Once a day may not make sense in the context of a sensor that captures data for a wide area, but it may in the context of sensors that capture data for very small, localized areas. Especially with regards to the security application that you dismiss out of hand - if postal trucks were driving around with radiological sensors while the Radioactive Boy Scout was building his breeder reactor, once a day would have been more than enough to detect what was going on before he gave himself cancer.
I had a similar idea awhile ago, but mine was an opt-in, privately-run system that would use members' cars (or even smartphones, if the sensor package was small enough and could be connected via Bluetooth) for similar purposes. In an ideal situation, that would allow a lot more frequent sampling, but even once per day - done over the course of many days - the organization running the system would be able to amass a *lot* of interesting data depending on the sensors - positions where police frequently set up speed traps, odd localized temperature/weather variations, average speed of traffic at that time of day, the aforementioned radiological/chemical oddities, etc. For a larger net/more frequent sensor polling, there are other things like building up a *very* accurate height-map of roads (to complement orbital radar surveys), real-world traffic conditions, and so on.
One of the theoretical problems I ran into was how to maintain the privacy of members while still ensuring that the data was accurate. If users are required to continuously reuse a unique identifier, then the data could be subpoenaed at some point to reveal where their vehicle was at any given time. I figured that would make people less likely to sign up, but on the other hand, if the source of a given set of data can't be identified, then it's very difficult to prevent abuse (people feeding in bogus data to throw off results). I had some thoughts along those lines*, but by putting them on postal service vehicles instead of privately-owned cars, that stops being a significant concern altogether.
Obviously the government could even do something like put a LIDAR scanner and camera array on them, then sell the collected data to companies like Google (since they're driving around anyway, it would be cheaper than Google's StreetView operation), but I imagine that might be a conflict of interest, at least some of the time, because the Postal Service has a reasonable expectation of access to places that Google doesn't.
* Basically, maintaining a "trust-level web" for each UID, where every sample was tied to a UID, and samples of the same area were regularly cross-checked. If a sample from a particular UID was outside the range of a bunch of other samples from the same area, the trust-level for all samples uploaded by that UID would be reduced. Users could reset their UID whenever they wanted (leaving no trace of the old one on their device, and no way to tie the old sample set back to them), but the base trust level for a given UID would be tied to how long it had been in use, to provide an incentive for not resetting it.
Did you get a different MSA2000 than I did? About 2-3 years ago, the group I was in needed to quickly deploy the modern equivalent of an MSA1000 or MSA1500 (which were incredibly reliable), and since we were a mostly-HP shop, the MSA2000 seemed like the logical option. I never stopped regretting that purchase.
First of all, the rack hardware was insultingly poorly designed. It was essentially impossible for someone to rackmount on their own. This was when I began to suspect that HP had just rebadged someone else's hardware, because HP's own rack kits (well, the ones whose designs they inherited from Compaq) are usually great.
Second, as soon as I'd had it up and running for a week or so, every night I'd get email alerts marked "Informational" that indicated there was a parity check problem and I needed to contact support as quickly as possible. When I did, HP support said it was not a problem and I should ignore them, because it was a bug in the firmware.
After a particular firmware update, those same messages kept coming, but were then marked "Critical Error", or something along those lines. I re-opened the ticket, and was told something to the effect of "oh, yeah, you are going to need to move all the data off of the array, delete everything, and rebuild it from scratch". This was for a number of parity check failures that I could count on one hand. There were literally something like four bad blocks on a 7TB array, and the only "fix" was to delete and rebuild the array.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, we had two of these devices, and they both did the same thing, but with a different ~5 blocks on each one. I asked HP Support how they expected me to believe that rebuilding the array would prevent the same problem from recurring given that it had happened on two different devices within a few weeks of each other, and never got a satisfactory response. They also weren't willing to e.g. ship us another pair of devices so I could copy the data to them, cut over, and ship them back the bad ones, despite my employer buying hundreds of HP servers every year. The hardware was at a remote location, so the idea that we would be forced to buy *another* 14TB storage system to use temporarily while the real one was rebuilt was pretty insulting.
It has a big red button marked "First Blood". Why??
Obviously this harvesting robot was repurposed from sort of military super-weapon after said weapon was banned by international treaty and the military supplier needed to recoup its investment. There is no chance - no chance! - that it will revert to its original programming later on and begin harvesting humans instead.
