... Of course, there is an argument that just giving the hardware specs and saying 'good luck' is the open source route..
Since if RMS etc are to be believed hundreds of us(*) then jump in, write free (beer/speach) drivers, if something does not work it gets tweaked/fixed etc..
[Of course that is a bit trollish] What shows a true commitment to the open-source customers is community development, with the manufacturer releasing HW specs, but with them also making some technical resources available to answer the really difficult questions driver development often poses (awkward timings/settings/etc..)
(*) Well.. not me obviously, I can't program C/CPP/ASM at all, and I guess nobody wants drivers written in Perl;)
There's a fair amount of other neat stuff at Greenwich, too.
I got taken there several times as a kid. The 'neatest' thing to me was always standing on the meridian line (0 Longitude) and saying 'This foot is East and that foot is West..' at the time it seemed like the most amazing thing to do..
The Guardian is a UK newspaper not owned by News Corp. and with no great love of them..
So keep this in mind when reading this that there will be a 'Lets take the piss out of NewsCorp' slant to this, since Newspapers gently dissing each other is par for the course (certainly in the UK, and I don't see it being different elsewhere).
Having said that, I actually Read the Guardian site almost every day, It's my favorite UK newspaper (because it has a gentle socialist bias), but I take everything I read, everywhere, with a pinch of salt. I always try to remember the source since it always alters the presentation of 'facts' and often which 'facts' get presented in the first place..
Wrong. Late fees, which frequently cost more than the original rental, are a major revenue stream for Blockbuster and other movie rental companies. They don't have any incentive to back this sort of technology.
There is another point about this, by having to return stuff to the shop I'll bet they get a reasonable number of additional rentals from impulse decisions while returning itemsf.. At least for those who do it during opening hours.
On the other hand, if returns stop they can reduce staff counts, this may seve them more money than they loose..
But they still have ways to get additional revenue streams to partially replace these. How about an environmental charge, similar to a deposit on glass bottles (common here in Europe). You pay extra 'up front' for the disk, but if you bring it back this gets refunded (CD's etc have a very small recyclable content/value, but since when have people in the entertainment biz. let the facts get in the way of profit?). This way they get extra money from the lazy and drag you back into the shop too..
How about moderation 'inheritance' for a author replying to their own posts..
So: You post a great comment, and it gets moderated up to (Score:5, Genius). Then you notice a mistake, or want to clarify something, so you post a reply which automatically gets a (Score:5 Inherited) since it is related to a post where you have already had good moderation. But after that it is on it's own, i.e. it can be modded down if it is a troll, or just plain stupid..
You would need some back-end logic, such as only inheriting on direct reply's (one level below the original post), and not allowing double-inheritance (i.e. moderation can only be inherited by -one- same author reply, this will prevent a troll/lamer hijacking an entire thread). And probably an automatic loss of this feature for people who's -inherited moderation- posts regularly get modded down to zero (they loose the privilige since they are probably abusing it).
I don't want editing as such, revisionism is a bad thing.. and would definitely be abused by many of the trolls and lamers that crawl out of the woodwork on/. like forums.
But an ability to annotate your -own- posts (i.e. an ability to add timestamped, limited length comments to the text of the post so they are visible to everyone viewing the post) would be very cool. Allowing for apologies/corrections/additional info to be placed in the comment by it's author, without despoiling the original comment..
There's no reason actors couldn't trademark their image -- I'd be surprised if some don't already
Princess Diana's memorial fund has been having a big fight about this since her death (Ok, she was not an actor, or at least not a very good one..)
This has raised all sorts of discussions in the UK and abroad about trying to copyright 'image'. In short, the use of her image for crap merchandising appears to be blocked in the UK (unless it is 'official' crap merchandising of course). But in the US some bunch of jokers were allowed to make a 'singing Diana memorial plate', very tasteful I'm sure.
The BBC has done some articles on this, start here.
It's cool, I was going from memory of the reports at the time, so I would not have been at all surprised if a different explanation had arrived later (and cumulative errors actually sounds more likely to me, I've seen similar effects in feedback modelling systems I once worked with).
It just seemed like a fairly relevent example of the great and good cocking up.. There are others, but of course it's the failures that we remember, and we forget the vast majority of times when everything goes perfectly (because the same people got it right). Perhaps the real lesson here is that success needs more recognition..
