That'll be helpful if it supports Flex-framework apps (which it should, given that they run in the flash player).
I've been developing a flex app for the Blackberry Playbook that's coming out in February; the ability to port it to the chrome store without much extra work would be handy.
Seriously, though, that's exactly the same story I keep hearing over and over from everyone who isn't on "the in" with Wikipedia. Despite its marketing, it is -not- an encyclopedia for 'the masses', it's an encyclopedia for a few handsfull of obsessives who carve out their own little fiefs under the feudal Lord of Wales.
The 'guidelines' are as much a coded language as scientology corpspeak. It's a whole different civilization in there...
In practise, it's more the encyclopedia for obsessive/compulsive agenda-driven basement dwellers who love to play politics over what is and isn't allowed in 'their' encyclopedia.
Frankly, your reason for not donating is my reason for not editing. I have no desire to play politics with various people's little baliwicks (baliwikis?); I'm sure that various edits that I've had the urge to make at various times would doubtless tread on someone's toes with a lot more free time than I have, and result in all manner of bullshit politics.
Besides, their system--like most reputational systems--is broken. The way they're set up, with proper attention to a given area, it would be possible to gain administrative privilege within about six months--possibly less, if you chose your 'area of expertise' wisely.
Don't get me wrong; I do like the concept behind Wikipedia. Unfortunately, the execution kind of sucks, and I think that, at this point, the brokenness of the system is too deeply entrenched to be removed.
Maybe some other knowledge repository with equal promise will start up. I'd like to support a competitor--a viable competitor--if only to ensure that competition would drive quality up....come to think of it, there's a good motto for it--"In competition, quality". Stick it in Latin (in contento, specialitas...or something like that; I don't have my dictionary with me) and you've got something to work with.
By the look of the article, they may well be going with a colo.
And you'd be surprised how much traffic that they generate--keep in mind, they're serving gigabytes a day, as each of those people tweeting is reading others' tweets, so each 160-byte iteration gets multiplied by however many people 'follow' that tweeter.
There's many accounts that have >1Million followers; that means each tweet multiplies into ~160 megabytes of traffic.
We're talking some serious database wrangling going on; I'm surprised that they've managed to go this far without having multiple dedicated server farms and still show any kind of responsiveness.
Hopefully some of that money will be spent on IT things, like security....come to think of it, I know some security-oriented IT people who would be interested in working there. I wonder how one would apply to work there?
Same here. I have no real desire to suck down the 'package' that various networks insist on selling me--and even less desire to order a cable or satellite 'package' that contains maybe three channels I'd want to watch and 50 that I wouldn't--6% usability is not a good deal for 200% the price of my data connection.
Add to that the single-use nature of cable and satellite (with the exception of those people with cable internet, but I have DSL at the moment) vs the multi-use functionality of a data connection, and it becomes apparent that buying TV programming is a waste of money and a very poor value.
Sure, I don't get to see TV shows in 'real time'--but I'm never -home- when those shows are on anyway, so it's not like I wouldn't be watching them the next day or on the weekend via Tivo or some other time-shifting tech anyway.
TV's pretty much useless to me, so I don't buy it.
I rather doubt that Amazon would notice the blip in sales. There might be, to be generous, a few million Anonymous, of which only a fraction would normally be buying from Amazon on any particular day; Amazon does on the order of $50 million in sales daily.
Any such action--unless coordinated with numerous other "legit" groups--would be lost in the noise.
Considering the volume of traffic that Amazon is designed to handle normally, it's no real surprise that an 'attack' that amounts to a slight bump in traffic for them would barely be noticed.
Further, unlike Gawker-clan, Amazon is likely to have actual IT people working on securing their servers from just such events.
They are a -much- harder target than most places.
That being said, they are far from invincible. There's always a way in, and if Anonymous and allied entities really worked on it for a long time, they would likely find a way to at least deface the site.
That would be rather beyond the usual level of patience that Anonymous exhibits, though.
A more effective (and more 'lulzy'--hence, more interesting for Anonymous) way of 'poisoning' Amazon would be to leverage the review process, injecting more noise than signal, and thus crippling one of the key selling points that Amazon has as a purchasing platform.
Other effective methods might be to 'punish' Amazon-affiliated sellers' websites, interfering with their ability to do business based on their association with Amazon. This might be insufficiently visible, though, unless they did so in a manner which caused many of them to complain to news organizations.
DDoSing Amazon itself is, and has been for years, a waste of time--there's nothing that an entity like Anonymous can do to it with LOIC that they don't get on Black Friday anyway.
I think this is more an opportunity than anything else. Mandatory strong encryption of cloud contents, together with strongly encrypted connections, would go a long way towards assuaging people's fears of their data being 'stolen'.
