When I worked at CompUSA they had us do the same thing, because when the company looks at the store numbers and see's that almost every PC sold had an extended warrenty, the manager gets a bonus. Not only that, but if we didn't meet a certain percentage of warrenties to items sold, both the manager and the sales people got in trouble or fired. They even told us when we worked the registers that if a product came up with no warrenty to take the price of the warrenty off and include it without asking the customer. Now if that isn't a shady way to run a company, I don't know what is.
It's not a shady practice, it's normal human nature. I do a lot of consulting around measure development, and warn my clients to be sure that the measures they pick reinforce the behaviors they need to be sucessful. People will figur eout how to meet a measure, even if it is counterproductive to the company or them personlly.
And it's not just retail - (altough the stories there are many). How many college students avoid courses that will help them learn (why, in theory, they are there for in the first place) for easy "A"s" to pump up a GPA and get the job or grad school slot? Or programmers who create yet another word processor / utility / program that does the same thing as six other ones because they believe the numebr of programs, not the useullness, is the measure of success against Windows?
Now, warranties can also do one other thing - since most give you store credit, they get some incremental followon sales for failed item, adding to their revenue at some future date (and making it to their advantage to be relatively liberal honoring warranties, as long as they don't go overboard, since the cost of coverage is the insurer's risk. In fact, If I was BB or CC or whomever, I'd eant to be right on the edge of the insurer stopping coverage without reaching that point, since anything less is lost revenue for my store)
I imagine that once the luggage has sat for months that they open it up to see who it belongs to, or maybe they sell it at a yard sale, but perhaps they just throw it out.
In the US, it's sold - there's an outfitthat sells the bag and contents. Apparently it's a big operation.
1. Regulations exist to protect incumbents - wether or not that was the original intent. (Not an original idea, but it did win a Nobel Prize in Economics) Which is why when companies complain about two much regulation, they're really complaining about ones which cost them money but don't keep others out.\\2. Comment on the rule - that's the way to make agencies pause and think, as well as give them political coverage if they make a decision corporate interest oppose. The lattter linked to the/. article provides a great template for making your voice heard - use it. I did.
I've been a model rocketeer for a long time, and my concern is this will push kids back to the homebrew engine days - with the resultant injuries and damage that was the reason G Harry Stine, George Estes and others created the hobby.
Model rocketry is fun, and a good way to get kids away from computers into the sun. It develops an interst in science, engineering, and using computers to design and test. Competitions are good ways to meet people and make friends for life.
It'l be a shame if teh government kills our hobby.
Anyway, I never bought into that whole 'humans are unique' bullcrap - countless reports have proven that several species elicit signs of abstract thinking, verbal communication (whales, dolphins in particular), emotions like sadness (chimpanzees and other primates), anger, tendency for rape (chimpanzees again - why am I not surprised? LOL), etc..
And don't forget, those that speak two languages have roughly double the vocabulary of someone that speaks only one
I don't buy that. I live in a very racially diverse area, and have a number of friends and acquaintences who learned English as a second language.
The age at which they learned English varies from early childhood to adolescence, but one thing they have in common is that their vocabulary in either language is not as good as a native speaker's.
But there are a tremendous number of words, often obscure or technical, that they know in one language but not the other.
I would imagine that results from their need to use certain words. Most people don't need to use obscure technical terms, and therefore never bother to learn them. OTOH, if they regulary are in an environment, such as work, that rquired them to know them in 2 languages, they would.
Anothe factor is - how often does one use either languae. If they only speak one on trips to family, their fluency will vary as they use it more or less frequently.
For example, I am bilingual, having learned two languages from birth. I know the technical terms in both languages for my field, but I worked in the US and abroad so I used them regularly in both languages. amechanic friend couldn't begin to describe a low pressure colant injection system in either, but can hold detailed discussion about automotive repair in either *which I can't), and we both are conversant in both languages. Need has driven our learning.
Judging from what I have seen, I would guess that that is pretty representative of the average bilingual person.
The problem is that that is anecdotal evidnece (as is mine as well). We all assume our experiences are representative of the whole.
I always believed a bi-lingual person counts (in their head)in only 1 language (the first they first learned to count in) since I and everyone I know does that (i.e I convert numbers to English, do the math, covert back to the other language).
