The difference isn't UK v US. I lived in the France for several years and and so can get by pretty well as a result. The problem in Quebec is that people often refuse to understand "French" phrases because they contain some English "Le Parking" for instance. This isn't slang its just pig-headedness. A friend, Parisien, was told in Quebec that she "should learn to speak French properly" the chap deliberately said the phrase in English to make the point on her "incorrect" French.
Slang I can deal with, France has different slang across the country, Sengal has different slang, but only in Quebec did people refuse to understand.
So now we know the minimum we should accept. Time to start negotiating upwards to see what other numbers can be achieved.
That is probably the most effective way to start companies shipping hardware only or Linux pre-installed as the negotiation process will cost money. If 1,000 people went through this process with Lenovo (or Dell, or HP, etc) then we would probably see more progress than 5 years of bitching has managed to achieve.
I like to think of the University of California as a sort of Oxford/Cambridge college system on steroids. So yes its at UCSD, also writers of a very fine version of Pascal, but its still UC.
The idea is to drive the point home to immigrants that they can't expect to live here without speaking french.
The problem is that even if you do speak French then you feel about as welcome as a vomit sandwich. You don't need to speak French you need to speak a particular flavour of French that has stagnated since the 17th century. This is a classic case of government bigotry masquerading as cultural promotion. Similar in fact to their approach to OSS.
The rules in Quebec are like somewhere in the deep south saying that all signs must be in the local Patois and that you can't be an immigrant unless you are willing to speak with the local accent.
"You have tried to access a secure site with a dodgy certificate, Cancel or Allow?"
IE meanwhile troops on regardless giving a better "user experience"
Oh until the machine goes down because the site was a trojan site using a self-signed certificate.
The issue here isn't that Firefox is making this hard, its that ANYONE ever made this easy. If a site has an expired certificate then that would worry me as it implies their IT support is a bit dodgy. If someone wants my credit card details and is using a self-signed certificate then I'm VERY worried.
There are functional issues (the duplicate cert problems of Linksys has been mentioned here) that should be addressed. But the basic problem of warning users very strongly that a site is self-signed or has an expired certificate is a good thing.
I'm using Firefox, I'm on a Mac and this problem just hasn't irritated me the way that Vista does because this does it when there is a REAL problem caused by a 3rd party, not a potential problem caused by me hitting a button. Expired or self-signed certs are a real 3rd party problem, not a scare story.
That is what makes OCR hard, not what makes automating the process hard. Have you ever bothered coding a computer to put "nearly a whole bit" into memory?
The thing about voting machines that always confused me, beyond running Anti-virus software on them, was what made it so complicated.
You have a voter, whose admission to the booth is controlled by the same people who have controlled access to ballot papers.
The voter is allowed to vote once.
You have a list of candidates/selections - this is a ballot. A voter can only vote for a candidate/selection from the list. You have a list of ballots for a given election that a voter can vote on.
ADD UP THE NUMBERS TO FIND THE WINNER.
Adding in a "double check" of a paper validation (which could be done via OCR as the forms will be standard) also sounds pretty trivial.
When I first heard about voting machines I thought that it was about the most trivial problem that anyone had ever had to solve... and yet they've completely screwed up.
So seriously, can anyone tell me what is so hard about automating a paper process that has ticks in boxes?
Last year one of the grandparents wanted to get all of the grand kids and the pets into a single photo. This is 7 kids under the age of 7, 4 cats and 3 dogs (combined weight of the dogs is around 300lbs, big dogs). They didn't want the adults in the photo just the pets and kids.
Without photoshop that picture wouldn't exist. First of all the cats don't like being held for more than 20 seconds and the kids won't stop falling on the dogs and cuddling them, secondly there is a boy in the mix who appears to be a source of near infinite energy. The video of the photoshoot is hilarious as we try and get them all in one place. In the end after over 300 pictures with around 20 nearly there shots I hit photoshop and created a composite image that looked superb in around 20 minutes.
That doesn't change my memory of the event (people are weird if they start creating a fantasy world) but it does mean there is now a decent picture on the wall. There is a line here between doctoring to create a potential reality and doctoring to create a fantasy. People in the later camp are looking over the wall at the looney bin.
