Windows users. On the Mac these were (and still are, I believe) referred to as "Desktop Patterns," which is a more sensible term. Especially back when desktop patterns really were patterns, and not full-screen pictures. I can't remember what term BeOS used, but it never seemed very concerned with maintaing the desktop metaphor.
I think the whole idea of the "office" metaphor (desktop, trash can, folders) has been pretty much given up on by the major OS vendors. Sure they still keep the icons, but there's not nearly the attempt at parallelism with the paper world that there used to be.
I've always thought that the term "file" was misused from the beginning, though. To me, a "file" is a collection of related documents, i.e. a 'personnel file' or 'expense file.' It seems like a more logical hierarchy would be documents, then loose, user-defined folders, then files for keeping related information together in a sort of organized index. While this is certainly possible with modern operating systems, the terminology falls apart and it doesn't work very well out of the box.
I suppose it's a moot point now, since people are now tailoring their workflows around the constraints of their computer's filesystem and interface, and not the other way around, and language from now on is always going to use the term 'file' as a word for a computer document primarily, with a secondary meaning having something to do with pressed-flat dead trees.
Although it doesn't have the failure recovery, recent versions of Photoshop work like this. Undo information is stored in the temp space, and then is wiped out and the file is baselined when you do a manual Save. I think there might be an autosave feature in there someplace (got knows it's got everything else) but the files I work with are big enough that I wouldn't want to use it, because saving is a fairly heavy I/O draw, and takes a few seconds to complete at least.
This is actually not a bad idea, and one I've looked into just for myself to have some 'project servers' to play around with at home. I'm not involved in datacenter operations or procurement, so I'm not sure what the issues would be around getting them for corporate use, but it seems like they could be an option for second-line stuff, or for an organization that was on a very limited budget.
You'd want to do your research into what you were buying, though. I've heard that there are some models of servers around that are flakier than a homebuild, and I can imagine those might turn up on the used/surplus market pretty frequently. However if you steered clear of the real lemons I could see it as a good way of getting well-engineered hardware for cheap. I'd be a little concerned about the availibility of spare parts though; perhaps one would want to buy somewhat more units than necessary and strip the extras for spares.
I was stunned a few weeks ago at the prices for used HP Proliant gear. Apparently it's all dot-bomb surplus, but there are whole servers available used now for the price of a new spare power supply. I'm not sure I'd want to tie my career to their success in a mission-critical role, but I'm sure they'd have their uses in shoestring projects.
Speaking as someone who used to sell these things, I second your thoughts. I wouldn't get a Canon or Nikon low-end camera for myself or someone in my family. At the higher end -- where the customers are somewhat more discriminating -- they make great gear, don't get me wrong. But at the low end they rely a lot on their brand name and cut a lot of corners.
Fuji, Olympus, and Minolta are all better in terms of consumer grade cameras than Nikon or Canon's entry level, IMO. Although they all have their good and bad years, and Nikon had some great prosumer equipment in the past (the Coolpix 950 comes to mind, that thing was great), you need to pay some money with Canon or Nikon to get into their non-crippled gear. Fuji -- possibly perhaps because they have a brand name that's associated with cheap drug-store film to most people -- gives a lot of bang for the buck. (Although I think they made a mistake with those xD cards.)
Anyway, just my two cents. I worked at a big camera retailer and we used to push Nikon merch like it was our job -- because basically it was, Nikon had great sales incentives -- but when it came time to get a gift for a friend or family, or pick up an inexpensive digital for myself, I went with the "second tier" brands.
He's probably not a racist at all, but that doesn't save you from being called one by "multiculturalists" who disagree with you.
Frankly I think we need to have some sort of 'Godwin's Law' type rule for political discussions. The first person to call the other guy a racist (without a clear indication of that) loses by default.
I'm aware of these aspects of the Air Force mission, but all of them mostly revolve around the physical, nuts and bolts side of either the interception or of the transmission of information. Although I have no doubt that there is a healthy Air Force intelligence branch, it by necessity and design ought to be focused on intelligence specific to air warfare; an entity in charge of 'cyberwarfare' should have a broader focus -- taking in intelligence from all sources and concentrating on information warfare on a strategic scale.
I agree with some of the above posters that every service should probably have an informational warfare-capable branch, specific to their mission. Pilots of strike fighters need SAM sites knocked offline, a submarine inserting a covert operations team might need shore defenses diverted, an advancing Army unit might need enemy communications falsified to prolong the elment of surprise. All of these necessitate 'cyberwar' at a low, tactical level. However they are definitely combat support roles -- they support the force's essential mission, whatever it is; they do not change it substantially.