PS. 100% with you on the quality of news reporting (look here), Always amazes me that the the news media are so quick to critisize errors in others, when they are the least accurate of all..
Given that a lot of smart people were working on this for a long time, I doubt it was "titanically stupid mistake".
Unlike, say, sending a probe all the way to Mars then having it burn up because two teams used different measurement units and forgot to convert them?
History is full of examples of very gifted and smart people making very simple but catastrophic mistakes, or totally failing to anticipate the consequences of their actions, this looks like another of them. At least nobody died in this one!
No matter how hard we (humanity) tries, things will go wrong, given the complexity of todays world it is probably unavoidable. But it is important that we at least learn.. And that is the good thing about this article, they are going to find the 'what' and 'why', and (if I read it correctly) make sure it does not happen again.
For once I find myself in very close agreement with JK. I've been trying to explain this to others for years and to be honest it is a very hard message to get across, so many people think 'information is good, speedy information is better' and switch off if you start gainsaying this.
So I devised an example, I ask them to think of any time the mass media has ever reported on a subject they understand really well. I then ask them to think about how it was reported.. Was it accurate? Did it actually explain anything? or was it just trite generalisations interspersed with political, commercial and personal bias?
Since the answers to those three questions are generally 'No', 'No' and 'Yes', the next step is to ask them if they really believe that the media reports anything else (stuff they do not understand so well) with any level of accuracy and objectivity.
This is a useful little argument, and while there are exceptions, it has helped me convince several of my peers and family to be a lot more critical and subjective about 'facts' they hear on the mass media.
SMS messages aren't going to take too long to relay
Individual messages, maybe not. But thousands of messages -will- hit your battery.
SMS is little used in the US (people still think 'bleeper' for messaging services). But in the rest of the world, especially Europe and Japan, SMS is king.
I send/recieve 5-10 a day and think nothing of it, and I am a light SMS user. SMS actually comprises a signifigent fraction of all network traffic over here (a year ago I heard figures of over 6 million SMS's a day, in a country who's population is only 18 million. The Netherlands)
Nice troll! or prehaps you're a spammer yourself? whatever, I don't care, you're a looser.
Intellegent people have no problem spotting spam, I've never had to pause in deciding if an email was legit, or just spam. But there again, I'm intellegent.
Very cheap units have a simple remote control with limited functionality and a few buttons. Cheap units where they want to bump the price a little has a simple remote control with limited functionality and HUNDREDS of buttons. Mid price has mediocre functionality, fewer buttons, and a LCD/swivel cover/joystick. The best stuff has high functionality, just enough buttons for that, and nothing else.
As Terry Prattchett said in Good Omens 'He had a sound system so expensive the amp was just a heavy black cube with a volume contol and nothing else' (iirc).
And no.. having a 'eject' button on a CD/DVD is not high functionality, it is a total waste of everybody's time.
Many people, myself included, have no problem with authorities having powers so long as there is proper oversight (warrents, involvement of judiciary, eventual reporting of activity, etc..). But you -cannot- trust paranoid services like the NSA/MI5/Mossad to do this volanterraly, they always seem to have to have it forced on them (and often appeat to ignore it anyway).
Those who are currently pushing for massive secret surveilance are wrong, those who are pushing for no survelkiance ever.. are also wrong.
A balance must be struck, and one we can trust.
At present I do not trust the branches of government that want to erod my freedom and I'll fight them all the way. By taking an extreme position myself, I help balance the scales a bit.
This is despite the fact that I'd actually accept some erosion of specific liberties if rights were given -back- in some other areas, and accountability and trust became something other than a NSA spin campaign.
IIRC, this works as a extradition replacement, so the police and courts in the country where the offence is commited pass the relevent data to the UK police. Rather than request extradition, which is slower and more expensive for them. The standards of proof still have to match UK law, and come through the official channels with everything gathered under oath and attested to by the courts. This aspect of the law was debated and modified a lot to address the more obvious concerns. But yes, you might end up needing to hire legal representatives in both countries..
If he is convicted, it would set a strange precident;
Quite a few countries (UK for instance) have laws that allow 'child sex tourists' to be convicted in their home country for paedophile acts comitted in countries with less-strong child protection, as if the crime was comitted domestically. This worries me a bit [but I tend to fall in with the mob in saying they deserve whatever they get, I'd just prefer it if the 'peds got time (and a bloody good buggering) in the Bancock Hilton, rather then Spacklerweg Hilton (a very comfortable prison here in Amsterdam)].
