What constitutes "proof"? If you have the signature in hand, does that suffice?
I'm still trying to figure out what good it does the credit card companies. Yes, they can often charge it back to the merchants, but not always, and they eat those losses. What do they gain? Are people going to jump ship if they were forced to show ID? They're already showing a card with their name on it, and the rest of the info on the mag strip. It's not like their civil liberties are suddenly even more in danger than they already were.
Why on earth would they do that? Isn't Visa, or the issuing bank, at risk of having to eat the cost if the card is used fraudulently?
Seems to me that they would be desperate to validate the card as much as possible. The cardholder's liability is limited, so somebody is eating the cost. Why should it be the merchant, if they're explicitly forbidden from taking the most rudimentary steps in preventing fraud?
So, it's not a product. It's not even a design for a product. It's an agreement for what you might do if you had an idea for a product. (It's a little hard to tell, because as far as I can tell, it's hosted on a non-open-hardware Commodore 64. Maybe if it were implemented on Open Hardware the web server might actually serve up the page.)
Whatever it is, it seems to be evolving fast, because it's at 1.1 already. It'll probably be thoroughly mature and passe before breakfast tomorrow.
The "sensitive intellectual property" turns out to be 18,384 files that employees had ripped from CD and DVD. The MPAA and RIAA estimate it's collectively worth $835,682,912, but I think they're exaggerating.
Oh, man. People remember the epically bad episodes, like The Savage Curtain or Spock's Brain or The Omega Glory. But we always just gloss over the plain old dumb ones, like "The Lights of Zetar" or "The Alternative Factor" or "A Taste of Armageddon".
TOS... I do love it, but oh, some days it's tough love.
Thank you for dredging that out of the dark recesses of my brain.
It's a good question. It does feel like there should be a market for a line of luxury computers. Pay more, get a faster system with better components, and no bloatware.
Such things do exist, but I think they're largely pushed out of the limelight by hordes of cheap computers. Especially since they're all ultimately running the same OS (Windows), which means that the experience will be largely the same anyway. Apple makes a genuinely different OS, and doesn't play around at all in the down-market game.
To make a car analogy: people seem intent on buying econoboxes. Apple sells the only Lexus (and it's not necessarily all that much better, at a significantly higher price). You'd think there would be a market for Infinitis and Cadillacs and such, but if they're still all Honda Civics with nicer trim and fewer stickers to scrape off, the market will be fairly limited.
Ultimately, people seem to go with what's on the screen, and the bloatware goes largely unnoticed by many. Those who notice are irritated, but for everybody else it's just another of the countless irrelevant features that every computer has, like blinking text in Word or the nine million privacy options in the browser.
Consumers hate bloatware. They also like getting computers for less than the price of the parts that go into it.
Companies don't change their policies because of letters, open or otherwise. Companies change their policies when they see consumers buying something else. Sometimes that "something else" is a lower price. Sometimes that "something else" is a nicer set of features, which might just include not having bloatware.
As long as the OEMs are being paid to include bloatware, they'll be able to score that lower price point. The bloatware may aggravate, but it's not driving the customers away fast enough to make it go away, either.
It's much like web sites. You're getting something cheap because you're looking at ads. You don't like it, go elsewhere.
I'd love to see Google link these high-res images to their Wikipedia pages. Or having the Wiki pages link to the high-res images. It would be kind of like a user-curated museum.
For that matter, if Wikipedia were the wrong place for it, a separate ArtWiki would be handy, especially if you could encourage art curators to help populate it. There might be an opportunity for special tools: "See where the layers of paint here indicate that a hand position was changed?" or "Here's a closeup of sfumato" or "Look at the detail on this couch, it's in thus-and-such style".
Yeah, I was rather oversimplifying. Executives have a lot of control over American corporations that really belongs to shareholders.
But unlike the peasants, you don't have to be in stocks. If you don't like the way it's run, sell. Or arrange a corporate coup, though the laws make that harder than it really should be.
Actually, I think it's "merely" $30B cash on hand. Still, that's a a LOT of money.
And there's a considerable fight over that. Having $30B cash on hand is not necessarily a good investment. If you can't pour it into that vaunted Apple-style R&D, maybe it's time to hand some out to the shareholders so that the cash can seek out more productive uses.
The company does make revenue, and you own a share of it. In principle, it could be handed out as dividends, but the shareholders collectively decide to reinvest it instead.
They could, in theory, divide it all up and hand it out. They don't ever actually have to do it; the company is worth more alive than dead. But that they could is the fundamental source of value.
The price of Apple's share's isn't completely out of line with its revenues. Even after its run-up, its price is only 18 times the revenues for the last 12 months. They could in theory be distributed, and if they were (and continued to do so for 18 years) you'd double your money. That corresponds to around 4% interest; not a huge win, but way better than the miserly.05% I'm getting in my bank account (or the.8% I could get by moving it to a CD).
