Ever try typing a *lot* of information on a laptop? They are just not typically ergonomic enough for extended typing use.
I type for a living, and I've never had a particular problem with a laptop keyboard. They do tend to have less key travel distance than your average keyboard, but in some ways, that's good. They cater to a lighter touch.
More importantly, the one thing people don't seem to understand about ergonomics is that it's all about movement. The point of an adjustable chair isn't to find the One True Position that will prevent you from ever having repeat stress problems. The point of an adjustable chair is that, when you start feeling fatigued, you can adjust it, moving to a different position that will give your other muscle groups a rest. The more you can re-adjust your furniture, the better.
So what's more adjustable than a laptop? Instead of cramping yourself into a desk in the corner in the same position all day, every day, you can move your laptop around anywhere you want. Move to the other side of the room. Work at your kitchen table. Take it down to the coffee shop with you. Lie on the couch with a bunch of pillows behind you. Whatever feels good.
You are in an e-business on demand environment when your organization connects its core business systems to key constituencies using intranets, extranets, and the Web
BR-DVD = NOT backwards compatable with ANYTHING! (now that Sony's made money getting a DVD player in almost every home in the world, now they go with ANOTHER format that you'll need to go out and buy a NEW DVD Player that reads BR-DVD)
Errrrr... huh?
How is HD-DVD "backward compatible"? You're not going to be able to read your HD-DVDs in your current DVD player.
Exactly how is the blessing of the DVD Forum a better thing than, say, the support of Sony, Matsushita, Pioneer, Sharp, Hitachi, LG, Philips, Samsung, and Thompson, inclusive?
What's interesting to me is thatboth the standards being talked about here seem to use blue lasers to pack more data onto the disc. Not too long ago, the competition vs. the Blu-ray group seemed to focus on sticking with traditional red lasers and just using more aggressive compression (e.g. MPEG-4). I'm glad to see that idea is going away. I still have a lot of early-generation DVDs where the compression artifacts are very noticeable. I'd hate to see that go back to being the norm.
Then again, if you encode straight from vinyl and encoded at say... 88 khz and 524 kbits, you would get higher than CD quality.
I don't understand this. Record player = snap, crackle, and pop. I have never heard anyone who's able to keep their needle completely free from dust, their records completely free of dust and scratches, their records in completely unworn, brand-new condition (i.e. never been played). Yes, in theory the sound of an analog record might be more "natural," but it's impossible to reproduce that sound in its pristine condition. By its very nature, the analog playback medium introduces noise that isn't on the original recording. So where's the benefit? Besides, most of those 180 gram vinyl records all the purists are buying for $25 these days were originally recorded on digital equipment anyway.
Scanning your palm turns you from a human being with feelings, rights, privelages, and the whole 9 yards into data on a computer.
Uh-oh. Um, look... before you pick out which bottle of wine to bring over to your boss's house for dinner tonight... you'd better sit down for a minute. Listen... let me explain something...
If removing GPL code is enough, one can use it as replacement while writing his own implementation (or carefully rearanging/changing GPL code) until cought.
Doesn't sound right to me.
In which case, it's up to the MPlayer guys to stop posting complaints on their own message board and simply sue them. Nobody was ever awarded damages if they never even went to court.
Then I bought another that's showing a corrupt firmware(AS-IS, damnit).
You might want to try flashing the firmware, if it's your DVD-ROM drive you're talking about. On the plus side, you can make the thing region-free, in most cases.
Hmm. Well, this is all starting to sound very unfortunate. I was really, seriously thinking of buying one of these KiSS DVD players. But...
... and here is the important thing...
...KiSS needs to know that I will not be supporting (buying) they products if they are violating the GPL. It seems to me that a large part of their market is going to be geeks like us. A DVD player that plays MPEG-4 is still rather a niche market, in the U.S. and Europe at least. If they want to corner the market that's going to be interested in these products -- us -- then they need to respect our ethics and our community.
If we continue to buy these players while this issue remains unresolved, we are just shooting ourselves in the foot.