So to test it out I grabbed a couple of logos (AIG, Slashdot, Bluesquare, Nike swoosh) and found that what it will do is find scaled down images or ones of lower quality but it won't handle significant colour shifts. So AIG for instance have a blue logo but sponsor Manchester United where their logo is displayed on a red background, the Nike swoosh I tested had a white background and all I got was basic black on white swoosh elements.
Now with photos this is less of an issue as major colour shifts are unusual but it does mean that for commercial and design art its not really as applicable.
No seriously. Fire up the usenet reader in Emacs and look at the scoring system. Very simple just +/- on users and threads but over time it becomes very powerful at filtering out the crap. Something like that with Bayesian maths around it would be great.
And of course you could display the dates in Mayan, with a bit of modding, which is useful given that this is what apparently tells us the end of the world
Good god it appears to be the phrase of the year "We are just modern slaves". Top of the shop of abuse of the term is Sepp "I'm a nutter" Blatter who in reference to someone who is paid about $300,000 A WEEK said that it was just like modern slavery.
These people aren't slaves because.... THEY COULD QUIT. It might be tough, it might be hard, but either quit and get another job or work out a constructive way of fixing it.
Don't compare it to the physical ownership of another human being and the sort of destruction of human rights that entails.
The similarity with Google Labs is the word "labs" this is about user requirements and suggestions rather than fully fledged products. Its about people suggesting improvements and then those moving into development. This means its at a much earlier part of the product development cycle than Google Labs (which starts with a beta or alpha product).
Saying its like Google Labs is like saying Saks Fifth Avenue is like Madison Avenue because they both have the word Avenue.
Today I met some people from Company X and it was all brilliant and great. Fabulous news that we are doing a big new partnership
Tuesday
I had pie for dinner
Wednesday
We've just lost $2bn as a result of an internal fraud, the FBI and CIA are now involved and all senior executives are being questioned
Thursday
I'm here in Brazil today speaking with their justice ministry, the weather is fantastic and I'm off to play golf later.
Now Jonathan Schwartz at Sun really blazed the trail here, but surely the really thing for a company to do is have such a god-awful boring blog full of mundane crap that any bad news is "published" in a place that no-one looks.
Rather than "posting DVDs" I'd go for something like Amazon's S3 and just dump the backup to them. Here is a list of S3 Backup solutions that would do the job.
I've personally moved away from hard-media as much as possible because the issue on restore is normally about the speed to get it back on the server and its there that online solutions really win as they have the peering arrangements to get you the bandwidth.
Re:I turn 50 in a couple of months and if I was...
on
NASA Turns 50
·
· Score: 1
Of course you would have, I mean if only you'd been given the billion dollar budget on your FIFTH BIRTHDAY you'd have had people on the moon by the time you were 11.
If it was all about money then Paris Hilton wouldn't be worthless.
At JavaOne about 3 years ago there was a boffin talk with Gosling, Joy and others and one guy raise the image of hearing something drop through his letter box and then suddenly a little bot appearing in his room with a message "don't worry I'm just indexing your house for Google"
His point was that he had two reactions to this firstly "what a huge invasion of privacy" and second "Great I'll be able to find my car keys".
Of course Google is profiling what people do as they search, indexing everything is what they are about. The question is where this impacts on privacy and what limits we want to put on it.
While I know its heresy to say it... Edison did just plain steal a lot of ideas and then pass them off as his own inventions. In fact the lack of global patent protection was a major reason for Edison becoming the person he did, in reality he lived off the inventions of others.
Come on folks you've got to admire sheer dumb ass brilliance of this level. This isn't a matter of minor incompetence this is world class stupidity. Checking my SPAM folder at the moment I picked out a few that looked similar and everyone had a different email address
So in other words this brilliant change in the rules now means that SPAM isn't SPAM. Maybe that is the real way to get rid of it... just define that it doesn't exist.
There is no poverty in North Korea either apparently.
Re:completely missing the point with SUV's.
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 1
Ummmm SUV v Merc/Jaguar/BMW/Audi station wagon.
One screams "new money" the other whispers "old money"
RTFA. Now I know that some people might argue that MIT isn't the place it was, but I think you'd be hard pushed to find people who don't think that MIT folks have opinions on tech issues.
