This has some really interesting long term implications in the market and innovation.
Just like other DotCom critical mass companies, the also-rans (who do not already have massive patent portfolios) will never accumilate enough agreements and acquisitions to have an impact. As an individual or startup, you just try create something that does not in some way cross an IBM or Microsoft patent. The Fortune 500 may love it because it manages a risk "promotes stability" and keeps a huge swath of terrain for the "Players" alone. It's win/win at that level.
It gets intersting when you think about the huge, reliable stream of revenue this sort of thing might generate, and the long term temptations of an easy life. Why bother taking the risky path of creating new products yourslef when you can sit back and rely on other companies? "We let other companies take the risks and charge them royalties or acquire them; why on earth would we risk our own cash?". For example, want to develop a killer video codec? Better sign a cooperation agreement (including first right to buy) with one of the majors. One might even conciously slow down the pace of innovation so one can properly recoup investments at each generation. The saving grace is that, large companies have demonstrated a willingness to take a genuine long term view and see the risks of this easier path.
We use R. I t produces visually appealing neat & clean graphics. My only bugbear is that the raster renders are external syscalls and often handle things like fonts and anti-aliasing poorly. We weer also looking at Rserv as a graphing service rather than invoking an R instance each time we want a graph. http://www.r-project.org/
Though the Office of Film and Literature Classification has taken 'censorship' out of its title it is able to censor media by refusing classification and making the media illegal for hire, exhibition and importation to Australia...
The census project seems to be a vertically integrated lump. I can't help thinking that leveraging existing FOSS tools would get a more flexible result. Say load the census data into Postgres, use
Geoserver's KML output to apply styles. The automated binning of different tables could be implemented by using vendor specific parameters as supported by Web Map Services (WMS). It should be blazing fast as Postgres geometries and the Geoserver WMS have some hefty optimisation already built in.
The voting will take place by people putting their state-issued ID card, which has an electronic chip on it, into a reader attached to a computer and then entering two passwords
Unless all Estonian PCs come with a state ID card reader, this sounds like using the Internet as a transport for tradtional electronic voting rather than "Internet Voting". A government agency uses something like ssh to transport confidential data, yawn...
Something that came up in a discussion with someone who develops electronic voting software. His specific concerns about Internet votin were:
How do you safeguard against me holding a voting party on election day? I'll sit next to my partner and make sure the newfangled voting technology doesn't confuse her into making an incorrect vote. Me and my friends will keep note of who doesn't attend my election day voting party, we'll all watch each other vote so we know we agree on who to vote for. I'll also make sure my kids vote properly as they are too young to understand no matter what the electoral acts say. Then I'll help my dear old grand parents vote as they don't have a computer at home.
Even in a society where there is no overt coercion, a non-trivial portion of the population will be disenfranchised. This sort of change should not be rolled out before solving the meat-space issues.
So suppose PJ is called up and is indeed a real person and everything is just as it appears? How does SCO propose to undo the violation of someone's privacy?
SCO and others can suspect all they want, but I to hear something a bit more substantial than yet another pretext for a SCO fishing trip. Until then, whoebver or whatever PJ is is entitled to privacy. Childish nothing, WTF should anyone pay attention to Darl "Timmy O'Toole" McBride?
To quote a common.sig, "On the Internet, no-one knows I am a labrador"
I set my aunt up because she insisted on Windows, there was a lot that I did that should have been out-of-the-box. Most people buy PCs with Windows alrady installed and never re-install for the duration they own that computer. Say if by default:
- The admin account was the only one with root and it was limited to make it un-attarctive as a genereal use account (i.e. ever log into SuSE X11 as root?)
- Ordinary user accounts are not able to install software or hit registry (login as admin please)
- Have most ports closed by default (by all means have a pop-up asking to un-block
- Get rid of Outlook Express! (though I think they've done that)
- Have the equivalent of security.debian.org and don't use it to inflict non-security updates
- Have security profile pre-sets for typical users
My sister bought her own Mac, I have never needed to help her at all and she hates computers and only got one for Internet and business. There's nothing in MacOS X that Windows shouldn't be able to implement in a similar fashion. I am surprised that the brand name PC makers take so much effort to build crippled install/restore partitions but don't take a few moments to expunge the more insane bogosity.