Then I met someone who used to count in one language but after 20 plus years of using English now counts in English. And English is this persons' 3rd fluent langauge, about 5th on the understand and converse with others list.)
Obviously some bilingual speakers will have an average vocabulary in each language (and therefore double the average single-language speaker's),
But I don't believe that that is the general case -- people can only remember so many words, and branching off into another language doesn't magically make your memory bigger.
While I agree that most bi-lingual speakers don't have double the voc, I disagree with your reasoning. I also doubt most people tap the limits of the brain's ability to recall infromation, but that's another topic.
Look at the recent history (20 yrs). Any regulated industry that is deregulated turns into a chinese firedrill, or clusterfuck. We can deregulate savings and loans, these guys are conservative bankers they won't do anything stupid. $50 billion later, that mess is almost straightened out. Cable TV, prices are only going up at 10X the rate of inflation. Airlines, talk about failed business models, they can't survive without taxpayer subsidies. The list goes on and on... The cost of deregulating is unbearable because of endless greed and basic stupidity.
Or you could look at it as a needed market correction after years of governmnet intervention.
Airline fares, for example, were set by the government, instead of market prices. As a result, airlines built route structures to make as much as possible within those rules. Once the rules went away, other airlines with new business models came in and lowered prices - look a jetBlue/Airtran/SWA - they seem to be making money.
Regulation benefits the regulated, and once free market forces are introduced, those that have bad business models will die.
was a mechanical rig that used 1 inch soda straws for 1's and blank holes fro zeros. You pulled a crank and it added two numbers. I wish I could remember its name - it was some sort of "science kit." from the 60's.
To address the free rider problem - why should I develop a great piece of software, invest time and money, when anybody can then take it and do what they want, without compensating me?
IP laws ensure creators have the right to control how their ideas are used in the marketplace - wether it's CS, OSS, free as in beer or $495 plus $200 in upgrades every year...
For the listening end, why not try to find 10 of teh old heavy duty Ma bell telephone handsets? You could run 2 wires to the speaker inside of it (coiled if you want to be fancy) and have a rugged earpiece. alternatively, you might be able to hack some of the cheaper wall plug phones sold in stores today.
As for players, look for closeout MP3 players - you could wire a switch across the play button. Another thing to look for, if teh duration of teh sound is short enough, are these "voice on a chip" thingies used in greetin cards - you might find one with enough memory for your needs at a specialty electronics parts house.
Anybody want to code up a solution to this dilema? Sure it would be a form letter, but click link, put in name and state, send . . should be easy enough, and it would let Congress know just how big the/. crowd is and how they feel.
Wrong way to do it - form letters don't have the impact that personal letters do, because they require less effort.
Now, a while ago someone had an 800 number that would put you through to your reps...
Re:Anti-Nuke (Score:1) "Oh good - if we die tomorrow from a North Vietnamese nuclear bomb, no worries. The Americans will revenge us. Huzzah!" I don't think the issue is whether or not someone will retaliate against North Vietnam for nuking Japan - but whether or not North Vietnam would nuke Japan at all if Japan had/have their "nuclear deterrent".
You miss the point - Japan has a nuclear deterrant, since an attack on them would be treated by the US as if it was an attack on the US - it's part of our nuclear umbrella.
US FBMs (Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines) - do you really doubt that we would not retaliate in kind if NK nuked Japan?
Perhaps it was North Vietnam's massive nuclear arsenal that kept us from turning Hanoi into a massive glowing parking lot?
Quite frankly, Japan is probably better of not building nukes and investing the money elsewhere, since all they need to do is call 001-911 if NK decides to not play nice.
RFID sensitivity
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RFID MasterCard
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· Score: 2, Informative
I recently spoke with an RFID engineer about how easy it is to read RFID tags. Basicaly, the readers are very sensitive to the position of the tag, as well as distance. Move the tag out of the ideal plane for the antenna and it becomes unreadable. Sheild it and the reader must be much closer to read it. Great technology for tracking shipments - anything that takes away people entering data via a keyboard and replaces it with people holdining recievers to spots on containers should help greatly reduce tracking errors - as well as allow shippers to track temperatures, if a container has been openned, etc.