You are joking, right? Or do you actually like the idea of your employer not only being able to fire you at will, but simultaneously kick you out of your place of residence? There is not a chance I would ever give a corporation that much power over me, and I've never even left an employer on anything other than good terms.
So, in other words, this is another in a long line of questionable and sensationalistic articles by The Register? I don't even bother to read anything they publish anymore, because their standards are so low these days.
Everything seemed to go downhill starting with that series of articles they ran a few years ago where they published truly bizarre and (AFAIK) unsubstantiated claims about some dot-com CEO.
Furthermore, if this isn't immediately obvious to anyone, the photos in TFA are not of the fluorescence. Some of them are near-infrared photos of trees, and the others look like a tree illuminated at night by conventional lighting.
If you want something with powder and some electronic circuits that looks "normal" to the airport security guy, then a toner cartridge is a perfect choice.
So next time, put the powder into a case that hides the fact that it's powder. A battery, for example, with enough cells to function, but enough removed to have space for the explosive. Or mix it with something that turns it into a more solid block, and disguise it as charcoal/pastels, and keep it separate from the electronics until the last minute. Etc., etc.. It's an unwinnable game for the people playing the reactionary side.
Personally, I'd support an income tax IF AND ONLY IF the sales tax was ended.
This is exactly the same reason I voted against I-1098. I would actually prefer a state income tax to a state sales tax for a variety of reasons.
Steve Ballmer may (or may not) see some immediate benefit because of the initiative's failure. I don't really care. I was thinking more of my long-term benefit, because there is essentially zero probability that the state would have kept the tax limited to the rich.
That my friend is one of the greatest problems with Mac/Linux adoption, IT boys are affraid of loosing "power" and are not willing to learn anything new.
You say "tomato", I say "the stubborn, tiny minority of Mac users are unwilling to learn how to use the exact same software (Photoshop) on a PC that they use on their Macs".
I used to work in a Windows engineering department. I supported 1000+ servers and numerous enterprise-level applications. It was a full-time job. Can you guess why I didn't want to double my workload by supporting Mac users as well? It wasn't because I don't like learning new things. It was because given a fixed number of people in my department, the needs of the many (the Windows user base of about 30,000 people) outweighed the needs of the few (the 200 or so Mac users and their ~10 servers). It didn't help that the Mac users expected their issues to be given top priority, even when it was just a handful of graphic designers being affected compared to hundreds or thousands of business users.
Furthermore, Apple always seems to go out of their way to "interoperate" in the most idiotic way imaginable. For example, OS X supports dynamic DNS registration. That should make interoperating with Windows-based DNS easy, right? Wrong! Because not only will OS X dynamically register itself, it will do things like (before registering itself in DNS) reverse-lookup the IP it gets from DHCP, and silently rename the computer it's running on to the entry it finds, regardless of whether that's a good idea or not.
Or how about how when accessing Windows fileshares, OS X will happily allow users to give filesystem objects names that end in spaces, making them nearly impossible to work with, rename, or delete on Windows clients. I partly blame MS for that, because SMB shouldn't allow it in the first place if it's going to cause issues for Windows clients, but OS X is the only client OS I know of that allows it.
So just as most people are WAY off in thinking that we can make lightsabers and blasters with laser beams, most are way off in thinking we can project light beams to create a hologram.
What you describe has already been done. I'm not going to dig up the MIT Media Lab holography link again, because I've posted it 4 or 5 times in response to similar claims from previous holography discussions here. I don't know why people keep claiming it's a physical impossibility. It's been done, in colour even.
Yeah, they must be kicking themselves for having already been paid once, and possibly having been paid again to port their apps over to IE7+...
If you wrote an app in such a bad way that it will only work on a very specific version of IE, would you really want to go back and work with that code, even if you were getting paid?
Companies and governments have massive amounts of custom code which runs only on IE6. The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.
Lots of people have massive amounts of 16-bit apps. Should Microsoft have included 16-bit support in x64 versions of Windows as a result? Lots of people still use VB6 apps. Should Microsoft continue to support Visual Studio 6? When I upgraded to Windows 7, I was annoyed that the one 16-bit app I still used at home wouldn't work anymore, but I got over it.
Are you seriously suggesting that organizations just toss out a mission-critical bit of software either because it's old or proprietary?
Organizations need to adjust to a world where they can't just build something that works and continue using it as-is indefinitely. That just isn't practical in an environment that also has internet connectivity of some kind. Long-term supportability must include the ability to continue updating the system over time when e.g. the client OS and/or browser are no longer supported by their vendor(s).