An entity which actually has as its overall mission the realization of 'cyberwarfare' (whatever you define that to be) should be supra-service. However, it should be able to use service assets (like AWACS, Rivet Joint, that were mentioned) in order to work on a strategic level. Just as a rough example, they might get some intelligence from a humint source that indicates a particular lack of information about something. In response, a cyberwar agency could employ a combination of disinformation strategies -- messages transmitted from aircraft, from ground troops, and on the internet -- to give the enemy the impression something was occuring that in reality wasn't. Or perhaps direct jamming aircraft and other more conventional methods to where they will be most beneficial with regards to the other disinformation strategies going on at the same time.
I don't think that any of the three conventional services, as much as they might all think so, are in a position to do this type of cross-service, high-level strategic analysis and implementation. That's why I said that something like the NSA or the CIA would really be a better choice (actually now that I think about it, I lean towards the CIA, because they do direct action already -- however the NSA has always been stronger about sigint and cryptography). There are far too many inter-service rivalries and competition for funding and future roles to achieve this sort of cooperation with one service acting as the lead.
I'm not that familiar with the NSA's mission; I'm not sure whether they're allowed to do things that might be considered 'offensive' or not. But as long as we're rewriting the mission statments of various services, it makes sense that we should take the service with the most expertise in the area we want to expand (information warfare) and change its mission, and not just hammer some other service into the new role.
Yeah I thought the same thing, but apparently they did sit on it for a while.
I'd like to know more about what's been going on since they discovered this back in May, and the present time. They knew the websites that the operator would have to register in order to send commands to the virus, although I'm sure it wouldn't have been 'simple,' it seems pretty straightforward to then monitor those websites and try to trace the IP of whoever registers it. I'm not familiar with the registration procedures of these sites, but maybe by staking one out you'd even get some more information than just an IP when a person goes to register.
Then you'd need to keep a lid on everything while you hunted down the person at the other end of the connection, through their country's authorites / a Predator drone / "unfortunate accident" / etc.
Unless the operator is dead or in jail, I'm not sure why this is being publicized. I mean sure, I find it interesting, but I don't really need to know this. I would have been a lot happier if they had kept it under wraps if it had made catching the person responsible any easier.
If I take my TV right now and turn it about its vertical axis by 90 degrees, the earth's magnetic field is now running through it in a completely different direction than it was before I turned it. Seems to work fine to me.
When's the last time you had to retune your TV because you reorganized your living room? It's not that sensitive to geo-magnetic fields.
The biggest group of people this is going to affect are cartographers, and maybe some people who use maps and compasses to navigate (the ones who are left and haven't switched to GPS). But any good navigational chart has a seasonal correction factor on it of a few degrees per year already, this might just mean -- if the pole really is now moving faster -- that the seasonal correction will have to be increased, and maybe we'll have to print new maps and navigational charts more often.
It sounds like the number of shares that they were trying to sell was four times greater than the total number of outstanding shares issued by the company. Even if they were trying to sell short, there's no way the transaction would have been legitimate.
I think an easier solution than trying to keep the trading systems constantly aware of every company's number of total outstanding shares, is just to have some sort of a special warning that would come up when you are attempting to buy or sell at a price that's more than one or two standard deviations off from the mean price of shares sold of that stock in the last day of trading. Since the warning would only come up when you tried to do something extreme, people wouldn't get too used to seeing it -- it wouldn't be like a confirmation dialog that they'd have to click every time they wanted to complete a transaction.
Well based on the photo that MSN decided to run with on its article, apparently people at the Tokyo stock exchange have a special, Solitare-based GUI for doing stock trades:
I think that the USAF tossed in "cyber warfare" into their mission statement because it's a great way to get in at the ground level of something that they think might be big in the future, even though they're not really sure what it is. However, I think it's fair to say that some bunch of generals somewhere though that in the future, this might have a lot of money and responsibility associated with it, and maybe by putting it into their mission statement, they could corner the market.
Frankly I think it's ridiculously outside of their mission. Cyberwarfare ought to be the domain of one of the intelligence agencies, since they're basically the ones with the signals interception, encryption, and intelligence analysis capabilities already. Neither the technical capabilities nor institutional culture of the Air Force really lend themselves to this mission.
Okay, first of all for all of your slashbots that are out of the loop, we (known on Slashdot as PlayfullyClever) are blatant plagiarists.... Why would we do this? Well, there are several reasons. First of all, we do it for kicks.... The second major reason is promoting our site.
Apparently this is his new user -- all of the old ones must have run out of karma when people caught on.
I can't compare to how things might work elsewhere, having never held a job outside the United States, but I think the premise you describe as being implicit in my post is true and valid. At least it has been my experience in almost every tech job I've ever worked, and especially present on jobs whose focus was the production of a deliverable (especially software).
