society must manage. Here are a few more: the right to think. The right to think w/the assistance of a device. The right to compute. The right to share thoughts with others. This where patents become particularly grevious in my opinion: they give people a monopoly on an idea.
One of the original motivations of patents was to encourage the disclosure of how a new technology works so that others my learn from it. If the patent system wasn't so out of whack, perhaps this tradeoff (plus the reward to the inventors of the work) would make it worth the loss in individual freedom.
The MP3 patent is particularly bothersome: not only is it a patent that inhibits pure computation, it's something that would have been invented anyways, with or without a patent system. The economic motivation for wanting to compress music would have payed the way, even if we didn't have an army of information theorists, academians, and open source programmers working on the problem.
I use Ogg because Debian has packages that encode to it. I've been waiting for an ogg-equipped mp3 player, and I think 2004 will the year I finally get one. The new iRivers look pretty sweet...
If the browser respects the refresh and intervening proxies don't try to short-circuit it, the requsted page will be re-transmitted from the server. This event will be logged and it will show up a new page view if your log analyzer is dumb.
I don't actually play with web logs, but it should be easy enough to make them "smart" enough to filter out repeated requests from the same IP address. I imagine that most analyse software could handle this, but check your documentation... Also, depending on what information you want, there are smarter ways to get it than by analyzing the logs.
Hit counters and other graphics that get loaded with a page are a different story. I would imagine that most browsers don't reload these on a META-refresh request.
As a side note, most hit counters are not smart... you can hit the manual refresh and watch them increment.
Out of politeness, it would be good if the press release outlined how XFree86 expects to move forward politically, not technically. A firm sentence like "this is expected to have no impact on the release schedule since the core team is not involved in development" might go far.
I didn't read the article, so the announcement may have covered this, but I w ouldn't be surprised if it was lacking... it sounds like some of XFree86's problems have stemmed from miscommunications.
A few months ago, I did a lot of searching for a cross-platform GUI toolkit. Some toolkits try to use native widgets (a la Java's AWT), but most implement their own drawing, optionally with themeability (a la Java's Swing). Why this bias against native widgets? I'm going to take some wild guesses: (1) many of these cross-platform GUI toolkits were not intended to be cross-platform, but they got popular and somebody wanted a quick and dirty port of their application to windows... instead of reengineering the toolkit, it was easier to port it. (2) it's more appealing to build something new than to merely wrap existing toolkits... not always a good excuse, but commonly used, I would guess. (3) wrapping native widgets threatens to be a maintenance nightmare... if you were wrapping just one native GUI, it would be straightforward, but if you want to support several, it's going to be a painful mash of code that is constantly breaking due the intricate coupling b/t the toolkit and native code. Adding new platforms would take considerable effort. (4) It's much easier just to reduce coupling to a minimum by doing the barest amount of buffer swapping and event handling with the native windowing system... and this means drawing your own widgets. Also, (5) you sometimes might want to introduce architectural innovations that don't translate to the native API's well. (6) Finally, the toolkit can only properly support features which are in the intersection of all the native API's it supports... features that are not implemented by all native API's can be implemented by the toolkit, but then the toolkit must try to handle that case specially (or worse, the programmer has to know the ins and outs of how the toolkit behaves on different platforms).
In a word, I think many programmers are content to screw the users (or put the burden on the UI artists who have to make themable toolkits look like the real thing). It's not user-friendly, but it is expedient.
The solution is not to make better toolkits (dang we have enough of those already)... the solution is to decouple the UI from the application logic where possible. Standard file formats and network protocals, proper seperation logic into shared library components, proper use of remoting technology (CORBA, RPC, web services, etc.) all work to make this possible. Case in point: I run an imap server on my network and store all of my mail on it. I can access it via a web interface (squirrelmail), a GUI interface (kmail, mozilla, perhaps even Outlook), and a curses interface (mutt)... whichever happens to most convienient and closest at hand. This is not a solution for every problem, but it should work for your example (an IM application).
I worked it out with `bc`, but the lameness filter wouldn't let me post the message. There are about 8.667561 * 10^22 atoms in an ounce of pure gold. To get one ounce of gold from sea water, you'd have to process 1.7 trillion "drops"... whatever that means. Sounds like a lot.
I'm not a chemist, but it was a required subject in school.
Your post is convincingly written, yet deceptive. Yes, I can "take it and fork it", but if I'm a KDE-fan (and I am), I miss out on all the software that was written to target Gnome instead of KDE (especially stuff like taskbar extensions and themes that must run in their native desktop environment).
The fact is, this is a substantial loss for people who prefer KDE (assuming that UserLinux accomplishes its goals). It's not trivial as you imply.
Note: even though I exclusively use KDE, I support Bruce's decision to standardize on one desktop environment. It will hurt KDE, but it will probably help Linux.
Wow... I love how you can encounter a bad usage of a technique and dismiss it forever with one sweeping declarative statement.
Translucency deserves to be a fundamental part of the modern windowing system. It's not a "version 1" feature, but it is important. Here's why:
Reason 1: Eye Candy
A good designer can get a lot of eye-candy mileage out of translucency. Agreed... there's a lot of stupid stuff that designers can do with the effect, but on the whole, it can add some remarkably classy effects to a basic GUI design. Apple OS X uses this strategically, as does some themes I've seen for KDE.
