Don't know about the rest of you, but I have a lot of dead time in my life -- waiting on my wife, waiting in traffic, waiting at airports and of course flying itself. I used to spend a lot of time assembling CD's and later mp3's to listen to. Lately, however, I listen to podcasts and audiobooks. For audiobooks there's nobody like Audible.Com as their subscriptions are very good value for money. For podcasts, I listen to Keith and the Girl if I'm in a belligerant mood, or the Screenwriters Podcast if I want to lean more about my hobby of screenwriting. The CNN podcast is pretty good, as are several ones put out by PBS and their affiliate stations. Podcasts are particularly good if you have a passionate interest in something narrow like fine wines, a particular religion, etc which the Clear Channel motherfuckers are unlikely to spend much time on. Oh, and i don't give a fuck if it's called podcasting or not, sorry to you moronic trolls who fret about such things.
When my company wants to propose a name a new product, one of the steps is to go to the USPTO to see if somebody in the same industry has a registered trademark on it. If so, we drop the proposed name and go on to the next. Seems elementary to me. We also try to get the.com domain if at all possible. Lastly, we do a google search to see if the name candidate is diluted or already in use as a claimed (but not registered) trademark. Sometimes we find that the name has negative connotations. Anyway, why doesn't MS hire people who do these elementary steps for them?
Perhaps they felt that "vista" was too diluted to be a trademark on its own, and/or that using the trademark "Microsoft Vista" is sufficiently distinct from any other use of "vista", but these arguments seem lazy and weak to me.
Other than that, it's a pretty good name.
Google has the ability to find "similar pages", they could reduce the score of any link where the pages lack similarity. Not perfect, but better than what they do now.
I'd just like to point out something about the claim in spyware EULA's which says that you are agreeing for them to capture "non-personally identifiable information" -- while it may be true that the captured web history and form input logs don't literally have your name in them, it's a simple matter for the customer of the spyware marketing service to match up a given capture log with your known identity on one of their web sites, by matching page sequences and/or time stamps, and then from that starting point they then can tell what you *individually* were looking at, searching for, and entering into web forms on every other site you visit, forever.
Imagine if you follow somebody around for months and watch every move they make -- you can learn anything needed to advance whatever agenda you have in mind.
My idea would be to make a card with a DVI input and output, which also has a compression chip on it for when the signal is going to or coming from the hard drive or RAID array. It would also have a mode where it would accept and playout the raw data.
Note that there are a number of uncompressed HD capture/playback cards on the market (DeckLink, BlueFish 444, etc.) and with the 400GB drives widely available now, it's not that unreasonable to have uncompressed HD if you really want it, but it's overkill for most applications. The problem with these HD cards is that they have SDI inputs and outputs, which would have to be converted externally to DVI and that's not cheap.
Me, I would like the option to run my box either compressed or uncompressed. For 1080i you would need something like 250 MB/s bandwidth, which would take a small RAID array of ATA drive to achieve.
I think most of us are aware of this card, but it's not much help in capturing the HD signals which come out of our cable and satellite boxes. We need something with a DVI input.
This all sounds great, but I just spent a wad on all new HDTV gear and am distressed to find that you can't easily capture HD to a DVR in a PC. Maybe in a year or two...
I buy the economic argument that we should execute verminscripters (and spammers while we are at it). But how about we also calculate the deterrence effect of executing officials of software companies if their products are so insecure that we have to download daily patches to keep from having our work utterly destroyed. What would the economic benefit to us be then?
Not that I normally hang out in the red light district in Amsterdam, but I happened to be there two weeks ago and accidentially went into a porn book store (was looking for the public library which I think is nearby). Anyway, this particular store specialized in corporal punishment (spanking) magazines, most of which involved girls in school uniforms. They had titles like "Janus #67", after the publisher's name (Society of Janus). More info is on their web site.
OK, seriously, you really are just load testing your web server, right? This site is has collapsed under the/. effect with only one comment posted, in the middle of the night USA time.
I found a few flight software links about the two Mars craft... it's normal that little of this information is put on the web due to ITAR regulations...
I wondered about this myself, so I asked several NASA people. They said that flight software and to some extent the hardware design, are illegal to export without an ITAR license, because one of the primary uses of spacecraft design technology is in advanced weapons systems. Or so the gubment thinks. Posting flight software on the net is considered exporting. Engineers appear to chafe at this, so they often publish EXTREMELY detailed software design specification documents, with handy tables showing exactly what happens under which cases. Don't know where any of these are for Spirit, but lots of them are around for other programs.
I remember Sarah from Fidonet -- sheesh we must both be getting very old. She was famous in those days for saying "Information is Free", and for being penpals with various Bulgarian virus writers (like the guy who wrote the "mutation engine"). I do believe that she has met more virus writers than virtually anyone else. You will find teasing tributes to her in some of the viruses from the 1980's and 1990's. Word up SaraH; remember me? The guy who sent you the dolphin shirt?