OTOH, what makes things easier when you can train a person to perform a task in a set way is not always better for mass consumption. Look at how often people have to reswipe cards becuse they put the strip on the wrong side of the reader - no imagine someone trying to align the RFID tag with a reader - all you've done is replace one motion with another. Mobil (ExxonMobil - the Mobile is silent) has SpeedPass - which never really caught on - that is esentially the same idea. They tried to push it for fast food purchase as well - ever see a SpeedPass enabled drive through? Which brings up th eissue - how much will it cost for companies to replace/upgrade existing readers to handle the new cards? Without a lot of cards, there's no incentive for companies to spend the money. Without readers, why have the card?
I've had one CC strip go bad - and all the clerck did was key in the info - this RFID idea sounds like a solution to a non-problem. Now, if they could add a biometric reader that required my thumb on the card to validate it - and it read the first thumb placed on the card as the right one when you get the card, then I'd be interested.
A switch that activates the tag sounds neat - but now I must not only get the RFID tag close to the reader but hold the card in a special way - forget it - not to mention some people may have trouble doing that due to physical constraints.
Very true. The problem with articles like this falls under not understanding the material under review (e.g. expecting it to be a Photoshop port to Linux) and not doing research before proudly exclaiming that "Gimp Sux0rs!"
having written reviews, I can tell you that anyone who expects reviewers to hunt down solutions to problems is dreaming. First of all, readers are not very likely, for most mainstream mags, to have the time or skill to find and install a bunch of extra software to make a program work right. Secondly, reviewers don't have the time to learn all the ins and outs of a program, and are going to compare them to what is widely used so people can decide if the program is worth considering.
The artilce also points out one of OSS' biggest challenges - who do you go to for help? Sure, there are people who are willing to help, but it takes time and knowledge to avail oneself of the support, and most people simply can't or won't do that. The are looking for a solution, not a hobby. The reviewer actually bought a copy and the company went dark when asked questions - not a very good intro to OSS, especially when virtually every other company has a reviewer hotline that will solve problems so that the reviewers knows the software is at least working correctly.
The review's bottom line wa sthat GIMP doesn't provide a very satisfying out of teh box experience, and there are betetr and affordable alternatives to PS. Not an unreasonable conclusion.
Powerful tools can justify (and often require) a non-standard interface to be useful.
Maybe, but far too many OSS developers are interested in the code, not how the program looks to end users, and feel because they know how to use it everyone else will. Not a good way to build a user base.
Wait until he or she is a teenager - then you'll want a chocker collar at the end of the leash./.'s talking about raising kids - you'd think they'd talk about some thing they now about instead, like sex - oh wait, never mind...
You got - Chainmail basic rules, there D&D addendums, lead painted figures, and a bunch of beer and pizza fueled college students, arguing over rules with the DM.
Some folks got to into it, like a friend who flunked out because 20+ hours of DnD was incompatible with minor thing like classes and exams. Or teh guy who was pissed when we , a "Jury of his peers" ruled against him and for a thief that stole and destroyed a magic lighting +50hp staff with unlimited reloads - becaus eit unbalanced our game.
I was really surprised to later see an interview with GG show up in one of my MBA classes on corporate strategy.
Re:Read the "Terms Of Service"
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Update on Playfair
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Except that the TOS also states that you agree not to encourage such behaviour, I suppose it MIGHT be questionable as to whether downloading the software and/or using it would/should be considered encouraging - I see your point though. Maybe it's not so black and white as I had thought originally.
I wasn't real clear as well- I was refering to Playfair's developer, not someone who uses it to remove DRM features. I think as long as the developer doesn't use ITMS, then he or she hasn't agreed to the TOS and is not bound by any terms - now someone actually using it would because they agreed to Apple's TOS.
So Playfair, itself, would not violate any contractual terms since the developer hadn't agreed to them, unlike someone who used it, Apple's recourse would be to go after its users if it suspects they are using Playfair for breach of contract, but has no grounds contractual grounds to stop Playfair from being distributed.
Of course, it may have other legal means to stop Playfair, and suing your users is both difficult and would be very counter productive to a company such as Apple which wants to be viewed as a part of its user's life. So guess what they do?
You really need to strip tools from their use - for example, I have friends who routinely carry "Burglery tools" in their vehicles, but because tehy ar elicensed locksmiths, they have a legitimate reason to do so. Baring the manufactur of such tools would prevent their legitimate use of them.
