I don't see anywhere in the article which pins on the firewire socket one has to connect to pos & neg from the batteries. I'd want to be real sure I got that right before plugging a gizmo like this into my iPod.
On second thoughts, I suppose all it takes to discover this is a multimeter and the Apple charger.
Still, it would be a nice addition to the article if he would explain that.
This is such crap. it seems Gates gets publicity and honours simply for being the richest man on the planet. I don't know why it should piss me off, because I know that's the way of the world, but it really does.
FFS, the man was headline news on BBC Radio this morning for his pronouncement that he would defeat spam within two years. If Microsoft really does achieve that, I will eat these words, but what utter BS. There is not one idea in that story that is his, or Microsoft's, and yet it reads like he is being given full personal credit for achieving some miracle.
A web page is not a newspaper page. Newspaper layout designers know what point size their text will be set in, and therefore how many words per line there will be. Web site designers don't know this for sure, since many browsers allow the user to vary it.
At a text size which is comfortable for me to view on the particular machine I'm using right now, the Paul Graham article in question has only 5-9 words per line, and occupies rather less than 30% of the width of my browser window - which I already adjusted to a convenient width for most web pages.
I really wish people would stop trying to control web page appearance by specifying widths in pixels.
What an excellent suggestion. After all, the speed^W safety cameras are only there to help us obey whatever rules our betters might choose to impose on us.
I'm sure there's absolutely no significance in the strong correlation between the way a road's speed limit gets arbitrarily reduced, and the sprouting up of a series of enforcement cameras alongside it. We should all be happy to obey all the speed limits, nor must we grumble as our cars ground across the "sleeping policemen" that are becoming commonplace on almost any non-approved through route.
Don't worry. If by any means they manage to get approval for this, the implementation will be so crap that it won't work anyway - though it will have cost millions before anyone in authority either realizes or admits to realizing what a dumb idea it was to begin with.
I can see the owners of those lining up to get one of these remote controllers fitted (not).
Newer vehicles are much less frequently stolen, presumably because it's getting much harder, what with improved central locking, engine management systems that mean you can't hot-wire the thing, and other anti-theft features. A spokesperson in the linked Guardian article is quoted as saying "it is virtually impossible to steal a new car without access to the correct keys."
I don't buy the argument that this remote control idea has much if anything to do with wanting to make it easier for police to stop joyriders. It won't help for the reasons above - joyriders don't, or simply can't steal the kinds of cars that have this technology on board.
It sounds to me like just another attempt to turn us all into good docile law-abiding consumers.
While I quite like the idea of a "duress PIN", I have more than enough trouble remembering all my various PINs already, and particularly those that I don't use very often. Let's please not complicate matters by adding yet another one that I'll (hopefully) use so seldom that there is almost no chance I'll recall it in the kinds of circumstances you describe.
... standards lead to portability, interoperability, and the dissemination of the knowledge needed for full participation in information-intensive societies.
Precisely. There you have it in a nutshell. That is the reason why SCO must not win here. The world does not need any more sheet-anchors on the advancement of knowledge and freedom. McBride admits that his goal is to extract a tax on all users of Linux. What has his company done to earn the right to that? Nothing at all.
For most people, now and in the future, computers, information technology, and all the stuff that Slashdotters hold dear, is nothing more than a means to an end. It is not an end in itself. As such it is right an proper that it should become commoditized. Companies like SCO, Microsoft, and yes, IBM, if it doesn't continue to reinvent itself, may go down in the process. That is the way of the world. Let's not lose sight of that.
It's not at all clear to me who is supposed to benefit from this scheme - except of course Sharman Networks.
Here are just some of the unanswered questions I have about this:
Are they proposing to divert some of the income from this towards the music companies?
On what basis? How will they determine how much is due to each company?
Will paying this "tax" somehow legitimise the sharing of copyrighted material? (I think not.)
What about P2P transfers of non-copyrighted material? Is any payment due on those?
What, apart from a bare-faced cheek, gives them any right to levy this tax on P2P transfers?
And why the hell should I pay anything at all to these people when the files I'm sharing are being tranferred directly from my system to the recipient's system without any involvement on their part?
The whole thing sounds like a complete non-starter to me.
