I feel the need to point out the BBFC and the ESRB are not even close to the same thing. ESRB is a "voluntary" industry board where people can choose to either submit their works for rating or not. The BBFC is a government agency that is required to approve and rate media for sale within the UK. What Rockstart is struggling with is their game getting no rating from the BBFC which means they cannot legally sell their game in the UK.
The article does not make this same confusion, though the/. editor did.
Being an American living in Britian, Chip & PIN makes a lot of sense. Any sort of technology is available for fraud, but this is 100x better then the signature security as well as the PIN is not transmitted past the terminal because it is all handled through the card. Basically the CHIP on the card is asked if the entered PIN is valid and the chip is responsible for authorizing it, not some remote system that needs to be verified with.
While retailers could hack their terminal to swipe PINs, they would essentially need the physical card as well in order to use the collected PIN anywhere else and in most cases, the card never leaves the direct control of the card holder. Online retailers never ask for your PIN. They have to use the standard CCV2 code and authorizations with the bank to get their money.
So while someone could "sneak" my PIN it is totally useless without the physical card. I personally have reduced the amount of cash I carry with me, because everyone has Chip and PIN terminals and it is a lot easier to pay with that then worry about the cash. I really like it and think the States should adopt it.
Personally I find that totally stupid. That is a waste of everyones time.
I can't name the "large airline" that I did work for, but we made sure that up to 80 pieces of data about your transaction was transferred to the agent as well as the desktop application for the agent went directly to the "logical" screen they should be on to pick up where you left off.
Also, it does quietly route you based on the value you represent to the airline, and you do get routed to the "general" area if you choose not to identify yourself.
We did watch the message boards for comments about the solution after it was rolled out. It was amazing how many people conspire to subvert it without giving it a good chance. There are some technical limitations as well. When you deploy a system as large as this one was, the technology actually got old right before our eyes. The newest version of the speech recognition software can improve recognition in noisy situations and on cell phone by 20-30%, but we didn't have the luxery of upgrading the solution right after we rolled it out.
Just like operating systems, Linux kernels and the like, things change quickly in the speech industry. Also CPU cycles matters. The more type you can spending thinking about what someone said, the more likely you are to understand it. So you have to trade off user experience of long delays with the amount of CPU you want to throw at it. Typically you can find quad 3GHz processors handling maybe about 70-100 calls at a time. That is quite a lot of CPU to throw at it.
First, the reason why companies are attached to this is that a successful transaction is cheaper then a human transaction, period. In most cases 100x cheaper (even if it is sent to India). So even if only 10-20% of people use it, then it often pays for itself easily.
Of course the problem is that a lot of companies don't spend enough time (and therefore money) in making the systems work well. We often try to get containment (having someone do a full transaction in a voice system) to get above 60%. If we can do that, then we are doing well. That of course isn't the easiest thing to do. If you are good at it, there are a lot of tools to analyze what people are saying and how to respond, because invariably you will get it wrong at some point or another.
I get super frustrated myself when companies do stupid things. You have to be very careful with "speak anything" sort of interfaces. This is often called "open speech" and I still don't think the technology is quite there yet. It is much better to go with a "directed dialog" interface that give you 3-4 choices that are easy to understand.
Another thing that a lot of companies don't think about is integrating the self service system with a human being. Even if the technology is brilliant, there are going to be certain things that can't be done in the automated system. Most companies simply transfer the calls, and if you get lucky, your account number might travel with the call. Personally I like to focus on making a robust sort of integration, so that if you get you get 1/2 way through something and have to speak to a human, that human is given all the information about your transaction, so you don't have to start over and can pick up right where you left off.
The whole point, while I understand, is that he went to a North Carolina judge versus Judge Wells and the North Carolina judge didn't understand the case and opened the witness up to whatever SCO wanted for 4 hours. While this plays well for SCO, it really is the poor guys fault for finding a lawyer and a judge who shouldn't have stuck their nose in the business.
Actually it is hard for the Supream Court to ever weigh in on a narrow set of rules. Here they have agreed to take on the question of what is "obvious" and that is what is being argued in front of the court. This ruling will have a large impact on that the implications of the 1952 patent law should consider "obvious".
