That's my immediate reaction from seeing the headline, I haven't read comments nor TFA. It makes about as much sense, actually more. If I were "The ISP Industry" I'd hire Don Passman to write the "Music Industry Code of Conduct."
Quote: "Linux is free, but the support for it is not."
A couple years ago, not knowing anything about Linux, I bought a boxed Linux release at the Big Computer Store and proceeded installing it on an older P200 machine. There's a place where it stalled during installation. I googled and group.googled for a while (searching on release version, looking for hints on install problems) and found a Usenet post complaining about my very problem, a respnse spelled out how it wouldn't install on a Pentium 1 because something was compiled for a later processor. The responder pointed to a fix: put this file on a floppy inserted into the floppy drive when installing. I did, it worked.
On most products it's just as easy to presume they are orphaned, and the only support is unofficial, outside the product's maker. This often gets me better support than going to the manufacturer.
(because they are Atlanta's ONLY polka band, but I digress)... named The Dots. They like to say "We have a website, it's dubya dubya dubya dot dot dot com."
I mean, it seems the majority use of such.new and.odd domain names is by spammers/scammers. There's wusb.fm, but the station apparently already had wusb.org which forwards to the same page anyway. Seems redundant to me.
Is there any real reason for these? It seems the demans remains for.com domains, with.net and.org of the same name registered just to prevent squatters.
I think these have always been arbitrary, since anyone can get a.com/.net/.org domain (unlike.edu and.gov), if not always then at least as of the late '90's, but there were supposedly people with mindspring.net email addresses, who were employees of mindspring.com.
While.com is obbviously commercial, AFAIK there was never anything stopping anyone from selling something from a.net or.org domain. I recall where someone (perhaps quite reasonably) around 1998 though you couldn't sell things from a.org domain, but I'd been chasing down spammers enough to know it didn't matter what your domain ended with.
I think Bill's promise to give away 90+% of his net worth is more noble than anything any slashdotter will ever accomplish.
Presuming it's not just a promise and he actually does it (I'm not familiar with this, I don't study Gates that closely), it still leaves him with hundreds of millions (or billions? - not sure of his current net worth, but it's enough to know it's way up there) of dollars, and still head of the worlds largest and most (financially and number-of-units sold) successful software company.
The OSS "community" has a bad reputation precisely because of ignorant stupid bullshit statements like that one.
Should the OSS community raise billions of dollars to give to charity? Are none of its members allowed to make "ignorant stupid bullshit statements"?
Do you not consider creating reliable software and making it freely available an admirable and useful goal? I think it IS an admirable and useful goal, and furthermore it's probably the one thing they can do that Bill Gates cannot do.
The problem isn't breathing the "fresh lunar air;" the problem is breathing the air inside after you take your suit off and shake the dust off it.
ISTR (quite vaguely, though I was a teenager at the time and of course could not possibly be wrong) that the Apollo astronauts (perhaps after 11, as they didn't have many clues before the first actual Moon mission) would vacuum their suits after coming in and pressurizing the Lunar Module after Moonwalks, to remove the dust from their suits and especially the bottoms of their shoes, so they wouldn't track the dust in and breathe it.
Something future missions will surely have, especially permanent Lunar stations, is airlocks that will suck/blow/wash away Lunar dust before the Lunarnauts open their suits and open the inner airlock door.
Your link doesn't work for me, but I've got several of his solo LP's (and a Hammer/Schon LP I never liked) from around the Miami Vice time and earlier. He used a fancy strap-on keyboard (sometimes generically called a 'keytar', a keyboard you wear on a strap like a guitar). I don't remember the brand name (ISTR the model was discussed in an issue of Polyphony, a magazine which later became Electronic Musician), but several manufacturers made them, such as the Korg RK-1. These were all basically MIDI (Thanks, Dave Smith) controllers (which output commands to synthesizers telling them which note to play, but not generating sound themselves), and the only uniqueness the keyboard brought to the sound was from Jan's deft use of the pitch-bend wheel, simulating the string bending of a lead guitarist. Hammer is shown playing this device in the photograph midway down this page: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/miamivice.html
'Sampling' was first done in the analog domain, by an instrument named the Mellotron. It had an organ keyboard with a magnetic tape, tape head, and capstan mechanism under each key, and activated whem the key was pressed. The samples were factory-recorded (for new sounds you had to record a new tape for each key) and the machine was playback-only, but it fits the name sampler. It was used by the Beatles ("Strawberry Fields Forever"), King Crimson, and most of the Moody Blues albums of the '60's and '70's, among others. And yes, the Mellotron was a commercial product.