You agree that you will not attempt to, or encourage or assist any other person to, circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service or used to administer the Usage Rules.
It's not really a question about whether it's ethical or not. If you have music from the ITMS, you bought it from Apple, and YOU AGREED TO THESE TERMS OF SERVICE. If you make a piece of software to "circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service" than you are breaking your contract with Apple, and thusly breaking the law. It's pretty simple.
It is possible that Playfair does not violate ITMS - for the developer, as long as it was written without using ITMS content in the development. If the devloper did not us ITMS music, then they would not be bound by its TOS, since they would not have agreed to ITMS TOS.
Now some one who uses it to remove DRM features would violate the TOS, but that is a different issue since they agreed to Apple's TOS.
Please. You 'theft' nuts are why we're moving to a pre-Statute of Anne conception of copyright. You cannot look at information as property,
Sure you can - you create it in the case o songs, books or programs, and you have rights to ownership. Just because someone can take a copy without taking the orginal doesn't make it any less a taking of your property.
and not end up at a situation where you advocate anything less than perpetual copyright.
No - you can limit the rights to such intangible property to balance the benefit to society of making it worth creating and ultimately th eability of others to build on it and create better versions.
Abd that is the key - making it worth someone's time to create it - without that, much of what fuels progress or the arts would not exist.
And copyright, by protecting works encourages dessimination because there's profit to be made in it, which leads to funding for more works and more profit.
Actually, my guess is they were trying to get around the solicitation rules for lawyers in their state. Most states have restrictions on how lawyers can advertise, and some states are much more strict than others
There spam, aka the Green Card Spam, was aimed at people wanting to immigrate to the US and offered to help people improve their chances at getting a card in the lottery that the US was holding for green cards. I'm not sure how the laws work, but they were practicing law at the federal, not state level.
People dug up a lot of info on them and generally tried to make their life miserable, Cantor would answer emails. Joel Furr, IIR, made t-shirts advertising their spam and was threatened with a lawsuit. Eventually the furor died off, replaced by the Spam King and others.
They used their real email address (since they needed responses), wrote a book on who to spam, and tehn dropped out of siight. Cantor, IIR, no works in the computer industry and Siegal died a while back.
baseball has always had the highest Geek Quotient of any major sport.
I'd say auto racing, with it's high degree of computerization, engineers/designers or mechanics, and use of the grand-daddy of geekdom - radios, would rate as high or higher.
well, can't i just upload one huge file full of gibberish and leave it there to rot?
How about by deleting inactive accounts? if you don't access it for say 3 months, kill the account.
But more to the point, why waste their space? If you don't like ads based on your mail, just don't use their service. They are offering you a deal - 1gig of space, paid for by advertisers. If you are worried about the impact on your privacy, don't take the deal.
Wasting their space to make a point about privacy is like spamming a mailing list becasue you don't like the admin's rules - trying to force your viewpoint on a community that has agreed to live by a set of rules that you don't agree with.
no-one buys an item because of its LED colour, or if it has them ata ll - you buy by the spec/brand/etc. It just so happens that they all have blue leds nowadays, so telling him to buy a different product is useless advice.
Actually, blue is used as a subtle marketing tool - blue LEDs make people think an item is "more expensive/higher end" than one with red LEDs. And part of branding is to convince you Berand X is btter than Y and get you to pay a premium for the name; and anything that helps that idea along is used to "build the brand."
Manufacturers use blue to elicit that (often sub-concious) response. As blue LEDs, become less expensive, you'll see them move into cheaper stuff - and eventuall they will no longer be associated with higher end gear, just as red LEDs have - remember when an LED watch was expensive instead of a giveaway item?
As for specs, mots consumers neither understand them but think they do- which is why manufacturers get into "spec wars" such as pushing 8megapixal cameras with tiny sensors that are actually, in many cases, have worse picture quality than say a 5 megapixel sensor of the same size, or a 6MP, but larger, sensor. Consumers see 8MP and immediately assume it's better than 5MP, so manufacturers build them and put 8MP in big bold letters on the box.
then, of course, there is the "Make up a word taht people think means something good but really doesn't" such as "hypoallergenic"
Of course, that's why MBAs get big bucks while programmers get laid off.