The Supream Court always decides the case based on the point of law being argued. They usually never broaden or narrow the scope. Often times you can be "right" but simply not have asked the proper question to the court, therefore not getting the answer you seek. It is a fun and interesting business...
It is interesting that it basically says someone who is skilled in the particular area would consider the invention obvious should not be awarded a patent. It should be interesting how much
I would say you are right to assume that things are changing too much and too fast to pick out a plan that includes the latest stuff.
My suggestion is that (and in this order):
Learn a good procedural programming language (e.g. C or Pascal)
Learn a good Object Oriented Language (e.g. C++, C# or Java)
Learn a good Scripting Language (e.g. Perl, PHP, etc)
Learn Regular Expressions
Learn some variety of XML to get the fundementals down
Learn XHTML
Now you should have a solid good base to learn just about anything. I would stay away from IDE's as much as possible and try to learn by hand, it is sort of doing division long hand before using the calculator.
Be aware that most technolgies like LAMP, AJAX, DHTML, etc are just applications and combinations of technologies that will be super easy to undertsand if you have a good grounding in the basics.
All I ask for is choice. Advertising in the US has subsidized or made free our entertainment. If Tivo goes the same direction, where their service is free or greatly reduced, I am all for it. But if I want to pay a premium price to avoid advertising, I should have that option as well.
Both satellite and cable have had it screwed up for a long time, advertisements and I am paying for the cable. At least stations like HBO and Showtime are still ad free, but the thing that TiVo should enable is a choice.
Are you surprised at the ignorance of the average slashdotter who doesn't realize that OSX is running on the Mach microkernel... All of this microkernal bashing and things like "If there was a decent microkernel out there I would use it" and there has been a modern OS that has been built on one. Amazing...
Scramjet's are a revolutionary "new" type of engine, they have just been difficult to get from the concept to pratical stage.
The biggest problem is a way to compress enough oxygen at top speeds to feed the fuel reaction without needing to carry oxygen on board (which would be a rocket).
I got the joke, but it doesn't mean I found it funny, as well as I thought I would contribute to the knowledge of the group while I was at it by clarifying the type of "partially" was not as in we are all mode of atoms reusable.
I played the Beast as it rolled out. It was a very strange sort of online thing. The problem was the game was a lot more fun then the movie turned out to be. I remember waiting around hours for things like trailers and the like to hit. I was part of the Cloudmaker's Yahoo! Group. Those were fun days, especially because I was bored out of my mind at work.
The problem is that their nature makes it very hard to be commercially viable on itself and their "ad-hoc" nature makes it hard to predict what the real market for something like this is. I say it will always be doomed for the "tie-in" realm and not really be a viable stand alone game experience.
I agree the article is interesting, but a couple things stand out. Four years is enough time to get samples to more broad and credible scientific community. Also, if you read the "structure" the essentially seem to be some sort of "carbon bubbles" with some iron, silicon and oxgyen. IMHO, it would appear more likely these are some sort of space dust versus space life. They claim a "cellular" type membrane, but they appear to be devoid of internal cellular scructures. Also, sitting in a jar for 4 years seems to have done nothing in decay or "procreation" for the items.
Some strange, yet unknown geothermal (either Earth based or extra terrestrial based) process could have produced these and they simply were transplanted. Eitehr way, it does sound interesting and that more people should take a look at this, but I highly doubt this is an example of panspermia.
I gotta get my Delphi plug in here. It would be great to have Borland but its weight behind OSX. IMO Delphi has always combined the power of of object oriented programming and a visual RAD environment while still maintain the ability to do the most low level stuff that you need. All the power, none of the crap. Visual Studio has taken a lot from Delphi (including 30+ Borland engineers a couple years ago).
There is still a lot to learn from Borland and Apple seems like the logical place to apply their design methods. It wouldn't be over difficult to apply Object Pascal to wrap all the Cocoa APIs and create a native environment.
There is a big difference between an company and the government collecting this information. While the government would only ask for it if it was needed, we lose control of the "needed". In a free society the government should not be handed this type of information. If we found an airline abusing it, we could simply refuse to fly the airline and public opinion would sway it. Once the government has this information, it is a lot harder to wrest control of it from them. No matter what the intentions are, or how nobel, there are certain things a government should not be allowed to do.