They could at least put a booster rocket on it and put it into a storage orbit until we can fix it.
I was thinking that myself, even broken it's one of the more valuable things in nearby Earth orbit.
There was money included in NASA's budget for FY 2004 or 5 that was specifcally for fixing Hubble.
I have no doubt money gets shifted around, repurposed and other such crap. I'm sure that money was allocated before Bush announced going back to the Moon and going to Mars, though the funds for these new goals are completely inadequate. Speaking of reallocating funds, I bet 87 billion dollars would be just about enough for manned Moon and Mars missions.
Many of you might be thinking who would be foolish enough to fly such a mission? I'd do it! Even if it killed me. Hard to beat that ride! I bet plenty of others would do it.
NASA is also thinking about other things, even if life were expendable (it is, but not astronauts' lives, at least not politically, even if they volunteer for a suicide mission). Even when people are willing to literally die (not just RISK their lives but KNOW they will die doing it) for the cause, others are not willing to let them.
Surely the biggest problem if another Shuttle is lost is the political fallout. There would likely be a serious Congressional investigation, and anything NASA was planning to do with the remaining two Shuttles would be put on hold at least for a couple more years.
The problem is if the tiles are damaged on a Hubble repair mission and they can't fix them, they will not be in an orbit to get to the Space Station, and it will take longer to get a rescue mission ready than they have supplies (water and food) for.
You and lots others, maybe I, would willingly train for and go on a Hubble repair mission, but they likely won't send anyone, because of other reasons.
Yes, I submitted this story earlier last evening, but it was rejected, in favor of a DUPE... ahem...
MY Story has an actual nasa.gov link in it. Does the dupe? Nope.
Water found on Mars! NASA has released a photo proving there is Water On Mars. This is certainly the most dramatic picture I've seen of such, leading credence to the idea that there was once Life on Mars.
no one watches Star Trek anymore. Let them merge with Dr. Who to save money and consolidate management. That Enterprise series was just ancient history anyway.
Very true, but to be fair it hasn't done anything because it isn't completed. They don't have enough room for crew to both take care of maintenance, and do any experiments.
I'm afraid if they had more room on that thing they would need MORE crewmembers to take care of the extra maintenance!
A CNN.COM article, presumably based on a NASA press release, circa Feb. 15 (because I remember thinking it's gonna be [at least is planned for] three months from now), said the scheduled launch date was May 15.
And the article I recall, actually dated Feb. 18: "NASA plans Discovery launch May 15 (CNN) -- More than two years after losing the space shuttle Columbia and its seven crew, NASA said Friday it has set May 15 as its target date for once again launching shuttles into space." http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/02/18/space.shu ttle/index.html
For this to be useful, English words need to be defined more narrowly than they are in regular usage, and "English" written for this "natural language processor" will become a new language that just happens to use English words.
I just RTFA, this looks interesting and probably useful, but seems hyped way beyond its usefulness.
Here's a rather realistic quote:
"At the same time, interpreting natural language is an extremely difficult artificial intelligence problem that is likely to take a decade or more to solve fully."
One problem is that a program that interprets natural language will surely fail the Turing Test at a point much sooner than a person would. Eliza (the very crude Freudian shrink program) demonstrates much more about the gullibility of people than about language understanding.
You don't have to read a lot in the area to see that context and a deep understanding of ordinary human knowledge and environment is neccesary for any reasonable success. An old example that can easily trip up computer understanding is: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
The real breakthrough, if it happens, will be the (Vinge-style) Singularity when machines actally become intelligent and conscious, and "artificial intelligence" will mean something more than the computer-equivalent of a waltzing bear.
... it's often a... I don't know, newbie? Non-USA resident? I'm not sure how to or if I can fairly categorize such a poster, but in so many of the technical groups I've seen several people respond to posts such as:
I cant get this 2 work, can u help me?
with admonitions to write proper English and cut it with the cute abbreviations, and rightly so. Such things look like Rebuses, and makes the poster look illiterate (maybe he/she is).
They might be coming from the realtime chat world which I rarely get into (perhaps it's because I'm middle age and see it as a younger person's thing), and carrying their overabbreviated "talking" into areas where it's not appropriate.