If you're on a team, or especially if you're in charge of the team, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who are On The Team, and everyone else who is Not On The Team. That's it. Sure, you probably have support personnel and people who help you out for various and sundry personal reasons, but they probably don't have a particularly vested interest in whether you succeed or not. The direct product of this is that people on the team have a 1:1 relationship (hopefully) with another group, People You Can Trust. If you're on the team and committed to the project, you get trusted with stuff, including passwords, access to confidential information, etc. When you're no longer on the team, you're no longer trusted, and therefore the stuff you could access gets immediately revoked. Or alternately, if you are for some reason perceived as being not fully committed to a project (within in the limits of it being your job, and not your entire existence), then you'll probably get the boot. Unless you have some very specialized skills that make you invaluable -- and in my experience this is very rare, much more rare than people with "special skills" think -- project managers are almost more interested in commitment and trustworthiness than they are with talent or skill.
This binary, black/white point of view is popular, IMO, because when you're up against a deadline and working like hell, nobody has time to figure out other people's myriad personal motivations and measure others' commitment in order to figure out what they should be given in terms of assignments and how to interpret their assessments of situations. And for what it's worth, I agree with them. I would rather work on a project where everyone is into their work and committed to success, but perhaps learning things as they go along, then work with a team of experts who couldn't give a shit what they're working on as long as they don't have to stay late and their paychecks don't bounce.
If that's not for you, that's fine and I wouldn't fault you for it, however I would urge you not to join an IT project in the U.S., because that's pretty much how things work.
IIRC, companies like Microsoft and IBM are not patent "holders," they're "assignees." The actual inventors, who are real persons and not corporate entities, are who the journalist in the article was searching for. in the process of filing a patent, most inventors assign it to the company they were working for when they did the inventing, but they are still listed as the inventor and it is to them that the patent is granted. After being assigned the patent, the company then basically owns it under law, and can use it as they wish. However if you went searching for most prolific patent-holders, I think what you'd get back would not contain any corporations, but only individuals.
Well if you've ever searched their database at USPTO.gov, they have recent patents in an electronic format where the full text is keyword-searchable (at least in theory, I don't know if you can actually search this way) but the older ones are TIFF images of the paper files, indexed by number and name and date. So unless you went though and OCRed all the old scans, it's very difficult to search for prior art and find anything, unless the title of the older patent is obviously related to what you're looking for. I can think of a lot of possible scenarios however where that would not be the case.
It would be interesting to get some sort of community-based effort going to OCR the old patent records. I suppose it wouldn't have the glamor of Project Gutenberg, but at the end you could make a free database of expired patents -- so essentially you'd have a vast repository of public domain knowledge, and a great way for people to back up prior art claims.
> I think the whole system is much more set up for physical science/engineering style inventions.
Well given that the whole system was basically put together in the 19th century and has -- as far as I can tell -- not been substantially overhauled, this makes sense. It's made for people who invent a new type of mousetrap or ball bearing or engine; if you deal entirely in abstract concepts like algorithms or 'business processes' it's not nearly as obvious what (if anything) a patent should protect. My personal feeling is that the patents should be fairly narrow in scope and only protect particular implementation schemes, and there should be at least a required proof-of-concept model (although I could probably be convinced to accept a good simulation).
However there is a line of argument which goes that broad patents are actually a good thing, as stupid as they may be, because they encourage companies to come out with inventions rather than keeping them secret. Having an idea encumbered under a 20-year patent grant, but free after that, is a lot better than encouraging a company to keep the details to themselves and only disclose it to people who've signed NDAs, or abuse copyright law to create a 95-year psuedo-patent.
It's getting obvious that we need some sort of patent reform, but I would hesitate to do so in the current climate because of what's happened to copyright. I could easily see a scenario where we revisit the idea of patents, and end up with 110-year renewable business-process, software, and human genome patents, because Microsoft, Pfizer, and ADM bought all the politicians that year. As much as the current system sucks, all you have to do is look at some other parts of our IP law framework to see how bad it could get.
Maybe a 19th century system is better than a late-20th-century one.
Or that guy who patented a way of swinging sideways on a playground swing...
I'm not going to go and actually dig up the patent right now, but basically he patented (or did it as a proxy for his kid, I hope) a method of moving oneself sideways on a swing by pulling alternately on the supporting chains. As someone who spent a good bit of my youth hanging around playgrounds, there's a lot of prior art on that one.
(Of course, personally I was always partial to swinging in an ellipsoidal fashion, by moving forwards and back and then pulling on alternately on the chains, the better to whack the person in the swing next to you.)
So far it works rather well and beats bringing a book into the bathroom for reading.