As a whole, the company is very valuable, but illiquid. The stock market provides liquidity. It's a bit of a consensual hallucination; in theory, the other buyers could all dry up. But in practice, as long as the company holds underlying value, there will always be people willing to bid against each other to take your shares off your hands. And because they bid against each other, the price corresponds (roughly) to the amount of money the company expects to take in over time.
I have the belief, possibly mistaken, that I might enjoy it if I learned about it.
Even if it is mistaken, it's something other people enjoy, and I'd like to be able to share that with them. The way I do with, say, baseball: I don't particularly love it but I know enough about the game to enjoy going to one with other people. I may never go to an art gallery on my own, but it would be nice to not be bored when I go with others.
If nothing else, just chalk it up to insatiable curiosity. I don't think of any kind of knowledge as off-limits to me. I'd learn it all, if I had time. This is a sizeable chunk of the human experience that has for the most part eluded me. I'm limited only by my time, especially now that Google has helped bring part of it as close as my keyboard.
I don't really understand art. I would like to. These museums picked these paintings for a reason, and it goes beyond "they look pretty". (Some of 'em don't.)
I know that art requires context. How do these paintings relate to the culture they were painted in, the other paintings that were made at the same time, the paintings that came before?
I could, presumably, google them, and that would be a nice neutral answer. This is just the first step, and perhaps there's some API that will allow curators to include the high-res Google images in with whatever technique they use to provide context. Every museum is different, of course, and some will simply want to ignore the distractions while others would like a guided tour.
But on it's own, the technical feat of producing these images intrigues me as an engineer, but the paintings themselves are just fodder for screen wallpaper. I don't want to be a philistine, but somebody will have to help me out here.
How can you use a bayesian model to average results into a precise number?
"At least 250" is not a precise number.
Why are you bothering to do this from theories on top of inelegant theories?
Good question. Practically, nothing. It's one of those "maybe we'll figure out something important, like velcro or tang or space pens in the process" things. Plus, people really like to think about the origins and destination of the universe, even though the time scale (10^10 years) is far bigger than the scale of human life (10^2).
if the universe actually is that size What does that mean for the heat death of the universe?
Nothing, directly. The assumptions that went into the model call for a universe that undergoes heat death (justified by observation), and the conclusion doesn't alter that. The universe is still big and indefinitely expanding; it's just bigger than we realized.
I'd been under the impression that it really was something slipped into the Google engine, but I think I was wrong about that. I could have sworn I'd seen it myself, directly on the Google page. I remember it because I was irritated; I'm too familiar with European history to think of it as anything other than very poor taste, very chauvinist. But my memory appears to be faulty.
Dictionary makers deliberately introduce "mountweazels", fake words designed to catch people violating their copyrights. Map makers use "copyright traps", fake streets.
Sounds like Google did this on a one-time basis, but it seems to me that they could make it permanent. If nothing else, finding the mountweazels could be fun.
They already have a few jokes interspersed, like "anagram" and "french military victories". I wonder if Bing shows unexpected results for those.
I think the goal is to show that it's fast enough for some compute-intensive applications. Five years ago, using Javascript for anything heavier than GMail and Google Maps was a dubious proposition; the first versions of the online office suites were bears.
Flop-intensive applications may not be the best poster child for that, since it's not really fast enough for, say, a 3D first-person shooter. It's precisely the sort of thing for which native apps can still push the limits of a system. If they could get Doom running in an HTML5 box, that would be a demo worth watching.
All with you on that, but we're fighting a losing battle. It's standard journalistic puffery. "Barriers" are more exciting than "marks" or "levels". Those terms point out the irrelevance of the article itself: this level is arbitrary.
The fact that we're seeing record-breaking DDOS attacks is newsworthy, but for some reason "Record breaking DDOS attacks" seems too pedestrian for editors. Especially, perhaps, technology editors who live their lives on hype.
Re:Why is this surprising?
on
Julia Meets HTML5
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think the point is that Julia sets are compute-intensive, and they want to show off that "Modern browsers have optimized JavaScript execution up to the point where it is now possible to render in a browser fractals like Julia sets almost instantly" (to quote the web page rather than the freaking blog TFS linked to).
The demo shows a count of "flops". It's hardly instant on my laptop (an elderly beast), and 20 megaflops isn't exactly making GPUs quake in their boots, but it implies that running Real Applications written in Javascript is a reasonable thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
What constitutes "proof"? If you have the signature in hand, does that suffice?
