A nice feature of open source is that projects have a much broader peer review for security flaws/bugs
this brings up another interesting thought. Suppose I was the man himself (Bill) and I've decided "enough of this buggy security swiss cheese we call software, lets start doing things right". So what I do is to say, "ya know, we've got about a gazillion programmers here in Redmond, why don't we start better utilizing a few". So what I do is to start company wide peer review of my closed source. Now obviously the breadth of eyes, even in a company like M$, is significantly less than the general programming population, but this would seem like a step in the right direction. Heck, if I really wanted to "do it right", lets say I drag in developers from my "partners" (like say Apple) to bring more eyes.
So now that I've done this, the question is have I been successful at eliminating (or at least mitigating) the advantage that OS projects have in this regard, and still keep the other "positive" aspects of CS?
Though I know the knee-jerk reaction is to scoff, M$'s statement does bring up an interesting issue. Given how porous M$ security is, just how much worse would/could it be if the source code were available? To be honest, and flame away if you must, I think that M$ does have an interesting practical point (not that I agree with how their applying it, but that doesn't make their point any less valid).
So the obvious question arises, is Linux/BSD (and any other software that has source available) more exposed to "serious" attacks. By "serious" I mean being launched by somebody who knew enough to be able to look at the source and find security flaws, vs a script kiddie who takes a virus toolkit and modifies the virus name and subject line. Theoretcially, it should be more vunerable than a picece of closed source software that was written with a similar level of "quality".
Again, I AM NOT DEFENDING OR SUPPORTING M$'S POSITION, only bringing up what I think is an interesting question.
Well lets see, if their accountants then they'd be using Excel. If they are secretaries then they'd be using word and/or excel. If they are marketing types, then they'd be using powerpoint. Man, why do you think office is one of the lynchpins of Windoze if nobody used it. The browser isn't the center of everyones life.
Several people have replied about migrating to StarOffice (can't say anything about OpenOffice since I've never used it). They are right in pointing out that getting the office apps right is the numero uno priority. Anything that a user uses 85% of the time is going to be something that they are very passionate about. Which brings me to my point.
Now to be honest, I haven't looked at SO in about a year, so things might have changed since then. But my impression (as a very long time Word/Excel user) was that the program was not up to snuff. On equivilent hardware it took forever and a day just to start up, the user interface is radically different than office products, and it just had a very clunky feel to it. Now the first two issues don't speak to whether SO is actually _better_, just different enough to create a learning curve. A learning curve that it will be hard to get the average user to try to tackle without a pretty darn good reason. I think that this will be your biggest hurdle. Saving a few bucks here or there is important only to the bean counters. And if those bean counters are going to be forced to switch from Excel (which most know quite intimately) to SO, then they might not be so quick to want to switch.
Actually it's you logic that is bogus. Your attempt to apply simple logic games to a complex issue is amusing, but no better than anyone who believes the original concept purely from the standpoint of "logic". This can not be "disproved" by x -> y -> z -> x as much as we'd like to think so. The overarching question is "is the exposure to violence more likely to make on exhibit that trait". Now tell me how your simplified logic is supposed to lend even the slightest bit of insight into trying to answer that question. Fact is we're talking human behaviour here, not simple "facts".
I know I'll problably get modd'ed down for this, and let me say that I don't believe in the blanket statement that "watching violent tv/playing violent video games makes for violent children". It's just that seeing such simple minded logic applied to counter what the author claims is simple minded logic is annoying. It's almost like the athiest saying "since there is evil/suffering in the world, god can not exist", brilliant.
Microsoft tends to solve problems by throwing money at them, but if this article is correct, that is a flawed strategy. The excess cash allows them to keep a flawed product on the shelves (e.g. XBox) long past the point where a poorer company would be focusing on improving the product to make it match the customers needs.
Well yes and no. Was the original version of IE vastly superior or "disruptive" technology, well NO. But they were able to use their deeeep financial resources (and desktop monopoly) to keep plugging away until they are now #1. So that tact can be made to work, given enough resources and the right set of circumstances.