>The modern solution to this is obvious: > > 1. Don't use type="img" > 2. Style your buttons with CSS instead
What if you *want* type=img to get the image coordinates? We're getting similar issues where we *want* button.x and button.y, but they are not being returned. I can guarantee that we are having problems supporting IE7 with type=img in our web applications:
Where we take button.x and button.y and do different things depending on where they clicked on the image (we have no interest in styling).
I am not our web person, but have been asked to figure out WTF. So far I am working on the assumption that MS *haven't* broken type=img, but this has uncovered some long ingrained bad habit abouyt how we are using type=img.
Being proficient with a computer is not optional if you want to own and use a computer. Learn about TCP/IP. Learn about NAT. Learn about not trusting everything. Learn about understanding how things work at least a little bit before you try to run. That's not really required. My aunt runs a Windows 2000 install I set up for her, she doesn';t have the admin password, IE, Outlook or the ability to install software and has never had a problem. My sister has a Mac, she keeps a seperate root account and has never had a problem.
I call it machiones shipping with shoddy, poorly set up operating systems.
I'll readily admit that the anti-Linux sentiment is very strong in the (Open)Solaris world, but you should understand where some of the frustration comes from. Daily (hourly!), the various newsgroups and discussion forums receive posts that come across as, "I can do THIS in Linux, but I can't in Solaris. Why does Solaris suck so badly?!" The answer is usually that Linux has some nonstandard (and more than occasionally undocumented) extensions to standard Unix tools.
OTOH, much frustration comes from non-standard and/or braindead Sun ventures. A friend spent many months beating his head against the wall with the curious implementation of 64 bit libraries. I had an Ultra 5 with Solaris 9 where the IO would grind to a halt when the CD-ROM was being read, stick Linux on it and suddenly it *can* walk and chew gum. What am I getting at? I suppose x64 and.doc shows that a "standard" is what people use because it works.
I say this as a long time fan of Sun gear. While my Ultra 5 was a bit naff, we are using v40z's and x4200's at work, and they are *nice*.:o)
I don't recall how they managed to link barcodes to books; whether each book was pre-assigned a specific barcode, or barcodes were applied and the system brought into sync via hand entry.
Back in the late 80's I helped set up a library and the bar codes were stuck onto the book and you'd add it to the system by readin the bar code into an "add book" menu which then let you enter the various details. Having just set up OpenDB for a community radio station (OpenDB lets you configure FreeDB, Amazon and other sites as lookup sources), I'd guess that these days, you also read the regular bar code and read the relevant data from the InterWeb.
It would also be interesting (though non-trivial) to calculate the fundamental cost of producing vegetable oils. For example, agriculture here in Australia consumes huges amounts of diesel to till the land and bring in chemically processed fertilisers from Pacfic islands. That and what proportion of the esrth's food growing area would need to be given over to oil production to meet current demand.
" Under the proposed legislation, any sex offender who submits a fraudulent email could face prison."
Presumably not declaring email addresses is fraudulent too. So yeah, they can use an anonymous address, but they also risk getting busted doing so. Not fool proof, but also forces such people to demonstrate intent.
Osama is already in the poo, flouting email address laws is unlikely to make his legal situation appreciably worse.
Both the The Universe Creators Association of Aetheria (UCAA) and the
Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and other Professional Thinking Persons have condemed this action as contrary to the Defence of Magrathea Concealment Act (DMCA) as it can only be used by chaotic minor deities to illegally copy proprietary universes or to discern the true nature of the universe.
A spokesomaan from the AUPSLOPTP is reported to have said, "What's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?". When contacted, a representative from the UCAA mumbled something about how hard it is to design good fjords.
The sooner we all buy GPSs and share/aggregate tracks of our local streets, the sooner we will have a better, more current product than the street maps that GE currently licences from traditional mapping agencies. This is an area where public data collection ought to cream anything a centralised/aggregated approach can do (certainly in terms of currency).
