I think cell phone manufacturers have a distinct advantage in this area because they have been working for years at making a product that is both user friendly, extremely small, and runs in real-time with no crashes.
As phones become more intelligent, it only seems natural that phone manufacturers would have an easier time than microsoft because microsoft has to scale down its product, clean out bugs, adapt the software to be real-time --- all while getting new teams organized that have the ability to do this.
Cell phone companies already have a large number of experienced exployees that have been meeting th ese necessary goals for years.
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
I seriously doubt that this guy has some new revolutionary technology that will allow him to force ads to pop up no matter what we are doing. This sounds like the typical spyware that comes with kazaa and other similar programs. There is a great cure for this: Ad-Aware. This could also be the IE bug that was mentioned on slashdot yesterday.
Whatever this guy is talking about, it can be easily defeated by ad-aware, using mozilla, or disabling activex in IE.
As far as I know, this is enforcable. I know several people who have had to sign agreements similar to this when starting jobs. Any patents, books, or marketable products even remotely related to what the company makes became the property of the computer, or in one case, the company got 40% of any profit from such products. I'm assuming that since these types of agreements are legal in the business world, they apply to the college world as well.
In some ways, I guess it is good because people won't start selling a ripoff of the company's product, or use company tools to make an invention and then sell it for personal profit. However, I can see it being bad because it also restricts what you can do with the knowledge you gain from a job. If you are able to invent something great, using only the knowledge you have gotten from a job, it seems unfair that you don't actually have any rights to that idea.
If you were to read the article, you would find this text at the bottom, "Update 2002-Oct-30
Several independent sources have now confirmed that The Middleware Company was indeed paid by Microsoft to conduct this report." Therefore, they obviously had approval from Microsoft to conduct the benchmark.
The Saturn V rocket (previous correction noted:-) was made of millions of parts. The work on the rocket was spread out over literally thousands of contractors all across the United States. The plans for the rocket would take up an entire library. Even to gather all of this material into one place would take quite a while to do, and it would require a budget to store this much material after it was gathered together. After the Apollo program ended, no budget was given to do this mammoth undertaking. Today, many of these contractors have changed hands or closed down and the documentation on building the rocket would be spotty at best.
After the Apollo missions, there was no budget to keep up the plans for the Apollo V spacecraft. If NASA wanted to land men on the moon again, they would have to reinvent the great rocket science of Wernher von Braun. NASA should just shoot for going to the moon now and establishing a science based set of missions.
Apollo was not built around science. It was built as another battlefield of the Cold War. The space program wasn't even important until the Soviet Union beat America into space. When NASA can make routine, scientific trips to the moon, then they can concentrate on building a space station at L1 and worry about getting to Mars.
The Space Shuttle is routine now, and usually stays within budget. NASA should build on this technology, slowly and gradually. We will learn so much more this way rather than putting a thermometer and a seismometer on the moon as quickly as possible.
I agree that UD is better for the human race in terms of technology utilization, but remember that without seti@home, there probably would be no UD. Seti@home made distributed computer popular enough that other companies could start, and succeed, in a previously unheard of field.
I don't agree with this. Sure we may never come in contact with any alien life, but think about the side benefits. Without the great impact of seti@home, we probably would have never had companies like United Devices which have done research into ways of curing cancer using distributed computing.
Seti@home has shown to the masses a new way of doing great things. If nothing else, the publicity that seti@home got has sparked a completely new area of computing that was only previously available to "techies".
I use seti on a lot of workstations here at the office (don't tell the boss:-) and am pretty high up the ladder. I think of it as doing something nerdy, something helpful for humanity, and something fun. My coworkers and I make a competition of getting more work units than the other. I know chances of one of my computers discovering an alien signal is about 1 in 1000000000000, but I still really enjoy SETI. I don't know if I could give money, but I would hope that some big donors would come in and help out.