Slashdot Mirror
When I worked at CompUSA they had us do the same thing, because when the company looks at the store numbers and see's that almost every PC sold had an extended warrenty, the manager gets a bonus. Not only that, but if we didn't meet a certain percentage of warrenties to items sold, both the manager and the sales people got in trouble or fired. They even told us when we worked the registers that if a product came up with no warrenty to take the price of the warrenty off and include it without asking the customer. Now if that isn't a shady way to run a company, I don't know what is.
It's not a shady practice, it's normal human nature. I do a lot of consulting around measure development, and warn my clients to be sure that the measures they pick reinforce the behaviors they need to be sucessful. People will figur eout how to meet a measure, even if it is counterproductive to the company or them personlly.
And it's not just retail - (altough the stories there are many). How many college students avoid courses that will help them learn (why, in theory, they are there for in the first place) for easy "A"s" to pump up a GPA and get the job or grad school slot? Or programmers who create yet another word processor / utility / program that does the same thing as six other ones because they believe the numebr of programs, not the useullness, is the measure of success against Windows?
Now, warranties can also do one other thing - since most give you store credit, they get some incremental followon sales for failed item, adding to their revenue at some future date (and making it to their advantage to be relatively liberal honoring warranties, as long as they don't go overboard, since the cost of coverage is the insurer's risk. In fact, If I was BB or CC or whomever, I'd eant to be right on the edge of the insurer stopping coverage without reaching that point, since anything less is lost revenue for my store)
In the end, you get what you measure.
I imagine that once the luggage has sat for months that they open it up to see who it belongs to, or maybe they sell it at a yard sale, but perhaps they just throw it out.
In the US, it's sold - there's an outfitthat sells the bag and contents. Apparently it's a big operation.
1. Regulations exist to protect incumbents - wether or not that was the original intent. (Not an original idea, but it did win a Nobel Prize in Economics) Which is why when companies complain about two much regulation, they're really complaining about ones which cost them money but don't keep others out.\\2. Comment on the rule - that's the way to make agencies pause and think, as well as give them political coverage if they make a decision corporate interest oppose. The lattter linked to the /. article provides a great template for making your voice heard - use it. I did.
I've been a model rocketeer for a long time, and my concern is this will push kids back to the homebrew engine days - with the resultant injuries and damage that was the reason G Harry Stine, George Estes and others created the hobby.
Model rocketry is fun, and a good way to get kids away from computers into the sun. It develops an interst in science, engineering, and using computers to design and test. Competitions are good ways to meet people and make friends for life.
It'l be a shame if teh government kills our hobby.
JLC NAR 21573
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID =3572216&thesection=news&thesubsection=general&the secondsubsection=
Talk about a bunch of boobs...
Anyway, I never bought into that whole 'humans are unique' bullcrap - countless reports have proven that several species elicit signs of abstract thinking, verbal communication (whales, dolphins in particular), emotions like sadness (chimpanzees and other primates), anger, tendency for rape (chimpanzees again - why am I not surprised? LOL), etc..
s ib _dp_rdr/102-7527096-8069744#reader-page
Of course - just look at any Far Side cartoon...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0836220625/ref=
And don't forget, those that speak two languages have roughly double the vocabulary of someone that speaks only one
I don't buy that. I live in a very racially diverse area, and have a number of friends and acquaintences who learned English as a second language.
The age at which they learned English varies from early childhood to adolescence, but one thing they have in common is that their vocabulary in either language is not as good as a native speaker's.
But there are a tremendous number of words, often obscure or technical, that they know in one language but not the other.
I would imagine that results from their need to use certain words. Most people don't need to use obscure technical terms, and therefore never bother to learn them. OTOH, if they regulary are in an environment, such as work, that rquired them to know them in 2 languages, they would.
Anothe factor is - how often does one use either languae. If they only speak one on trips to family, their fluency will vary as they use it more or less frequently.
For example, I am bilingual, having learned two languages from birth. I know the technical terms in both languages for my field, but I worked in the US and abroad so I used them regularly in both languages. amechanic friend couldn't begin to describe a low pressure colant injection system in either, but can hold detailed discussion about automotive repair in either *which I can't), and we both are conversant in both languages. Need has driven our learning.
Judging from what I have seen, I would guess that that is pretty representative of the average bilingual person.