With the exception of the screen, you get all of that list and more in today's ThinkPad T40. It goes up to 2GB RAM, has wired (Gigabit) and wireless (802.11b and g) Ethernet plus Bluetooth, 80GB disk, (externally) lighted keyboard, 64MB ATI Fire graphics, etc. And it will run Linux (though IBM doesn't offer it as a preload option).
But the biggest, highest resolution screen you can get is 14", 1400x1050. Face it, a 17" screen is going to make any laptop a rather bulky and awkward thing - witness the 17" Powerbook. I can't see IBM doing it.
I was once a participant in a class - part of a software engineering course - taught by an old-timer aircraft design engineer. He came across as very experienced and very well-informed. He was telling us some very scary tales about real life fly-by-wire systems and the kinds of failure modes they can exhibit.
But the most telling thing he said was "There is no way I would ever be a passenger on an Airbus."
Personally, it doesn't particularly bother me. In fact after 727s, I have flown more times on Airbusses than any other type of plane, and overall I prefer them.
how many places in the world there are where there are no microwaves at all?
I live in the heavily populated south-east of England, 100 meters off the main road between two large towns each with a population of around 140,000; I'm six miles away from one and ten from the other. The only place I can get any signal on a cellphone in my house is if I stand in the corner next to the window in one of the bedrooms upstairs.
I am ten miles due east as the crow flies from a major TV and radio transmitter mast and I cannot get a strong enough signal on the digital terrestrial channels to even register on a regular set-top box. To get acceptable signals on analog TV I need a carefully aligned roof-mounted fourteen element high gain aerial and a signal booster. I cannot receive FM broacasts on portable radios with telescopic aerials; I need a roof-mounted aerial for that too. I'm not in a dip or hollow either.
It's like something is sucking all the radio waves around here into a black hole.
We do a few things rather differently, and I don't think this kind of mail theft would be at all likely to happen here.
First, we don't have those crazy mailboxes on posts out in front of our properties, where anyone can (a) see you have mail and (b) take it. Instead, we have a letterbox, usually in the front door, and items get posted through this and end up inside the house. The key point being that you need access into the premises to obtain delivered mail. Casual theft of mail is simply not that easy.
If you plan to be away for any length of time and you don't want mail to be delivered, you can arrange to have the post office hold all your mail, and then deliver it all on a specified date when you expect to be back. This is a chargeable service, which costs around 5 if I recall correctly, and has always worked very well for me.
There are people out there who are just sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for the next e-mail with a great get rich quick scheme, or brain enlargement, or whatever. Sometimes they are called "Opportunity Seekers".
Personally, I call them dickheads. It's evident I should also have mentioned in my post the significant minority of sad losers who appear to actually believe the sort of nonsense that turns up in the majority of spam.
As if anyone who had come up with a genuine get-rich scheme would freely publish the details to a random distribution list he got off a dodgy CDROM. Get real.
The only person who is going to make any money from any of these scams is the shark who is out to collect upfront fees from the spammed suckers who respond. It's sad, but there is one born every minute. Yet another reason we need some laws and some spiffy new technical solutions to save these people from their own stupidity.
In western societies, we pride ourselves on being democracies, and in democracies, the will of the people is supposed to prevail, though of course the rights of minorities need to be respected.
For me, the key point about spam is that no-one wants to receive it.
Sure there are plenty of misguided individuals who are financially motivated to think it's in their personal interest for other people to have to be on the receiving end of it, and will therefore cynically maintain that they are in favour of it. But I have never met anyone who could honestly say they would willing endure being sold to via cold-call, unsolicited sales pitches for products they mostly have less than zero interest in. And I've had that discussion with plenty of people.
That universal distaste for it is what makes spam so reprehensible, and that is why I am totally in favour of all legal and technical measures to curtail it to the maximum extent. It wastes more and more of everyone's time and money (it's wasting my time right now, writing this!), and the sooner we are rid of it, the better.
The Observer had an article in its business section on Sunday by John Naughton in which he makes the very valid point that the epidemic of viruses is made a lot worse by the fact that desktop computing is in effect a Windows monoculture.
The IBM counter suit I'm not sure about, there patent portfolio is a weapon that could just as easily be turned on us.
Overall, I have to say that while I'd be the first to agree that the (US) patent system is comprehensively broken, I regard IBM as a model of restraint when it comes to enforcing its patent rights. Admittedly, it earns a fair amount of its income from licensing fees, but on the other hand it actually does invest substantial amounts in real R&D. And in general it doesn't throw its considerable weight around unless provoked, which it clearly has been, mightily, by SCO.
