Setting aside the gushing tone of the submitter's post, Aurora is Adaptive Path's first open source design project and collaboration with Mozilla -- it's not all Mozilla.
Adaptive Path team designers and members discuss the design process extensively and in detail on their blog. More details in the Firehose
You might want to check out the Aurora Launch Party, too, if you're in San Francisco tonight
While in theory this sounds like a good idea, the reality would be a nightmare.
Moving more slowly than the rest of the traffic on a highway is a hazard and causes accidents. Undoubtedly such a system would take as much as a decade to phase in, increasing the mix of restricted acceleration cars with those that have normal acceleration.
Anyone who has tried to traverse an eight-lane highway at speed knows how important their ability to accelerate is.
Changing the way a critical control mechanism -- like the accelerator -- behaves during an emergency situation could easily make an accident far worse than it would otherwise be. I have been in situations where I have had to suddenly accelerate and far exceed the posted speed limit to avoid a major accident. Unless this system comes with the best artificial intelligence ever invented, then it's a recipe for disaster.
This is a perfect example of using technology as sledgehammer to solve a social problem that would more effectively be addressed by education and training.
The thing that I find interesting is that like Wendel/Fatal1ty, Patry/Grrrr was also an athlete before he got into gaming. In Patry's case, he was a competitive skiier.
Some analysis and context is usually beneficial to all. I've seen other commenters say that they haven't seen the original patent. I always find it helpful to read as many original source documents as possible although it's obvious that some people don't agree that it's important or useful information.
Or maybe it means that novices sign up to become familiar with interacting with the online world.
Once they've become comfortable with using a computer and an online service, they feel that they can take the training wheels off and find things on the Web for themselves. The most common Internet activities are e-mail, Web and chat. You don't need AOL for those.
AP's Larry Neumeister reports that the AOL employee who sold 92 million stolen e-mail addresses and screen names to spammers has been sentenced to one year and three months in prison. Jason Smathers sold the list to spammers for $28,000, who then proceeded to send as many as 7 billion spam messages. The prosecutor in the case estimated 'AOL suffered a loss of 10 cents for every 1,000 spam e-mails sent to subscribers.' The judge suggested that Smathers pay $84,000 in restitution but will decide on the final figure after AOL files details of financial losses due to increased staff, hardware and software costs. An interesting note: Judge Alvin Hellerstein said in December that he canceled his AOL subscription because he received too much spam.
2005-08-17 21:42:32 AOL E-mail Data Thief Gets 15 Months in Prison (Index,Spam) (rejected)
Microsoft says this virus has medium impact, not low as the submitter says. Is the submitter perhaps spreading some FUD of his own or did MS upgrade the threat?
I leave the FUD to others. Before accusing someone, check your facts.
The very best technical writers I've known were highly skilled writers with a rare ability to take highly complex and technical subject matter and communicate that information in simple (but not simplistic) and clear terms at the level appropriate to their audience.
Their most common complaint was that management (typically with engineering backgrounds) in the R&D operations that they were part of discounted or denigrated their role and contributions to products, instead of regarding them as the skilled usability professionals they are.
I don't know how many serious usability issues and critical bugs have been detected and resolved as a result of the work of those technical writers.
At a technical content review for an alpha-stage product line I saw one operations director who defined good documentation by the numbering system. Because the technical content was flawless, the only criticism he could come up with was, "Where's the numbering? Everyone knows that good documentation has to have good numbering!"
He followed that up with some comment about being short-staffed for developers on the team and "helping" the docs specialist by tasking some developers to take on future technical writing tasks. In other words, he was trying to get his developers take over the technical writing tasks and get rid of the docs specialist altogether. The only reason he felt he could do this was because of the attitude that anyone can write, and any developer who can write can also write good technical documentation. Unfortunately that attitude tends to be typical of many engineers.
While a book like this is definitely a great help to developers and scientists who want to improve their ability to communicate their ideas, I wonder how many managers of the sort I've described will use it as a tool to devalue the work of professional technical writers.
Just because you can write, it doesn't mean you can write well.
How does Netcraft define the word "site"? If it just means domains that resolve to a host, it's not very encouraging.
I would like to see a breakdown of the numbers that shows how many of these sites are linkspam farms, redirects and other such junk.
My suspicion is that most of the growth comes from from such "sites". The survey notes read:
Speculation in the market for domain names, buoyed by rising resale prices and the ability to generate revenue via pay-per-click advertising on parked domains.
Strong sales of online advertising, especially keyword-based contextual ads that support business models for both domain parking and commercial weblogs.