I think that that would also go a long way towards getting proper encryption and data access controls to become available in other places as well....and I'm sorry, but I think that IE's a piece of crap. I'd rather use lynx than IE.
...would be for Google to litigate via this patent to force dissociation of IE from the rest of Windows.
We all win, with that one; the IE/OS intermingling has caused entirely too many security problems for the Windows OS over the years....though, ironically enough, that's sort of the same thing that ChromeOS is supposed to accomplish, isn't it?
Someone needs to build an open-source authenticator that provides strong (not DES, FFS) password-mangling, easy interoperability with most common systems, and which rejects, logs, and unleashes attack dogs on anyone who tries to use "password" as a credential.
Not to throw cold water on what sounds like a fascinating innovation, but are there any studies that show that it works?
Or is it just a very expensive placebo that provides a magic-feather effect for the stroke patients, giving them enough support and confidence to put some more effort into their therapy?
Though if it had a bit more oomph to it, I could see quite a lot of use for people with extensive lower-body damage...internalize the structure, and it sounds like it could be a pretty handy prosthetic, albeit an expensive one.
...except that no judge would allow that particular argument unless he was a complete tosser who had never worked in, around, or with a business in his life.
The whole reason for copyrighting company names, the whole reason for brand names on websites and on products--hell, the entire justification for the concept of a 'trademark'--is summed up in a line-item in corporate accounts: Goodwill.
Goodwill is an attempt by the beancounters to make tangible the company's reputation--the name brand recognition, the associations made by the customers with it, and everything associated with that.
The Drudge Report has -significant- goodwill (though not all of it is good;-P) associated with the name "The Drudge Report"--and as such, any judge or lawyer who has the word "competent" in his dictionary would immediately shoot down the "it's only $30" argument--any lawyer suggesting that wouldn't even be able to finish the statement before the objection would happen.
So no, there is no 'beauty' to this demand. It's stupid. It's demanding a significant chunk of the goodwill and trademark recognition of the alleged infringer for a minor alleged act of infringement. It is -vastly- out of proportion to the alleged offense.
(And, IMHO, Righthaven and all other IP-trolling companies really ought to be denied the ability to litigate, being as they have, technically, no direct interest in the IP in question.)
Wing struts and the like; IIRC most of the tolerances were around 5 to 7 thousandths. Turbine parts would naturally require tighter tolerances than that.
Honestly, though, most backyard projects are not likely to even require.015"; the birds will be OK if their birdhouse roof is a little out of tolerance;-p
Even aerospace parts are cut to.007"-ish--something down around 2/10k would require exquisite temperature control.
Your typical hobbyist is likely going to be perfectly happy with.015"-ish. That's well within properly built modular assemblies.
And yes, you need a market--but why not make the market possible by allowing for the possibility of modification at the start? It'll help with the factory-replacement parts as well.
Exactly. With user data living entirely in the cloud, that eliminates the tiresome "backup and restore" idiocy that happens with every OS upgrade; with no user access to the OS, it eliminates userspace errors leading to OS errors.
Now, for home users who know WTF they're doing, that'll be annoying...but if the commercial versions of the thin clients include the 'jailbreak' switch, then I won't complain too much.
The only really -bad- thing I can see about this--other than security worries, but that's a whole other very long discussion in itself--is that it'll put some IT techs out of business.
That's what I would have said about sorting algorithms years ago, but there's more than enough wharrgarble out there about software patents these days...
If generated automatically by the software, then the path would derive the copyright on the software license that generated it, I think. All the more reason to generate your own paths by hand, then.;-p
But yes, this seems to be a particularly fertile area of legal ambiguity. The IP flamewars over this are going to be -epic-. I'm going to have to buy stock in popcorn manufacturers.
Hold on, though...I think there may be something to this.
Why not modularize the electronics, as well? Swap a couple plugin carts and you can have more or less speed or precision as required. Further, this would create a huge industry for CNC mods; there'd be people selling their "revolutionary" drive modules in the back of every industry magazine.
All it'd need is a standard interface with the guts of the thing, and a standard set of driving instructions...
The path may well be counted as IP and, hence, licensable. CNC programmers (I used to work at an aerospace parts manufacturer, hence why I know this tidbit) can create the same part in many different ways, depending on how fast or how efficient they want the process to be.
So while a model file showing all the dimensions of a part may be freely tradeable, the machine path required to build that part in the least time or least material may well be copyrightable under current laws.
O'course, it could always be counted as a trade secret, but that's another kettle of beans altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the bad publicity that insurance companies--especially medical insurance companies--have had lately, that's really only to be expected.
That'll be helpful if it supports Flex-framework apps (which it should, given that they run in the flash player).
I've been developing a flex app for the Blackberry Playbook that's coming out in February; the ability to port it to the chrome store without much extra work would be handy.