OTOH, I've fairly often done some of this myself, using common online abbreviations such as AFAIK and OTOH, as well as cutsy HTML-like statements to describe the tone of a sentence or statement.
<Sudden Insight> Why don't you ask your students where they pick up such writing habits? </si>
We need more efficient keyboards. The standard Querty thing has lasted long enough.
I don't mean small, incremental fixes like the Dvorak layout, we need a substantial change in keyboard (or more generally, computer input) design. Ten fingers can press ten keys in 1023 combinations (the 1024th is with all keys up). This allows not only the common control, alt and function keys and combinations, but hundreds of codes for the most common combinations of word sequences.
Such a thing may well be surpassed by voice recognition becoming more reliable and easily usable, but I still think it could be a good change.
A radical new keyboard is far from a new idea, I recall magazine blurb of a sinle-handed "chorded" keyboard in a ball shape from circa 15 years ago.
There's surely some good web reference on this, but ISTR that most lost trademarks are just plain victims of their own success, that too many people start using the trademark as a generic name for a product for it to be reasonably stopped. Aspirin is one example, there are others I can't think of, but there are lots of almost-examples: Kleenex, Frigidaire, Rollerblade.
The registered names of games such as Monopoly and Scrabble could be in danger of becoming generic mainly because of their great and enduring popularity, and the companies who own them have to spend lots of money to keep these names as their own "brand names."
(sorry, an OT rant) I've worked at companies that used version control (they liked it so much they used to different systems on the two projects I worked on) on software, but not schematics. Perhaps the worst thing is you could change a component value without having to (or even being able to) write a line of paragraph of text explaining why you did it. Try that with changing just one character in a program source file.
and as many open and blind relays got shut down, spammers got new technologies (|-|ac|0rz actually helped them) such as DSL zombie trojans.
I suppose it's true, these may well disable the actual machines sending the spam.
Hmm, some fool whose zombie machine gets shut down by IBM... company with deep pockets... law$uit. "So what if it was spamming, it was working fine until you Big Blue guyz hacked it."
"Make Money Fast with a Zombie Machine on the Net" spamming only ibm.com addy's.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my immediate reaction from seeing the headline, I haven't read comments nor TFA. It makes about as much sense, actually more. If I were "The ISP Industry" I'd hire Don Passman to write the "Music Industry Code of Conduct."
Quote: "Linux is free, but the support for it is not."
A couple years ago, not knowing anything about Linux, I bought a boxed Linux release at the Big Computer Store and proceeded installing it on an older P200 machine. There's a place where it stalled during installation. I googled and group.googled for a while (searching on release version, looking for hints on install problems) and found a Usenet post complaining about my very problem, a respnse spelled out how it wouldn't install on a Pentium 1 because something was compiled for a later processor. The responder pointed to a fix: put this file on a floppy inserted into the floppy drive when installing. I did, it worked.
On most products it's just as easy to presume they are orphaned, and the only support is unofficial, outside the product's maker. This often gets me better support than going to the manufacturer.
(because they are Atlanta's ONLY polka band, but I digress)... named The Dots. They like to say "We have a website, it's dubya dubya dubya dot dot dot com."
But of course that's not really their website.
I mean, it seems the majority use of such .new and .odd domain names is by spammers/scammers. There's wusb.fm, but the station apparently already had wusb.org which forwards to the same page anyway. Seems redundant to me.
.com domains, with .net and .org of the same name registered just to prevent squatters.
Is there any real reason for these? It seems the demans remains for
I think these have always been arbitrary, since anyone can get a
While
The feet never leave the ground.
That makes it a moonwalking robot. Keep children away.
I think Bill's promise to give away 90+% of his net worth is more noble than anything any slashdotter will ever accomplish.
Presuming it's not just a promise and he actually does it (I'm not familiar with this, I don't study Gates that closely), it still leaves him with hundreds of millions (or billions? - not sure of his current net worth, but it's enough to know it's way up there) of dollars, and still head of the worlds largest and most (financially and number-of-units sold) successful software company.
The OSS "community" has a bad reputation precisely because of ignorant stupid bullshit statements like that one.
Should the OSS community raise billions of dollars to give to charity? Are none of its members allowed to make "ignorant stupid bullshit statements"?
Do you not consider creating reliable software and making it freely available an admirable and useful goal? I think it IS an admirable and useful goal, and furthermore it's probably the one thing they can do that Bill Gates cannot do.