While individuals may use ad revenues to subsidize the cost of parking domains while they develop them, the new business model for advertising-filled parked domains and spam-filled "commercial weblogs" means that the amount of junk on the net will increase.
This also means that it's now even more lucrative for domain squatters to hold onto decent domains, which will increase their resources and abilities to register and squat on an even greater number of domains. After all, this is now an acceptable and viable business model that works against those who want to contribute something useful to the Internet. Squatters can now cite ad-revenue squats in arbitration cases.
For some reason the last part of the post was removed, which is important for context since it contradicts the article and shows that Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this vs. its competitors. The last part originally read:
... The article says that this type of game '... is not found on the shelves of video game or consumer electronic stores. Nor is it sold on the DVD's that deliver interactive 3-D fantasies to millions of PlayStation 2 and Xbox game consoles,' but Microsoft already has its Xbox Live Arcade.
Yes, Xbox 360 will include a casual games component, no doubt because of research Microsoft obtained from the Arcade product.
I thought about adding text to the write-up that pointed out the taxpaying public have already paid for those reports (and thousands more).
I decided against it for a few reasons:
Brevity
The Open CRS site discusses that point
I assumed that the 'staff of more than 700 and a nearly $100 million budget' quotation made it clear enough to Slashdot readers that the reports are funded by tax dollars
'Free' is much more economical than 'no additional charge'
I didn't want to editorialize so I left that to the comments section.
Biometrics sounds great, right up until the point you run into the desperate dude who is willing to take out your eyeball -- or in this case remove your hand...
The cut-off-the-hand-to-defeat-a-biometric-scanner approach is a typical Hollywood interpretation of a clever way to compromise biometrics.
Biometric systems that are worth using to protect assets of any value test for what is called "liveness" to make sure that someone's hand (or body part of choice) hasn't been severed to bypass the system.
That's not to say that biometric systems can't be attacked or circumvented, but anyone who relies exclusively on a scanner to provide security for valuable assets is just asking for a breach.
Multiple-factor authentication that includes a biometric component is a much more likely implementation as a security measure than a biometric system alone. That significantly reduces the chances of a security breach even if the biometric component is compromised.
"What?" and "How?" are for pragmatic, applied questions.
If you want a leader who truly understands you, what you do, and what you need to excel, "Why?" is a question that needs to be asked. It's a question that you should want and expect to be asked.
Renaissance men who know and understand every aspect of a company are few and far between. One of the reasons why we have specializations that nobody could have imagined in the past is because it is impractical (given the body of knowledge that exists) for any one person to be knowledgeable in all domains of expertise.
Don't forget that at one time you asked "Why?" When you stop asking that question, you stop growing.
The original post was edited down and the title truncated, which add a bit of context for those who don't bother to read the article, namely the sales methods of the service providers and the lack of tools to track usage.
It's not completely surprising that a profit-driven organization would fail to draw attention to deals, but it's in the carriers' long-term interest to do so. Slightly reduced monthly revenues is far more desirable than terminating an unpaid account, foresaking all future potential revenues, alienating a customer and generating negative word-of-mouth.
The last line of the original post reads:
... Carriers are also criticized for failure to "draw customers' attention to the cost-saving deals" and - in market leader Cingular's case - an inability to track the number and cost of text messages sent.
Howard Kurtz is a well-respected media reporter and media critic.
At the time I submitted the story, Kurtz's was the only article with any analysis that I found on the Web. It seems only fair to present the buyer's view since that of the bought was already linked.
Your metaphor is flawed, which tends to happen with selective editing and taking excerpts out of context. If you read on, there are also three more stories: from David Carr at the New York Times, an AP story, not to mention the NPR audio -- hardly a "two party system".
I'd like to point out that the story as posted edited out the attribution.
Editors: Please don't remove quotation marks where they are necessary because that effectively results in plagiarism. The words in quotes are not mine. They belong to the reporter.
Also, the reference to the interview with the Chairman of Satyam - an Indian outsourcer that has set up shop in Toronto - was removed. Knowing that Slashdotters often don't read the source articles, I included that detail as an incentive for people to read what the leader of a large outsourcing company has to say about this politicized business practice.
Original post follows:
Metro International newspapers Toronto edition reports that 'more Indian companies are opening back doors into the United States by setting up shop in Canada.' The issue of outsourcing, offshoring and nearshoring has become a hot issue, with the 2004 presidential election less than a week away. Candidate John Kerry has said he will close the tax loophole that makes it advantageous to outsource call centers. The article includes an interview with Ramalinga Raju, chairman of Satyam Computer Services Ltd., India's fourth-largest computer services firm.