G
One of my engineers switched to StarOffice a few months ago and nobody noticed until he told us. His documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and emails all open fine on our PC's with Office, and he reports no problems reading the stuff we send him. He gets lots of PowerPoints from vendors and reports no problems there, either. So it's good enough for routine office-type use. Serious tech writers don't use Office anyway, so minor glitches with table formats are not likely to work their way into formal product documentation.
The problem is that Joe Consumer visiting his local PC Slut retailer has no way to know what artificial restrictions Lexmark has placed on the ink refills, nor if it lies about when the cartridges are empty, nor if it deliberately rejects non-Lexmark cartridges. There certainly isn't any disclosure on the packaging. Now, I agree with the Libertarian thrust of your comments, but as long as we have consumer protection laws which require disclosure of material facts on the packaging, this ought to be fairly applied across the board. As an exercise for the reader, please propose suggested packaging disclosures for popular PC products such as Windows XP and Office...
Bill is about two years too late coming to this particular party. Now if we could only get him onboard with standardizing an OPEN micropayments scheme then I would stop chanting voodoo hexes against him and his family.
You might start seeing PCI-E in servers in the CY2005-CY2006 timeframe, after PCI-X and DDR PCI-X have run their course. This isn't something that's right around the corner, regardless of the hype.
These new data retention laws are a boon to those of us in the data storage industry. If this keeps up I'm going to name my new yacht after the dude at the SEC (although "Cunt" is probably already taken).
Done properly, this kind of move by Apple could eventually kill the big record labels by removing their need to exist. Bands could get their product to market without the absurd overhead imposed upon them by the big labels. You all know the scam -- the big label "advances" the band a seductively huge blob of cash, then leeches it all back in fees and charges, to where the band become their indentured servants.
It should not surprise anybody that, in absence of meaningful government action, some clever people are taking the law into their own hands and attacking spammers with any means at their disposal. Rock on, I say. There is a threshold of offense to society at large which has been crossed long ago by these bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
I loved that novel. I can also recommend the Screenwriters Podcast if you want to learn about how to write screenplays for TV and film.
Don't know about the rest of you, but I have a lot of dead time in my life -- waiting on my wife, waiting in traffic, waiting at airports and of course flying itself. I used to spend a lot of time assembling CD's and later mp3's to listen to. Lately, however, I listen to podcasts and audiobooks. For audiobooks there's nobody like Audible.Com as their subscriptions are very good value for money. For podcasts, I listen to Keith and the Girl if I'm in a belligerant mood, or the Screenwriters Podcast if I want to lean more about my hobby of screenwriting. The CNN podcast is pretty good, as are several ones put out by PBS and their affiliate stations. Podcasts are particularly good if you have a passionate interest in something narrow like fine wines, a particular religion, etc which the Clear Channel motherfuckers are unlikely to spend much time on. Oh, and i don't give a fuck if it's called podcasting or not, sorry to you moronic trolls who fret about such things.
When my company wants to propose a name a new product, one of the steps is to go to the USPTO to see if somebody in the same industry has a registered trademark on it. If so, we drop the proposed name and go on to the next. Seems elementary to me. We also try to get the .com domain if at all possible. Lastly, we do a google search to see if the name candidate is diluted or already in use as a claimed (but not registered) trademark. Sometimes we find that the name has negative connotations. Anyway, why doesn't MS hire people who do these elementary steps for them?
Perhaps they felt that "vista" was too diluted to be a trademark on its own, and/or that using the trademark "Microsoft Vista" is sufficiently distinct from any other use of "vista", but these arguments seem lazy and weak to me.
Other than that, it's a pretty good name.
You should take your original letter to the police who raided you. Hopefully they will then prosecute your employer for filing a false police report.
Google has the ability to find "similar pages", they could reduce the score of any link where the pages lack similarity. Not perfect, but better than what they do now.
I'd just like to point out something about the claim in spyware EULA's which says that you are agreeing for them to capture "non-personally identifiable information" -- while it may be true that the captured web history and form input logs don't literally have your name in them, it's a simple matter for the customer of the spyware marketing service to match up a given capture log with your known identity on one of their web sites, by matching page sequences and/or time stamps, and then from that starting point they then can tell what you *individually* were looking at, searching for, and entering into web forms on every other site you visit, forever.
Imagine if you follow somebody around for months and watch every move they make -- you can learn anything needed to advance whatever agenda you have in mind.
This web page is from 2002 and may be obsolete, but it says that all Kodak media is silver/gold and has phthalocyanine dye: http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/faqs/faq163 0.shtml
Guerre
Well, the speculative mockups of the "iPod Flash" look something like a suppository, so maybe someone will stick it in the other end...