Yes, I realize this is painful, and it's a big shift from the world as it was a few decades ago, but that's the tradeoff when internet connectivity is involved. Hopefully it will also make managers realize that meeting a list of feature/behaviour requirements is not enough. The way an application is built is also critical, because obviously it's possible to build something that meets a feature/behaviour requirements list but that will break as soon as any one piece of infrastructure receives a minor update.
It was just about at the level of a plain drama with a little peppering of sci-fi.
I actually didn't mind that aspect of it, but I felt like it was another entry in the recent trend of trying to constantly "surprise" viewers by introducing endless series of plot twists that are supposed to turn everything on their head. I've only seen the premiere (I was waiting for the full season 1 set to come out instead of buying the half-season set), but
SPOILERS
the revelation that the Cylons believed in one god because one of their original models was basically the brain of a human who happened to believe in only one god seemed kind of cheap. I felt like if there were a third prequel series afterwards, it would just reveal that that breakaway human sect had themselves been influenced by Cylons from their own future, or something along those lines. It's turtles all the way down!
END SPOILERS
Way too many follow-on projects seem to be taking this route. The most recent Terminator film was terrible and a disaster for a whole host of reasons, but one of the biggest for me was the similar "all of your preconceptions are wrong" twist that the writers tried to ham-fist into that fictional world. It's not *as* evident in the final version of the film as it is in the original script/screenplay, but AFAIK that's only because someone decided it would be better to make it into a two- or three-part film series instead of one and save the ridiculous "surprise" for later.
Plot twists are fun when they're unexpected (I loved Memento and The Prestige, for example), but I can't be the only one suffering from repetitive plot twist fatigue, can I?
Candidates such as Palin might want to increase economic freedoms in some areas but want to bring the state into many personal issues.
This is why your original statement is flawed. Both the neo-Fascist and Completely Useless parties want to decrease some personal freedoms while increasing others, and the same is true for economic freedom.
The Libertarians want to indirectly decrease personal freedom, because in a Libertarian-ruled world, everyone's individual freedom would be signed away to a corporation (or more likely, THE corporation) approximately thirty seconds after they were born.
Maybe not so much for the people playing the games, but it's a big hassle if you're writing your own.
And, of course, as others have mentioned, the lifespan of the Dreamcast's GD-ROM drive was definitely finite. After this long, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the existing units are worn out. It's always made me a little sad that disc-based consoles would wear out after such a relatively short period of time, whereas consoles like the Atari 2600 that are almost as old as I am still work. There's always emulation, but having working original hardware is pretty cool.
When some site management discovers a DOS attack is coming from Belgum and does nothing for two days, then runs across a very odd unconfirmable rumor that the attack originates in an African nation and starts a blanket block of all of them within the next half hour, then hears another rumor the attack comes from a North Korean group and blocks NK, China, Hong Kong and Tibet (of all things), what more do you need to take a claim of racism seriously?
It's hardly racist to make decisions based on how likely legal remedies are going to work based on the source of some network traffic. If someone was DoSing your network from Africa, North Korea, or China, would you even know who to contact to attempt to address the problem? Are you suggesting that *anyone* in North Korea cares if someone is launching a DoS attack there? They've got bigger problems to worry about, like not starving to death or being forced to appear in bizarre private action films at the behest of their dictator.
Back when one of my sites had a monthly traffic limit, I blocked access to it from several of the biggest Russian ISPs. Was it because I suddenly decided to hate Russians? No. It was because someone in Russia with multiple dynamic IP addresses was being a jerk and downloading the same big file hundreds of times per day. I never found out why. I don't have time to play detective, and it took about ten minutes to block those IP ranges. I felt badly for the people in Russia who *weren't* abusing that site, but if I'd had the ability to press a big red "block all of Russia" button to avoid paying any more monthly overcharges, I would have done it in a second.
I have to agree with other peoples' comments that using "racism" in situations like this only waters down the term, to the point that people will ignore *actual* racism, because they associate it with arguments like yours. *That* is the real danger here.
Optics on revolvers don't help for shots hundreds of feet away, they're just not that accurate.