Actually the requirements to identify yourself to travel on a plane are rather vaugue as it is and is something organizations like the EFF have been fighting. We are supposed to be able to travel in between states without restriction, that is one of the fundemental rights we have as American citizens.
I also fail to see how, if there was a pandemic, the CDC would actually be able to usefully use this type of information. Especially if they don't have possesion of it unless they ask for it from the airlines. They would have to analyze vasts amounts of data in short amount of time and do what with it? The best form of mass communication has been the media, and who wouldn't carry a pandemic story?
Little or no value, high potential for governmental abuse, high potential for bad data means why would we allow our government to do this?
My comment [PDF] from a few years ago (via the EFF) still appears in the top 10 pages for my name when you search on Google.
This go around, I don't know if I am any more confident. Mine does fall under one of the valid reasons for legal circumvention of not being able to watch legit videos purchased in other regions. Even though the case was marked "Region 0" it appeaars it was encoded as "Region 2" and I live in "Region 1". The problem is the blanket exceptions. I would be fine if there was a "affermative defenses" clauses in the law that allowed you to get around it for things like making backup copies, transferring media, etc. The only one allowed is artistic or scientific pursuits because those laws appear to supercede the others.
That the desire to remove the technology also makes the job of testing easier, especially when dealing with security related code, I am sure that testing of this is more of annoyance. People expect it to be secure and unexploitable. Then you can focus your development and patches on new code.
This isn't just about making stuff compatible for the users. Then the developers can focus on MSIE quicky mode rendering instead of SSL 2.0!
If you are interested in something like that, check out Last.FM powered by AudioScrobbler. It will let you know other people who share your same musical interests. Instead of "rating" songs, it simply analyzes what you listen to and lets you know what others listen to.
AudioScrobbler plug-ins are available for many popular players.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel the need to point out the BBFC and the ESRB are not even close to the same thing. ESRB is a "voluntary" industry board where people can choose to either submit their works for rating or not. The BBFC is a government agency that is required to approve and rate media for sale within the UK. What Rockstart is struggling with is their game getting no rating from the BBFC which means they cannot legally sell their game in the UK.
/. editor did.
The article does not make this same confusion, though the
Being an American living in Britian, Chip & PIN makes a lot of sense. Any sort of technology is available for fraud, but this is 100x better then the signature security as well as the PIN is not transmitted past the terminal because it is all handled through the card. Basically the CHIP on the card is asked if the entered PIN is valid and the chip is responsible for authorizing it, not some remote system that needs to be verified with.
While retailers could hack their terminal to swipe PINs, they would essentially need the physical card as well in order to use the collected PIN anywhere else and in most cases, the card never leaves the direct control of the card holder. Online retailers never ask for your PIN. They have to use the standard CCV2 code and authorizations with the bank to get their money.
So while someone could "sneak" my PIN it is totally useless without the physical card. I personally have reduced the amount of cash I carry with me, because everyone has Chip and PIN terminals and it is a lot easier to pay with that then worry about the cash. I really like it and think the States should adopt it.
Personally I find that totally stupid. That is a waste of everyones time.
I can't name the "large airline" that I did work for, but we made sure that up to 80 pieces of data about your transaction was transferred to the agent as well as the desktop application for the agent went directly to the "logical" screen they should be on to pick up where you left off.
Also, it does quietly route you based on the value you represent to the airline, and you do get routed to the "general" area if you choose not to identify yourself.
We did watch the message boards for comments about the solution after it was rolled out. It was amazing how many people conspire to subvert it without giving it a good chance. There are some technical limitations as well. When you deploy a system as large as this one was, the technology actually got old right before our eyes. The newest version of the speech recognition software can improve recognition in noisy situations and on cell phone by 20-30%, but we didn't have the luxery of upgrading the solution right after we rolled it out.
Just like operating systems, Linux kernels and the like, things change quickly in the speech industry. Also CPU cycles matters. The more type you can spending thinking about what someone said, the more likely you are to understand it. So you have to trade off user experience of long delays with the amount of CPU you want to throw at it. Typically you can find quad 3GHz processors handling maybe about 70-100 calls at a time. That is quite a lot of CPU to throw at it.