Plus, I'm not sure if your example of the xbox is good, since many people do recognize that as a game machine, it has many strengths over it's competition. So in some ways it is the superiour product. Also, because of the lack of sales, they are in a position where they _have_ to innovate at a faster rate than Sony to make up the deficit (again, look at the browser wars, IE sucked at first but they were able to quickly, once they put their minds to it, start adding features to improve it, so much so that Netscape couldn't really effectively keep up).
Actually my point was that for anyone to code in assembler usually implies coding for max performance therefore you would maximize the number of parallel instructions for the particular version of EPIC you were targeting. That in turn would make your code either non portable (going down in # of EU's) or non optimized (going up in # of EU's).
I too would be interested in hearing about how the cpu handles the dependencies. The only modern "general purpose" cpu that I know of that _doesn't_ stall is the MIPS.
Ah, porting to homogeneous isa but with a bigger word size. Funny how it's the same old issues over and over again. Structs change in size, bad assumptions about the size of things such as size_t, sizeof(void *) != sizeof(int) (though sizeof(void *) == sizeof(long) seems to be pretty good at holding true here), etc. Of course now there are concerns about misaligned memory accesses, which on IA32 was just a performance hit. Most IA32 types are not used to being forced to be concerned about this (of course many *NIX/RISC types are very used to this).
When things were shifting from 16 to 32 bit (seems like just yesterday, oh wait, for M$ it was just yesterday), we had pretty much the same issues. Never had to do any 8 -> 16bit ports (since pretty much everything was either in BASIC, where it didn't matter, or assembler, which you couldn't "port" anyway).
Speaking of assembler, I guess the days of hand crafting code out of assembler is really going to take a hit if IA64 ever takes off. The assembler code would be so tied to a specific rev of EPIC, that it would be hard to justify the future expense of doing so. It would be interesting to see what type of tools are available for the assembler developer. Does the chip provide any enhanced debugging capabilities (keeping writes straight at a particular point in execution, can you see speculative writes too?). It'd be cool if the assembler IDE could automagically group parallelizable (is that a word?) together as you are coding.
Sure someone can duplicate my fingerprint (how easy that would be to both do and hide when checking out is another point, but let's assume that it's reasonable to lift a latent print, make a mold and check through without the clerk noticing), but they still must know my pin.
But that's not when they'd do it. They'd come over to your house late at night, pick a few things out of your trash, and just lift the prints then. Or just lift them from your door knob, or the door handle of your car, or sit around in a mall with little security and lots of people when you use the atm there. Tons-o-places to lift prints, since no one really thinks about leaving prints anywhere. Now true that all those places might not give you the BEST print, but there's bound to be lots of places that do.
This is no worse than the current system of debit cards
Right, but is it any better, thats the million (give or take) dollar question. If companies are going to spring mucho dinero to upgrade systems (and then likely to pass that expense onto the customer, citing "improved security for the betterment of the customer") only to end up with a system that in reality is no more secure than the one it replaces, that would be a "bad thing".
I agree that it is more convenient though. However the "you can only be hacked ten times before you can no longer purchase anything" issue is an interesting one. You could DOS people quite effectively that way (esp co-workers since lifting their prints off of their keyboards would be trivial).
The first result of the price drop will be a buying spree for people who have lurked on the sidelines, undecided about which game system to buy
Right, but how is their choice any easier now than before? You still have to decide between the $199 xbox or $199 ps2. I could see though that since you're paying $100 less, your less concerned about making the "wrong" decision since the penalty has dropped by $200 (purchase xbox, hate xbox, purchase ps2, not counting money from selling xbox of course). I don't think I agree with the sales increasing by that margin though, a spike yes, 33%, I don't know. But I definitely agree that M$ would be hosed had they left the price alone and ps2 went to $199.
Which brings up an interesting point about Sony, why didn't they drop prices earlier? Had they done the price drop say a month before xmas, could tbey have slaughtered xbox, lost more money short term, but gained in the long term. Or, are they thinking that M$ has deep enough pockets that they would have simply just lost money while M$ would not have backed down anyway?