Hope you can spray Lysol on it afterwards. Otherwise... remind me never to touch any random PDAs I find in other people's houses.
Speaking of odd bathroom entertainment, I guess I shouldn't make too much fun of you: I went into a fairly trendy bar a few days ago in DC, and in the men's rest room there were televisions mounted on pretty much every surface that you'd be looking at as you were doing your various bathroom activities. Above the urinals, above the mirror at the sink, and another that was visible up near the ceiling from within the stalls as you were sitting there. They were playing what seemed to be some sort of music video channel ("MTV 'No. 2'"?)
I think the reason this is done, even though it seems illogical on the surface, is because of the company's responsibility to act with "due diligence" in regards to security.
If you as an employee compromise the system or act as some sort of mole or corporate spy, after you're busted when the shareholders come down on your boss, he can say "Well, hey we had no way of knowing he was bent, we had no warning that this was about to happen. It could happen to anybody."
But let's say you put in your resignation, then backdoored their network on your way out because they didn't cut off your access until two weeks later. This time when the Powers That Be come looking for blood, your boss is SOL: he could try saying "well, we had no idea he was bent..." but the shareholders are just going to respond "He had just turned in his resignation! He was on his way out the door! Why did he still have access?" And your boss becomes the next one on the chopping block, and depending on the nature of the business possibly liable for fines as well.
So really your boss, and your boss' boss, and probably their boss' boss, all the way up the CoC, are just covering their asses by pulling your access as soon as they get a hint that you're not going to be a career employee.
The Canon 1Ds doesn't approach medium format film in absolute terms. It's a nice camera, but it's out of its league when you start comparing it to medium format, film or digital.
It might approach medium format if a photographer wasn't using it to it's full ability, and doing a better job maximizing the digital's capabilities, but this is really an operator-training issue and not an equipment one.
A 35mm film frame, shot on Fuji Velvia, is considered to be equivalent to somewhere between 10 and 16 MP. So the Canon is quite possibly the first digital camera that actually approaches the limit of what 35mm film can do at its best -- but even then I take issue, since each pixel in the digital frame records one color, and then the software interpolates the missing values for the other two colors on each pixel (unless you have a camera with the Foveon sensor).
However for medium format film still has a clear advantage. Even Ektachrome -- which has something of a reputation for being grainy at times -- is going to give you somewhere in the neighborhood of 18MP; Velvia is way above that (granted the error does start to get large). To get a digital that can compete with medium-format film, you're well out of the 1Ds range and looking more at things like the 22MP Mamiya ZD. (Feel free to tell me how much that one costs -- the press release doesn't even mention a price.)
Digital definitely has gotten APS film beat, and it's closing in on what quality advantage 35mm still holds. But Medium format is still superior, and 4x5 and the larger medium-format pano formats have no competition at all. If you want really high quality digital at the upper end of the spectrum, you're better to shoot film and then scan it, either on a flatbed or a drum scanner, to get your file.
I'm not some film-photo Luddite -- I use a digital myself because I think the loss in quality is worth the gain in convenience. However I think it's important to objectively assess the difference in quality, and realize that for the price, film still has its advantages.
Yeah. If anything, it's probably a lot easier to take 10,000 images with a consumer camera than with a pro camera.
The pro camera is going to generate huge RAW files, and even considering the fact that a professional photographer might spend more money on high-cap memory cards than the average hobbyist, they're going to fill up much more quickly. A snapshot-happy user with a hefty supply of batteries and who's travelling with their PowerBook to download the cards to when they get full could easily rack up tens of thousands of images a week that they'll want to sort through. Quantity is not something restricted to professionals.
Also, with the exception of fashion or sports photography, I doubt that many photographers take large numbers of snapshots. An amateur trying to take a good photo of a flower might take 100 different shots of it, hoping for a good one; a professional might spend their time perfecting the lighting and composition, and take 10 images -- but have them all look good. Furthermore, really high end professional studio digital equipment (medium format 6x7 digital backs) don't even use memory cards -- they interface directly to computers and have very slow shot-to-shot times. You couldn't take more than a few hundred images a day with them if you wanted to.
The "10,000 shots per day" professional is representative only of one particular kind of photographer, probably a fashion one, and while Aperture may appeal to them because it's capable of handling large numbers of images at once, that's not necessarily the software's sole target audience.
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>> who puts wallpaper on their desktop!
Windows users. On the Mac these were (and still are, I believe) referred to as "Desktop Patterns," which is a more sensible term. Especially back when desktop patterns really were patterns, and not full-screen pictures. I can't remember what term BeOS used, but it never seemed very concerned with maintaing the desktop metaphor.