I'm still trying to figure out what good it does the credit card companies. Yes, they can often charge it back to the merchants, but not always, and they eat those losses. What do they gain? Are people going to jump ship if they were forced to show ID? They're already showing a card with their name on it, and the rest of the info on the mag strip. It's not like their civil liberties are suddenly even more in danger than they already were.
Why on earth would they do that? Isn't Visa, or the issuing bank, at risk of having to eat the cost if the card is used fraudulently?
Seems to me that they would be desperate to validate the card as much as possible. The cardholder's liability is limited, so somebody is eating the cost. Why should it be the merchant, if they're explicitly forbidden from taking the most rudimentary steps in preventing fraud?
So, it's not a product. It's not even a design for a product. It's an agreement for what you might do if you had an idea for a product. (It's a little hard to tell, because as far as I can tell, it's hosted on a non-open-hardware Commodore 64. Maybe if it were implemented on Open Hardware the web server might actually serve up the page.)
Whatever it is, it seems to be evolving fast, because it's at 1.1 already. It'll probably be thoroughly mature and passe before breakfast tomorrow.
Us? Or them?
The "sensitive intellectual property" turns out to be 18,384 files that employees had ripped from CD and DVD. The MPAA and RIAA estimate it's collectively worth $835,682,912, but I think they're exaggerating.
Oh, man. People remember the epically bad episodes, like The Savage Curtain or Spock's Brain or The Omega Glory. But we always just gloss over the plain old dumb ones, like "The Lights of Zetar" or "The Alternative Factor" or "A Taste of Armageddon".
TOS... I do love it, but oh, some days it's tough love.
Thank you for dredging that out of the dark recesses of my brain.
Nonexistent product will change your life! Film at 11.
(Eleven years from now, that is. We think. Maybe the schedule will slip a bit.)
It's a good question. It does feel like there should be a market for a line of luxury computers. Pay more, get a faster system with better components, and no bloatware.
Such things do exist, but I think they're largely pushed out of the limelight by hordes of cheap computers. Especially since they're all ultimately running the same OS (Windows), which means that the experience will be largely the same anyway. Apple makes a genuinely different OS, and doesn't play around at all in the down-market game.
To make a car analogy: people seem intent on buying econoboxes. Apple sells the only Lexus (and it's not necessarily all that much better, at a significantly higher price). You'd think there would be a market for Infinitis and Cadillacs and such, but if they're still all Honda Civics with nicer trim and fewer stickers to scrape off, the market will be fairly limited.
Ultimately, people seem to go with what's on the screen, and the bloatware goes largely unnoticed by many. Those who notice are irritated, but for everybody else it's just another of the countless irrelevant features that every computer has, like blinking text in Word or the nine million privacy options in the browser.
Consumers hate bloatware. They also like getting computers for less than the price of the parts that go into it.
Companies don't change their policies because of letters, open or otherwise. Companies change their policies when they see consumers buying something else. Sometimes that "something else" is a lower price. Sometimes that "something else" is a nicer set of features, which might just include not having bloatware.
As long as the OEMs are being paid to include bloatware, they'll be able to score that lower price point. The bloatware may aggravate, but it's not driving the customers away fast enough to make it go away, either.
It's much like web sites. You're getting something cheap because you're looking at ads. You don't like it, go elsewhere.
I'd love to see Google link these high-res images to their Wikipedia pages. Or having the Wiki pages link to the high-res images. It would be kind of like a user-curated museum.
For that matter, if Wikipedia were the wrong place for it, a separate ArtWiki would be handy, especially if you could encourage art curators to help populate it. There might be an opportunity for special tools: "See where the layers of paint here indicate that a hand position was changed?" or "Here's a closeup of sfumato" or "Look at the detail on this couch, it's in thus-and-such style".
Here's one:
Yeah, I was rather oversimplifying. Executives have a lot of control over American corporations that really belongs to shareholders.
But unlike the peasants, you don't have to be in stocks. If you don't like the way it's run, sell. Or arrange a corporate coup, though the laws make that harder than it really should be.
Actually, I think it's "merely" $30B cash on hand. Still, that's a a LOT of money.
And there's a considerable fight over that. Having $30B cash on hand is not necessarily a good investment. If you can't pour it into that vaunted Apple-style R&D, maybe it's time to hand some out to the shareholders so that the cash can seek out more productive uses.
The company does make revenue, and you own a share of it. In principle, it could be handed out as dividends, but the shareholders collectively decide to reinvest it instead.
They could, in theory, divide it all up and hand it out. They don't ever actually have to do it; the company is worth more alive than dead. But that they could is the fundamental source of value.
The price of Apple's share's isn't completely out of line with its revenues. Even after its run-up, its price is only 18 times the revenues for the last 12 months. They could in theory be distributed, and if they were (and continued to do so for 18 years) you'd double your money. That corresponds to around 4% interest; not a huge win, but way better than the miserly .05% I'm getting in my bank account (or the .8% I could get by moving it to a CD).