[citation needed] ;-P
Seriously, though, that's exactly the same story I keep hearing over and over from everyone who isn't on "the in" with Wikipedia. Despite its marketing, it is -not- an encyclopedia for 'the masses', it's an encyclopedia for a few handsfull of obsessives who carve out their own little fiefs under the feudal Lord of Wales.
The 'guidelines' are as much a coded language as scientology corpspeak. It's a whole different civilization in there...
In theory, perhaps.
In practise, it's more the encyclopedia for obsessive/compulsive agenda-driven basement dwellers who love to play politics over what is and isn't allowed in 'their' encyclopedia.
If they put it next to exhibits of the Great Chicago Fire, Love Canal, and Three Mile Island then I would applaud the curators for their good taste.
Frankly, your reason for not donating is my reason for not editing. I have no desire to play politics with various people's little baliwicks (baliwikis?); I'm sure that various edits that I've had the urge to make at various times would doubtless tread on someone's toes with a lot more free time than I have, and result in all manner of bullshit politics.
...come to think of it, there's a good motto for it--"In competition, quality". Stick it in Latin (in contento, specialitas...or something like that; I don't have my dictionary with me) and you've got something to work with.
Besides, their system--like most reputational systems--is broken. The way they're set up, with proper attention to a given area, it would be possible to gain administrative privilege within about six months--possibly less, if you chose your 'area of expertise' wisely.
Don't get me wrong; I do like the concept behind Wikipedia. Unfortunately, the execution kind of sucks, and I think that, at this point, the brokenness of the system is too deeply entrenched to be removed.
Maybe some other knowledge repository with equal promise will start up. I'd like to support a competitor--a viable competitor--if only to ensure that competition would drive quality up.
By the look of the article, they may well be going with a colo.
And you'd be surprised how much traffic that they generate--keep in mind, they're serving gigabytes a day, as each of those people tweeting is reading others' tweets, so each 160-byte iteration gets multiplied by however many people 'follow' that tweeter.
There's many accounts that have >1Million followers; that means each tweet multiplies into ~160 megabytes of traffic.
We're talking some serious database wrangling going on; I'm surprised that they've managed to go this far without having multiple dedicated server farms and still show any kind of responsiveness.
Hopefully some of that money will be spent on IT things, like security. ...come to think of it, I know some security-oriented IT people who would be interested in working there. I wonder how one would apply to work there?
Same here. I have no real desire to suck down the 'package' that various networks insist on selling me--and even less desire to order a cable or satellite 'package' that contains maybe three channels I'd want to watch and 50 that I wouldn't--6% usability is not a good deal for 200% the price of my data connection.
Add to that the single-use nature of cable and satellite (with the exception of those people with cable internet, but I have DSL at the moment) vs the multi-use functionality of a data connection, and it becomes apparent that buying TV programming is a waste of money and a very poor value.
Sure, I don't get to see TV shows in 'real time'--but I'm never -home- when those shows are on anyway, so it's not like I wouldn't be watching them the next day or on the weekend via Tivo or some other time-shifting tech anyway.
TV's pretty much useless to me, so I don't buy it.
I rather doubt that Amazon would notice the blip in sales. There might be, to be generous, a few million Anonymous, of which only a fraction would normally be buying from Amazon on any particular day; Amazon does on the order of $50 million in sales daily.
Any such action--unless coordinated with numerous other "legit" groups--would be lost in the noise.
Considering the volume of traffic that Amazon is designed to handle normally, it's no real surprise that an 'attack' that amounts to a slight bump in traffic for them would barely be noticed.
Further, unlike Gawker-clan, Amazon is likely to have actual IT people working on securing their servers from just such events.
They are a -much- harder target than most places.
That being said, they are far from invincible. There's always a way in, and if Anonymous and allied entities really worked on it for a long time, they would likely find a way to at least deface the site.
That would be rather beyond the usual level of patience that Anonymous exhibits, though.
A more effective (and more 'lulzy'--hence, more interesting for Anonymous) way of 'poisoning' Amazon would be to leverage the review process, injecting more noise than signal, and thus crippling one of the key selling points that Amazon has as a purchasing platform.
Other effective methods might be to 'punish' Amazon-affiliated sellers' websites, interfering with their ability to do business based on their association with Amazon. This might be insufficiently visible, though, unless they did so in a manner which caused many of them to complain to news organizations.
DDoSing Amazon itself is, and has been for years, a waste of time--there's nothing that an entity like Anonymous can do to it with LOIC that they don't get on Black Friday anyway.
I think this is more an opportunity than anything else. Mandatory strong encryption of cloud contents, together with strongly encrypted connections, would go a long way towards assuaging people's fears of their data being 'stolen'.
...and I'm sorry, but I think that IE's a piece of crap. I'd rather use lynx than IE.