I think the whole idea of the "office" metaphor (desktop, trash can, folders) has been pretty much given up on by the major OS vendors. Sure they still keep the icons, but there's not nearly the attempt at parallelism with the paper world that there used to be.
I've always thought that the term "file" was misused from the beginning, though. To me, a "file" is a collection of related documents, i.e. a 'personnel file' or 'expense file.' It seems like a more logical hierarchy would be documents, then loose, user-defined folders, then files for keeping related information together in a sort of organized index. While this is certainly possible with modern operating systems, the terminology falls apart and it doesn't work very well out of the box.
I suppose it's a moot point now, since people are now tailoring their workflows around the constraints of their computer's filesystem and interface, and not the other way around, and language from now on is always going to use the term 'file' as a word for a computer document primarily, with a secondary meaning having something to do with pressed-flat dead trees.
Although it doesn't have the failure recovery, recent versions of Photoshop work like this. Undo information is stored in the temp space, and then is wiped out and the file is baselined when you do a manual Save. I think there might be an autosave feature in there someplace (got knows it's got everything else) but the files I work with are big enough that I wouldn't want to use it, because saving is a fairly heavy I/O draw, and takes a few seconds to complete at least.
This is actually not a bad idea, and one I've looked into just for myself to have some 'project servers' to play around with at home. I'm not involved in datacenter operations or procurement, so I'm not sure what the issues would be around getting them for corporate use, but it seems like they could be an option for second-line stuff, or for an organization that was on a very limited budget.
You'd want to do your research into what you were buying, though. I've heard that there are some models of servers around that are flakier than a homebuild, and I can imagine those might turn up on the used/surplus market pretty frequently. However if you steered clear of the real lemons I could see it as a good way of getting well-engineered hardware for cheap. I'd be a little concerned about the availibility of spare parts though; perhaps one would want to buy somewhat more units than necessary and strip the extras for spares.
I was stunned a few weeks ago at the prices for used HP Proliant gear. Apparently it's all dot-bomb surplus, but there are whole servers available used now for the price of a new spare power supply. I'm not sure I'd want to tie my career to their success in a mission-critical role, but I'm sure they'd have their uses in shoestring projects.
Speaking as someone who used to sell these things, I second your thoughts. I wouldn't get a Canon or Nikon low-end camera for myself or someone in my family. At the higher end -- where the customers are somewhat more discriminating -- they make great gear, don't get me wrong. But at the low end they rely a lot on their brand name and cut a lot of corners.
Fuji, Olympus, and Minolta are all better in terms of consumer grade cameras than Nikon or Canon's entry level, IMO. Although they all have their good and bad years, and Nikon had some great prosumer equipment in the past (the Coolpix 950 comes to mind, that thing was great), you need to pay some money with Canon or Nikon to get into their non-crippled gear. Fuji -- possibly perhaps because they have a brand name that's associated with cheap drug-store film to most people -- gives a lot of bang for the buck. (Although I think they made a mistake with those xD cards.)
Anyway, just my two cents. I worked at a big camera retailer and we used to push Nikon merch like it was our job -- because basically it was, Nikon had great sales incentives -- but when it came time to get a gift for a friend or family, or pick up an inexpensive digital for myself, I went with the "second tier" brands.
He's probably not a racist at all, but that doesn't save you from being called one by "multiculturalists" who disagree with you.
Frankly I think we need to have some sort of 'Godwin's Law' type rule for political discussions. The first person to call the other guy a racist (without a clear indication of that) loses by default.
I'm aware of these aspects of the Air Force mission, but all of them mostly revolve around the physical, nuts and bolts side of either the interception or of the transmission of information. Although I have no doubt that there is a healthy Air Force intelligence branch, it by necessity and design ought to be focused on intelligence specific to air warfare; an entity in charge of 'cyberwarfare' should have a broader focus -- taking in intelligence from all sources and concentrating on information warfare on a strategic scale.
I agree with some of the above posters that every service should probably have an informational warfare-capable branch, specific to their mission. Pilots of strike fighters need SAM sites knocked offline, a submarine inserting a covert operations team might need shore defenses diverted, an advancing Army unit might need enemy communications falsified to prolong the elment of surprise. All of these necessitate 'cyberwar' at a low, tactical level. However they are definitely combat support roles -- they support the force's essential mission, whatever it is; they do not change it substantially.
An entity which actually has as its overall mission the realization of 'cyberwarfare' (whatever you define that to be) should be supra-service. However, it should be able to use service assets (like AWACS, Rivet Joint, that were mentioned) in order to work on a strategic level. Just as a rough example, they might get some intelligence from a humint source that indicates a particular lack of information about something. In response, a cyberwar agency could employ a combination of disinformation strategies -- messages transmitted from aircraft, from ground troops, and on the internet -- to give the enemy the impression something was occuring that in reality wasn't. Or perhaps direct jamming aircraft and other more conventional methods to where they will be most beneficial with regards to the other disinformation strategies going on at the same time.