Good, clean aesthetic design makes Linux more attractive to newbies... and, confess it, we hardcore geeks kinda like it too. Obviously, I am NOT talking about the gratitious use of hyperactive Flash animations and dorky custom GUI's for business tools (a la Kai's Powertools)... those things should crawl back to the marketing department that spawned them.
Reason 2: Usability
Beyond aesthetics, the appropriate use of translucency can help you convey more information to your users. One example: antialiased text. Other, better examples are waiting to be found as transparency creeps into more and more windowing systems/applicaitions.
Reason 3: Completeness
Deciding which features should or should not go into a toolset API can sometimes be a challenge. However, there tends to be a natural "stratification" to a lot of these features those... for instance, if you have an appliance with a "volume" feature, you generally expect it to have a "mute" feature too (even though it used to be absent in older TV sets, stereos, etc.). Likewise, if an app lets you "copy" and "delete" an object, you expect it to also give you a "cut" option, even though this is redundant. Graphics programmers must work with Red, Green, and Blue... since they are having to do a lot of work building up a raster image, they kind of expect to see Alpha there as well. If the graphics API doesn't put it there, they will have to go off and write it themselves. If the windowing system implements this, it just makes life that much easier and helps avoid some duplicate code.
Reason 4: Inevitablity/B>
Sometimes features have to be added to software because users demand it. You may think you've provided a good clean technical solution, but academic purity only oges so far in the real world.
Most people criticize the unix file system w/o realizing that a lot of thought has been put into its design.
The Michelson Morley experiment attempted to do this over a hundred years ago, but it didn't work. Subsequent experimentation has confirmed that "velocity relative to the universe" is not a meaningful idea.
Ditto... One thing that I've been slow to appreciate about Open Source is that... when I start to wonder how a piece of software works, I can actually go examine the source. This becomes especially enlightening when I'm trying to solve a common design problem or I run into trouble using an API. For instance, I browsed the KDE archive to figure out how to create new kscreensavers...
Um... no. The judges ruled that Lindows could not use that name in their countries. Just because you're a global corporation does not mean you can ignore local law. The judges do have the authority to enforce it, and this is a clear case where they should enforce trademark law.
Maybe it's just me, but purposely naming your product one-letter-off from your only significant competitor is just plain shady. What if Microsoft rolled out "Limux/BravoWolf Clustering Technology"? Phonetically, that's different from "Linux/Beowulf", but it's still unfair. Trademark law exists to prevent this bullshit.
"Lindows" is very obviously a slimey rip-off of Microsoft's flagship product. Lindows is something of a leech in many ways... from charging people a subscription to use a GUI apt interface against Debian's mirrors (e.g., instead of Lindow's setting up its own mirrors) to having everything run as root by default (which might tarnish Linux's security record). Be careful and objective before you jump to defend them.
Keep in mind that it's the old people who have all the money in this country. Of course, some of them have a lot more money than others. You can address this by "redistribution of wealth"... taxing richer and/or younger tax payers to cover the drugs and other medical expenses of the old.
There are no easy answers here... redistribution is unfair, but NOT redistributing causes problems too.
Once concern with providing medical care for the old is that there is unlimited upside potiential: We may be facing a lot of old versus young issues if technology start to significantly extend lifetimes during this century. Bruce Sterling's novels explore this issue a good bit (Holy Fire and Schismatrix).
Umm... I don't have any stats on the ratio of CC fraud dollars to Debit fraud dollars. Nor do I have any stats on the ratio of CC fraud newscoverage to Debit fraud newscoverage. So I can't evaluate whether there's really a "conspiracy" here to focus newscoverage in a way that will reduce fraud for corporations. That aside, I suspect that local news stations would find something like ATM fraud very intresting... they make their bread and butter playing bad cop/good cop. That is, they love to trump out scary stories and then try to play the hero role by asking "tough questions", etc. (As a further aside... I think I understand Bill O'Reilly now. He's the up-sized version local news's personality ethic combined with a big-media god complex.)
But seriously... what I mainly wanted to say in response to your post is this: when a big-ass company gets hit by fraud, the cost mostly gets redistributed to shareholders and customers. So unless you've had your checking account wiped clean by one of these fake ATM's, credit card fraud has had a much bigger impact on the quality of your life. You pay for it, left and right, but the costs are hidden.
Keep in mind that innovation is treacherous ground: most innovative software won't find a significant usage niche. Reality has a way of turning neat research ideas into stupid user frustrations. This is not to critize efforts like Dashboard and Gnome Storage, but it's a given that you have to go through a lot of bad ideas to get the really good ideas. Just take Microsoft Word: the product that gave us both Clippy [bad!], and background spellchecking [good!].
We have a more fundamental problem with how society takes and processes information in masse.... I'm not trying to blame the media of ill-intent, but the way the pick and choose b/t newstories is geared towards sensationalism.
Per the dot-com bust (which had a much greater impact on the current IT depression): greed was responsible for overfunding the different ventures that were attempted. The greed of the entrepreneurs (many of who took real risk and did a lot of work) isn't as important from an economic perspective. The blind faith of the marketplace was the real problem, and that's a lesson we should have learned during the 1920's.