And yes, I live in the Netherlands too, US customs can already get really 'funny' about that. I have heard that some countries (Singapore?) have laws where they can, and do, test returning citizens (not forigners) for THC (cannabis/mary J) use and convict them after they return from the Netherlands.
Remember, you'll never hear a politician saying 'We need fewer laws' (Unless they have been bribed by a big corporation who do not like a law that puts power back to consumers).
I dont get it, I had a quick look at the PARCS stuff and I cannot find any mention of relativistic effects..
However, they seem to be talking of comparing clocks which are moving at different speeds relative to each other. Presumably, given the sort of accuracy they are trying to achieve, these clocks will suffer signifigent relativistic drift from each other. I know that relativistic effects have been observed with a pair of clocks, one on the ground, and another in a Jet doing a large number of long trips. IIRC They actually confirmed the predicted relative time dilation effects by experiment that way.
Everybody just needs to email their slashdot username/password to me
Sure! Just put your email, unfudged, in a reply to this and I'm sure lots of people will be emailing you real soon, with emails that will 'CHANGE YOUR LIFE BY MAKING $MILLIONS WHILE SVCRATCHING YOUR ARSE'.
Slashdot Mirror
... Of course, there is an argument that just giving the hardware specs and saying 'good luck' is the open source route..
;)
Since if RMS etc are to be believed hundreds of us(*) then jump in, write free (beer/speach) drivers, if something does not work it gets tweaked/fixed etc..
[Of course that is a bit trollish] What shows a true commitment to the open-source customers is community development, with the manufacturer releasing HW specs, but with them also making some technical resources available to answer the really difficult questions driver development often poses (awkward timings/settings/etc..)
(*) Well.. not me obviously, I can't program C/CPP/ASM at all, and I guess nobody wants drivers written in Perl
There's a fair amount of other neat stuff at Greenwich, too.
I got taken there several times as a kid. The 'neatest' thing to me was always standing on the meridian line (0 Longitude) and saying 'This foot is East and that foot is West..' at the time it seemed like the most amazing thing to do..
The Guardian is a UK newspaper not owned by News Corp. and with no great love of them..
So keep this in mind when reading this that there will be a 'Lets take the piss out of NewsCorp' slant to this, since Newspapers gently dissing each other is par for the course (certainly in the UK, and I don't see it being different elsewhere).
Having said that, I actually Read the Guardian site almost every day, It's my favorite UK newspaper (because it has a gentle socialist bias), but I take everything I read, everywhere, with a pinch of salt. I always try to remember the source since it always alters the presentation of 'facts' and often which 'facts' get presented in the first place..
Wrong. Late fees, which frequently cost more than the original rental, are a major revenue stream for Blockbuster and other movie rental companies. They don't have any incentive to back this sort of technology.
There is another point about this, by having to return stuff to the shop I'll bet they get a reasonable number of additional rentals from impulse decisions while returning itemsf.. At least for those who do it during opening hours.
On the other hand, if returns stop they can reduce staff counts, this may seve them more money than they loose..
But they still have ways to get additional revenue streams to partially replace these. How about an environmental charge, similar to a deposit on glass bottles (common here in Europe). You pay extra 'up front' for the disk, but if you bring it back this gets refunded (CD's etc have a very small recyclable content/value, but since when have people in the entertainment biz. let the facts get in the way of profit?). This way they get extra money from the lazy and drag you back into the shop too..
Meybe I ought to patent this as a business model?
Here's an idea..
How about moderation 'inheritance' for a author replying to their own posts..
So: You post a great comment, and it gets moderated up to (Score:5, Genius). Then you notice a mistake, or want to clarify something, so you post a reply which automatically gets a (Score:5 Inherited) since it is related to a post where you have already had good moderation. But after that it is on it's own, i.e. it can be modded down if it is a troll, or just plain stupid..
You would need some back-end logic, such as only inheriting on direct reply's (one level below the original post), and not allowing double-inheritance (i.e. moderation can only be inherited by -one- same author reply, this will prevent a troll/lamer hijacking an entire thread). And probably an automatic loss of this feature for people who's -inherited moderation- posts regularly get modded down to zero (they loose the privilige since they are probably abusing it).