As a whole, the company is very valuable, but illiquid. The stock market provides liquidity. It's a bit of a consensual hallucination; in theory, the other buyers could all dry up. But in practice, as long as the company holds underlying value, there will always be people willing to bid against each other to take your shares off your hands. And because they bid against each other, the price corresponds (roughly) to the amount of money the company expects to take in over time.
I have the belief, possibly mistaken, that I might enjoy it if I learned about it.
Even if it is mistaken, it's something other people enjoy, and I'd like to be able to share that with them. The way I do with, say, baseball: I don't particularly love it but I know enough about the game to enjoy going to one with other people. I may never go to an art gallery on my own, but it would be nice to not be bored when I go with others.
If nothing else, just chalk it up to insatiable curiosity. I don't think of any kind of knowledge as off-limits to me. I'd learn it all, if I had time. This is a sizeable chunk of the human experience that has for the most part eluded me. I'm limited only by my time, especially now that Google has helped bring part of it as close as my keyboard.
I don't really understand art. I would like to. These museums picked these paintings for a reason, and it goes beyond "they look pretty". (Some of 'em don't.)
I know that art requires context. How do these paintings relate to the culture they were painted in, the other paintings that were made at the same time, the paintings that came before?
I could, presumably, google them, and that would be a nice neutral answer. This is just the first step, and perhaps there's some API that will allow curators to include the high-res Google images in with whatever technique they use to provide context. Every museum is different, of course, and some will simply want to ignore the distractions while others would like a guided tour.
But on it's own, the technical feat of producing these images intrigues me as an engineer, but the paintings themselves are just fodder for screen wallpaper. I don't want to be a philistine, but somebody will have to help me out here.
And how do you deal with the floating shreds after sharpening?
How can you use a bayesian model to average results into a precise number?
"At least 250" is not a precise number.
Why are you bothering to do this from theories on top of inelegant theories?
Good question. Practically, nothing. It's one of those "maybe we'll figure out something important, like velcro or tang or space pens in the process" things. Plus, people really like to think about the origins and destination of the universe, even though the time scale (10^10 years) is far bigger than the scale of human life (10^2).
if the universe actually is that size What does that mean for the heat death of the universe?
Nothing, directly. The assumptions that went into the model call for a universe that undergoes heat death (justified by observation), and the conclusion doesn't alter that. The universe is still big and indefinitely expanding; it's just bigger than we realized.
I'd been under the impression that it really was something slipped into the Google engine, but I think I was wrong about that. I could have sworn I'd seen it myself, directly on the Google page. I remember it because I was irritated; I'm too familiar with European history to think of it as anything other than very poor taste, very chauvinist. But my memory appears to be faulty.
True. But catching your opponents stealing your results is very good marketing fodder. "Google: so good even Bing uses it."
Dictionary makers deliberately introduce "mountweazels", fake words designed to catch people violating their copyrights. Map makers use "copyright traps", fake streets.
Sounds like Google did this on a one-time basis, but it seems to me that they could make it permanent. If nothing else, finding the mountweazels could be fun.
They already have a few jokes interspersed, like "anagram" and "french military victories". I wonder if Bing shows unexpected results for those.
I think the goal is to show that it's fast enough for some compute-intensive applications. Five years ago, using Javascript for anything heavier than GMail and Google Maps was a dubious proposition; the first versions of the online office suites were bears.
Flop-intensive applications may not be the best poster child for that, since it's not really fast enough for, say, a 3D first-person shooter. It's precisely the sort of thing for which native apps can still push the limits of a system. If they could get Doom running in an HTML5 box, that would be a demo worth watching.
All with you on that, but we're fighting a losing battle. It's standard journalistic puffery. "Barriers" are more exciting than "marks" or "levels". Those terms point out the irrelevance of the article itself: this level is arbitrary.
The fact that we're seeing record-breaking DDOS attacks is newsworthy, but for some reason "Record breaking DDOS attacks" seems too pedestrian for editors. Especially, perhaps, technology editors who live their lives on hype.
I think the point is that Julia sets are compute-intensive, and they want to show off that "Modern browsers have optimized JavaScript execution up to the point where it is now possible to render in a browser fractals like Julia sets almost instantly" (to quote the web page rather than the freaking blog TFS linked to).
The demo shows a count of "flops". It's hardly instant on my laptop (an elderly beast), and 20 megaflops isn't exactly making GPUs quake in their boots, but it implies that running Real Applications written in Javascript is a reasonable thing to do.
Here's a wacky idea: a link that is (a) not slashdotted, and (b) not to a blog posting.
Google Labs