Isn't that partly because of the typical combination of bullet size, amount of gunpowder, and barrel length in a revolver? My granddad had an S&W.22 Jet revolver which I believe came from the factory with an optical sight. It was intended for use as a "varmint gun" on farms. It looked like a full-size.357 or.44 magnum (long barrel, etc.), and the cartridge size was (IIRC) the same as a.357 magnum, but necked down to fit a.22 bullet, so it was almost like a pistol configured to fire 5.56mm rifle rounds. Supposedly it was pretty accurate at range (at least for a pistol), but the design had a problem with the cartridges jamming in the cylinder.
I know you aren't supposed to read TFA, but "'It's like putting a flashlight behind your hand,' said Sylvain Gigan... 'You cannot see an image, but you can still see a faint glow.'"
I think it would help if TFA included an actual example image, and not just a photo of someone holding their hand up behind a shower screen and a note to the effect that the actual technology might produce images sort of like that one.
If you're on XP, have 4Gb RAM and just do normal stuff then you're fine for quite a few years yet.
I'm not sure I'd consider 3.5 years "quite a few". XP drops off of support in April of 2014.
I was reluctant to upgrade to 7 after being disappointed with the overall feel of Vista and Server 2008, and to be fair, there is a lot of Vista in 7. But I just built a new PC, and I didn't want to have to reinstall the OS in a year or two just because I needed some 64-bit-only app, or because I wanted to use something that required a newer version of DirectX.
It's not a bad OS. It's got some quirks, but it does have a lot of nice touches*, and it removes most of the worst aspects of Vista (the HDCP-related components being the major remaining one that I'm aware of). I'm even tentatively leaving UAC enabled, which is extremely surprising given how annoyed I got with it under Vista. I still don't think UAC is ready for use on servers (it needs to be smart enough to do something other than add individual users to ACLs when they access administrator-only locations), but my experience so far is that it's getting pretty close to being as usable as the equivalent in Linux.
I still use XP at work for a number of reasons, but I'm pretty happy with 7 for my personal use (photo processing, development, gaming every once in awhile, etc.). I think most people will have a similar experience as XP-based PCs succumb to attrition and are replaced with new ones running 7. If anything ends up being a problem, I suspect it will be for people who discover that some old utility or game they've been using for a long time is 16-bit and won't run on a 64-bit OS.
* The taskbar pinning in particular was something that annoyed me initially, until I realized that it was doing exactly what I tried to approximate every time I booted up my PC - opening foobar2000 first so it would be the first button on the taskbar, then Thunderbird so it would be the second, etc.
In other words, the HDCP hardware decryptor is more powerful than the main CPU.
I'm pretty sure it's not, given that the $50 video card I bought last week to run a second monitor at work has an HDMI port on it. If the chip were that powerful, it would be too expensive to put on a card that cheap.
I'm sure this is just a case where specialized hardware is able to accomplish the task a lot more quickly than the first version of some software running on a general-purpose CPU.
A lot of good that actually does. It's easy to make DIY lockpicks from the pieces of spring steel that come off of the metal brushes that street-cleaning vehicles use. Once someone has those, they can make an electric lockpick out of them and a $10 (or less) electric flossing tool.
I do not think it is ridiculous to suggest that an AI could replace their CEO.
I don't think you'd need an AI, or even an expert system to replace this particular CEO. He could probably be replaced by a couple of SQL queries and a script (or maybe put everything in a single stored procedure, but I'm too lazy to write that out):
SELECT TOP 10 Job_Title FROM Employees WHERE Job_Class NOT LIKE '%Executive%' ORDER BY Salary DESC SELECT TOP 20 Expense_Category FROM Budget WHERE Expense_Category NOT IN ('Call Girls For Executives', 'Cocaine For Executives') ORDER BY Annual_Cost DESC
Pick 1-3 of the results at random and fire off an email to the press suggesting that the positions and/or services be eliminated to save money.
Of course, there's plenty of room for optimization, once the shareholders see the value in implementing this cost-effective piece of automation. Since it would entirely replace the CEO and his enormous salary, the WHERE clauses could be eliminated, and the CEO's position replaced by a much more affordable spokesperson.
They have a solar panel on top, which charges a battery during the day and they discharge at night, so they have no need for an external power source.
But they do require periodic replacement of the rechargeable batteries. Am I the only one that (for non-portable devices, like garden lights) would rather pay less than $5 upfront for an AC adapter instead of about $3 every 6-12 months on batteries?
Slashdot Mirror
Once a day? Not useful at all.
Once a day may not make sense in the context of a sensor that captures data for a wide area, but it may in the context of sensors that capture data for very small, localized areas. Especially with regards to the security application that you dismiss out of hand - if postal trucks were driving around with radiological sensors while the Radioactive Boy Scout was building his breeder reactor, once a day would have been more than enough to detect what was going on before he gave himself cancer.