The problem is that that is anecdotal evidnece (as is mine as well). We all assume our experiences are representative of the whole.
I always believed a bi-lingual person counts (in their head)in only 1 language (the first they first learned to count in) since I and everyone I know does that (i.e I convert numbers to English, do the math, covert back to the other language).
Then I met someone who used to count in one language but after 20 plus years of using English now counts in English. And English is this persons' 3rd fluent langauge, about 5th on the understand and converse with others list.)
Obviously some bilingual speakers will have an average vocabulary in each language (and therefore double the average single-language speaker's),
But I don't believe that that is the general case -- people can only remember so many words, and branching off into another language doesn't magically make your memory bigger.
While I agree that most bi-lingual speakers don't have double the voc, I disagree with your reasoning. I also doubt most people tap the limits of the brain's ability to recall infromation, but that's another topic.
Look at the recent history (20 yrs). Any regulated industry that is deregulated turns into a chinese firedrill, or clusterfuck. We can deregulate savings and loans, these guys are conservative bankers they won't do anything stupid. $50 billion later, that mess is almost straightened out. Cable TV, prices are only going up at 10X the rate of inflation. Airlines, talk about failed business models, they can't survive without taxpayer subsidies. The list goes on and on... The cost of deregulating is unbearable because of endless greed and basic stupidity.
Or you could look at it as a needed market correction after years of governmnet intervention.
Airline fares, for example, were set by the government, instead of market prices. As a result, airlines built route structures to make as much as possible within those rules. Once the rules went away, other airlines with new business models came in and lowered prices - look a jetBlue/Airtran/SWA - they seem to be making money.
Regulation benefits the regulated, and once free market forces are introduced, those that have bad business models will die.
was a mechanical rig that used 1 inch soda straws for 1's and blank holes fro zeros. You pulled a crank and it added two numbers. I wish I could remember its name - it was some sort of "science kit." from the 60's.
"Why the hell *do* we have these laws?"
To address the free rider problem - why should I develop a great piece of software, invest time and money, when anybody can then take it and do what they want, without compensating me?
IP laws ensure creators have the right to control how their ideas are used in the marketplace - wether it's CS, OSS, free as in beer or $495 plus $200 in upgrades every year...
For the listening end, why not try to find 10 of teh old heavy duty Ma bell telephone handsets? You could run 2 wires to the speaker inside of it (coiled if you want to be fancy) and have a rugged earpiece. alternatively, you might be able to hack some of the cheaper wall plug phones sold in stores today.
As for players, look for closeout MP3 players - you could wire a switch across the play button. Another thing to look for, if teh duration of teh sound is short enough, are these "voice on a chip" thingies used in greetin cards - you might find one with enough memory for your needs at a specialty electronics parts house.
Good luck
Anybody want to code up a solution to this dilema? Sure it would be a form letter, but click link, put in name and state, send . . should be easy enough, and it would let Congress know just how big the /. crowd is and how they feel.
Wrong way to do it - form letters don't have the impact that personal letters do, because they require less effort.
Now, a while ago someone had an 800 number that would put you through to your reps...
Re:Anti-Nuke (Score:1)
"Oh good - if we die tomorrow from a North Vietnamese nuclear bomb, no worries. The Americans will revenge us. Huzzah!" I don't think the issue is whether or not someone will retaliate against North Vietnam for nuking Japan - but whether or not North Vietnam would nuke Japan at all if Japan had/have their "nuclear deterrent".
You miss the point - Japan has a nuclear deterrant, since an attack on them would be treated by the US as if it was an attack on the US - it's part of our nuclear umbrella.
US FBMs (Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines) - do you really doubt that we would not retaliate in kind if NK nuked Japan?
Perhaps it was North Vietnam's massive nuclear arsenal that kept us from turning Hanoi into a massive glowing parking lot?
Quite frankly, Japan is probably better of not building nukes and investing the money elsewhere, since all they need to do is call 001-911 if NK decides to not play nice.
I recently spoke with an RFID engineer about how easy it is to read RFID tags. Basicaly, the readers are very sensitive to the position of the tag, as well as distance. Move the tag out of the ideal plane for the antenna and it becomes unreadable. Sheild it and the reader must be much closer to read it. Great technology for tracking shipments - anything that takes away people entering data via a keyboard and replaces it with people holdining recievers to spots on containers should help greatly reduce tracking errors - as well as allow shippers to track temperatures, if a container has been openned, etc.