This is really turning into a very interesting horse race, even more so than previous console wars since the players are HUGE (not just gaming companies) and have tons of resources and even more corp. pride.
Well, I wouldn't be so quick to say that Palm "made a new market from something M$ bought...". Don't forget that there were a great many players that came and went in that market (esp. Apple with the Newton). Palm just made a "true" PDA, vs what M$ and others tried with scaled down portables.
But that's another market segment. Yes, I agree that their huge cash reserve doesn't necessarily help innovation. It simply helps them weather the storm if they feel that they need to push through whatever technology they happen to be hawking at the time. I was being sarcastic about the "beauty" of the cash reserve and massive income (unless of course your M$).
Keep in mind that M$ needs the retailers way more than they need M$. Retailers don't make a lot on the consoles themselves, and if M$ tries to eat into their already slim margins by foisting part of the price cut on to them, then they could balk and simply use the shelf space for PS2, which they know will sell. The absolute last thing that M$ needs now (since sales are under estimates and there is a perception that they are on their heels) is to have any of the major retailers drop the xbox. This would hugely undermine confidence in the platform, and in this market, perception is everything!
M$ will absorb the loss, because they must. They have more than enough in the warchest to fund the thing for as long as they want to. That's the "beauty" of M$, with such huge resources behind them, they have play in the sandbox until _they_ decide it's time to get out (anyone here old enough to remember the early days of cdrom and who championed the format for years until everyone else caught up?)
Keep in mind that while other component prices have decreased, memory has sharply increased in this time frame (and keep in mind that all the xbox's sold at launch were obviously produced before the launch, some even months before, so memory was even cheaper). So while I'm sure it's cheaper, it's probably not as cheap as you might think. Good thing for M$ that they didn't put an lcd in the thing, then they'd really be hosed.
Yes, I was aware of DDJ online. It's cool that they are offering this (and have been for a several years now, pre-internet, well, pre-widespread-internet anyway). Two problems though, first is that this only represents a small portion of the stuff that I happen to have. Old Byte, Micro Cornucopia, PC Tech, Compute, etc, etc are probably not going to make it any time soon (though I guess Byte might, they already have some).
The second and the one that many people don't really think of (and to be honest, care about) are the ad's. Both as a reference (for many old products, the ad can be the only source of information) and for entertainment value (hey, look at the 20MB MFM Seagate for $1200, not including controller). The ads always get lost when companies put their content online, sigh.
I think you may be underestimating the sheer enormity of your task. Getting sheets to all feed right (a little skew and you're skrewed) and in order (feeder issues, what happens when one page mis-scans/feeds, can you go back and insert it into it's proper location), handling front to back issues (though I would assume that decent scanning software would take care of this for you). Also, your plan to use jpg might be problematic. OCR is finicky enough as it is, back when we were scanning documents we always used 300dpi tiff (using group3 or group4 lossless compression) to get the maximum accuracy rates from the ocr package we were using. And speaking of accuracy, keep in mind that OCR software that has a 97% accuracy rate means that it will flub 3 out of every 100 words, in a book that might contain tens/hundreds of thousands or words, that is a whole lot of errors. Now it's been a few years (6-8) since I've done this kind of stuff, so who knows, maybe things are much better now?
I've been wanting to do something similar for years, but with technical magazines, not books. But the sheer amount of manual labor involved has turned me off considerably (not to mention the thought of destroying the original source).
Keep in mind that this is such a common need, that if it were pretty straight forward, much of it would be done already (perhaps someone out there has the time/hardware/software to have done some of this already?) Not to mention the issue that with the web, that much of the information contained in those books are now available online, makes you wonder if it's really worth the time and effort, esp. considering that a great many of the technical books are obsolete two weeks before they hit the shelves.
How a 867mhz processor (NOW, not "soon"). How about a 1024x768 screen (can you say decent surfing, document editing, picture viewing). How about two USB ports and a firewire port (can you say "standard peripherals"). How about a 20GB HD. How about being able to run the SAME apps as your desktop.