Piracy may have been a factor, but there were many more things wrong with that business than the fact that their encryption could be easily broken.
The coverage from their transmitters was patchy; the technical quality of the broadcasts was poor (gross MPEG artefacts all over the screen); the software on the set-top boxes was buggy; they had no compelling content that couldn't be gotten elsewhere for the same or less cost; they paid way over the odds for sports rights, and so on and so on.
I don't think they would have survived even if there had been no viewing card piracy .
I have to say I find it odd that every single one of these inventions was made in the U.S.A.
Many other countries have significant financial institutions that are equally, or arguably more, sophisticated.
I don't have the timem or for that matter the inclination to research this myself, but I'd have thought that at least one out of any top ten money technology inventions would have had a non-U.S. origin.
That's BS. While it does appear to be trivially easy to acquire ever more credit cards in the UK, it has been illegal for years to hand them out unsolicited.
On a visit to Disney in Orlando last month, the parking lot attendants were whishing up and down the lanes on Segways, directing traffic, scooting over to their colleagues, and so on. This struck me as something the Segway is ideal for. If they had a better cargo carrying capability, I could also see postal workers using them, and maintenance people or anyone who has to cover long distances in factories, campuses, and the like.
But as a means of serious personal A to B transportation? Forget it; bikes and cars beat it hands down.
The problem is that a email is not a 'bag of words', but we classify them as if they are.
But we don't need to.
Along with the rest of the world, after I read Paul Graham's Plan for Spam, I implemented it myself (in my case, within Lotus Notes). One of the options I played with was how to tokenize the message. And it turned out that simply looking at n-tuplets (i.e. sequences of n characters, irrespective of what they are) works just as well as attempting to parse out the "words". You end up with a fairly significantly larger token corpus, and some adjustments downstream, such as examining a larger set of significant tokens, seemed like a worthwhile thing to do, but overall the accuracy of the filter was just as good using n-tuplets as it was using words.
FWIW, I did settle on tokenization for words, for the simple reason that I liked to be able to see what the significant trigger words were. And I abandoned my little tool as soon as found another one that worked for me so I didn't have to keep tinkering with it myself (I have a real job, after all).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see anywhere in the article which pins on the firewire socket one has to connect to pos & neg from the batteries. I'd want to be real sure I got that right before plugging a gizmo like this into my iPod.
On second thoughts, I suppose all it takes to discover this is a multimeter and the Apple charger.
Still, it would be a nice addition to the article if he would explain that.
This is such crap. it seems Gates gets publicity and honours simply for being the richest man on the planet. I don't know why it should piss me off, because I know that's the way of the world, but it really does.
FFS, the man was headline news on BBC Radio this morning for his pronouncement that he would defeat spam within two years. If Microsoft really does achieve that, I will eat these words, but what utter BS. There is not one idea in that story that is his, or Microsoft's, and yet it reads like he is being given full personal credit for achieving some miracle.
I'm too mad to carry on with this.
So tell that to the website designers who don't seem to to have heard about CSS and who persist in using pixels as their unit of measure.
A web page is not a newspaper page. Newspaper layout designers know what point size their text will be set in, and therefore how many words per line there will be. Web site designers don't know this for sure, since many browsers allow the user to vary it.
At a text size which is comfortable for me to view on the particular machine I'm using right now, the Paul Graham article in question has only 5-9 words per line, and occupies rather less than 30% of the width of my browser window - which I already adjusted to a convenient width for most web pages.
I really wish people would stop trying to control web page appearance by specifying widths in pixels.
What an excellent suggestion. After all, the speed^W safety cameras are only there to help us obey whatever rules our betters might choose to impose on us.
I'm sure there's absolutely no significance in the strong correlation between the way a road's speed limit gets arbitrarily reduced, and the sprouting up of a series of enforcement cameras alongside it. We should all be happy to obey all the speed limits, nor must we grumble as our cars ground across the "sleeping policemen" that are becoming commonplace on almost any non-approved through route.
Don't worry. If by any means they manage to get approval for this, the implementation will be so crap that it won't work anyway - though it will have cost millions before anyone in authority either realizes or admits to realizing what a dumb idea it was to begin with.
according to The Guardian is the 1986 Vauxhall Belmont.