I don't want editing as such, revisionism is a bad thing.. and would definitely be abused by many of the trolls and lamers that crawl out of the woodwork on /. like forums.
But an ability to annotate your -own- posts (i.e. an ability to add timestamped, limited length comments to the text of the post so they are visible to everyone viewing the post) would be very cool. Allowing for apologies/corrections/additional info to be placed in the comment by it's author, without despoiling the original comment..
There's no reason actors couldn't trademark their image -- I'd be surprised if some don't already
Princess Diana's memorial fund has been having a big fight about this since her death (Ok, she was not an actor, or at least not a very good one..)
This has raised all sorts of discussions in the UK and abroad about trying to copyright 'image'. In short, the use of her image for crap merchandising appears to be blocked in the UK (unless it is 'official' crap merchandising of course). But in the US some bunch of jokers were allowed to make a 'singing Diana memorial plate', very tasteful I'm sure.
The BBC has done some articles on this, start here.
It's cool, I was going from memory of the reports at the time, so I would not have been at all surprised if a different explanation had arrived later (and cumulative errors actually sounds more likely to me, I've seen similar effects in feedback modelling systems I once worked with).
It just seemed like a fairly relevent example of the great and good cocking up.. There are others, but of course it's the failures that we remember, and we forget the vast majority of times when everything goes perfectly (because the same people got it right). Perhaps the real lesson here is that success needs more recognition..
PS. 100% with you on the quality of news reporting (look here), Always amazes me that the the news media are so quick to critisize errors in others, when they are the least accurate of all..
Given that a lot of smart people were working on this for a long time, I doubt it was "titanically stupid mistake".
Unlike, say, sending a probe all the way to Mars then having it burn up because two teams used different measurement units and forgot to convert them?
History is full of examples of very gifted and smart people making very simple but catastrophic mistakes, or totally failing to anticipate the consequences of their actions, this looks like another of them. At least nobody died in this one!
No matter how hard we (humanity) tries, things will go wrong, given the complexity of todays world it is probably unavoidable. But it is important that we at least learn.. And that is the good thing about this article, they are going to find the 'what' and 'why', and (if I read it correctly) make sure it does not happen again.
For once I find myself in very close agreement with JK. I've been trying to explain this to others for years and to be honest it is a very hard message to get across, so many people think 'information is good, speedy information is better' and switch off if you start gainsaying this.
So I devised an example, I ask them to think of any time the mass media has ever reported on a subject they understand really well. I then ask them to think about how it was reported.. Was it accurate? Did it actually explain anything? or was it just trite generalisations interspersed with political, commercial and personal bias?
Since the answers to those three questions are generally 'No', 'No' and 'Yes', the next step is to ask them if they really believe that the media reports anything else (stuff they do not understand so well) with any level of accuracy and objectivity.
This is a useful little argument, and while there are exceptions, it has helped me convince several of my peers and family to be a lot more critical and subjective about 'facts' they hear on the mass media.
SMS messages aren't going to take too long to relay
Individual messages, maybe not. But thousands of messages -will- hit your battery.
SMS is little used in the US (people still think 'bleeper' for messaging services). But in the rest of the world, especially Europe and Japan, SMS is king.
I send/recieve 5-10 a day and think nothing of it, and I am a light SMS user. SMS actually comprises a signifigent fraction of all network traffic over here (a year ago I heard figures of over 6 million SMS's a day, in a country who's population is only 18 million. The Netherlands)
whatever they decide is "spam"
Nice troll! or prehaps you're a spammer yourself? whatever, I don't care, you're a looser.
Intellegent people have no problem spotting spam, I've never had to pause in deciding if an email was legit, or just spam. But there again, I'm intellegent.
There seems to be some sort of design law on this
Very cheap units have a simple remote control with limited functionality and a few buttons. Cheap units where they want to bump the price a little has a simple remote control with limited functionality and HUNDREDS of buttons. Mid price has mediocre functionality, fewer buttons, and a LCD/swivel cover/joystick. The best stuff has high functionality, just enough buttons for that, and nothing else.
As Terry Prattchett said in Good Omens 'He had a sound system so expensive the amp was just a heavy black cube with a volume contol and nothing else' (iirc).