Netzero and other similar companies failed after many strong and repeated attempts to offer the same service, except through dial up. The idea sounds nice except for a couple of problems: no one ever clicks on banner ads (except the great slashdot ads, of course), and people will just find a way to keep the banner ad from displaying on the screen. I would love for your idea to work, but I just don't see that happening, given the past history of free internet access. Today, I don't think there is a single free ISP left (could be mistaken), and this is mostly due to a poor revenue model.
So it turns out that we don't have to pay royalties. How long before they come under new management or are bought and we are forced to pay to create and listen to mp3's? This could still turn into another compuserve.gif patent fight very easily. We should not make ourselves be at the whim of a company like that. We really should all use ogg. We know that it will always be free and open source, and the quality of ogg sound files rock.
This type of mouse has been out for at least a year. I first used one about six months ago. It was neat, but I never felt like I had the precise control like I do with a desktop mouse. The problem was that a person's had can not be steady just hovering in the air. It is really only possible to steady a mouse by using downward pressure on a tabletop. Sure this mouse is nice for presentations where precision is not so important, but for games, I would never use it.
I believe that your company should stop using the DMCA to cover up security flaws in its products (refering to the Tru64 bug that was hidden using a DMCA threat). This application of the DMCA is beyond the intent of the designers and is just abuse of the system.
I purposely didn't mention that I hated the DMCA in all its forms because in their minds, that would place me in the stereotypical role of a "hacker" that just wants to rip them off.
I guess we differ on how we look at these books. I loved the part of the book about Tom Bombadil. I realize that it has nothing to do with the plot of the book, but that is not the only reason I enjoy the books. I enjoy the wide variety of characters. It is like exploring a new world in great detail, and I feel that the section with Tom offers me exactly that - a look into the powerful and mysterious characters of this world. I believe that this section could have worked on screen because it would have drawn audiences into the magic and mystery of this world and would have enhanced the story.
That is ridiculous. You are saying that Microsoft is helping macintosh in order to destroy linux? That seems a little far-fetched, even for our lovely Bill Gates.
Quote from the article: World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
Go ahead, sue us! We'll suddenly all become friendly to your overcharging, greedy ways and allow you to completely ignore any technological innovations that have taken place in the past 6 years. Seriously, how can they even contemplate such an action and not think that the entire Internet will become their enemy. They are fighting their source of revenue. They need to embrace what everyone else already has and stop pretending like the Internet doesn't exist. There is nothing to be gained by them suing individuals.
Go to dictionary.com. Terrorism is defined as The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons. I tend to agree with this definition. During our war of independence, we never attacked civilians and all of our battles were legitimate battles against the army of another nation, England. Yes, I know that we killed other Americans (Tories), but they were willfully representing the enemy, England. There was never a time that we engaged in killing neutral civilians. We have not committed terrorism.
Now, Al Qaeda has done the complete opposite. They killed neutral civilians of many nations and intentionally ignored the army of their self-declared enemy, the United States. This is obviously a terrorist attack. Several years ago when Al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole, they attacked a legitimate military representative of their enemy. I don't believe that this was an act of terrorism, but I believe that it was an act of war. In no way do I believe that Al Qaeda was correct in taking this action, and I completely believe that Al Qaeda should be destroyed. However, any reference to the idea that American colonials fighting for independence were terrorists is completely wrong and needs correcting.
AFAIK, Congress does not mandate what software for the federal government to use. If the White House CIO is looking into this, I think we need to write Bush, not our congress representative. I'm sure that this Mark Forman guy has an email address of a fax machine through some pub. relations office. If someone could post that, we could work on forumlating a quality response.
Remember - it will not help our cause to just blindly send hundreds of stupid emails or faxes.
I refuse to believe that our government is so stupid as to pander to the monopoly that it is sueing. Reason must prevail. I know that if we have to, we can kill this idea the same way we killed the SSSCA.