What would they have to do to get some one who really cares in your mind, hire RMS? Now that would be brilliantly funny but completely unelectable (imaging RMS and Obama's pastor going at it) hell throw in Noam Chomsky and you're away.
1) Reliability, there is bugger all that can go wrong with a tell tale 2) Weight, a vane and a fan are going weigh grams more than the tell tale and when sending something to Mars those things count.
Personally I love this sort of engineering you can almost imagine the meeting
"We've got 5 grams and we need to tell where the wind is coming from" "Weather, vane with a fan?" "Nope to heavy" "Hang on how about just something hanging down from a stick"
And thus extensive engineering and testing was born (it is worth reading the page linked above on what they had to do).
The production kit did when it was shipped but not the stuff that was in our test environment (different from the Sys Admin test environment) we just hadn't realised that our fellow employees were more stupid than any of our clients could ever hope to be.
He used to be able to turn any working piece of kit into a piece of metal art in about 20 seconds, EVERYTHING was always a BIOS issue and he would NEVER check with anyone before replacing the BIOS.
Lets be clear about how dumb this person was, he had a BIOS that worked on his test servers and would then apply that to all the other servers INDEPENDENT OF HARDWARE OR OS. He would then start the machines (which of course wouldn't start) declare them "broken" and say the issue was with the software.
We did some low level hardware stuff in our software and it did break the boxes sometimes so it took 2 months of painful testing and debugging which found nothing, it only came about because one of the team had a heavy night and decided to "rest" in the server room and saw the moron apply the BIOS to a server that had been running and then scurry out to blame the team again.
Basic rule after then was BIOS set to read-only and locked down with a secure password, to this day my BIOS has a password thanks to the sheer physical shock of realising how dumb some people can be.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they'd publish a fixed price which means you could cost it out. Which after all is what we all want isn't it?
The difference isn't UK v US. I lived in the France for several years and and so can get by pretty well as a result. The problem in Quebec is that people often refuse to understand "French" phrases because they contain some English "Le Parking" for instance. This isn't slang its just pig-headedness. A friend, Parisien, was told in Quebec that she "should learn to speak French properly" the chap deliberately said the phrase in English to make the point on her "incorrect" French.
Slang I can deal with, France has different slang across the country, Sengal has different slang, but only in Quebec did people refuse to understand.
So now we know the minimum we should accept. Time to start negotiating upwards to see what other numbers can be achieved.
That is probably the most effective way to start companies shipping hardware only or Linux pre-installed as the negotiation process will cost money. If 1,000 people went through this process with Lenovo (or Dell, or HP, etc) then we would probably see more progress than 5 years of bitching has managed to achieve.
Kudos to the guy
Errr you might not know, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I like to think of the University of California as a sort of Oxford/Cambridge college system on steroids. So yes its at UCSD, also writers of a very fine version of Pascal, but its still UC.
The idea is to drive the point home to immigrants that they can't expect to live here without speaking french.
The problem is that even if you do speak French then you feel about as welcome as a vomit sandwich. You don't need to speak French you need to speak a particular flavour of French that has stagnated since the 17th century. This is a classic case of government bigotry masquerading as cultural promotion. Similar in fact to their approach to OSS.
The rules in Quebec are like somewhere in the deep south saying that all signs must be in the local Patois and that you can't be an immigrant unless you are willing to speak with the local accent.
First view.....
Err... I'm feeling depressed and angry and that guy Brad is really getting on my nerves.
Quick brainstorm... Brad in the airlock... press the button... end of anger and depression.
Second view....
Automated helper with a level of "intelligence"....
Err... I'm feeling depressed and angry about Brad.... err what was that noise? What was that liquid hitting the ship?
"I made a decision to help you Dave"
This is a switch of the "Cancel/Allow" Mac/PC ad.
Here we have FF3 saying
"You have tried to access a secure site with a dodgy certificate, Cancel or Allow?"
IE meanwhile troops on regardless giving a better "user experience"
Oh until the machine goes down because the site was a trojan site using a self-signed certificate.