I don't think that any of the three conventional services, as much as they might all think so, are in a position to do this type of cross-service, high-level strategic analysis and implementation. That's why I said that something like the NSA or the CIA would really be a better choice (actually now that I think about it, I lean towards the CIA, because they do direct action already -- however the NSA has always been stronger about sigint and cryptography). There are far too many inter-service rivalries and competition for funding and future roles to achieve this sort of cooperation with one service acting as the lead.
I'm not that familiar with the NSA's mission; I'm not sure whether they're allowed to do things that might be considered 'offensive' or not. But as long as we're rewriting the mission statments of various services, it makes sense that we should take the service with the most expertise in the area we want to expand (information warfare) and change its mission, and not just hammer some other service into the new role.
Yeah I thought the same thing, but apparently they did sit on it for a while.
I'd like to know more about what's been going on since they discovered this back in May, and the present time. They knew the websites that the operator would have to register in order to send commands to the virus, although I'm sure it wouldn't have been 'simple,' it seems pretty straightforward to then monitor those websites and try to trace the IP of whoever registers it. I'm not familiar with the registration procedures of these sites, but maybe by staking one out you'd even get some more information than just an IP when a person goes to register.
Then you'd need to keep a lid on everything while you hunted down the person at the other end of the connection, through their country's authorites / a Predator drone / "unfortunate accident" / etc.
Unless the operator is dead or in jail, I'm not sure why this is being publicized. I mean sure, I find it interesting, but I don't really need to know this. I would have been a lot happier if they had kept it under wraps if it had made catching the person responsible any easier.
Pffft.
Federal Express says that he lives in Snowmass, Colorado. And if FedEx says it, it must be true.
http://www.davidm.net/personal/fedex.html
What? Care to explain why that would be?
If I take my TV right now and turn it about its vertical axis by 90 degrees, the earth's magnetic field is now running through it in a completely different direction than it was before I turned it. Seems to work fine to me.
When's the last time you had to retune your TV because you reorganized your living room? It's not that sensitive to geo-magnetic fields.
The biggest group of people this is going to affect are cartographers, and maybe some people who use maps and compasses to navigate (the ones who are left and haven't switched to GPS). But any good navigational chart has a seasonal correction factor on it of a few degrees per year already, this might just mean -- if the pole really is now moving faster -- that the seasonal correction will have to be increased, and maybe we'll have to print new maps and navigational charts more often.
It sounds like the number of shares that they were trying to sell was four times greater than the total number of outstanding shares issued by the company. Even if they were trying to sell short, there's no way the transaction would have been legitimate.
I think an easier solution than trying to keep the trading systems constantly aware of every company's number of total outstanding shares, is just to have some sort of a special warning that would come up when you are attempting to buy or sell at a price that's more than one or two standard deviations off from the mean price of shares sold of that stock in the last day of trading. Since the warning would only come up when you tried to do something extreme, people wouldn't get too used to seeing it -- it wouldn't be like a confirmation dialog that they'd have to click every time they wanted to complete a transaction.
Well based on the photo that MSN decided to run with on its article, apparently people at the Tokyo stock exchange have a special, Solitare-based GUI for doing stock trades:
d ium.jpg
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10394551/
This image:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/ap/tok11012090345.hme
Based on this line from the the above posted translation of the company's press release...
...
> At this corporation, we receive apology from the Mizuho bond in the same day and night moment.
I'm going to make a wild guess and say that the appropriate "apology" in this case is "the responsible party's head in a hat box."
I think that the USAF tossed in "cyber warfare" into their mission statement because it's a great way to get in at the ground level of something that they think might be big in the future, even though they're not really sure what it is. However, I think it's fair to say that some bunch of generals somewhere though that in the future, this might have a lot of money and responsibility associated with it, and maybe by putting it into their mission statement, they could corner the market.
Frankly I think it's ridiculously outside of their mission. Cyberwarfare ought to be the domain of one of the intelligence agencies, since they're basically the ones with the signals interception, encryption, and intelligence analysis capabilities already. Neither the technical capabilities nor institutional culture of the Air Force really lend themselves to this mission.
That user (and pretty much anyone else who links to playfullyclever) is just a troll trying to slashvertise and drive traffic to his site.
From his own site:
http://www.playfullyclever.com/slashdot.html (link intentionally broken)
Apparently this is his new user -- all of the old ones must have run out of karma when people caught on.