I had a similar idea awhile ago, but mine was an opt-in, privately-run system that would use members' cars (or even smartphones, if the sensor package was small enough and could be connected via Bluetooth) for similar purposes. In an ideal situation, that would allow a lot more frequent sampling, but even once per day - done over the course of many days - the organization running the system would be able to amass a *lot* of interesting data depending on the sensors - positions where police frequently set up speed traps, odd localized temperature/weather variations, average speed of traffic at that time of day, the aforementioned radiological/chemical oddities, etc. For a larger net/more frequent sensor polling, there are other things like building up a *very* accurate height-map of roads (to complement orbital radar surveys), real-world traffic conditions, and so on.
One of the theoretical problems I ran into was how to maintain the privacy of members while still ensuring that the data was accurate. If users are required to continuously reuse a unique identifier, then the data could be subpoenaed at some point to reveal where their vehicle was at any given time. I figured that would make people less likely to sign up, but on the other hand, if the source of a given set of data can't be identified, then it's very difficult to prevent abuse (people feeding in bogus data to throw off results). I had some thoughts along those lines*, but by putting them on postal service vehicles instead of privately-owned cars, that stops being a significant concern altogether.
Obviously the government could even do something like put a LIDAR scanner and camera array on them, then sell the collected data to companies like Google (since they're driving around anyway, it would be cheaper than Google's StreetView operation), but I imagine that might be a conflict of interest, at least some of the time, because the Postal Service has a reasonable expectation of access to places that Google doesn't.
* Basically, maintaining a "trust-level web" for each UID, where every sample was tied to a UID, and samples of the same area were regularly cross-checked. If a sample from a particular UID was outside the range of a bunch of other samples from the same area, the trust-level for all samples uploaded by that UID would be reduced. Users could reset their UID whenever they wanted (leaving no trace of the old one on their device, and no way to tie the old sample set back to them), but the base trust level for a given UID would be tied to how long it had been in use, to provide an incentive for not resetting it.
Pretty good hardware for the money.
Did you get a different MSA2000 than I did? About 2-3 years ago, the group I was in needed to quickly deploy the modern equivalent of an MSA1000 or MSA1500 (which were incredibly reliable), and since we were a mostly-HP shop, the MSA2000 seemed like the logical option. I never stopped regretting that purchase.
First of all, the rack hardware was insultingly poorly designed. It was essentially impossible for someone to rackmount on their own. This was when I began to suspect that HP had just rebadged someone else's hardware, because HP's own rack kits (well, the ones whose designs they inherited from Compaq) are usually great.
Second, as soon as I'd had it up and running for a week or so, every night I'd get email alerts marked "Informational" that indicated there was a parity check problem and I needed to contact support as quickly as possible. When I did, HP support said it was not a problem and I should ignore them, because it was a bug in the firmware.
After a particular firmware update, those same messages kept coming, but were then marked "Critical Error", or something along those lines. I re-opened the ticket, and was told something to the effect of "oh, yeah, you are going to need to move all the data off of the array, delete everything, and rebuild it from scratch". This was for a number of parity check failures that I could count on one hand. There were literally something like four bad blocks on a 7TB array, and the only "fix" was to delete and rebuild the array.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, we had two of these devices, and they both did the same thing, but with a different ~5 blocks on each one. I asked HP Support how they expected me to believe that rebuilding the array would prevent the same problem from recurring given that it had happened on two different devices within a few weeks of each other, and never got a satisfactory response. They also weren't willing to e.g. ship us another pair of devices so I could copy the data to them, cut over, and ship them back the bad ones, despite my employer buying hundreds of HP servers every year. The hardware was at a remote location, so the idea that we would be forced to buy *another* 14TB storage system to use temporarily while the real one was rebuilt was pretty insulting.
It has a big red button marked "First Blood". Why??
Obviously this harvesting robot was repurposed from sort of military super-weapon after said weapon was banned by international treaty and the military supplier needed to recoup its investment. There is no chance - no chance! - that it will revert to its original programming later on and begin harvesting humans instead.
It would be nice if more companies did this.
You are joking, right? Or do you actually like the idea of your employer not only being able to fire you at will, but simultaneously kick you out of your place of residence? There is not a chance I would ever give a corporation that much power over me, and I've never even left an employer on anything other than good terms.