The issue here isn't that Firefox is making this hard, its that ANYONE ever made this easy. If a site has an expired certificate then that would worry me as it implies their IT support is a bit dodgy. If someone wants my credit card details and is using a self-signed certificate then I'm VERY worried.
There are functional issues (the duplicate cert problems of Linksys has been mentioned here) that should be addressed. But the basic problem of warning users very strongly that a site is self-signed or has an expired certificate is a good thing.
I'm using Firefox, I'm on a Mac and this problem just hasn't irritated me the way that Vista does because this does it when there is a REAL problem caused by a 3rd party, not a potential problem caused by me hitting a button. Expired or self-signed certs are a real 3rd party problem, not a scare story.
That is what makes OCR hard, not what makes automating the process hard. Have you ever bothered coding a computer to put "nearly a whole bit" into memory?
The thing about voting machines that always confused me, beyond running Anti-virus software on them, was what made it so complicated.
You have a voter, whose admission to the booth is controlled by the same people who have controlled access to ballot papers.
The voter is allowed to vote once.
You have a list of candidates/selections - this is a ballot. A voter can only vote for a candidate/selection from the list.
You have a list of ballots for a given election that a voter can vote on.
ADD UP THE NUMBERS TO FIND THE WINNER.
Adding in a "double check" of a paper validation (which could be done via OCR as the forms will be standard) also sounds pretty trivial.
When I first heard about voting machines I thought that it was about the most trivial problem that anyone had ever had to solve... and yet they've completely screwed up.
So seriously, can anyone tell me what is so hard about automating a paper process that has ticks in boxes?
Last year one of the grandparents wanted to get all of the grand kids and the pets into a single photo. This is 7 kids under the age of 7, 4 cats and 3 dogs (combined weight of the dogs is around 300lbs, big dogs). They didn't want the adults in the photo just the pets and kids.
Without photoshop that picture wouldn't exist. First of all the cats don't like being held for more than 20 seconds and the kids won't stop falling on the dogs and cuddling them, secondly there is a boy in the mix who appears to be a source of near infinite energy. The video of the photoshoot is hilarious as we try and get them all in one place. In the end after over 300 pictures with around 20 nearly there shots I hit photoshop and created a composite image that looked superb in around 20 minutes.
That doesn't change my memory of the event (people are weird if they start creating a fantasy world) but it does mean there is now a decent picture on the wall. There is a line here between doctoring to create a potential reality and doctoring to create a fantasy. People in the later camp are looking over the wall at the looney bin.
So to test it out I grabbed a couple of logos (AIG, Slashdot, Bluesquare, Nike swoosh) and found that what it will do is find scaled down images or ones of lower quality but it won't handle significant colour shifts. So AIG for instance have a blue logo but sponsor Manchester United where their logo is displayed on a red background, the Nike swoosh I tested had a white background and all I got was basic black on white swoosh elements.
Now with photos this is less of an issue as major colour shifts are unusual but it does mean that for commercial and design art its not really as applicable.
No seriously. Fire up the usenet reader in Emacs and look at the scoring system. Very simple just +/- on users and threads but over time it becomes very powerful at filtering out the crap. Something like that with Bayesian maths around it would be great.
And of course you could display the dates in Mayan, with a bit of modding, which is useful given that this is what apparently tells us the end of the world
Good god it appears to be the phrase of the year "We are just modern slaves". Top of the shop of abuse of the term is Sepp "I'm a nutter" Blatter who in reference to someone who is paid about $300,000 A WEEK said that it was just like modern slavery.
These people aren't slaves because.... THEY COULD QUIT. It might be tough, it might be hard, but either quit and get another job or work out a constructive way of fixing it.
Don't compare it to the physical ownership of another human being and the sort of destruction of human rights that entails.
The similarity with Google Labs is the word "labs" this is about user requirements and suggestions rather than fully fledged products. Its about people suggesting improvements and then those moving into development. This means its at a much earlier part of the product development cycle than Google Labs (which starts with a beta or alpha product).
Saying its like Google Labs is like saying Saks Fifth Avenue is like Madison Avenue because they both have the word Avenue.