The problem isn't breathing the "fresh lunar air;" the problem is breathing the air inside after you take your suit off and shake the dust off it.
ISTR (quite vaguely, though I was a teenager at the time and of course could not possibly be wrong) that the Apollo astronauts (perhaps after 11, as they didn't have many clues before the first actual Moon mission) would vacuum their suits after coming in and pressurizing the Lunar Module after Moonwalks, to remove the dust from their suits and especially the bottoms of their shoes, so they wouldn't track the dust in and breathe it.
Something future missions will surely have, especially permanent Lunar stations, is airlocks that will suck/blow/wash away Lunar dust before the Lunarnauts open their suits and open the inner airlock door.
Can't we just fuse it all into glass with a few thousands well placed nukes?
No, that would blow it flat out of orbit, resulting in some really bad sci-fi. PLEASE don't do that.
Your link doesn't work for me, but I've got several of his solo LP's (and a Hammer/Schon LP I never liked) from around the Miami Vice time and earlier. He used a fancy strap-on keyboard (sometimes generically called a 'keytar', a keyboard you wear on a strap like a guitar). I don't remember the brand name (ISTR the model was discussed in an issue of Polyphony, a magazine which later became Electronic Musician), but several manufacturers made them, such as the Korg RK-1.
These were all basically MIDI (Thanks, Dave Smith) controllers (which output commands to synthesizers telling them which note to play, but not generating sound themselves), and the only uniqueness the keyboard brought to the sound was from Jan's deft use of the pitch-bend wheel, simulating the string bending of a lead guitarist.
Hammer is shown playing this device in the photograph midway down this page:
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/miamivice.html
the man that fucking INVENTED sampling
'Sampling' was first done in the analog domain, by an instrument named the Mellotron. It had an organ keyboard with a magnetic tape, tape head, and capstan mechanism under each key, and activated whem the key was pressed. The samples were factory-recorded (for new sounds you had to record a new tape for each key) and the machine was playback-only, but it fits the name sampler. It was used by the Beatles ("Strawberry Fields Forever"), King Crimson, and most of the Moody Blues albums of the '60's and '70's, among others. And yes, the Mellotron was a commercial product.
They could at least put a booster rocket on it and put it into a storage orbit until we can fix it.
I was thinking that myself, even broken it's one of the more valuable things in nearby Earth orbit.
There was money included in NASA's budget for FY 2004 or 5 that was specifcally for fixing Hubble.
I have no doubt money gets shifted around, repurposed and other such crap. I'm sure that money was allocated before Bush announced going back to the Moon and going to Mars, though the funds for these new goals are completely inadequate.
Speaking of reallocating funds, I bet 87 billion dollars would be just about enough for manned Moon and Mars missions.
Many of you might be thinking who would be foolish enough to fly such a mission? I'd do it! Even if it killed me. Hard to beat that ride! I bet plenty of others would do it.
NASA is also thinking about other things, even if life were expendable (it is, but not astronauts' lives, at least not politically, even if they volunteer for a suicide mission). Even when people are willing to literally die (not just RISK their lives but KNOW they will die doing it) for the cause, others are not willing to let them.
Surely the biggest problem if another Shuttle is lost is the political fallout. There would likely be a serious Congressional investigation, and anything NASA was planning to do with the remaining two Shuttles would be put on hold at least for a couple more years.
The problem is if the tiles are damaged on a Hubble repair mission and they can't fix them, they will not be in an orbit to get to the Space Station, and it will take longer to get a rescue mission ready than they have supplies (water and food) for.
You and lots others, maybe I, would willingly train for and go on a Hubble repair mission, but they likely won't send anyone, because of other reasons.
...it has that Magnetic Attraction.
Yes, I submitted this story earlier last evening, but it was rejected, in favor of a DUPE ... ahem ...
MY Story has an actual nasa.gov link in it. Does the dupe? Nope.
Water found on Mars!
NASA has released a photo proving there is Water On Mars. This is certainly the most dramatic picture I've seen of such, leading credence to the idea that there was once Life on Mars.
no one watches Star Trek anymore. Let them merge with Dr. Who to save money and consolidate management. That Enterprise series was just ancient history anyway.
Very true, but to be fair it hasn't done anything because it isn't completed. They don't have enough room for crew to both take care of maintenance, and do any experiments.
I'm afraid if they had more room on that thing they would need MORE crewmembers to take care of the extra maintenance!