So, in other words, this is another in a long line of questionable and sensationalistic articles by The Register? I don't even bother to read anything they publish anymore, because their standards are so low these days.
Everything seemed to go downhill starting with that series of articles they ran a few years ago where they published truly bizarre and (AFAIK) unsubstantiated claims about some dot-com CEO.
Nothing to see here, move on.
Furthermore, if this isn't immediately obvious to anyone, the photos in TFA are not of the fluorescence. Some of them are near-infrared photos of trees, and the others look like a tree illuminated at night by conventional lighting.
Definitely nothing to see here.
If you want something with powder and some electronic circuits that looks "normal" to the airport security guy, then a toner cartridge is a perfect choice.
So next time, put the powder into a case that hides the fact that it's powder. A battery, for example, with enough cells to function, but enough removed to have space for the explosive. Or mix it with something that turns it into a more solid block, and disguise it as charcoal/pastels, and keep it separate from the electronics until the last minute. Etc., etc.. It's an unwinnable game for the people playing the reactionary side.
Personally, I'd support an income tax IF AND ONLY IF the sales tax was ended.
This is exactly the same reason I voted against I-1098. I would actually prefer a state income tax to a state sales tax for a variety of reasons.
Steve Ballmer may (or may not) see some immediate benefit because of the initiative's failure. I don't really care. I was thinking more of my long-term benefit, because there is essentially zero probability that the state would have kept the tax limited to the rich.
That my friend is one of the greatest problems with Mac/Linux adoption, IT boys are affraid of loosing "power" and are not willing to learn anything new.
You say "tomato", I say "the stubborn, tiny minority of Mac users are unwilling to learn how to use the exact same software (Photoshop) on a PC that they use on their Macs".
I used to work in a Windows engineering department. I supported 1000+ servers and numerous enterprise-level applications. It was a full-time job. Can you guess why I didn't want to double my workload by supporting Mac users as well? It wasn't because I don't like learning new things. It was because given a fixed number of people in my department, the needs of the many (the Windows user base of about 30,000 people) outweighed the needs of the few (the 200 or so Mac users and their ~10 servers). It didn't help that the Mac users expected their issues to be given top priority, even when it was just a handful of graphic designers being affected compared to hundreds or thousands of business users.
Furthermore, Apple always seems to go out of their way to "interoperate" in the most idiotic way imaginable. For example, OS X supports dynamic DNS registration. That should make interoperating with Windows-based DNS easy, right? Wrong! Because not only will OS X dynamically register itself, it will do things like (before registering itself in DNS) reverse-lookup the IP it gets from DHCP, and silently rename the computer it's running on to the entry it finds, regardless of whether that's a good idea or not.
Or how about how when accessing Windows fileshares, OS X will happily allow users to give filesystem objects names that end in spaces, making them nearly impossible to work with, rename, or delete on Windows clients. I partly blame MS for that, because SMB shouldn't allow it in the first place if it's going to cause issues for Windows clients, but OS X is the only client OS I know of that allows it.
So just as most people are WAY off in thinking that we can make lightsabers and blasters with laser beams, most are way off in thinking we can project light beams to create a hologram.
What you describe has already been done. I'm not going to dig up the MIT Media Lab holography link again, because I've posted it 4 or 5 times in response to similar claims from previous holography discussions here. I don't know why people keep claiming it's a physical impossibility. It's been done, in colour even.
Yeah, they must be kicking themselves for having already been paid once, and possibly having been paid again to port their apps over to IE7+...
If you wrote an app in such a bad way that it will only work on a very specific version of IE, would you really want to go back and work with that code, even if you were getting paid?
Companies and governments have massive amounts of custom code which runs only on IE6. The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.
Lots of people have massive amounts of 16-bit apps. Should Microsoft have included 16-bit support in x64 versions of Windows as a result? Lots of people still use VB6 apps. Should Microsoft continue to support Visual Studio 6? When I upgraded to Windows 7, I was annoyed that the one 16-bit app I still used at home wouldn't work anymore, but I got over it.
Are you seriously suggesting that organizations just toss out a mission-critical bit of software either because it's old or proprietary?
Organizations need to adjust to a world where they can't just build something that works and continue using it as-is indefinitely. That just isn't practical in an environment that also has internet connectivity of some kind. Long-term supportability must include the ability to continue updating the system over time when e.g. the client OS and/or browser are no longer supported by their vendor(s).