My idea would be to make a card with a DVI input and output, which also has a compression chip on it for when the signal is going to or coming from the hard drive or RAID array. It would also have a mode where it would accept and playout the raw data. Note that there are a number of uncompressed HD capture/playback cards on the market (DeckLink, BlueFish 444, etc.) and with the 400GB drives widely available now, it's not that unreasonable to have uncompressed HD if you really want it, but it's overkill for most applications. The problem with these HD cards is that they have SDI inputs and outputs, which would have to be converted externally to DVI and that's not cheap. Me, I would like the option to run my box either compressed or uncompressed. For 1080i you would need something like 250 MB/s bandwidth, which would take a small RAID array of ATA drive to achieve.
I think most of us are aware of this card, but it's not much help in capturing the HD signals which come out of our cable and satellite boxes. We need something with a DVI input.
This all sounds great, but I just spent a wad on all new HDTV gear and am distressed to find that you can't easily capture HD to a DVR in a PC. Maybe in a year or two...
The Raptor drives are not native SATA. They use a ATA/SATA converter chip made by Marvell.
I buy the economic argument that we should execute verminscripters (and spammers while we are at it). But how about we also calculate the deterrence effect of executing officials of software companies if their products are so insecure that we have to download daily patches to keep from having our work utterly destroyed. What would the economic benefit to us be then?
Not that I normally hang out in the red light district in Amsterdam, but I happened to be there two weeks ago and accidentially went into a porn book store (was looking for the public library which I think is nearby). Anyway, this particular store specialized in corporal punishment (spanking) magazines, most of which involved girls in school uniforms. They had titles like "Janus #67", after the publisher's name (Society of Janus). More info is on their web site.
Do you suppose this is where MS got their name?
OK, seriously, you really are just load testing your web server, right? This site is has collapsed under the /. effect with only one comment posted, in the middle of the night USA time.
I found a few flight software links about the two Mars craft... it's normal that little of this information is put on the web due to ITAR regulations...
PDF of a powerpoint about static analysis of the code
First and second links from GCN magazine.
And here is a chatty JPL page showing the key team members and their personal reflections
Some technical briefs on the science payload can be downloaded here or here
A list of Cornell's scientists and their bios etc is here
Here is an article about another software guy.
A cool technical power point about the computers, only available on google cache, is here
And lastly, a technical comparison of today's rovers against something called Fido.
I simply don't know what I did before Google!
I wondered about this myself, so I asked several NASA people. They said that flight software and to some extent the hardware design, are illegal to export without an ITAR license, because one of the primary uses of spacecraft design technology is in advanced weapons systems. Or so the gubment thinks. Posting flight software on the net is considered exporting. Engineers appear to chafe at this, so they often publish EXTREMELY detailed software design specification documents, with handy tables showing exactly what happens under which cases. Don't know where any of these are for Spirit, but lots of them are around for other programs.
I remember Sarah from Fidonet -- sheesh we must both be getting very old. She was famous in those days for saying "Information is Free", and for being penpals with various Bulgarian virus writers (like the guy who wrote the "mutation engine"). I do believe that she has met more virus writers than virtually anyone else. You will find teasing tributes to her in some of the viruses from the 1980's and 1990's. Word up SaraH; remember me? The guy who sent you the dolphin shirt? G
One of my engineers switched to StarOffice a few months ago and nobody noticed until he told us. His documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and emails all open fine on our PC's with Office, and he reports no problems reading the stuff we send him. He gets lots of PowerPoints from vendors and reports no problems there, either. So it's good enough for routine office-type use. Serious tech writers don't use Office anyway, so minor glitches with table formats are not likely to work their way into formal product documentation.
The problem is that Joe Consumer visiting his local PC Slut retailer has no way to know what artificial restrictions Lexmark has placed on the ink refills, nor if it lies about when the cartridges are empty, nor if it deliberately rejects non-Lexmark cartridges. There certainly isn't any disclosure on the packaging. Now, I agree with the Libertarian thrust of your comments, but as long as we have consumer protection laws which require disclosure of material facts on the packaging, this ought to be fairly applied across the board. As an exercise for the reader, please propose suggested packaging disclosures for popular PC products such as Windows XP and Office...
Bill is about two years too late coming to this particular party. Now if we could only get him onboard with standardizing an OPEN micropayments scheme then I would stop chanting voodoo hexes against him and his family.
You might start seeing PCI-E in servers in the CY2005-CY2006 timeframe, after PCI-X and DDR PCI-X have run their course. This isn't something that's right around the corner, regardless of the hype.
These new data retention laws are a boon to those of us in the data storage industry. If this keeps up I'm going to name my new yacht after the dude at the SEC (although "Cunt" is probably already taken).
Done properly, this kind of move by Apple could eventually kill the big record labels by removing their need to exist. Bands could get their product to market without the absurd overhead imposed upon them by the big labels. You all know the scam -- the big label "advances" the band a seductively huge blob of cash, then leeches it all back in fees and charges, to where the band become their indentured servants.
It should not surprise anybody that, in absence of meaningful government action, some clever people are taking the law into their own hands and attacking spammers with any means at their disposal. Rock on, I say. There is a threshold of offense to society at large which has been crossed long ago by these bastards.