For me, Sony may have struck upon the near perfect form factor. PDA's are still toys (for me at least) and laptops (even subnotes) still too large to cart around day to day. It seems just about right. I can live with hunt and peck, heck, not much different than what I do with my keyboard now;)
Now I say make it sub 1 lb and integrate the wireless nic into the unit, and whammo, damn near perfect.
Well, 20 years later and things have come full circle for Compaq. From the roadmap it looks like they'll be phasing out the Compaq name from most everything with the notable exception of business/consumer pc's. After forays into high end servers, laser printers, RISC/VMS (i.e. DEC), pda's, Compaq has come back to it's roots.
Maybe Compaq should come out with a 20th anniversary luggable just for old times sake? Hey, that's not a bad idea. They could put an lcd instead of a crt, mount the floppy/hd on one side and the dvd/cd on the other. Now that would be cool. Maybe one of those case mod'ers can get cracking on this one.
I would respectfully disagree, well sort of. I don't think it's necessary for these judges to be guru level c++/os/compiler guys to make a reasonably informed judgement. I would agree that to excel in either law or tech, you have to spend enough time in either discipline, which basically rules out being an expert in the other.
I can easily see however, judges that are well versed in the ways of tech. Hell, if you can have lawyers with so many specialties, why not judges (now don't take that statement to the extreme, I don't think that _everything_ needs specialized judges, though I think that there are definitely areas where a more in depth knowledge is critical to making imformed opinions/judgements).
Of course for M$, I see 8 individuals in black robes and hoods, with BillG on the rack, and (for some odd reason), Mel Brooks in a red robe and hood trying to get him to confess his herecy.
Windows XP Embedded is the componentized version of the leading desktop operating system,
Based on the same binaries as Windows XP Professional
They seem to go out of their way to say that it is the same as the desktop XP.
I never understood M$'s argument anyway. What a load of hokum. Too bad there can't be a tribunal of judges that actually knew something about technology, they'd see just how lame M$'s claims are.
Uh, maybe because it would be the same as taxation without representation. Being in the US, we would not receive any of the "benefits" from any type of sales tax. This is how it works over here too with state sales tax. Only if the company has a "presence" in the same state as you live in (thereby allowing your tax dollars to stay in the state).
Of course I could make a statement about how this concept is STILL beyond the ability for any Brit to comprehend, but I won't;)
You say that you can't enact policy and that the teachers are not covered by any current policy. I assume then that means that students are. You could therefore enact measures that also affect the teachers and claim that those measures must be taken to ensure that students can not circumvent the policy. Therefore if you shutdown ALL outgoing ports and force users through a proxy, you can claim that it is the only effective way of preventing misuse by the students.
In some of the pix, there are two rods on opposite corners. Then in one pic, all four rods are there. But then in some other pix there are two rods in a single side. I think that this is a rod conspiracy. All these pictures are not of the same unit, no sir ree bob. That page was obviously pieced together from multiple units being put together in multiple locations over some period of time. For what nefarious purpose, only Alex Jones would know (I swear, if you look real close in one of the pics, you can see a tiny black helicopter in the reflection of the DMM).
If you're an old phart like me, it's kinofa bummer when actors that you knew and loved growing up start to die. We can remember the "young" versions of these actors and to even think of them being 82 is mind blowing.
Heck, next thing you know companies like DEC and Pan-Am won't exist anymo... Damn, I'm really feeling old now.
P.S. If this is true, and he doesn't pull through, condolences to his family.
There is a company that makes chat software called ichat, and they've been around off and on for the last 7-8 years or so. I wonder if they will run into any problems with their chosen name. I wouldn't think having one letter capitialized would be enough to diferentiate the names.
I'm sure that there are at least three performance artists in NY that do exactly that as 'art';)
Beyond that, I'm a bit confused by your reply, perhaps being bonked on the head with a rock as a boy has caused more brain damage than I had originally thought.