On the other hand, this guy sounds like a typical suit, who doesn't really know how his product gets made and whose main job is to pump it. Somebody else posted that he was once heard bragging about the "2 million lines of code" that went into his product. That's exactly the type of dumb, meaningless puffery you can expect from somebody who really doesn't understand what he's selling at a fundamental level.
He has said that KiSS is looking into the problem. If they discover that their firmware contains open source code in violation of its license, then KiSS should immediately issue a firmware update that removes that code, for good or ill as far as product performance goes. (I'm assuming here that they aren't going to relent on their stance that they cannot, under any circumstances, open their code.)
If they find that they really didn't use MPlayer's code, then I guess what they need to do is show their source code to a representative of MPlayer under strict NDA, such that the MPlayer people can be convinced. Would that solve MPlayer's problem, or would they be unwilling to sign an NDA for this purpose?
Still, this whole "we can't open the code" thing is a little silly. KiSS should at least be considering the possibility of opening their source code at this juncture. They're already beginning to face competition in the form of MPEG-4 enabled DVD players from Korea, Taiwan etc. These things are going to beat them on price, guaranteed. Meanwhile, domestic companies like Linksys have announced similar products for the U.S. market, and I can't see how Sony or Panasonic can be too far behind. Any of the established consumer electronics companies is easily going to shut these guys out of the retail channel for good, just on brand recognition alone.
If they open their source, they open up the possibility of "hacked" variants of their player, sure. But what's to lose?
Nobody says they have to support a hacked version of their firmware, or even support the player at all once the end user flashes a hacked version.
By opening their source, they gain extra goodwill and patronage from their core market (geeks)
Closed source isn't going to prevent anyone from emulating their features. We're already seeing it happen. Who cares how 1337 they are when $50 Korean hardware does the same thing?
It's unlikely that their firmware is going to be binary compatible with another manufacturer's hardware. In other words, you couldn't download a KiSS firmware and run it on a Taiwanese player unless it was hardware compatible, and I assume the hardware design could still be protected by various intellectual property laws. So open KiSS firmware helps to sell closed KiSS hardware.
What the hell? Open the source, use all the MPlayer code you want, save on R&D!
Right now, I really could not in good conscience buy a KiSS product. If they opened their source tomorrow, I'd probably be jonesing for one even twice as hard as before.
Then he seems to fail to mention that letting each device have its own IP opens up a whole host of possible attacks.
No, that actually seems to be one of the main thrusts of his article...that IPv6 gives every machine its own address, opening up all sorts of security problems.
Who would honestly let an out of the box Windows machine be open to the rest of the internet with no NAT?
Here, however, you seem to be confusing the function of a NAT with the function of a firewall.
In all honesty, though, most of my hardcore IP networking friends -- the kind of people who always use FreeBSD over Linux because of FreeBSD's superior, time-tested, proven TCP/IP stack -- pretty much agree with Garfinkel's assertion that NAT is the Devil. I've never really understood that viewpoint, though. Or at least, it seems to me that NAT is here to stay until something radical happens (like switching to IPv6).
OK, granted the Internet was designed such that every machine would have a unique IP address. It's evolved away from that early model, however. Wouldn't it be better to deal with it, rather than complain? (I, obviously, am nobody's idea of a network engineer.)
Peppercoin requires the user to download and install software, while Bitpass doesn't. While you and I might not be too troubled by this, many people are.
Wait... you're saying the Peppercoin software is actually available for Linux only?
This is as worthy a cause as I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. I'm heading to my homepage to tuck a link somewhere on there right now! If you have decent luck finding your own page on Google, I suggest you do the same.
... and you don't have a voice number on that line? When you call Covad for help they don't ask "what's your phone number?"
They do ask me that, but so far as I can tell it's just a number they use to index my account. I know for a fact that my DSL line is on a different pair of posts from my voice phone at the box outside my house. I know this because, at one point, somebody moved into the apartment upstairs from me, ordered SBC phone service, and suddenly I found my Covad DSL line mysteriously cut. I had to go and reconnect it myself at the demarc box. My voice phone service was unaffected. (Somebody once suggested to me that this happens because SBC is a union shop, while Covad is not.)