I can see the owners of those lining up to get one of these remote controllers fitted (not).
Newer vehicles are much less frequently stolen, presumably because it's getting much harder, what with improved central locking, engine management systems that mean you can't hot-wire the thing, and other anti-theft features. A spokesperson in the linked Guardian article is quoted as saying "it is virtually impossible to steal a new car without access to the correct keys."
I don't buy the argument that this remote control idea has much if anything to do with wanting to make it easier for police to stop joyriders. It won't help for the reasons above - joyriders don't, or simply can't steal the kinds of cars that have this technology on board.
It sounds to me like just another attempt to turn us all into good docile law-abiding consumers.
While I quite like the idea of a "duress PIN", I have more than enough trouble remembering all my various PINs already, and particularly those that I don't use very often. Let's please not complicate matters by adding yet another one that I'll (hopefully) use so seldom that there is almost no chance I'll recall it in the kinds of circumstances you describe.
... standards lead to portability, interoperability, and the dissemination of the knowledge needed for full participation in information-intensive societies.
Precisely. There you have it in a nutshell. That is the reason why SCO must not win here. The world does not need any more sheet-anchors on the advancement of knowledge and freedom. McBride admits that his goal is to extract a tax on all users of Linux. What has his company done to earn the right to that? Nothing at all.
For most people, now and in the future, computers, information technology, and all the stuff that Slashdotters hold dear, is nothing more than a means to an end. It is not an end in itself. As such it is right an proper that it should become commoditized. Companies like SCO, Microsoft, and yes, IBM, if it doesn't continue to reinvent itself, may go down in the process. That is the way of the world. Let's not lose sight of that.
IBM and Sony announced quite a time ago that IBM would be providing the CPU for the Playstation 3. See this BBC News article.
Here are just some of the unanswered questions I have about this:
The whole thing sounds like a complete non-starter to me.
With the exception of the screen, you get all of that list and more in today's ThinkPad T40. It goes up to 2GB RAM, has wired (Gigabit) and wireless (802.11b and g) Ethernet plus Bluetooth, 80GB disk, (externally) lighted keyboard, 64MB ATI Fire graphics, etc. And it will run Linux (though IBM doesn't offer it as a preload option).
But the biggest, highest resolution screen you can get is 14", 1400x1050. Face it, a 17" screen is going to make any laptop a rather bulky and awkward thing - witness the 17" Powerbook. I can't see IBM doing it.
I was once a participant in a class - part of a software engineering course - taught by an old-timer aircraft design engineer. He came across as very experienced and very well-informed. He was telling us some very scary tales about real life fly-by-wire systems and the kinds of failure modes they can exhibit.
But the most telling thing he said was "There is no way I would ever be a passenger on an Airbus."
Personally, it doesn't particularly bother me. In fact after 727s, I have flown more times on Airbusses than any other type of plane, and overall I prefer them.
how many places in the world there are where there are no microwaves at all?
I live in the heavily populated south-east of England, 100 meters off the main road between two large towns each with a population of around 140,000; I'm six miles away from one and ten from the other. The only place I can get any signal on a cellphone in my house is if I stand in the corner next to the window in one of the bedrooms upstairs.
I am ten miles due east as the crow flies from a major TV and radio transmitter mast and I cannot get a strong enough signal on the digital terrestrial channels to even register on a regular set-top box. To get acceptable signals on analog TV I need a carefully aligned roof-mounted fourteen element high gain aerial and a signal booster. I cannot receive FM broacasts on portable radios with telescopic aerials; I need a roof-mounted aerial for that too. I'm not in a dip or hollow either.
It's like something is sucking all the radio waves around here into a black hole.
We do a few things rather differently, and I don't think this kind of mail theft would be at all likely to happen here.
First, we don't have those crazy mailboxes on posts out in front of our properties, where anyone can (a) see you have mail and (b) take it. Instead, we have a letterbox, usually in the front door, and items get posted through this and end up inside the house. The key point being that you need access into the premises to obtain delivered mail. Casual theft of mail is simply not that easy.
If you plan to be away for any length of time and you don't want mail to be delivered, you can arrange to have the post office hold all your mail, and then deliver it all on a specified date when you expect to be back. This is a chargeable service, which costs around 5 if I recall correctly, and has always worked very well for me.