Monday
Today I met some people from Company X and it was all brilliant and great. Fabulous news that we are doing a big new partnership
Tuesday
I had pie for dinner
Wednesday
We've just lost $2bn as a result of an internal fraud, the FBI and CIA are now involved and all senior executives are being questioned
Thursday
I'm here in Brazil today speaking with their justice ministry, the weather is fantastic and I'm off to play golf later.
Now Jonathan Schwartz at Sun really blazed the trail here, but surely the really thing for a company to do is have such a god-awful boring blog full of mundane crap that any bad news is "published" in a place that no-one looks.
Rather than "posting DVDs" I'd go for something like Amazon's S3 and just dump the backup to them. Here is a list of S3 Backup solutions that would do the job.
I've personally moved away from hard-media as much as possible because the issue on restore is normally about the speed to get it back on the server and its there that online solutions really win as they have the peering arrangements to get you the bandwidth.
Of course you would have, I mean if only you'd been given the billion dollar budget on your FIFTH BIRTHDAY you'd have had people on the moon by the time you were 11.
If it was all about money then Paris Hilton wouldn't be worthless.
At JavaOne about 3 years ago there was a boffin talk with Gosling, Joy and others and one guy raise the image of hearing something drop through his letter box and then suddenly a little bot appearing in his room with a message "don't worry I'm just indexing your house for Google"
His point was that he had two reactions to this firstly "what a huge invasion of privacy" and second "Great I'll be able to find my car keys".
Of course Google is profiling what people do as they search, indexing everything is what they are about. The question is where this impacts on privacy and what limits we want to put on it.
While I know its heresy to say it... Edison did just plain steal a lot of ideas and then pass them off as his own inventions. In fact the lack of global patent protection was a major reason for Edison becoming the person he did, in reality he lived off the inventions of others.
Edison was a patent troll ;)
Come on folks you've got to admire sheer dumb ass brilliance of this level. This isn't a matter of minor incompetence this is world class stupidity. Checking my SPAM folder at the moment I picked out a few that looked similar and everyone had a different email address
So in other words this brilliant change in the rules now means that SPAM isn't SPAM. Maybe that is the real way to get rid of it... just define that it doesn't exist.
There is no poverty in North Korea either apparently.
Ummmm SUV v Merc/Jaguar/BMW/Audi station wagon.
One screams "new money" the other whispers "old money"
Status? Nope. SUVs are just bling.
RTFA. Now I know that some people might argue that MIT isn't the place it was, but I think you'd be hard pushed to find people who don't think that MIT folks have opinions on tech issues.
What would they have to do to get some one who really cares in your mind, hire RMS? Now that would be brilliantly funny but completely unelectable (imaging RMS and Obama's pastor going at it) hell throw in Noam Chomsky and you're away.
Two reasons
1) Reliability, there is bugger all that can go wrong with a tell tale
2) Weight, a vane and a fan are going weigh grams more than the tell tale and when sending something to Mars those things count.
Personally I love this sort of engineering you can almost imagine the meeting
"We've got 5 grams and we need to tell where the wind is coming from"
"Weather, vane with a fan?"
"Nope to heavy"
"Hang on how about just something hanging down from a stick"
And thus extensive engineering and testing was born (it is worth reading the page linked above on what they had to do).
The production kit did when it was shipped but not the stuff that was in our test environment (different from the Sys Admin test environment) we just hadn't realised that our fellow employees were more stupid than any of our clients could ever hope to be.
He used to be able to turn any working piece of kit into a piece of metal art in about 20 seconds, EVERYTHING was always a BIOS issue and he would NEVER check with anyone before replacing the BIOS.
Lets be clear about how dumb this person was, he had a BIOS that worked on his test servers and would then apply that to all the other servers INDEPENDENT OF HARDWARE OR OS. He would then start the machines (which of course wouldn't start) declare them "broken" and say the issue was with the software.
We did some low level hardware stuff in our software and it did break the boxes sometimes so it took 2 months of painful testing and debugging which found nothing, it only came about because one of the team had a heavy night and decided to "rest" in the server room and saw the moron apply the BIOS to a server that had been running and then scurry out to blame the team again.
Basic rule after then was BIOS set to read-only and locked down with a secure password, to this day my BIOS has a password thanks to the sheer physical shock of realising how dumb some people can be.