At any rate, I certainly don't get voice service from Covad.
Here in California, Verizon will not sell you DSL unless you also subscribe to voice service.
I also live in California, and I don't have this requirement. In fact, I'm not even sure Verizon provides DSL in my area (San Francisco).
I got my DSL from Earthlink, who provisioned it through Covad. A Covad guy showed up at my house for my installation. I asked him if he was going to run it over my existing SBC (nee Pacific Bell) phone line. He said something to the effect of, if I really wanted that he'd do it, but he didn't think I wanted that. In the end, he ran a new jack to exactly where I told him to put it -- drilled a hole in my wall, ran the wiring along the baseboard, everything. I'm still sitting right here next to a jack with the Covad logo on it, and there are no "filters" on my regular phone line. And, I might add, this installation was free. Things may have changed since then, which was a couple of years ago now, probably; but I've had consistent service with the same provider since then, with very few complaints.
I pay about $50/month, which until recently was pretty much the going rate in the area, whether you went with SBC, Covad or some other DSL provider, or whomever the local cable provider was (Viacom, then AT&T and now Comcast). Competition seems to finally be starting to drive the prices down; or, Comcast seems to be going back to the model of competing on bandwidth, I believe offering 6Mbit in some areas.
Like they care. We're not really dealing with SCO, we're dealing with The Canopy Group, which chased the ambulance, bought the wounded body, and threw it into passing traffic in hopes of suing on the body's behalf.
I really wonder. If we are to believe Ransom Love's recent comments, "Darl took [trying to indemnify people who had used both Unix and Linux] in a little different direction than we intended."
No, that's the thing. There is no such clause. They can examine your records for any reason, and not only do they not have to tell you about it, your financial institution (the definition of which is now extended to to include everything from banks to insurance companies to casinos) is compelled by law to keep it a secret from you.
I wonder -- is there any way to identify these chips by model number? I mean, what does it say in "About this Mac" and Apple System Profiler?
Also, it will be interesting to see what this means for the next wave of Apple PowerBooks. The 90nm process is definitely what they need to get a G5 into a notebook format... provided they can get the heat dissipation down low enough and get respectable performance in a low-voltage mode.
Clustering databases has different issues/concerns than clustering computational problems. I wrote an article about database clustering a while back, available here, if you're interested.
And as for "lying" about how to get a high rank. No kidding. Google doesn't publicize that information for good reason: people like Spam (er search)King abuse the system and then people like him whine when the system they took advantage of is no longer there.
I don't think Google has ever done anything to conceal how PageRank works. If you're in the dark, let me point you to the September 2001 issue of Web Techniques magazine (later known as New Architect), where I interviewed Google's CTO, Craig Silverstein, on the subject:
WT: So how does PageRank work?
CS: It takes advantage of the fact that the Web has links. We can use the Web's link structure to get a quality score for every page on the Web. If a lot of high-PageRank pages point to your site, then your site also gets a high PageRank. PageRank wasn't developed for Web search, actually. But when Larry Page, the developer, started studying it, he discovered that the PageRank of a page corresponded closely to his intuitive idea of the quality or importance of a Web page. Intuitively, if Yahoo, the New York Times, and the maintainer of the most popular Barbie Doll site all link to your Web page--I won't try to guess what your Web page might be about--that reflects well on your page. From that observation was born the idea of using this quality score as part of a search engine ranking system--an idea we feel has been very successful.
So basically, your page's rank depends not only on the quantity, but also on the quality of the links you receive. You can spam your own Web address over a thousand low-ranked pages and not have too much effect. If your site is linked to on the New York Times Web site, however, that's bound to make Google's spiders take notice. In a sense, Google's system is therefore somewhat self-policing. This guy's site (which sounds like some sort of online pharmacy site -- read: cheap viagra and penis pills) probably didn't rank very highly for totally legitimate reasons.