Slashdot Mirror
A nice feature of open source is that projects have a much broader peer review for security flaws/bugs
this brings up another interesting thought. Suppose I was the man himself (Bill) and I've decided "enough of this buggy security swiss cheese we call software, lets start doing things right". So what I do is to say, "ya know, we've got about a gazillion programmers here in Redmond, why don't we start better utilizing a few". So what I do is to start company wide peer review of my closed source. Now obviously the breadth of eyes, even in a company like M$, is significantly less than the general programming population, but this would seem like a step in the right direction. Heck, if I really wanted to "do it right", lets say I drag in developers from my "partners" (like say Apple) to bring more eyes.
So now that I've done this, the question is have I been successful at eliminating (or at least mitigating) the advantage that OS projects have in this regard, and still keep the other "positive" aspects of CS?
Though I know the knee-jerk reaction is to scoff, M$'s statement does bring up an interesting issue. Given how porous M$ security is, just how much worse would/could it be if the source code were available? To be honest, and flame away if you must, I think that M$ does have an interesting practical point (not that I agree with how their applying it, but that doesn't make their point any less valid).
So the obvious question arises, is Linux/BSD (and any other software that has source available) more exposed to "serious" attacks. By "serious" I mean being launched by somebody who knew enough to be able to look at the source and find security flaws, vs a script kiddie who takes a virus toolkit and modifies the virus name and subject line. Theoretcially, it should be more vunerable than a picece of closed source software that was written with a similar level of "quality".
Again, I AM NOT DEFENDING OR SUPPORTING M$'S POSITION, only bringing up what I think is an interesting question.
Well lets see, if their accountants then they'd be using Excel. If they are secretaries then they'd be using word and/or excel. If they are marketing types, then they'd be using powerpoint. Man, why do you think office is one of the lynchpins of Windoze if nobody used it. The browser isn't the center of everyones life.
Several people have replied about migrating to StarOffice (can't say anything about OpenOffice since I've never used it). They are right in pointing out that getting the office apps right is the numero uno priority. Anything that a user uses 85% of the time is going to be something that they are very passionate about. Which brings me to my point.
Now to be honest, I haven't looked at SO in about a year, so things might have changed since then. But my impression (as a very long time Word/Excel user) was that the program was not up to snuff. On equivilent hardware it took forever and a day just to start up, the user interface is radically different than office products, and it just had a very clunky feel to it. Now the first two issues don't speak to whether SO is actually _better_, just different enough to create a learning curve. A learning curve that it will be hard to get the average user to try to tackle without a pretty darn good reason. I think that this will be your biggest hurdle. Saving a few bucks here or there is important only to the bean counters. And if those bean counters are going to be forced to switch from Excel (which most know quite intimately) to SO, then they might not be so quick to want to switch.
Actually it's you logic that is bogus. Your attempt to apply simple logic games to a complex issue is amusing, but no better than anyone who believes the original concept purely from the standpoint of "logic". This can not be "disproved" by x -> y -> z -> x as much as we'd like to think so. The overarching question is "is the exposure to violence more likely to make on exhibit that trait". Now tell me how your simplified logic is supposed to lend even the slightest bit of insight into trying to answer that question. Fact is we're talking human behaviour here, not simple "facts".
I know I'll problably get modd'ed down for this, and let me say that I don't believe in the blanket statement that "watching violent tv/playing violent video games makes for violent children". It's just that seeing such simple minded logic applied to counter what the author claims is simple minded logic is annoying. It's almost like the athiest saying "since there is evil/suffering in the world, god can not exist", brilliant.
Microsoft tends to solve problems by throwing money at them, but if this article is correct, that is a flawed strategy. The excess cash allows them to keep a flawed product on the shelves (e.g. XBox) long past the point where a poorer company would be focusing on improving the product to make it match the customers needs.
Well yes and no. Was the original version of IE vastly superior or "disruptive" technology, well NO. But they were able to use their deeeep financial resources (and desktop monopoly) to keep plugging away until they are now #1. So that tact can be made to work, given enough resources and the right set of circumstances.