I can't compare to how things might work elsewhere, having never held a job outside the United States, but I think the premise you describe as being implicit in my post is true and valid. At least it has been my experience in almost every tech job I've ever worked, and especially present on jobs whose focus was the production of a deliverable (especially software).
If you're on a team, or especially if you're in charge of the team, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who are On The Team, and everyone else who is Not On The Team. That's it. Sure, you probably have support personnel and people who help you out for various and sundry personal reasons, but they probably don't have a particularly vested interest in whether you succeed or not. The direct product of this is that people on the team have a 1:1 relationship (hopefully) with another group, People You Can Trust. If you're on the team and committed to the project, you get trusted with stuff, including passwords, access to confidential information, etc. When you're no longer on the team, you're no longer trusted, and therefore the stuff you could access gets immediately revoked. Or alternately, if you are for some reason perceived as being not fully committed to a project (within in the limits of it being your job, and not your entire existence), then you'll probably get the boot. Unless you have some very specialized skills that make you invaluable -- and in my experience this is very rare, much more rare than people with "special skills" think -- project managers are almost more interested in commitment and trustworthiness than they are with talent or skill.
This binary, black/white point of view is popular, IMO, because when you're up against a deadline and working like hell, nobody has time to figure out other people's myriad personal motivations and measure others' commitment in order to figure out what they should be given in terms of assignments and how to interpret their assessments of situations. And for what it's worth, I agree with them. I would rather work on a project where everyone is into their work and committed to success, but perhaps learning things as they go along, then work with a team of experts who couldn't give a shit what they're working on as long as they don't have to stay late and their paychecks don't bounce.
If that's not for you, that's fine and I wouldn't fault you for it, however I would urge you not to join an IT project in the U.S., because that's pretty much how things work.
IIRC, companies like Microsoft and IBM are not patent "holders," they're "assignees." The actual inventors, who are real persons and not corporate entities, are who the journalist in the article was searching for. in the process of filing a patent, most inventors assign it to the company they were working for when they did the inventing, but they are still listed as the inventor and it is to them that the patent is granted. After being assigned the patent, the company then basically owns it under law, and can use it as they wish. However if you went searching for most prolific patent-holders, I think what you'd get back would not contain any corporations, but only individuals.
Well if you've ever searched their database at USPTO.gov, they have recent patents in an electronic format where the full text is keyword-searchable (at least in theory, I don't know if you can actually search this way) but the older ones are TIFF images of the paper files, indexed by number and name and date. So unless you went though and OCRed all the old scans, it's very difficult to search for prior art and find anything, unless the title of the older patent is obviously related to what you're looking for. I can think of a lot of possible scenarios however where that would not be the case.
It would be interesting to get some sort of community-based effort going to OCR the old patent records. I suppose it wouldn't have the glamor of Project Gutenberg, but at the end you could make a free database of expired patents -- so essentially you'd have a vast repository of public domain knowledge, and a great way for people to back up prior art claims.
> I think the whole system is much more set up for physical science/engineering style inventions.
Well given that the whole system was basically put together in the 19th century and has -- as far as I can tell -- not been substantially overhauled, this makes sense. It's made for people who invent a new type of mousetrap or ball bearing or engine; if you deal entirely in abstract concepts like algorithms or 'business processes' it's not nearly as obvious what (if anything) a patent should protect. My personal feeling is that the patents should be fairly narrow in scope and only protect particular implementation schemes, and there should be at least a required proof-of-concept model (although I could probably be convinced to accept a good simulation).
However there is a line of argument which goes that broad patents are actually a good thing, as stupid as they may be, because they encourage companies to come out with inventions rather than keeping them secret. Having an idea encumbered under a 20-year patent grant, but free after that, is a lot better than encouraging a company to keep the details to themselves and only disclose it to people who've signed NDAs, or abuse copyright law to create a 95-year psuedo-patent.
It's getting obvious that we need some sort of patent reform, but I would hesitate to do so in the current climate because of what's happened to copyright. I could easily see a scenario where we revisit the idea of patents, and end up with 110-year renewable business-process, software, and human genome patents, because Microsoft, Pfizer, and ADM bought all the politicians that year. As much as the current system sucks, all you have to do is look at some other parts of our IP law framework to see how bad it could get.
Maybe a 19th century system is better than a late-20th-century one.
Or that guy who patented a way of swinging sideways on a playground swing...
I'm not going to go and actually dig up the patent right now, but basically he patented (or did it as a proxy for his kid, I hope) a method of moving oneself sideways on a swing by pulling alternately on the supporting chains. As someone who spent a good bit of my youth hanging around playgrounds, there's a lot of prior art on that one.