To further demonstrate Google's impartiality, try doing a Google search for either "google sucks" or "google blows." Two seemingly contradictory phrases, and yet the guy's site shows up top ranked every time! (grins)
Apple does seem to have gotten sloppy with terminology once again. They can't call a component "JavaScriptCore" -- technically and legally, "JavaScript" can only describe the Netscape implementation of the language. The generic term is ECMAScript. Anyone taking bets on how long before Time-Warner's lawyers notice the trademark infringment?
Actually, ECMAScript and JavaScript are not the same language. The link you provide says that JavaScript 2.0 is a slight superset of the ECMAScript 4 proposal. ActionScript, the language used in Macromedia Flash, is also derived from the ECMAScript syntactic core, but it is not the same language as JavaScript. So if Apple says it supports JavaScript, that's probably precisely what it means.
Furthermore, I doubt Time-Warner will be tracking down anyone for the misuse of the word "JavaScript." If you check the U.S. Patent Office, you'll find that JavaScript is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems.
Biggest "war on drugs" taboo
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
2) I wholeheartedly agree with this, the war on drugs has done nothing to combat the evils of addiction, and the human cost of the 'war' has been terrible
I wholeheartedly agree as well. But I've got an even bigger drug-related "taboo" for you: Try some time walking into a social setting composed of metropolitan 20-40 year olds in the United States and saying something along the lines of: "Drugs are bullshit. You should not use drugs."
Every time I say something along these lines, someone will immediately counter with: No, it's the war on drugs that's bullshit. The war on drugs has had an incredible human cost in this country, and it's done nothing to combat the evils of addiction.
OK, fine. But then they'll follow it up with: Besides, I should have the right to experiment in the privacy of my own home!
To which I say: Experiment? And what, pray tell, is the nature of these experiments? What is the hypothesis to be proven here? That drugs get you high? Cuz I can point you to substantial prior work in that area, if you like.
What's more, who in the hell ever said that the war on drugs had anything to do with preventing you from dropping ecstasy in the privacy of your own home? Or in public, for that matter? As far as I'm concerned, it should be obvious to anybody that the war on drugs is all about money. It's about corrupt politicians, corrupt law enforcement, and blatant criminals both locally and overseas, all arranged in a little circle trading the money around. And in the middle are the people who use drugs, and they're the ones who are paying the bills -- with both their money, and the toll drugs take on their own lives.
The war on drugs isn't going to make drugs go away. But if you want the war on drugs to go away, there's one easy way to do it: Stop using drugs. Until people are willing to do that, you're just pouring more and more money toward preserving the status quo. And what do you get out of it, really?
Heresy, I know. Cuz after all, drugs are cool. They make you "counter culture." You're doing something they don't want you to do. Drugs make you more fun, more appealing. Proper use of them is a sign of maturity. It lends you worldliness, experience. There are lots of situations where you can't even imagine not doing drugs -- hell anybody who isn't is missing out, plain and simple.
Just like they said about cigarettes in the 1930s-40s. Go figure.
P.S. Before people bother to flame me, let me just point out that I'm not a tent preacher or anything. I'm not posting this to preach to people, or to convert them to any way of thinking. I'm posting it because this is a topic about speech taboos, and this is a line of thinking that I do believe in but I learned long ago to never bring up in public, cuz it's just not worth it. I reckon that's what makes it a taboo topic, right?
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, the one thing people don't seem to understand about ergonomics is that it's all about movement. The point of an adjustable chair isn't to find the One True Position that will prevent you from ever having repeat stress problems. The point of an adjustable chair is that, when you start feeling fatigued, you can adjust it, moving to a different position that will give your other muscle groups a rest. The more you can re-adjust your furniture, the better.
So what's more adjustable than a laptop? Instead of cramping yourself into a desk in the corner in the same position all day, every day, you can move your laptop around anywhere you want. Move to the other side of the room. Work at your kitchen table. Take it down to the coffee shop with you. Lie on the couch with a bunch of pillows behind you. Whatever feels good.
How is HD-DVD "backward compatible"? You're not going to be able to read your HD-DVDs in your current DVD player.
On the other hand, both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players will appear that can support earlier generations of discs.