Java's strength is nowhere near a Windows desktop
on
Trouble Ahead for Java
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Java does not belong anywhere near a Windows desktop when actually running programs (not just coding/testing). Java belongs on a server. plain and simple. On the desktop, Java is slow - no, Java is *really* slow. Other programming languages (i.e. VB) are slow, but they provide an easy way for people to make simple applications that can look professional. Java does not provide this. Therefore Java's slightly higher knowledge requirements and slowness make it unsuitable for the desktop. However, Java's strength is running on a server in a JSP environment. This is because Java has so many tools built in for networking (no more C style sockets, yay!!) that a (relatively) few lines of code can produce a very powerful Internet program that is fairly safe to run. I believe it is only hurting Java's image to even pretend that it can function as an application base for desktop applications. Sun should drop all of that - including Swing - and focus on enabling network technologies such as database interfaces and web services where the end user never even knows that they are being fed by Java.
Slashdot Mirror
As phones become more intelligent, it only seems natural that phone manufacturers would have an easier time than microsoft because microsoft has to scale down its product, clean out bugs, adapt the software to be real-time --- all while getting new teams organized that have the ability to do this.
Cell phone companies already have a large number of experienced exployees that have been meeting th ese necessary goals for years.
Any halfway decent firewall will by default block all incoming connections, which includes the service for windows messenger.
Even the built in windows xp firewall will accomplish this much I believe.
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam. It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened. "This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
I seriously doubt that this guy has some new revolutionary technology that will allow him to force ads to pop up no matter what we are doing. This sounds like the typical spyware that comes with kazaa and other similar programs. There is a great cure for this: Ad-Aware. This could also be the IE bug that was mentioned on slashdot yesterday.
Whatever this guy is talking about, it can be easily defeated by ad-aware, using mozilla, or disabling activex in IE.
In some ways, I guess it is good because people won't start selling a ripoff of the company's product, or use company tools to make an invention and then sell it for personal profit. However, I can see it being bad because it also restricts what you can do with the knowledge you gain from a job. If you are able to invent something great, using only the knowledge you have gotten from a job, it seems unfair that you don't actually have any rights to that idea.
If you were to read the article, you would find this text at the bottom, "Update 2002-Oct-30 Several independent sources have now confirmed that The Middleware Company was indeed paid by Microsoft to conduct this report." Therefore, they obviously had approval from Microsoft to conduct the benchmark.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
The Saturn V rocket (previous correction noted :-) was made of millions of parts. The work on the rocket was spread out over literally thousands of contractors all across the United States. The plans for the rocket would take up an entire library. Even to gather all of this material into one place would take quite a while to do, and it would require a budget to store this much material after it was gathered together. After the Apollo program ended, no budget was given to do this mammoth undertaking. Today, many of these contractors have changed hands or closed down and the documentation on building the rocket would be spotty at best.
Apollo was not built around science. It was built as another battlefield of the Cold War. The space program wasn't even important until the Soviet Union beat America into space. When NASA can make routine, scientific trips to the moon, then they can concentrate on building a space station at L1 and worry about getting to Mars.
The Space Shuttle is routine now, and usually stays within budget. NASA should build on this technology, slowly and gradually. We will learn so much more this way rather than putting a thermometer and a seismometer on the moon as quickly as possible.
I agree that UD is better for the human race in terms of technology utilization, but remember that without seti@home, there probably would be no UD. Seti@home made distributed computer popular enough that other companies could start, and succeed, in a previously unheard of field.
I don't agree with this. Sure we may never come in contact with any alien life, but think about the side benefits. Without the great impact of seti@home, we probably would have never had companies like United Devices which have done research into ways of curing cancer using distributed computing. Seti@home has shown to the masses a new way of doing great things. If nothing else, the publicity that seti@home got has sparked a completely new area of computing that was only previously available to "techies".
I use seti on a lot of workstations here at the office (don't tell the boss :-) and am pretty high up the ladder. I think of it as doing something nerdy, something helpful for humanity, and something fun. My coworkers and I make a competition of getting more work units than the other. I know chances of one of my computers discovering an alien signal is about 1 in 1000000000000, but I still really enjoy SETI. I don't know if I could give money, but I would hope that some big donors would come in and help out.
r u sure this is a problem? IMHO, TPTB should not be upset by it. TTFN
Netzero and other similar companies failed after many strong and repeated attempts to offer the same service, except through dial up. The idea sounds nice except for a couple of problems: no one ever clicks on banner ads (except the great slashdot ads, of course), and people will just find a way to keep the banner ad from displaying on the screen. I would love for your idea to work, but I just don't see that happening, given the past history of free internet access. Today, I don't think there is a single free ISP left (could be mistaken), and this is mostly due to a poor revenue model.