GE is neat but the main innovation it offers is ready access to large volume of base data.
There's a bunch of materials regarding copyright at the moment, this is the list that the AG's newletter refers to, but I also
found this bill which seems to be more generic than the DRM focussed titles in the former link. It's be nice if someone familiar the legislature wades through this and explains it to the rest of us, preferably pointing to the actual legislation. I note that the original press release doesn't bother telling us which bill they are irked about.
Xix.
Slashdot Mirror
Xix.
If the targets are sufficiently obliterated there's no way you can prove that they *weren't* engaged in nefarious activities.
If they weren't terrorists, they wouldn't have towels on their heads, now would they?
Xix.
Just like other DotCom critical mass companies, the also-rans (who do not already have massive patent portfolios) will never accumilate enough agreements and acquisitions to have an impact. As an individual or startup, you just try create something that does not in some way cross an IBM or Microsoft patent. The Fortune 500 may love it because it manages a risk "promotes stability" and keeps a huge swath of terrain for the "Players" alone. It's win/win at that level.
It gets intersting when you think about the huge, reliable stream of revenue this sort of thing might generate, and the long term temptations of an easy life. Why bother taking the risky path of creating new products yourslef when you can sit back and rely on other companies? "We let other companies take the risks and charge them royalties or acquire them; why on earth would we risk our own cash?". For example, want to develop a killer video codec? Better sign a cooperation agreement (including first right to buy) with one of the majors. One might even conciously slow down the pace of innovation so one can properly recoup investments at each generation. The saving grace is that, large companies have demonstrated a willingness to take a genuine long term view and see the risks of this easier path.
Xix.
We use R. I t produces visually appealing neat & clean graphics. My only bugbear is that the raster renders are external syscalls and often handle things like fonts and anti-aliasing poorly. We weer also looking at Rserv as a graphing service rather than invoking an R instance each time we want a graph. http://www.r-project.org/
Xix.
Judging by the examples, this brings the readability of Perl into graphs.
i echart/warning.en.html
I think I can hear Edward Tufte weeping...
And the only chart they implement is the pie chart:
http://www.usf.uni-osnabrueck.de/~breiter/tools/p
Xix.
The key data used to promote Dvorak was collected by Dvorak.
/.
Here's a URL from the last time Dvorak was discussed on
http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html
Xix.
There was no option to install Cowboy Neal. How can they claim to be geek savvy?
Xix.
Xix.
Xix.
Something that came up in a discussion with someone who develops electronic voting software. His specific concerns about Internet votin were:
How do you safeguard against me holding a voting party on election day? I'll sit next to my partner and make sure the newfangled voting technology doesn't confuse her into making an incorrect vote. Me and my friends will keep note of who doesn't attend my election day voting party, we'll all watch each other vote so we know we agree on who to vote for. I'll also make sure my kids vote properly as they are too young to understand no matter what the electoral acts say. Then I'll help my dear old grand parents vote as they don't have a computer at home.
Even in a society where there is no overt coercion, a non-trivial portion of the population will be disenfranchised. This sort of change should not be rolled out before solving the meat-space issues.
Xix.
So suppose PJ is called up and is indeed a real person and everything is just as it appears? How does SCO propose to undo the violation of someone's privacy?
.sig, "On the Internet, no-one knows I am a labrador"
SCO and others can suspect all they want, but I to hear something a bit more substantial than yet another pretext for a SCO fishing trip. Until then, whoebver or whatever PJ is is entitled to privacy. Childish nothing, WTF should anyone pay attention to Darl "Timmy O'Toole" McBride?
To quote a common
Apparently they've started using Caesar Cipher, maybe they thought the feds had broken ROT-13?
I set my aunt up because she insisted on Windows, there was a lot that I did that should have been out-of-the-box. Most people buy PCs with Windows alrady installed and never re-install for the duration they own that computer. Say if by default:
- The admin account was the only one with root and it was limited to make it un-attarctive as a genereal use account (i.e. ever log into SuSE X11 as root?)