Thawte was founded in 1995 and had about 35% of the digital certificate market at the time. VeriSign bought Thawte in 1999, turning VeriSign into a virtual monopoly with about 95% of the SSL digital certificate market.
Sony supports MP3 on its CD products, but not in its best digital products which is what most people think of when it comes to MP3/music players.
The real story here is shift in business strategy. Sony was the king of portable music after the introduction of the Walkman, but has seen its share slip. It seems that someone at Sony has realized that using a closed, proprietary standard and forcing customers to listen to their music collections how Sony wants them to quickly turns them into ex-customers.
That is big news for Sony. The Sony PSP is coming and Sony has decided to introduce yet another proprietary standard: the Universal Media Disc, which will be hardly universal if Sony is the only one that uses it.
Original post follows:
2004-09-22 16:20:39 Sony to Support MP3 (Index,Music) (rejected)
CNet/ZDNet reports that Sony has confirmed 'it is working to add native MP3 support to its portable music players,' reversing its previous strategy of native support for its proprietary ATRAC music file format only. Currently, MP3 files must be converted into ATRAC format to listen to them on Sony music players. MP3 support will be included on upcoming flash memory-based players, with a decision on hard drive based music players to come later, but there's no word if the Sony Connect music store will offer anything but ATRAC-encoded music. The strategy reversal is seen as a way to compete with Apple's dominant iPod, which supports both MP3 and its own proprietary Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. The story was originally reported by ZDNet France (French) reporters Christophe Guillemin and Pierre Labousset. The move comes on the heels of an IDC study that projects a $58 billion MP3 player market by 2008, with the greatest growth coming from flash memory players (press release).
The following business reasons might explain why they are releasing the Nintedo DS in North America first:
2004-09-21 09:42:51 Nintendo DS to Launch in N. America Nov. 21 @ $150 (Index,Games) (rejected)
John Markoff at the New York Times (mirror at CNet) reports that the Nintendo DS handheld game system will launch in North America on Nov. 21 with a retail price of almost $150. Apparently Nintendo hopes to avoid a direct sales confrontation with the Sony PSP, which will launch in Japan later this year. However, Walmart still lists availability of the Nintendo DS Platinum on Nov. 30 for $199.82. The retailer was probably caught unaware since Nintendo published its press release on BusinessWire at 1:30 AM Eastern Time.
Apologies for the cross-post but it seems relevant here.
Here's a bunch of links to the New York Times/ CNet, our games pages and the Walmart site which lists some differing information in a rejected post from VERY early this morning:
2004-09-21 09:42:51 Nintendo DS to Launch in N. America Nov. 21 @ $150 (Index,Games) (rejected)
John Markoff at the New York Times (mirror at CNet) reports that the Nintendo DS handheld game system will launch in North America on Nov. 21 with a retail price of almost $150. Apparently Nintendo hopes to avoid a direct sales confrontation with the Sony PSP, which will launch in Japan later this year. However, Walmart still lists availability of the Nintendo DS Platinum on Nov. 30 for $199.82. The retailer was probably caught unaware since Nintendo published its press release on BusinessWire at 1:30 AM Eastern Time.
A BlackBerry is a handheld, wireless mobile e-mail device and organizer manufactured by Research In Motion (RIM). It differs from other mobile e-mail devices because it uses a push-based technology to deliver e-mail, instead of the traditional model where you would have to manually retrieve e-mails from the server.
The newer models have mobile phones built in. They are very addictive to use and as a result have earned the nickname CrackBerry.
Slashdot Mirror
Setting aside the gushing tone of the submitter's post, Aurora is Adaptive Path's first open source design project and collaboration with Mozilla -- it's not all Mozilla.
Adaptive Path team designers and members discuss the design process extensively and in detail on their blog. More details in the Firehose
You might want to check out the Aurora Launch Party, too, if you're in San Francisco tonight
While in theory this sounds like a good idea, the reality would be a nightmare.
Moving more slowly than the rest of the traffic on a highway is a hazard and causes accidents. Undoubtedly such a system would take as much as a decade to phase in, increasing the mix of restricted acceleration cars with those that have normal acceleration.
Anyone who has tried to traverse an eight-lane highway at speed knows how important their ability to accelerate is.
Changing the way a critical control mechanism -- like the accelerator -- behaves during an emergency situation could easily make an accident far worse than it would otherwise be. I have been in situations where I have had to suddenly accelerate and far exceed the posted speed limit to avoid a major accident. Unless this system comes with the best artificial intelligence ever invented, then it's a recipe for disaster.