I work in the industry...
First, the reason why companies are attached to this is that a successful transaction is cheaper then a human transaction, period. In most cases 100x cheaper (even if it is sent to India). So even if only 10-20% of people use it, then it often pays for itself easily.
Of course the problem is that a lot of companies don't spend enough time (and therefore money) in making the systems work well. We often try to get containment (having someone do a full transaction in a voice system) to get above 60%. If we can do that, then we are doing well. That of course isn't the easiest thing to do. If you are good at it, there are a lot of tools to analyze what people are saying and how to respond, because invariably you will get it wrong at some point or another.
I get super frustrated myself when companies do stupid things. You have to be very careful with "speak anything" sort of interfaces. This is often called "open speech" and I still don't think the technology is quite there yet. It is much better to go with a "directed dialog" interface that give you 3-4 choices that are easy to understand.
Another thing that a lot of companies don't think about is integrating the self service system with a human being. Even if the technology is brilliant, there are going to be certain things that can't be done in the automated system. Most companies simply transfer the calls, and if you get lucky, your account number might travel with the call. Personally I like to focus on making a robust sort of integration, so that if you get you get 1/2 way through something and have to speak to a human, that human is given all the information about your transaction, so you don't have to start over and can pick up right where you left off.
The whole point, while I understand, is that he went to a North Carolina judge versus Judge Wells and the North Carolina judge didn't understand the case and opened the witness up to whatever SCO wanted for 4 hours. While this plays well for SCO, it really is the poor guys fault for finding a lawyer and a judge who shouldn't have stuck their nose in the business.
When did we start confusing Patents with Trademarks... They are quite different things. The title is very misleading.
Actually it is hard for the Supream Court to ever weigh in on a narrow set of rules. Here they have agreed to take on the question of what is "obvious" and that is what is being argued in front of the court. This ruling will have a large impact on that the implications of the 1952 patent law should consider "obvious".
The Supream Court always decides the case based on the point of law being argued. They usually never broaden or narrow the scope. Often times you can be "right" but simply not have asked the proper question to the court, therefore not getting the answer you seek. It is a fun and interesting business...
It is interesting that it basically says someone who is skilled in the particular area would consider the invention obvious should not be awarded a patent. It should be interesting how much
My suggestion is that (and in this order):
Now you should have a solid good base to learn just about anything. I would stay away from IDE's as much as possible and try to learn by hand, it is sort of doing division long hand before using the calculator.
Be aware that most technolgies like LAMP, AJAX, DHTML, etc are just applications and combinations of technologies that will be super easy to undertsand if you have a good grounding in the basics.
All I ask for is choice. Advertising in the US has subsidized or made free our entertainment. If Tivo goes the same direction, where their service is free or greatly reduced, I am all for it. But if I want to pay a premium price to avoid advertising, I should have that option as well.
Both satellite and cable have had it screwed up for a long time, advertisements and I am paying for the cable. At least stations like HBO and Showtime are still ad free, but the thing that TiVo should enable is a choice.
OSX and Mach... Feature rich and robust enough for you?
Are you surprised at the ignorance of the average slashdotter who doesn't realize that OSX is running on the Mach microkernel... All of this microkernal bashing and things like "If there was a decent microkernel out there I would use it" and there has been a modern OS that has been built on one. Amazing...
Nor does OSX... Mach Microkernel...
Finally processors have gotten to the point to support such a robust architecture... just because it is faster doesn't make it more usable...
Hey, man, lay off the redbull!!!!!
Scramjet's are a revolutionary "new" type of engine, they have just been difficult to get from the concept to pratical stage.
The biggest problem is a way to compress enough oxygen at top speeds to feed the fuel reaction without needing to carry oxygen on board (which would be a rocket).
I got the joke, but it doesn't mean I found it funny, as well as I thought I would contribute to the knowledge of the group while I was at it by clarifying the type of "partially" was not as in we are all mode of atoms reusable.
Actually it is the "partially" in the sense that the first stage should parachute and be reused, but the second stage is space junk.