Yes, I realize this is painful, and it's a big shift from the world as it was a few decades ago, but that's the tradeoff when internet connectivity is involved. Hopefully it will also make managers realize that meeting a list of feature/behaviour requirements is not enough. The way an application is built is also critical, because obviously it's possible to build something that meets a feature/behaviour requirements list but that will break as soon as any one piece of infrastructure receives a minor update.
It was just about at the level of a plain drama with a little peppering of sci-fi.
I actually didn't mind that aspect of it, but I felt like it was another entry in the recent trend of trying to constantly "surprise" viewers by introducing endless series of plot twists that are supposed to turn everything on their head. I've only seen the premiere (I was waiting for the full season 1 set to come out instead of buying the half-season set), but
SPOILERS
the revelation that the Cylons believed in one god because one of their original models was basically the brain of a human who happened to believe in only one god seemed kind of cheap. I felt like if there were a third prequel series afterwards, it would just reveal that that breakaway human sect had themselves been influenced by Cylons from their own future, or something along those lines. It's turtles all the way down!
END SPOILERS
Way too many follow-on projects seem to be taking this route. The most recent Terminator film was terrible and a disaster for a whole host of reasons, but one of the biggest for me was the similar "all of your preconceptions are wrong" twist that the writers tried to ham-fist into that fictional world. It's not *as* evident in the final version of the film as it is in the original script/screenplay, but AFAIK that's only because someone decided it would be better to make it into a two- or three-part film series instead of one and save the ridiculous "surprise" for later.
Plot twists are fun when they're unexpected (I loved Memento and The Prestige, for example), but I can't be the only one suffering from repetitive plot twist fatigue, can I?
Candidates such as Palin might want to increase economic freedoms in some areas but want to bring the state into many personal issues.
This is why your original statement is flawed. Both the neo-Fascist and Completely Useless parties want to decrease some personal freedoms while increasing others, and the same is true for economic freedom.
The Libertarians want to indirectly decrease personal freedom, because in a Libertarian-ruled world, everyone's individual freedom would be signed away to a corporation (or more likely, THE corporation) approximately thirty seconds after they were born.
I want something that looks like Windows (start button, trashbin, tabs on bottom or top, etc).
I am assuming you've already tried KDE?
Was this really a big problem? Burning discs?
Maybe not so much for the people playing the games, but it's a big hassle if you're writing your own.
And, of course, as others have mentioned, the lifespan of the Dreamcast's GD-ROM drive was definitely finite. After this long, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the existing units are worn out. It's always made me a little sad that disc-based consoles would wear out after such a relatively short period of time, whereas consoles like the Atari 2600 that are almost as old as I am still work. There's always emulation, but having working original hardware is pretty cool.
When some site management discovers a DOS attack is coming from Belgum and does nothing for two days, then runs across a very odd unconfirmable rumor that the attack originates in an African nation and starts a blanket block of all of them within the next half hour, then hears another rumor the attack comes from a North Korean group and blocks NK, China, Hong Kong and Tibet (of all things), what more do you need to take a claim of racism seriously?
It's hardly racist to make decisions based on how likely legal remedies are going to work based on the source of some network traffic. If someone was DoSing your network from Africa, North Korea, or China, would you even know who to contact to attempt to address the problem? Are you suggesting that *anyone* in North Korea cares if someone is launching a DoS attack there? They've got bigger problems to worry about, like not starving to death or being forced to appear in bizarre private action films at the behest of their dictator.
Back when one of my sites had a monthly traffic limit, I blocked access to it from several of the biggest Russian ISPs. Was it because I suddenly decided to hate Russians? No. It was because someone in Russia with multiple dynamic IP addresses was being a jerk and downloading the same big file hundreds of times per day. I never found out why. I don't have time to play detective, and it took about ten minutes to block those IP ranges. I felt badly for the people in Russia who *weren't* abusing that site, but if I'd had the ability to press a big red "block all of Russia" button to avoid paying any more monthly overcharges, I would have done it in a second.
I have to agree with other peoples' comments that using "racism" in situations like this only waters down the term, to the point that people will ignore *actual* racism, because they associate it with arguments like yours. *That* is the real danger here.
Optics on revolvers don't help for shots hundreds of feet away, they're just not that accurate.