Plus, I'm not sure if your example of the xbox is good, since many people do recognize that as a game machine, it has many strengths over it's competition. So in some ways it is the superiour product. Also, because of the lack of sales, they are in a position where they _have_ to innovate at a faster rate than Sony to make up the deficit (again, look at the browser wars, IE sucked at first but they were able to quickly, once they put their minds to it, start adding features to improve it, so much so that Netscape couldn't really effectively keep up).
Actually my point was that for anyone to code in assembler usually implies coding for max performance therefore you would maximize the number of parallel instructions for the particular version of EPIC you were targeting. That in turn would make your code either non portable (going down in # of EU's) or non optimized (going up in # of EU's).
I too would be interested in hearing about how the cpu handles the dependencies. The only modern "general purpose" cpu that I know of that _doesn't_ stall is the MIPS.
Ah, porting to homogeneous isa but with a bigger word size. Funny how it's the same old issues over and over again. Structs change in size, bad assumptions about the size of things such as size_t, sizeof(void *) != sizeof(int) (though sizeof(void *) == sizeof(long) seems to be pretty good at holding true here), etc. Of course now there are concerns about misaligned memory accesses, which on IA32 was just a performance hit. Most IA32 types are not used to being forced to be concerned about this (of course many *NIX/RISC types are very used to this).
When things were shifting from 16 to 32 bit (seems like just yesterday, oh wait, for M$ it was just yesterday), we had pretty much the same issues. Never had to do any 8 -> 16bit ports (since pretty much everything was either in BASIC, where it didn't matter, or assembler, which you couldn't "port" anyway).
Speaking of assembler, I guess the days of hand crafting code out of assembler is really going to take a hit if IA64 ever takes off. The assembler code would be so tied to a specific rev of EPIC, that it would be hard to justify the future expense of doing so. It would be interesting to see what type of tools are available for the assembler developer. Does the chip provide any enhanced debugging capabilities (keeping writes straight at a particular point in execution, can you see speculative writes too?). It'd be cool if the assembler IDE could automagically group parallelizable (is that a word?) together as you are coding.
Sure someone can duplicate my fingerprint (how easy that would be to both do and hide when checking out is another point, but let's assume that it's reasonable to lift a latent print, make a mold and check through without the clerk noticing), but they still must know my pin.
But that's not when they'd do it. They'd come over to your house late at night, pick a few things out of your trash, and just lift the prints then. Or just lift them from your door knob, or the door handle of your car, or sit around in a mall with little security and lots of people when you use the atm there. Tons-o-places to lift prints, since no one really thinks about leaving prints anywhere. Now true that all those places might not give you the BEST print, but there's bound to be lots of places that do.
This is no worse than the current system of debit cards
Right, but is it any better, thats the million (give or take) dollar question. If companies are going to spring mucho dinero to upgrade systems (and then likely to pass that expense onto the customer, citing "improved security for the betterment of the customer") only to end up with a system that in reality is no more secure than the one it replaces, that would be a "bad thing".
I agree that it is more convenient though. However the "you can only be hacked ten times before you can no longer purchase anything" issue is an interesting one. You could DOS people quite effectively that way (esp co-workers since lifting their prints off of their keyboards would be trivial).
The first result of the price drop will be a buying spree for people who have lurked on the sidelines, undecided about which game system to buy
Right, but how is their choice any easier now than before? You still have to decide between the $199 xbox or $199 ps2. I could see though that since you're paying $100 less, your less concerned about making the "wrong" decision since the penalty has dropped by $200 (purchase xbox, hate xbox, purchase ps2, not counting money from selling xbox of course). I don't think I agree with the sales increasing by that margin though, a spike yes, 33%, I don't know. But I definitely agree that M$ would be hosed had they left the price alone and ps2 went to $199.
Which brings up an interesting point about Sony, why didn't they drop prices earlier? Had they done the price drop say a month before xmas, could tbey have slaughtered xbox, lost more money short term, but gained in the long term. Or, are they thinking that M$ has deep enough pockets that they would have simply just lost money while M$ would not have backed down anyway?