There are people out there who are just sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for the next e-mail with a great get rich quick scheme, or brain enlargement, or whatever. Sometimes they are called "Opportunity Seekers".
Personally, I call them dickheads. It's evident I should also have mentioned in my post the significant minority of sad losers who appear to actually believe the sort of nonsense that turns up in the majority of spam.
As if anyone who had come up with a genuine get-rich scheme would freely publish the details to a random distribution list he got off a dodgy CDROM. Get real.
The only person who is going to make any money from any of these scams is the shark who is out to collect upfront fees from the spammed suckers who respond. It's sad, but there is one born every minute. Yet another reason we need some laws and some spiffy new technical solutions to save these people from their own stupidity.
In western societies, we pride ourselves on being democracies, and in democracies, the will of the people is supposed to prevail, though of course the rights of minorities need to be respected.
For me, the key point about spam is that no-one wants to receive it.
Sure there are plenty of misguided individuals who are financially motivated to think it's in their personal interest for other people to have to be on the receiving end of it, and will therefore cynically maintain that they are in favour of it. But I have never met anyone who could honestly say they would willing endure being sold to via cold-call, unsolicited sales pitches for products they mostly have less than zero interest in. And I've had that discussion with plenty of people.
That universal distaste for it is what makes spam so reprehensible, and that is why I am totally in favour of all legal and technical measures to curtail it to the maximum extent. It wastes more and more of everyone's time and money (it's wasting my time right now, writing this!), and the sooner we are rid of it, the better.
The Observer had an article in its business section on Sunday by John Naughton in which he makes the very valid point that the epidemic of viruses is made a lot worse by the fact that desktop computing is in effect a Windows monoculture.
The IBM counter suit I'm not sure about, there patent portfolio is a weapon that could just as easily be turned on us.
Overall, I have to say that while I'd be the first to agree that the (US) patent system is comprehensively broken, I regard IBM as a model of restraint when it comes to enforcing its patent rights. Admittedly, it earns a fair amount of its income from licensing fees, but on the other hand it actually does invest substantial amounts in real R&D. And in general it doesn't throw its considerable weight around unless provoked, which it clearly has been, mightily, by SCO.
ITV Digital went down due to piracy.
Piracy may have been a factor, but there were many more things wrong with that business than the fact that their encryption could be easily broken.
The coverage from their transmitters was patchy; the technical quality of the broadcasts was poor (gross MPEG artefacts all over the screen); the software on the set-top boxes was buggy; they had no compelling content that couldn't be gotten elsewhere for the same or less cost; they paid way over the odds for sports rights, and so on and so on.
I don't think they would have survived even if there had been no viewing card piracy
.
I have to say I find it odd that every single one of these inventions was made in the U.S.A.
Many other countries have significant financial institutions that are equally, or arguably more, sophisticated.
I don't have the timem or for that matter the inclination to research this myself, but I'd have thought that at least one out of any top ten money technology inventions would have had a non-U.S. origin.
That's BS. While it does appear to be trivially easy to acquire ever more credit cards in the UK, it has been illegal for years to hand them out unsolicited.
and it excels in it.
On a visit to Disney in Orlando last month, the parking lot attendants were whishing up and down the lanes on Segways, directing traffic, scooting over to their colleagues, and so on. This struck me as something the Segway is ideal for. If they had a better cargo carrying capability, I could also see postal workers using them, and maintenance people or anyone who has to cover long distances in factories, campuses, and the like.
But as a means of serious personal A to B transportation? Forget it; bikes and cars beat it hands down.
What he says is just so true.
The problem is that a email is not a 'bag of words', but we classify them as if they are.
But we don't need to.
Along with the rest of the world, after I read Paul Graham's Plan for Spam, I implemented it myself (in my case, within Lotus Notes). One of the options I played with was how to tokenize the message. And it turned out that simply looking at n-tuplets (i.e. sequences of n characters, irrespective of what they are) works just as well as attempting to parse out the "words". You end up with a fairly significantly larger token corpus, and some adjustments downstream, such as examining a larger set of significant tokens, seemed like a worthwhile thing to do, but overall the accuracy of the filter was just as good using n-tuplets as it was using words.
FWIW, I did settle on tokenization for words, for the simple reason that I liked to be able to see what the significant trigger words were. And I abandoned my little tool as soon as found another one that worked for me so I didn't have to keep tinkering with it myself (I have a real job, after all).