Isn't that partly because of the typical combination of bullet size, amount of gunpowder, and barrel length in a revolver? My granddad had an S&W .22 Jet revolver which I believe came from the factory with an optical sight. It was intended for use as a "varmint gun" on farms. It looked like a full-size .357 or .44 magnum (long barrel, etc.), and the cartridge size was (IIRC) the same as a .357 magnum, but necked down to fit a .22 bullet, so it was almost like a pistol configured to fire 5.56mm rifle rounds. Supposedly it was pretty accurate at range (at least for a pistol), but the design had a problem with the cartridges jamming in the cylinder.
I know you aren't supposed to read TFA, but "'It's like putting a flashlight behind your hand,' said Sylvain Gigan... 'You cannot see an image, but you can still see a faint glow.'"
I think it would help if TFA included an actual example image, and not just a photo of someone holding their hand up behind a shower screen and a note to the effect that the actual technology might produce images sort of like that one.
If you're on XP, have 4Gb RAM and just do normal stuff then you're fine for quite a few years yet.
I'm not sure I'd consider 3.5 years "quite a few". XP drops off of support in April of 2014.
I was reluctant to upgrade to 7 after being disappointed with the overall feel of Vista and Server 2008, and to be fair, there is a lot of Vista in 7. But I just built a new PC, and I didn't want to have to reinstall the OS in a year or two just because I needed some 64-bit-only app, or because I wanted to use something that required a newer version of DirectX.
It's not a bad OS. It's got some quirks, but it does have a lot of nice touches*, and it removes most of the worst aspects of Vista (the HDCP-related components being the major remaining one that I'm aware of). I'm even tentatively leaving UAC enabled, which is extremely surprising given how annoyed I got with it under Vista. I still don't think UAC is ready for use on servers (it needs to be smart enough to do something other than add individual users to ACLs when they access administrator-only locations), but my experience so far is that it's getting pretty close to being as usable as the equivalent in Linux.
I still use XP at work for a number of reasons, but I'm pretty happy with 7 for my personal use (photo processing, development, gaming every once in awhile, etc.). I think most people will have a similar experience as XP-based PCs succumb to attrition and are replaced with new ones running 7. If anything ends up being a problem, I suspect it will be for people who discover that some old utility or game they've been using for a long time is 16-bit and won't run on a 64-bit OS.
* The taskbar pinning in particular was something that annoyed me initially, until I realized that it was doing exactly what I tried to approximate every time I booted up my PC - opening foobar2000 first so it would be the first button on the taskbar, then Thunderbird so it would be the second, etc.
In other words, the HDCP hardware decryptor is more powerful than the main CPU.
I'm pretty sure it's not, given that the $50 video card I bought last week to run a second monitor at work has an HDMI port on it. If the chip were that powerful, it would be too expensive to put on a card that cheap.
I'm sure this is just a case where specialized hardware is able to accomplish the task a lot more quickly than the first version of some software running on a general-purpose CPU.
Someone get the CDC on the phone. The disease that's been killing honeybees has jumped species to the apostrophe.
Yeah, Bonded and authorized.
A lot of good that actually does. It's easy to make DIY lockpicks from the pieces of spring steel that come off of the metal brushes that street-cleaning vehicles use. Once someone has those, they can make an electric lockpick out of them and a $10 (or less) electric flossing tool.
I do not think it is ridiculous to suggest that an AI could replace their CEO.
I don't think you'd need an AI, or even an expert system to replace this particular CEO. He could probably be replaced by a couple of SQL queries and a script (or maybe put everything in a single stored procedure, but I'm too lazy to write that out):
SELECT TOP 10 Job_Title FROM Employees WHERE Job_Class NOT LIKE '%Executive%' ORDER BY Salary DESC
SELECT TOP 20 Expense_Category FROM Budget WHERE Expense_Category NOT IN ('Call Girls For Executives', 'Cocaine For Executives') ORDER BY Annual_Cost DESC
Pick 1-3 of the results at random and fire off an email to the press suggesting that the positions and/or services be eliminated to save money.
Of course, there's plenty of room for optimization, once the shareholders see the value in implementing this cost-effective piece of automation. Since it would entirely replace the CEO and his enormous salary, the WHERE clauses could be eliminated, and the CEO's position replaced by a much more affordable spokesperson.
They have a solar panel on top, which charges a battery during the day and they discharge at night, so they have no need for an external power source.
But they do require periodic replacement of the rechargeable batteries. Am I the only one that (for non-portable devices, like garden lights) would rather pay less than $5 upfront for an AC adapter instead of about $3 every 6-12 months on batteries?