- Ordinary user accounts are not able to install software or hit registry (login as admin please)
- Have most ports closed by default (by all means have a pop-up asking to un-block
- Get rid of Outlook Express! (though I think they've done that)
- Have the equivalent of security.debian.org and don't use it to inflict non-security updates
- Have security profile pre-sets for typical users
My sister bought her own Mac, I have never needed to help her at all and she hates computers and only got one for Internet and business. There's nothing in MacOS X that Windows shouldn't be able to implement in a similar fashion. I am surprised that the brand name PC makers take so much effort to build crippled install/restore partitions but don't take a few moments to expunge the more insane bogosity.
Xix.
>The modern solution to this is obvious:
>
> 1. Don't use type="img"
> 2. Style your buttons with CSS instead
What if you *want* type=img to get the image coordinates? We're getting similar issues where we *want* button.x and button.y, but they are not being returned. I can guarantee that we are having problems supporting IE7 with type=img in our web applications:
Where we take button.x and button.y and do different things depending on where they clicked on the image (we have no interest in styling).
I am not our web person, but have been asked to figure out WTF. So far I am working on the assumption that MS *haven't* broken type=img, but this has uncovered some long ingrained bad habit abouyt how we are using type=img.
Xix.
Being proficient with a computer is not optional if you want to own and use a computer. Learn about TCP/IP. Learn about NAT. Learn about not trusting everything. Learn about understanding how things work at least a little bit before you try to run.
That's not really required. My aunt runs a Windows 2000 install I set up for her, she doesn';t have the admin password, IE, Outlook or the ability to install software and has never had a problem. My sister has a Mac, she keeps a seperate root account and has never had a problem.
I call it machiones shipping with shoddy, poorly set up operating systems.
Xix.
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
/engines/header.inc, line 91
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Cannot open database requested in login 'motorprogram_temp'. Login fails.
It sure was an IDE CD-ROM. Solaris 9 isn't that old either, we just deployed a major site on it because 10 is a bit too bleeding edge.
OTOH, much frustration comes from non-standard and/or braindead Sun ventures. A friend spent many months beating his head against the wall with the curious implementation of 64 bit libraries. I had an Ultra 5 with Solaris 9 where the IO would grind to a halt when the CD-ROM was being read, stick Linux on it and suddenly it *can* walk and chew gum. What am I getting at? I suppose x64 and
I say this as a long time fan of Sun gear. While my Ultra 5 was a bit naff, we are using v40z's and x4200's at work, and they are *nice*.
Xix.
Xix.
It would also be interesting (though non-trivial) to calculate the fundamental cost of producing vegetable oils. For example, agriculture here in Australia consumes huges amounts of diesel to till the land and bring in chemically processed fertilisers from Pacfic islands. That and what proportion of the esrth's food growing area would need to be given over to oil production to meet current demand.
Xix.
" Under the proposed legislation, any sex offender who submits a fraudulent email could face prison."
Presumably not declaring email addresses is fraudulent too. So yeah, they can use an anonymous address, but they also risk getting busted doing so. Not fool proof, but also forces such people to demonstrate intent.
Osama is already in the poo, flouting email address laws is unlikely to make his legal situation appreciably worse.
Xix.
A spokesomaan from the AUPSLOPTP is reported to have said, "What's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?". When contacted, a representative from the UCAA mumbled something about how hard it is to design good fjords.
The sooner we all buy GPSs and share/aggregate tracks of our local streets, the sooner we will have a better, more current product than the street maps that GE currently licences from traditional mapping agencies. This is an area where public data collection ought to cream anything a centralised/aggregated approach can do (certainly in terms of currency).
GE is neat but the main innovation it offers is ready access to large volume of base data.
Xix.
There's a bunch of materials regarding copyright at the moment, this is the list that the AG's newletter refers to, but I also found this bill which seems to be more generic than the DRM focussed titles in the former link. It's be nice if someone familiar the legislature wades through this and explains it to the rest of us, preferably pointing to the actual legislation. I note that the original press release doesn't bother telling us which bill they are irked about. Xix.