Exactly how is the blessing of the DVD Forum a better thing than, say, the support of Sony, Matsushita, Pioneer, Sharp, Hitachi, LG, Philips, Samsung, and Thompson, inclusive?
What's interesting to me is thatboth the standards being talked about here seem to use blue lasers to pack more data onto the disc. Not too long ago, the competition vs. the Blu-ray group seemed to focus on sticking with traditional red lasers and just using more aggressive compression (e.g. MPEG-4). I'm glad to see that idea is going away. I still have a lot of early-generation DVDs where the compression artifacts are very noticeable. I'd hate to see that go back to being the norm.
If we continue to buy these players while this issue remains unresolved, we are just shooting ourselves in the foot.
On the other hand, this guy sounds like a typical suit, who doesn't really know how his product gets made and whose main job is to pump it. Somebody else posted that he was once heard bragging about the "2 million lines of code" that went into his product. That's exactly the type of dumb, meaningless puffery you can expect from somebody who really doesn't understand what he's selling at a fundamental level.
He has said that KiSS is looking into the problem. If they discover that their firmware contains open source code in violation of its license, then KiSS should immediately issue a firmware update that removes that code, for good or ill as far as product performance goes. (I'm assuming here that they aren't going to relent on their stance that they cannot, under any circumstances, open their code.)
If they find that they really didn't use MPlayer's code, then I guess what they need to do is show their source code to a representative of MPlayer under strict NDA, such that the MPlayer people can be convinced. Would that solve MPlayer's problem, or would they be unwilling to sign an NDA for this purpose?
Still, this whole "we can't open the code" thing is a little silly. KiSS should at least be considering the possibility of opening their source code at this juncture. They're already beginning to face competition in the form of MPEG-4 enabled DVD players from Korea, Taiwan etc. These things are going to beat them on price, guaranteed. Meanwhile, domestic companies like Linksys have announced similar products for the U.S. market, and I can't see how Sony or Panasonic can be too far behind. Any of the established consumer electronics companies is easily going to shut these guys out of the retail channel for good, just on brand recognition alone.
If they open their source, they open up the possibility of "hacked" variants of their player, sure. But what's to lose?
- Nobody says they have to support a hacked version of their firmware, or even support the player at all once the end user flashes a hacked version.
- By opening their source, they gain extra goodwill and patronage from their core market (geeks)
- Closed source isn't going to prevent anyone from emulating their features. We're already seeing it happen. Who cares how 1337 they are when $50 Korean hardware does the same thing?
- It's unlikely that their firmware is going to be binary compatible with another manufacturer's hardware. In other words, you couldn't download a KiSS firmware and run it on a Taiwanese player unless it was hardware compatible, and I assume the hardware design could still be protected by various intellectual property laws. So open KiSS firmware helps to sell closed KiSS hardware.
- What the hell? Open the source, use all the MPlayer code you want, save on R&D!
Right now, I really could not in good conscience buy a KiSS product. If they opened their source tomorrow, I'd probably be jonesing for one even twice as hard as before.In all honesty, though, most of my hardcore IP networking friends -- the kind of people who always use FreeBSD over Linux because of FreeBSD's superior, time-tested, proven TCP/IP stack -- pretty much agree with Garfinkel's assertion that NAT is the Devil. I've never really understood that viewpoint, though. Or at least, it seems to me that NAT is here to stay until something radical happens (like switching to IPv6).
OK, granted the Internet was designed such that every machine would have a unique IP address. It's evolved away from that early model, however. Wouldn't it be better to deal with it, rather than complain? (I, obviously, am nobody's idea of a network engineer.)
Oh yeah, totally ... you won't be seeing any more of the amazing SCO stories we were reading in the press like back in ... um ... er ... help me out here.
This is as worthy a cause as I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. I'm heading to my homepage to tuck a link somewhere on there right now! If you have decent luck finding your own page on Google, I suggest you do the same.
At any rate, I certainly don't get voice service from Covad.
Actually, according to this, Gates made no mention of either Linux or SCO.