So it turns out that we don't have to pay royalties. How long before they come under new management or are bought and we are forced to pay to create and listen to mp3's? This could still turn into another compuserve .gif patent fight very easily. We should not make ourselves be at the whim of a company like that. We really should all use ogg. We know that it will always be free and open source, and the quality of ogg sound files rock.
Fast browser slowed by repeatedly loading large, annoying advertisements begging the user to purchase the browser. Details at 11.
This type of mouse has been out for at least a year. I first used one about six months ago. It was neat, but I never felt like I had the precise control like I do with a desktop mouse. The problem was that a person's had can not be steady just hovering in the air. It is really only possible to steady a mouse by using downward pressure on a tabletop. Sure this mouse is nice for presentations where precision is not so important, but for games, I would never use it.
I believe that your company should stop using the DMCA to cover up security flaws in its products (refering to the Tru64 bug that was hidden using a DMCA threat). This application of the DMCA is beyond the intent of the designers and is just abuse of the system.
I purposely didn't mention that I hated the DMCA in all its forms because in their minds, that would place me in the stereotypical role of a "hacker" that just wants to rip them off.
That is ridiculous. You are saying that Microsoft is helping macintosh in order to destroy linux? That seems a little far-fetched, even for our lovely Bill Gates.
Go ahead, sue us! We'll suddenly all become friendly to your overcharging, greedy ways and allow you to completely ignore any technological innovations that have taken place in the past 6 years. Seriously, how can they even contemplate such an action and not think that the entire Internet will become their enemy. They are fighting their source of revenue. They need to embrace what everyone else already has and stop pretending like the Internet doesn't exist. There is nothing to be gained by them suing individuals.
Now, Al Qaeda has done the complete opposite. They killed neutral civilians of many nations and intentionally ignored the army of their self-declared enemy, the United States. This is obviously a terrorist attack. Several years ago when Al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole, they attacked a legitimate military representative of their enemy. I don't believe that this was an act of terrorism, but I believe that it was an act of war. In no way do I believe that Al Qaeda was correct in taking this action, and I completely believe that Al Qaeda should be destroyed. However, any reference to the idea that American colonials fighting for independence were terrorists is completely wrong and needs correcting.
AFAIK, Congress does not mandate what software for the federal government to use. If the White House CIO is looking into this, I think we need to write Bush, not our congress representative. I'm sure that this Mark Forman guy has an email address of a fax machine through some pub. relations office. If someone could post that, we could work on forumlating a quality response. Remember - it will not help our cause to just blindly send hundreds of stupid emails or faxes.
I refuse to believe that our government is so stupid as to pander to the monopoly that it is sueing. Reason must prevail. I know that if we have to, we can kill this idea the same way we killed the SSSCA.
Java does not belong anywhere near a Windows desktop when actually running programs (not just coding/testing). Java belongs on a server. plain and simple. On the desktop, Java is slow - no, Java is *really* slow. Other programming languages (i.e. VB) are slow, but they provide an easy way for people to make simple applications that can look professional. Java does not provide this. Therefore Java's slightly higher knowledge requirements and slowness make it unsuitable for the desktop. However, Java's strength is running on a server in a JSP environment. This is because Java has so many tools built in for networking (no more C style sockets, yay!!) that a (relatively) few lines of code can produce a very powerful Internet program that is fairly safe to run. I believe it is only hurting Java's image to even pretend that it can function as an application base for desktop applications. Sun should drop all of that - including Swing - and focus on enabling network technologies such as database interfaces and web services where the end user never even knows that they are being fed by Java.
Use Steve Gibson's ideserve to query the server yourself. When I ran it, the server came back IIS 5.0.