This is a perfect example of using technology as sledgehammer to solve a social problem that would more effectively be addressed by education and training.
Guillaume Patry is another professional gamer who was a StarCraft champ in South Korea. We did an interview with him last year and his view was particularly interesting as someone who was nearing the end of his gaming career.
The thing that I find interesting is that like Wendel/Fatal1ty, Patry/Grrrr was also an athlete before he got into gaming. In Patry's case, he was a competitive skiier.
Some analysis and context is usually beneficial to all. I've seen other commenters say that they haven't seen the original patent. I always find it helpful to read as many original source documents as possible although it's obvious that some people don't agree that it's important or useful information.
Or maybe it means that novices sign up to become familiar with interacting with the online world.
Once they've become comfortable with using a computer and an online service, they feel that they can take the training wheels off and find things on the Web for themselves. The most common Internet activities are e-mail, Web and chat. You don't need AOL for those.
AOL E-mail Data Thief Gets 15 Months in Prison
AP's Larry Neumeister reports that the AOL employee who sold 92 million stolen e-mail addresses and screen names to spammers has been sentenced to one year and three months in prison. Jason Smathers sold the list to spammers for $28,000, who then proceeded to send as many as 7 billion spam messages. The prosecutor in the case estimated 'AOL suffered a loss of 10 cents for every 1,000 spam e-mails sent to subscribers.' The judge suggested that Smathers pay $84,000 in restitution but will decide on the final figure after AOL files details of financial losses due to increased staff, hardware and software costs. An interesting note: Judge Alvin Hellerstein said in December that he canceled his AOL subscription because he received too much spam.
2005-08-17 21:42:32 AOL E-mail Data Thief Gets 15 Months in Prison (Index,Spam) (rejected)
Microsoft says this virus has medium impact, not low as the submitter says. Is the submitter perhaps spreading some FUD of his own or did MS upgrade the threat?
I leave the FUD to others. Before accusing someone, check your facts.
The very best technical writers I've known were highly skilled writers with a rare ability to take highly complex and technical subject matter and communicate that information in simple (but not simplistic) and clear terms at the level appropriate to their audience.
Their most common complaint was that management (typically with engineering backgrounds) in the R&D operations that they were part of discounted or denigrated their role and contributions to products, instead of regarding them as the skilled usability professionals they are.
I don't know how many serious usability issues and critical bugs have been detected and resolved as a result of the work of those technical writers.
At a technical content review for an alpha-stage product line I saw one operations director who defined good documentation by the numbering system. Because the technical content was flawless, the only criticism he could come up with was, "Where's the numbering? Everyone knows that good documentation has to have good numbering!"
He followed that up with some comment about being short-staffed for developers on the team and "helping" the docs specialist by tasking some developers to take on future technical writing tasks. In other words, he was trying to get his developers take over the technical writing tasks and get rid of the docs specialist altogether. The only reason he felt he could do this was because of the attitude that anyone can write, and any developer who can write can also write good technical documentation. Unfortunately that attitude tends to be typical of many engineers.
While a book like this is definitely a great help to developers and scientists who want to improve their ability to communicate their ideas, I wonder how many managers of the sort I've described will use it as a tool to devalue the work of professional technical writers.
Just because you can write, it doesn't mean you can write well.
How does Netcraft define the word "site"? If it just means domains that resolve to a host, it's not very encouraging. I would like to see a breakdown of the numbers that shows how many of these sites are linkspam farms, redirects and other such junk.
My suspicion is that most of the growth comes from from such "sites". The survey notes read:
While individuals may use ad revenues to subsidize the cost of parking domains while they develop them, the new business model for advertising-filled parked domains and spam-filled "commercial weblogs" means that the amount of junk on the net will increase.
This also means that it's now even more lucrative for domain squatters to hold onto decent domains, which will increase their resources and abilities to register and squat on an even greater number of domains. After all, this is now an acceptable and viable business model that works against those who want to contribute something useful to the Internet. Squatters can now cite ad-revenue squats in arbitration cases.
This isn't a positive development.
For some reason the last part of the post was removed, which is important for context since it contradicts the article and shows that Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this vs. its competitors. The last part originally read:
Yes, Xbox 360 will include a casual games component, no doubt because of research Microsoft obtained from the Arcade product.
timothy,
I thought about adding text to the write-up that pointed out the taxpaying public have already paid for those reports (and thousands more).
I decided against it for a few reasons:
But point taken.
Biometrics sounds great, right up until the point you run into the desperate dude who is willing to take out your eyeball -- or in this case remove your hand...