OTOH, what makes things easier when you can train a person to perform a task in a set way is not always better for mass consumption. Look at how often people have to reswipe cards becuse they put the strip on the wrong side of the reader - no imagine someone trying to align the RFID tag with a reader - all you've done is replace one motion with another. Mobil (ExxonMobil - the Mobile is silent) has SpeedPass - which never really caught on - that is esentially the same idea. They tried to push it for fast food purchase as well - ever see a SpeedPass enabled drive through? Which brings up th eissue - how much will it cost for companies to replace/upgrade existing readers to handle the new cards? Without a lot of cards, there's no incentive for companies to spend the money. Without readers, why have the card?
I've had one CC strip go bad - and all the clerck did was key in the info - this RFID idea sounds like a solution to a non-problem. Now, if they could add a biometric reader that required my thumb on the card to validate it - and it read the first thumb placed on the card as the right one when you get the card, then I'd be interested.
A switch that activates the tag sounds neat - but now I must not only get the RFID tag close to the reader but hold the card in a special way - forget it - not to mention some people may have trouble doing that due to physical constraints.
Very true. The problem with articles like this falls under not understanding the material under review (e.g. expecting it to be a Photoshop port to Linux) and not doing research before proudly exclaiming that "Gimp Sux0rs!"
having written reviews, I can tell you that anyone who expects reviewers to hunt down solutions to problems is dreaming. First of all, readers are not very likely, for most mainstream mags, to have the time or skill to find and install a bunch of extra software to make a program work right. Secondly, reviewers don't have the time to learn all the ins and outs of a program, and are going to compare them to what is widely used so people can decide if the program is worth considering.
The artilce also points out one of OSS' biggest challenges - who do you go to for help? Sure, there are people who are willing to help, but it takes time and knowledge to avail oneself of the support, and most people simply can't or won't do that. The are looking for a solution, not a hobby. The reviewer actually bought a copy and the company went dark when asked questions - not a very good intro to OSS, especially when virtually every other company has a reviewer hotline that will solve problems so that the reviewers knows the software is at least working correctly.
The review's bottom line wa sthat GIMP doesn't provide a very satisfying out of teh box experience, and there are betetr and affordable alternatives to PS. Not an unreasonable conclusion.
Powerful tools can justify (and often require) a non-standard interface to be useful.
Maybe, but far too many OSS developers are interested in the code, not how the program looks to end users, and feel because they know how to use it everyone else will. Not a good way to build a user base.
Wait until he or she is a teenager - then you'll want a chocker collar at the end of the leash.
You got - Chainmail basic rules, there D&D addendums, lead painted figures, and a bunch of beer and pizza fueled college students, arguing over rules with the DM.
Some folks got to into it, like a friend who flunked out because 20+ hours of DnD was incompatible with minor thing like classes and exams. Or teh guy who was pissed when we , a "Jury of his peers" ruled against him and for a thief that stole and destroyed a magic lighting +50hp staff with unlimited reloads - becaus eit unbalanced our game.
I was really surprised to later see an interview with GG show up in one of my MBA classes on corporate strategy.
Except that the TOS also states that you agree not to encourage such behaviour, I suppose it MIGHT be questionable as to whether downloading the software and/or using it would/should be considered encouraging - I see your point though. Maybe it's not so black and white as I had thought originally.
I wasn't real clear as well- I was refering to Playfair's developer, not someone who uses it to remove DRM features. I think as long as the developer doesn't use ITMS, then he or she hasn't agreed to the TOS and is not bound by any terms - now someone actually using it would because they agreed to Apple's TOS.
So Playfair, itself, would not violate any contractual terms since the developer hadn't agreed to them, unlike someone who used it, Apple's recourse would be to go after its users if it suspects they are using Playfair for breach of contract, but has no grounds contractual grounds to stop Playfair from being distributed.
Of course, it may have other legal means to stop Playfair, and suing your users is both difficult and would be very counter productive to a company such as Apple which wants to be viewed as a part of its user's life. So guess what they do?
You really need to strip tools from their use - for example, I have friends who routinely carry "Burglery tools" in their vehicles, but because tehy ar elicensed locksmiths, they have a legitimate reason to do so. Baring the manufactur of such tools would prevent their legitimate use of them.