This is really turning into a very interesting horse race, even more so than previous console wars since the players are HUGE (not just gaming companies) and have tons of resources and even more corp. pride.
Well, I wouldn't be so quick to say that Palm "made a new market from something M$ bought ...". Don't forget that there were a great many players that came and went in that market (esp. Apple with the Newton). Palm just made a "true" PDA, vs what M$ and others tried with scaled down portables.
But that's another market segment. Yes, I agree that their huge cash reserve doesn't necessarily help innovation. It simply helps them weather the storm if they feel that they need to push through whatever technology they happen to be hawking at the time. I was being sarcastic about the "beauty" of the cash reserve and massive income (unless of course your M$).
Keep in mind that M$ needs the retailers way more than they need M$. Retailers don't make a lot on the consoles themselves, and if M$ tries to eat into their already slim margins by foisting part of the price cut on to them, then they could balk and simply use the shelf space for PS2, which they know will sell. The absolute last thing that M$ needs now (since sales are under estimates and there is a perception that they are on their heels) is to have any of the major retailers drop the xbox. This would hugely undermine confidence in the platform, and in this market, perception is everything!
M$ will absorb the loss, because they must. They have more than enough in the warchest to fund the thing for as long as they want to. That's the "beauty" of M$, with such huge resources behind them, they have play in the sandbox until _they_ decide it's time to get out (anyone here old enough to remember the early days of cdrom and who championed the format for years until everyone else caught up?)
Keep in mind that while other component prices have decreased, memory has sharply increased in this time frame (and keep in mind that all the xbox's sold at launch were obviously produced before the launch, some even months before, so memory was even cheaper). So while I'm sure it's cheaper, it's probably not as cheap as you might think. Good thing for M$ that they didn't put an lcd in the thing, then they'd really be hosed.
Yes, I was aware of DDJ online. It's cool that they are offering this (and have been for a several years now, pre-internet, well, pre-widespread-internet anyway). Two problems though, first is that this only represents a small portion of the stuff that I happen to have. Old Byte, Micro Cornucopia, PC Tech, Compute, etc, etc are probably not going to make it any time soon (though I guess Byte might, they already have some).
The second and the one that many people don't really think of (and to be honest, care about) are the ad's. Both as a reference (for many old products, the ad can be the only source of information) and for entertainment value (hey, look at the 20MB MFM Seagate for $1200, not including controller). The ads always get lost when companies put their content online, sigh.
I think you may be underestimating the sheer enormity of your task. Getting sheets to all feed right (a little skew and you're skrewed) and in order (feeder issues, what happens when one page mis-scans/feeds, can you go back and insert it into it's proper location), handling front to back issues (though I would assume that decent scanning software would take care of this for you). Also, your plan to use jpg might be problematic. OCR is finicky enough as it is, back when we were scanning documents we always used 300dpi tiff (using group3 or group4 lossless compression) to get the maximum accuracy rates from the ocr package we were using. And speaking of accuracy, keep in mind that OCR software that has a 97% accuracy rate means that it will flub 3 out of every 100 words, in a book that might contain tens/hundreds of thousands or words, that is a whole lot of errors. Now it's been a few years (6-8) since I've done this kind of stuff, so who knows, maybe things are much better now?
I've been wanting to do something similar for years, but with technical magazines, not books. But the sheer amount of manual labor involved has turned me off considerably (not to mention the thought of destroying the original source).
Keep in mind that this is such a common need, that if it were pretty straight forward, much of it would be done already (perhaps someone out there has the time/hardware/software to have done some of this already?) Not to mention the issue that with the web, that much of the information contained in those books are now available online, makes you wonder if it's really worth the time and effort, esp. considering that a great many of the technical books are obsolete two weeks before they hit the shelves.
How a 867mhz processor (NOW, not "soon"). How about a 1024x768 screen (can you say decent surfing, document editing, picture viewing). How about two USB ports and a firewire port (can you say "standard peripherals"). How about a 20GB HD. How about being able to run the SAME apps as your desktop.