The cut-off-the-hand-to-defeat-a-biometric-scanner approach is a typical Hollywood interpretation of a clever way to compromise biometrics.
Biometric systems that are worth using to protect assets of any value test for what is called "liveness" to make sure that someone's hand (or body part of choice) hasn't been severed to bypass the system. That's not to say that biometric systems can't be attacked or circumvented, but anyone who relies exclusively on a scanner to provide security for valuable assets is just asking for a breach.
Multiple-factor authentication that includes a biometric component is a much more likely implementation as a security measure than a biometric system alone. That significantly reduces the chances of a security breach even if the biometric component is compromised.
We're going to be in Toronto during the VON Canada conference starting tomorrow and so will many VOIP thought leaders, including Asterisk/Digium founder & president Mark Spencer, who is delivering a keynote on DUNDi.
If you have any questions for them, we'll try to get interviews with as many as possible and pose the questions you ask.
Other speakers include:
Full speakers/session list.
Just post the question and who it's for below and we'll do out best to interview the people you want hear from.
"What?" and "How?" are for pragmatic, applied questions.
If you want a leader who truly understands you, what you do, and what you need to excel, "Why?" is a question that needs to be asked. It's a question that you should want and expect to be asked.
Renaissance men who know and understand every aspect of a company are few and far between. One of the reasons why we have specializations that nobody could have imagined in the past is because it is impractical (given the body of knowledge that exists) for any one person to be knowledgeable in all domains of expertise.
Don't forget that at one time you asked "Why?" When you stop asking that question, you stop growing.
Does anyone know if "surveillance data" also includes digital photography from other government satellites and the Blue Marble/Earth Observatory?
Are there any plans to extend this ban to cover these categories?
Napster is a public company. Nasdaq symbol NAPS
Here's a Coral-cached version of the tsunami deep water fish photos page.
The original post was edited down and the title truncated, which add a bit of context for those who don't bother to read the article, namely the sales methods of the service providers and the lack of tools to track usage.
It's not completely surprising that a profit-driven organization would fail to draw attention to deals, but it's in the carriers' long-term interest to do so. Slightly reduced monthly revenues is far more desirable than terminating an unpaid account, foresaking all future potential revenues, alienating a customer and generating negative word-of-mouth. The last line of the original post reads:
Howard Kurtz is a well-respected media reporter and media critic.
At the time I submitted the story, Kurtz's was the only article with any analysis that I found on the Web. It seems only fair to present the buyer's view since that of the bought was already linked.
Your metaphor is flawed, which tends to happen with selective editing and taking excerpts out of context. If you read on, there are also three more stories: from David Carr at the New York Times, an AP story, not to mention the NPR audio -- hardly a "two party system".
Feel free to link to another source.
I'd like to point out that the story as posted edited out the attribution.
Editors: Please don't remove quotation marks where they are necessary because that effectively results in plagiarism. The words in quotes are not mine. They belong to the reporter.
Also, the reference to the interview with the Chairman of Satyam - an Indian outsourcer that has set up shop in Toronto - was removed. Knowing that Slashdotters often don't read the source articles, I included that detail as an incentive for people to read what the leader of a large outsourcing company has to say about this politicized business practice.
Original post follows:
A minor correction.
Thawte was founded in 1995 and had about 35% of the digital certificate market at the time. VeriSign bought Thawte in 1999, turning VeriSign into a virtual monopoly with about 95% of the SSL digital certificate market.
Sony supports MP3 on its CD products, but not in its best digital products which is what most people think of when it comes to MP3/music players.
The real story here is shift in business strategy. Sony was the king of portable music after the introduction of the Walkman, but has seen its share slip. It seems that someone at Sony has realized that using a closed, proprietary standard and forcing customers to listen to their music collections how Sony wants them to quickly turns them into ex-customers.
That is big news for Sony. The Sony PSP is coming and Sony has decided to introduce yet another proprietary standard: the Universal Media Disc, which will be hardly universal if Sony is the only one that uses it.
Original post follows:
The following business reasons might explain why they are releasing the Nintedo DS in North America first:
Apologies for the cross-post but it seems relevant here.
Here's a bunch of links to the New York Times/ CNet, our games pages and the Walmart site which lists some differing information in a rejected post from VERY early this morning:
A BlackBerry is a handheld, wireless mobile e-mail device and organizer manufactured by Research In Motion (RIM). It differs from other mobile e-mail devices because it uses a push-based technology to deliver e-mail, instead of the traditional model where you would have to manually retrieve e-mails from the server.
The newer models have mobile phones built in. They are very addictive to use and as a result have earned the nickname CrackBerry.