A CNN.COM article, presumably based on a NASA press release, circa Feb. 15 (because I remember thinking it's gonna be [at least is planned for] three months from now), said the scheduled launch date was May 15.
u ttle/index.html
u ttle/index.html
A quick search on cnn.com shows this:
"NASA hoping for May 15 shuttle launch
But managers keeping door open for a slide in that date"
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/03/22/space.sh
And the article I recall, actually dated Feb. 18:
"NASA plans Discovery launch May 15
(CNN) -- More than two years after losing the space shuttle Columbia and its seven crew, NASA said Friday it has set May 15 as its target date for once again launching shuttles into space."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/02/18/space.sh
For this to be useful, English words need to be defined more narrowly than they are in regular usage, and "English" written for this "natural language processor" will become a new language that just happens to use English words.
I just RTFA, this looks interesting and probably useful, but seems hyped way beyond its usefulness.
Here's a rather realistic quote:
"At the same time, interpreting natural language is an extremely difficult artificial intelligence problem that is likely to take a decade or more to solve fully."
One problem is that a program that interprets natural language will surely fail the Turing Test at a point much sooner than a person would. Eliza (the very crude Freudian shrink program) demonstrates much more about the gullibility of people than about language understanding.
You don't have to read a lot in the area to see that context and a deep understanding of ordinary human knowledge and environment is neccesary for any reasonable success. An old example that can easily trip up computer understanding is:
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
The real breakthrough, if it happens, will be the (Vinge-style) Singularity when machines actally become intelligent and conscious, and "artificial intelligence" will mean something more than the computer-equivalent of a waltzing bear.
I'm sure this guy [pixyland.org] would just loooove to sign up for the test run.
OMG, I've seen that before. Let's send him, er, it!
... it's often a ... I don't know, newbie? Non-USA resident? I'm not sure how to or if I can fairly categorize such a poster, but in so many of the technical groups I've seen several people respond to posts such as:
I cant get this 2 work, can u help me?
with admonitions to write proper English and cut it with the cute abbreviations, and rightly so. Such things look like Rebuses, and makes the poster look illiterate (maybe he/she is).
They might be coming from the realtime chat world which I rarely get into (perhaps it's because I'm middle age and see it as a younger person's thing), and carrying their overabbreviated "talking" into areas where it's not appropriate.
OTOH, I've fairly often done some of this myself, using common online abbreviations such as AFAIK and OTOH, as well as cutsy HTML-like statements to describe the tone of a sentence or statement.
<Sudden Insight>
Why don't you ask your students where they pick up such writing habits?
</si>
We need more efficient keyboards. The standard Querty thing has lasted long enough.
I don't mean small, incremental fixes like the Dvorak layout, we need a substantial change in keyboard (or more generally, computer input) design. Ten fingers can press ten keys in 1023 combinations (the 1024th is with all keys up). This allows not only the common control, alt and function keys and combinations, but hundreds of codes for the most common combinations of word sequences.
Such a thing may well be surpassed by voice recognition becoming more reliable and easily usable, but I still think it could be a good change.
A radical new keyboard is far from a new idea, I recall magazine blurb of a sinle-handed "chorded" keyboard in a ball shape from circa 15 years ago.
There's surely some good web reference on this, but ISTR that most lost trademarks are just plain victims of their own success, that too many people start using the trademark as a generic name for a product for it to be reasonably stopped. Aspirin is one example, there are others I can't think of, but there are lots of almost-examples: Kleenex, Frigidaire, Rollerblade.
The registered names of games such as Monopoly and Scrabble could be in danger of becoming generic mainly because of their great and enduring popularity, and the companies who own them have to spend lots of money to keep these names as their own "brand names."
(sorry, an OT rant)
I've worked at companies that used version control (they liked it so much they used to different systems on the two projects I worked on) on software, but not schematics. Perhaps the worst thing is you could change a component value without having to (or even being able to) write a line of paragraph of text explaining why you did it. Try that with changing just one character in a program source file.
and as many open and blind relays got shut down, spammers got new technologies (|-|ac|0rz actually helped them) such as DSL zombie trojans.
... company with deep pockets ... law$uit. "So what if it was spamming, it was working fine until you Big Blue guyz hacked it."
I suppose it's true, these may well disable the actual machines sending the spam.
Hmm, some fool whose zombie machine gets shut down by IBM
"Make Money Fast with a Zombie Machine on the Net" spamming only ibm.com addy's.