;)
For me, Sony may have struck upon the near perfect form factor. PDA's are still toys (for me at least) and laptops (even subnotes) still too large to cart around day to day. It seems just about right. I can live with hunt and peck, heck, not much different than what I do with my keyboard now
Now I say make it sub 1 lb and integrate the wireless nic into the unit, and whammo, damn near perfect.
Well, 20 years later and things have come full circle for Compaq. From the roadmap it looks like they'll be phasing out the Compaq name from most everything with the notable exception of business/consumer pc's. After forays into high end servers, laser printers, RISC/VMS (i.e. DEC), pda's, Compaq has come back to it's roots.
Maybe Compaq should come out with a 20th anniversary luggable just for old times sake? Hey, that's not a bad idea. They could put an lcd instead of a crt, mount the floppy/hd on one side and the dvd/cd on the other. Now that would be cool. Maybe one of those case mod'ers can get cracking on this one.
I would respectfully disagree, well sort of. I don't think it's necessary for these judges to be guru level c++/os/compiler guys to make a reasonably informed judgement. I would agree that to excel in either law or tech, you have to spend enough time in either discipline, which basically rules out being an expert in the other.
I can easily see however, judges that are well versed in the ways of tech. Hell, if you can have lawyers with so many specialties, why not judges (now don't take that statement to the extreme, I don't think that _everything_ needs specialized judges, though I think that there are definitely areas where a more in depth knowledge is critical to making imformed opinions/judgements).
Of course for M$, I see 8 individuals in black robes and hoods, with BillG on the rack, and (for some odd reason), Mel Brooks in a red robe and hood trying to get him to confess his herecy.
Just look at the language they themselves use:
Windows XP Embedded is the componentized version of the leading desktop operating system,
Based on the same binaries as Windows XP Professional
They seem to go out of their way to say that it is the same as the desktop XP.
I never understood M$'s argument anyway. What a load of hokum. Too bad there can't be a tribunal of judges that actually knew something about technology, they'd see just how lame M$'s claims are.
Uh, maybe because it would be the same as taxation without representation. Being in the US, we would not receive any of the "benefits" from any type of sales tax. This is how it works over here too with state sales tax. Only if the company has a "presence" in the same state as you live in (thereby allowing your tax dollars to stay in the state).
;)
Of course I could make a statement about how this concept is STILL beyond the ability for any Brit to comprehend, but I won't
You say that you can't enact policy and that the teachers are not covered by any current policy. I assume then that means that students are. You could therefore enact measures that also affect the teachers and claim that those measures must be taken to ensure that students can not circumvent the policy. Therefore if you shutdown ALL outgoing ports and force users through a proxy, you can claim that it is the only effective way of preventing misuse by the students.
In some of the pix, there are two rods on opposite corners. Then in one pic, all four rods are there. But then in some other pix there are two rods in a single side. I think that this is a rod conspiracy. All these pictures are not of the same unit, no sir ree bob. That page was obviously pieced together from multiple units being put together in multiple locations over some period of time. For what nefarious purpose, only Alex Jones would know (I swear, if you look real close in one of the pics, you can see a tiny black helicopter in the reflection of the DMM).
If you're an old phart like me, it's kinofa bummer when actors that you knew and loved growing up start to die. We can remember the "young" versions of these actors and to even think of them being 82 is mind blowing.
Heck, next thing you know companies like DEC and Pan-Am won't exist anymo... Damn, I'm really feeling old now.
P.S. If this is true, and he doesn't pull through, condolences to his family.
There is a company that makes chat software called ichat, and they've been around off and on for the last 7-8 years or so. I wonder if they will run into any problems with their chosen name. I wouldn't think having one letter capitialized would be enough to diferentiate the names.
I'm sure that there are at least three performance artists in NY that do exactly that as 'art' ;)
Beyond that, I'm a bit confused by your reply, perhaps being bonked on the head with a rock as a boy has caused more brain damage than I had originally thought.