(Of course, personally I was always partial to swinging in an ellipsoidal fashion, by moving forwards and back and then pulling on alternately on the chains, the better to whack the person in the swing next to you.)
So far it works rather well and beats bringing a book into the bathroom for reading.
... remind me never to touch any random PDAs I find in other people's houses.
Hope you can spray Lysol on it afterwards. Otherwise
Speaking of odd bathroom entertainment, I guess I shouldn't make too much fun of you: I went into a fairly trendy bar a few days ago in DC, and in the men's rest room there were televisions mounted on pretty much every surface that you'd be looking at as you were doing your various bathroom activities. Above the urinals, above the mirror at the sink, and another that was visible up near the ceiling from within the stalls as you were sitting there. They were playing what seemed to be some sort of music video channel ("MTV 'No. 2'"?)
Right, well I just call up my ISP on the phone and whistle 2400 baud.
I think the reason this is done, even though it seems illogical on the surface, is because of the company's responsibility to act with "due diligence" in regards to security.
If you as an employee compromise the system or act as some sort of mole or corporate spy, after you're busted when the shareholders come down on your boss, he can say "Well, hey we had no way of knowing he was bent, we had no warning that this was about to happen. It could happen to anybody."
But let's say you put in your resignation, then backdoored their network on your way out because they didn't cut off your access until two weeks later. This time when the Powers That Be come looking for blood, your boss is SOL: he could try saying "well, we had no idea he was bent..." but the shareholders are just going to respond "He had just turned in his resignation! He was on his way out the door! Why did he still have access?" And your boss becomes the next one on the chopping block, and depending on the nature of the business possibly liable for fines as well.
So really your boss, and your boss' boss, and probably their boss' boss, all the way up the CoC, are just covering their asses by pulling your access as soon as they get a hint that you're not going to be a career employee.
The Canon 1Ds doesn't approach medium format film in absolute terms. It's a nice camera, but it's out of its league when you start comparing it to medium format, film or digital.
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It might approach medium format if a photographer wasn't using it to it's full ability, and doing a better job maximizing the digital's capabilities, but this is really an operator-training issue and not an equipment one.
If you want to read a good professional assessment of film versus digital equivalent megapixels, read this:
http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digita
A 35mm film frame, shot on Fuji Velvia, is considered to be equivalent to somewhere between 10 and 16 MP. So the Canon is quite possibly the first digital camera that actually approaches the limit of what 35mm film can do at its best -- but even then I take issue, since each pixel in the digital frame records one color, and then the software interpolates the missing values for the other two colors on each pixel (unless you have a camera with the Foveon sensor).
However for medium format film still has a clear advantage. Even Ektachrome -- which has something of a reputation for being grainy at times -- is going to give you somewhere in the neighborhood of 18MP; Velvia is way above that (granted the error does start to get large). To get a digital that can compete with medium-format film, you're well out of the 1Ds range and looking more at things like the 22MP Mamiya ZD. (Feel free to tell me how much that one costs -- the press release doesn't even mention a price.)
Digital definitely has gotten APS film beat, and it's closing in on what quality advantage 35mm still holds. But Medium format is still superior, and 4x5 and the larger medium-format pano formats have no competition at all. If you want really high quality digital at the upper end of the spectrum, you're better to shoot film and then scan it, either on a flatbed or a drum scanner, to get your file.
I'm not some film-photo Luddite -- I use a digital myself because I think the loss in quality is worth the gain in convenience. However I think it's important to objectively assess the difference in quality, and realize that for the price, film still has its advantages.
Yeah. If anything, it's probably a lot easier to take 10,000 images with a consumer camera than with a pro camera.
The pro camera is going to generate huge RAW files, and even considering the fact that a professional photographer might spend more money on high-cap memory cards than the average hobbyist, they're going to fill up much more quickly. A snapshot-happy user with a hefty supply of batteries and who's travelling with their PowerBook to download the cards to when they get full could easily rack up tens of thousands of images a week that they'll want to sort through. Quantity is not something restricted to professionals.
Also, with the exception of fashion or sports photography, I doubt that many photographers take large numbers of snapshots. An amateur trying to take a good photo of a flower might take 100 different shots of it, hoping for a good one; a professional might spend their time perfecting the lighting and composition, and take 10 images -- but have them all look good. Furthermore, really high end professional studio digital equipment (medium format 6x7 digital backs) don't even use memory cards -- they interface directly to computers and have very slow shot-to-shot times. You couldn't take more than a few hundred images a day with them if you wanted to.
The "10,000 shots per day" professional is representative only of one particular kind of photographer, probably a fashion one, and while Aperture may appeal to them because it's capable of handling large numbers of images at once, that's not necessarily the software's sole target audience.