I played the Beast as it rolled out. It was a very strange sort of online thing. The problem was the game was a lot more fun then the movie turned out to be. I remember waiting around hours for things like trailers and the like to hit. I was part of the Cloudmaker's Yahoo! Group. Those were fun days, especially because I was bored out of my mind at work.
The problem is that their nature makes it very hard to be commercially viable on itself and their "ad-hoc" nature makes it hard to predict what the real market for something like this is. I say it will always be doomed for the "tie-in" realm and not really be a viable stand alone game experience.
I agree the article is interesting, but a couple things stand out. Four years is enough time to get samples to more broad and credible scientific community. Also, if you read the "structure" the essentially seem to be some sort of "carbon bubbles" with some iron, silicon and oxgyen. IMHO, it would appear more likely these are some sort of space dust versus space life. They claim a "cellular" type membrane, but they appear to be devoid of internal cellular scructures. Also, sitting in a jar for 4 years seems to have done nothing in decay or "procreation" for the items.
Some strange, yet unknown geothermal (either Earth based or extra terrestrial based) process could have produced these and they simply were transplanted. Eitehr way, it does sound interesting and that more people should take a look at this, but I highly doubt this is an example of panspermia.
I gotta get my Delphi plug in here. It would be great to have Borland but its weight behind OSX. IMO Delphi has always combined the power of of object oriented programming and a visual RAD environment while still maintain the ability to do the most low level stuff that you need. All the power, none of the crap. Visual Studio has taken a lot from Delphi (including 30+ Borland engineers a couple years ago).
There is still a lot to learn from Borland and Apple seems like the logical place to apply their design methods. It wouldn't be over difficult to apply Object Pascal to wrap all the Cocoa APIs and create a native environment.
There is a big difference between an company and the government collecting this information. While the government would only ask for it if it was needed, we lose control of the "needed". In a free society the government should not be handed this type of information. If we found an airline abusing it, we could simply refuse to fly the airline and public opinion would sway it. Once the government has this information, it is a lot harder to wrest control of it from them. No matter what the intentions are, or how nobel, there are certain things a government should not be allowed to do.
Actually the requirements to identify yourself to travel on a plane are rather vaugue as it is and is something organizations like the EFF have been fighting. We are supposed to be able to travel in between states without restriction, that is one of the fundemental rights we have as American citizens.
I also fail to see how, if there was a pandemic, the CDC would actually be able to usefully use this type of information. Especially if they don't have possesion of it unless they ask for it from the airlines. They would have to analyze vasts amounts of data in short amount of time and do what with it? The best form of mass communication has been the media, and who wouldn't carry a pandemic story?
Little or no value, high potential for governmental abuse, high potential for bad data means why would we allow our government to do this?
Did Declan pay someone at Slashdot!!!! Only a one article gap now!
My comment [PDF] from a few years ago (via the EFF) still appears in the top 10 pages for my name when you search on Google.
This go around, I don't know if I am any more confident. Mine does fall under one of the valid reasons for legal circumvention of not being able to watch legit videos purchased in other regions. Even though the case was marked "Region 0" it appeaars it was encoded as "Region 2" and I live in "Region 1". The problem is the blanket exceptions. I would be fine if there was a "affermative defenses" clauses in the law that allowed you to get around it for things like making backup copies, transferring media, etc. The only one allowed is artistic or scientific pursuits because those laws appear to supercede the others.
That the desire to remove the technology also makes the job of testing easier, especially when dealing with security related code, I am sure that testing of this is more of annoyance. People expect it to be secure and unexploitable. Then you can focus your development and patches on new code.
This isn't just about making stuff compatible for the users. Then the developers can focus on MSIE quicky mode rendering instead of SSL 2.0!
Zonk man, you even posted the duplicated to this article two days ago: here
I guess drugs do really cause short term memory loss...
In other news, Apple has decided to switch to Intel processors in 2006.
If you are interested in something like that, check out Last.FM powered by AudioScrobbler. It will let you know other people who share your same musical interests. Instead of "rating" songs, it simply analyzes what you listen to and lets you know what others listen to.
AudioScrobbler plug-ins are available for many popular players.