I got my DSL from Earthlink, who provisioned it through Covad. A Covad guy showed up at my house for my installation. I asked him if he was going to run it over my existing SBC (nee Pacific Bell) phone line. He said something to the effect of, if I really wanted that he'd do it, but he didn't think I wanted that. In the end, he ran a new jack to exactly where I told him to put it -- drilled a hole in my wall, ran the wiring along the baseboard, everything. I'm still sitting right here next to a jack with the Covad logo on it, and there are no "filters" on my regular phone line. And, I might add, this installation was free. Things may have changed since then, which was a couple of years ago now, probably; but I've had consistent service with the same provider since then, with very few complaints.
I pay about $50/month, which until recently was pretty much the going rate in the area, whether you went with SBC, Covad or some other DSL provider, or whomever the local cable provider was (Viacom, then AT&T and now Comcast). Competition seems to finally be starting to drive the prices down; or, Comcast seems to be going back to the model of competing on bandwidth, I believe offering 6Mbit in some areas.
On the other hand, Darl's dedication to making a buck for himself is well-documented.
No, that's the thing. There is no such clause. They can examine your records for any reason, and not only do they not have to tell you about it, your financial institution (the definition of which is now extended to to include everything from banks to insurance companies to casinos) is compelled by law to keep it a secret from you.
I wonder -- is there any way to identify these chips by model number? I mean, what does it say in "About this Mac" and Apple System Profiler?
... provided they can get the heat dissipation down low enough and get respectable performance in a low-voltage mode.
Also, it will be interesting to see what this means for the next wave of Apple PowerBooks. The 90nm process is definitely what they need to get a G5 into a notebook format
Clustering databases has different issues/concerns than clustering computational problems. I wrote an article about database clustering a while back, available here, if you're interested.
Try the veal.
To further demonstrate Google's impartiality, try doing a Google search for either "google sucks" or "google blows." Two seemingly contradictory phrases, and yet the guy's site shows up top ranked every time! (grins)
Furthermore, I doubt Time-Warner will be tracking down anyone for the misuse of the word "JavaScript." If you check the U.S. Patent Office, you'll find that JavaScript is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems.
Every time I say something along these lines, someone will immediately counter with: No, it's the war on drugs that's bullshit. The war on drugs has had an incredible human cost in this country, and it's done nothing to combat the evils of addiction.
OK, fine. But then they'll follow it up with: Besides, I should have the right to experiment in the privacy of my own home!
To which I say: Experiment? And what, pray tell, is the nature of these experiments? What is the hypothesis to be proven here? That drugs get you high? Cuz I can point you to substantial prior work in that area, if you like.
What's more, who in the hell ever said that the war on drugs had anything to do with preventing you from dropping ecstasy in the privacy of your own home? Or in public, for that matter? As far as I'm concerned, it should be obvious to anybody that the war on drugs is all about money. It's about corrupt politicians, corrupt law enforcement, and blatant criminals both locally and overseas, all arranged in a little circle trading the money around. And in the middle are the people who use drugs, and they're the ones who are paying the bills -- with both their money, and the toll drugs take on their own lives.
The war on drugs isn't going to make drugs go away. But if you want the war on drugs to go away, there's one easy way to do it: Stop using drugs. Until people are willing to do that, you're just pouring more and more money toward preserving the status quo. And what do you get out of it, really?
Heresy, I know. Cuz after all, drugs are cool. They make you "counter culture." You're doing something they don't want you to do. Drugs make you more fun, more appealing. Proper use of them is a sign of maturity. It lends you worldliness, experience. There are lots of situations where you can't even imagine not doing drugs -- hell anybody who isn't is missing out, plain and simple.
Just like they said about cigarettes in the 1930s-40s. Go figure.
P.S. Before people bother to flame me, let me just point out that I'm not a tent preacher or anything. I'm not posting this to preach to people, or to convert them to any way of thinking. I'm posting it because this is a topic about speech taboos, and this is a line of thinking that I do believe in but I learned long ago to never bring up in public, cuz it's just not worth it. I reckon that's what makes it a taboo topic, right?