And no.. having a 'eject' button on a CD/DVD is not high functionality, it is a total waste of everybody's time.
Many people, myself included, have no problem with authorities having powers so long as there is proper oversight (warrents, involvement of judiciary, eventual reporting of activity, etc..). But you -cannot- trust paranoid services like the NSA/MI5/Mossad to do this volanterraly, they always seem to have to have it forced on them (and often appeat to ignore it anyway).
Those who are currently pushing for massive secret surveilance are wrong, those who are pushing for no survelkiance ever.. are also wrong.
A balance must be struck, and one we can trust.
At present I do not trust the branches of government that want to erod my freedom and I'll fight them all the way. By taking an extreme position myself, I help balance the scales a bit.
This is despite the fact that I'd actually accept some erosion of specific liberties if rights were given -back- in some other areas, and accountability and trust became something other than a NSA spin campaign.
You're right (BBC reporting that too).
KNEE_JERK_REACTION_MODE==FALSE
Hope that holds true for Dubbyah too..
You can look at this (about Afghan civil war) for more details on what is going on there recently.
Who says they are bombing civilians?
Experience.
They're not aiming at civilians, but such attacks rarely hurt those who deserve it.
Here in the UK I'm hearing reports that missiles are falling in Kabul.
Two wrongs don't make a right. The civilians of Afghanistan deserve it no more than the civilians of New York.
Naah, It's just an F14 in a tutu (sounds like a Smiths song).
The patch is availible here
Not any more it's not.. Looks like Microsoft have started responding, probably moved it more prominent..
Wonder when the 'Red Menace' spin from Mr gates sympathisers in the Gvt. will start.
EZ
IIRC, this works as a extradition replacement, so the police and courts in the country where the offence is commited pass the relevent data to the UK police. Rather than request extradition, which is slower and more expensive for them. The standards of proof still have to match UK law, and come through the official channels with everything gathered under oath and attested to by the courts. This aspect of the law was debated and modified a lot to address the more obvious concerns. But yes, you might end up needing to hire legal representatives in both countries..
EZ
If he is convicted, it would set a strange precident;
Quite a few countries (UK for instance) have laws that allow 'child sex tourists' to be convicted in their home country for paedophile acts comitted in countries with less-strong child protection, as if the crime was comitted domestically. This worries me a bit [but I tend to fall in with the mob in saying they deserve whatever they get, I'd just prefer it if the 'peds got time (and a bloody good buggering) in the Bancock Hilton, rather then Spacklerweg Hilton (a very comfortable prison here in Amsterdam)].
And yes, I live in the Netherlands too, US customs can already get really 'funny' about that. I have heard that some countries (Singapore?) have laws where they can, and do, test returning citizens (not forigners) for THC (cannabis/mary J) use and convict them after they return from the Netherlands.
Remember, you'll never hear a politician saying 'We need fewer laws' (Unless they have been bribed by a big corporation who do not like a law that puts power back to consumers).
EZ
I dont get it, I had a quick look at the PARCS stuff and I cannot find any mention of relativistic effects..
However, they seem to be talking of comparing clocks which are moving at different speeds relative to each other. Presumably, given the sort of accuracy they are trying to achieve, these clocks will suffer signifigent relativistic drift from each other. I know that relativistic effects have been observed with a pair of clocks, one on the ground, and another in a Jet doing a large number of long trips. IIRC They actually confirmed the predicted relative time dilation effects by experiment that way.
Anyone know how PARCS addresses this..?
EZ
The CNet article seems to have someone from Microsoft hinting it was a hardware failure..
What Happened? did all three CTRL-ALT and DEL keys fall off at the same time?
Enquiring minds want to know, cos if you talk to Cisco, HP, et al.. they'll sell you something called a 'Maintenance Contract'.
EZ
Why can't people just select all and hit delete
Because my delete key wore out.
I can delete a couple of spams a week, but the current several hundred? Get real.
Oh damn, I just responded to a troll.
EZ
Everybody just needs to email their slashdot username/password to me
Sure! Just put your email, unfudged, in a reply to this and I'm sure lots of people will be emailing you real soon, with emails that will 'CHANGE YOUR LIFE BY MAKING $MILLIONS WHILE SVCRATCHING YOUR ARSE'.
EZ