You agree that you will not attempt to, or encourage or assist any other person to, circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service or used to administer the Usage Rules.
It's not really a question about whether it's ethical or not. If you have music from the ITMS, you bought it from Apple, and YOU AGREED TO THESE TERMS OF SERVICE. If you make a piece of software to "circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service" than you are breaking your contract with Apple, and thusly breaking the law. It's pretty simple.
It is possible that Playfair does not violate ITMS - for the developer, as long as it was written without using ITMS content in the development. If the devloper did not us ITMS music, then they would not be bound by its TOS, since they would not have agreed to ITMS TOS.
Now some one who uses it to remove DRM features would violate the TOS, but that is a different issue since they agreed to Apple's TOS.
Please. You 'theft' nuts are why we're moving to a pre-Statute of Anne conception of copyright. You cannot look at information as property,
Sure you can - you create it in the case o songs, books or programs, and you have rights to ownership. Just because someone can take a copy without taking the orginal doesn't make it any less a taking of your property.
and not end up at a situation where you advocate anything less than perpetual copyright.
No - you can limit the rights to such intangible property to balance the benefit to society of making it worth creating and ultimately th eability of others to build on it and create better versions.
Abd that is the key - making it worth someone's time to create it - without that, much of what fuels progress or the arts would not exist.
And copyright, by protecting works encourages dessimination because there's profit to be made in it, which leads to funding for more works and more profit.
Actually, my guess is they were trying to get around the solicitation rules for lawyers in their state. Most states have restrictions on how lawyers can advertise, and some states are much more strict than others
There spam, aka the Green Card Spam, was aimed at people wanting to immigrate to the US and offered to help people improve their chances at getting a card in the lottery that the US was holding for green cards. I'm not sure how the laws work, but they were practicing law at the federal, not state level.
People dug up a lot of info on them and generally tried to make their life miserable, Cantor would answer emails. Joel Furr, IIR, made t-shirts advertising their spam and was threatened with a lawsuit. Eventually the furor died off, replaced by the Spam King and others.
They used their real email address (since they needed responses), wrote a book on who to spam, and tehn dropped out of siight. Cantor, IIR, no works in the computer industry and Siegal died a while back.
baseball has always had the highest Geek Quotient of any major sport.
I'd say auto racing, with it's high degree of computerization, engineers/designers or mechanics, and use of the grand-daddy of geekdom - radios, would rate as high or higher.
well, can't i just upload one huge file full of gibberish and leave it there to rot?
How about by deleting inactive accounts? if you don't access it for say 3 months, kill the account.
But more to the point, why waste their space? If you don't like ads based on your mail, just don't use their service. They are offering you a deal - 1gig of space, paid for by advertisers. If you are worried about the impact on your privacy, don't take the deal.
Wasting their space to make a point about privacy is like spamming a mailing list becasue you don't like the admin's rules - trying to force your viewpoint on a community that has agreed to live by a set of rules that you don't agree with.
no-one buys an item because of its LED colour, or if it has them ata ll - you buy by the spec/brand/etc. It just so happens that they all have blue leds nowadays, so telling him to buy a different product is useless advice.
Actually, blue is used as a subtle marketing tool - blue LEDs make people think an item is "more expensive/higher end" than one with red LEDs. And part of branding is to convince you Berand X is btter than Y and get you to pay a premium for the name; and anything that helps that idea along is used to "build the brand."
Manufacturers use blue to elicit that (often sub-concious) response. As blue LEDs, become less expensive, you'll see them move into cheaper stuff - and eventuall they will no longer be associated with higher end gear, just as red LEDs have - remember when an LED watch was expensive instead of a giveaway item?
As for specs, mots consumers neither understand them but think they do- which is why manufacturers get into "spec wars" such as pushing 8megapixal cameras with tiny sensors that are actually, in many cases, have worse picture quality than say a 5 megapixel sensor of the same size, or a 6MP, but larger, sensor. Consumers see 8MP and immediately assume it's better than 5MP, so manufacturers build them and put 8MP in big bold letters on the box.
then, of course, there is the "Make up a word taht people think means something good but really doesn't" such as "hypoallergenic"
Of course, that's why MBAs get big bucks while programmers get laid off.