I think that that would also go a long way towards getting proper encryption and data access controls to become available in other places as well.
...would be for Google to litigate via this patent to force dissociation of IE from the rest of Windows.
...though, ironically enough, that's sort of the same thing that ChromeOS is supposed to accomplish, isn't it?
We all win, with that one; the IE/OS intermingling has caused entirely too many security problems for the Windows OS over the years.
Someone needs to build an open-source authenticator that provides strong (not DES, FFS) password-mangling, easy interoperability with most common systems, and which rejects, logs, and unleashes attack dogs on anyone who tries to use "password" as a credential.
Not to throw cold water on what sounds like a fascinating innovation, but are there any studies that show that it works?
Or is it just a very expensive placebo that provides a magic-feather effect for the stroke patients, giving them enough support and confidence to put some more effort into their therapy?
Though if it had a bit more oomph to it, I could see quite a lot of use for people with extensive lower-body damage...internalize the structure, and it sounds like it could be a pretty handy prosthetic, albeit an expensive one.
...except that no judge would allow that particular argument unless he was a complete tosser who had never worked in, around, or with a business in his life.
;-P) associated with the name "The Drudge Report"--and as such, any judge or lawyer who has the word "competent" in his dictionary would immediately shoot down the "it's only $30" argument--any lawyer suggesting that wouldn't even be able to finish the statement before the objection would happen.
The whole reason for copyrighting company names, the whole reason for brand names on websites and on products--hell, the entire justification for the concept of a 'trademark'--is summed up in a line-item in corporate accounts: Goodwill.
Goodwill is an attempt by the beancounters to make tangible the company's reputation--the name brand recognition, the associations made by the customers with it, and everything associated with that.
The Drudge Report has -significant- goodwill (though not all of it is good
So no, there is no 'beauty' to this demand. It's stupid. It's demanding a significant chunk of the goodwill and trademark recognition of the alleged infringer for a minor alleged act of infringement. It is -vastly- out of proportion to the alleged offense.
(And, IMHO, Righthaven and all other IP-trolling companies really ought to be denied the ability to litigate, being as they have, technically, no direct interest in the IP in question.)
Phones aren't allowed in secured areas that contain SIPR computers.
Neither are any other electronics.
Wing struts and the like; IIRC most of the tolerances were around 5 to 7 thousandths. Turbine parts would naturally require tighter tolerances than that.
.015"; the birds will be OK if their birdhouse roof is a little out of tolerance ;-p
Honestly, though, most backyard projects are not likely to even require
Jeeze, what are you doing down at .0002"?
.007"-ish--something down around 2/10k would require exquisite temperature control.
.015"-ish. That's well within properly built modular assemblies.
Even aerospace parts are cut to
Your typical hobbyist is likely going to be perfectly happy with
And yes, you need a market--but why not make the market possible by allowing for the possibility of modification at the start? It'll help with the factory-replacement parts as well.
Exactly. With user data living entirely in the cloud, that eliminates the tiresome "backup and restore" idiocy that happens with every OS upgrade; with no user access to the OS, it eliminates userspace errors leading to OS errors.
Now, for home users who know WTF they're doing, that'll be annoying...but if the commercial versions of the thin clients include the 'jailbreak' switch, then I won't complain too much.
The only really -bad- thing I can see about this--other than security worries, but that's a whole other very long discussion in itself--is that it'll put some IT techs out of business.
That's what I would have said about sorting algorithms years ago, but there's more than enough wharrgarble out there about software patents these days...
If generated automatically by the software, then the path would derive the copyright on the software license that generated it, I think. All the more reason to generate your own paths by hand, then. ;-p
But yes, this seems to be a particularly fertile area of legal ambiguity. The IP flamewars over this are going to be -epic-. I'm going to have to buy stock in popcorn manufacturers.
Hold on, though...I think there may be something to this.
Why not modularize the electronics, as well? Swap a couple plugin carts and you can have more or less speed or precision as required. Further, this would create a huge industry for CNC mods; there'd be people selling their "revolutionary" drive modules in the back of every industry magazine.
All it'd need is a standard interface with the guts of the thing, and a standard set of driving instructions...
Someone please mod parent "funny"; I very nearly had a coffee-keyboard interface incident.
And yes, AC, that does bring amusing dimensions into the whole "would you steal your neighbor's car" salvo in the pirating debates.
The path may well be counted as IP and, hence, licensable. CNC programmers (I used to work at an aerospace parts manufacturer, hence why I know this tidbit) can create the same part in many different ways, depending on how fast or how efficient they want the process to be.
So while a model file showing all the dimensions of a part may be freely tradeable, the machine path required to build that part in the least time or least material may well be copyrightable under current laws.
O'course, it could always be counted as a trade secret, but that's another kettle of beans altogether.