The WSJ article mentions that spammers commonly have their Viagra ads sent as images (I get a lot myself, including a bunch of "stock tips" sent as attached images along with Gutentext).
Why don't spam filters simply use OCR technology to decipher such attached and better determine their spamminess? I've noticed that OCR must be getting really good as of late, since Captchas have been getting much more difficult.
but that didn't stop [Win 95] from becoming the most popular OS in the world for quite a few years...
Ah, but the difference here is that Windows is already by far the most popular OS in the world. Depending on what stats you believe, they've got 90-95% locked in already. That doesn't leave much room for conversion with their shiny new OS. From here on, the only direction Windows marketshare can go is down.
And yes, I realize that they could expand the number of installs without increasing percentage marketshare, with third world people etc. getting new computers for the first time. I don't think this is likely, especially with the $100 laptop taking off, and foreign governments being more Linux-friendly.
What do these new technologies bring to the table?
Let's not forget all sorts of crippling DRM, which is probably one of the main reasons movie execs are drooling over this crap. And this time, it's not just a joke like CSS. Lest we forget, according to Wikipedia HD DVD has sophisticated audio watermarking, HDCP downconversion, and other crap. Blu Ray is just as bad, with "dynamically-changing keys for the cryptographic protections", HDCP, digital watermarking, and so forth.
I think I'll stick to plain DVDs and save my money.
If you've been waiting to buy a fancy DLP because the prices are astronomical.. looks like they might just be starting to come down. Tigerdirect has a Samsung HL-R5078W 50" DLP with 1080p (yes, real 1080p!) for a mere $1600. Plus you can watch broadcast HDTV with the built-in tuner when no one's looking:)
Barring that, I'd go for a nice projector and a screen. Personally, I'm not such a huge fan of projectors, but they can be good with a proper setup (big, flat, custom-installed screen, everything aligned and focused correctly, etc.).
As another poster pointed out, it might be illegal to use extra money from federal loans for investing. That said, there are some great ideas out there for college kids without a lot of money.
If you don't have thousands to invest, forget about stocks, mutual funds, etc. -- There are some great ways to earn ridiculous percentages on small amounts of money. See this site to get started. I'm in on the Bank of America deal where they give you $100 after two months just for opening an account, with additional 'Keep the Change' rewards for using your debit card. Keep your eyes out for similar incentives. Key Bank is offering a free 1 gig iPod nano for opening a checking account, etc.
Other than small things like that, just live frugally, pay off your debt as soon as possible, and start investing for your future as soon as you can. Remember that the miracle of compound interest works best for you the sooner you start putting away. Want to retire by age 50? Start saving now! A great option for young people in the low/no income tax bracket is a Roth IRA. You put the money in at your current tax bracket (low if you're a student with little income) and it grows tax free until you take it out. You mentioned you'd like to have access to your money if you need it -- with a Roth IRA, you can take out your principal (though not any capital gains, unless it's for a house) any time you want without penalty.
More young people should think about their financial future, though for too many a never-ending cycle of credit card debt seems to be the norm. Best of luck to you.
I could go on.. but you get the point. We should all thank Microsoft for being so generous with their R&D budget. That's MS.. always on the cutting edge.
Besides, how many stock traders do you know that got rich sitting on a basket of stocks and watching the dividends trickle in?
Ah yes. But on the same note, how many traders do you know that got caught up in the heydays of the late 90s, and bought into some dot-com stars and ended up broke? There's something to be said for value investing. Might not make you rich (though Buffet et. al did quite well with it) overnight, but IMO it's a much better long-term strategy.
Or is it simply because the white earbuds are more visible at night, thus making their owner a more obvious target?
Or maybe it's because people that walk around listening to iPods can't hear what's going on around them and are oblivious to their surroundings, making them vulnerable targets for a mugging.
The CSS inheritance model is nonsensical, I need a 2-page cheat-sheet to get the syntax right, its designer thinks declaring aliases are 'too complex' and it takes a bona fide css expert to get css positioning working across browsers with a design that survives user-preferred fonts.
As someone who has just recently switched from old fashioned (hand-written, of course) HTML to CSS+XHTML, I've loved all that the new standards has to offer. I used to loathe formatting with tables in HTML.. it always struck me as idiotic to have to do formatting with these complicated tables. Then, when I read up on CSS I realized what a fantastic idea the separation of content and styling is.
The problem, as Dvorak complains, is that the CSS model can get really complicated, really quickly, and can be a pain in the ass to figure out. I respect the power of the inheritance model, and, provided that it's used correctly, it can be great. However, take a look at real-world CSS used by someone like Amazon. Looking at the CSS on their main page I count five in-page
<style..>
declarations. There's easily over a hundred lines of CSS tucked away in there. Of course.. that's not necessarily a bad thing.. Amazon has a highly customized design, and it looks pretty nice.
However, if I wanted to learn how to borrow some design element (e.g. the gradients) from the Amazon site.. imagine what a headache that would be, tracking first through the HTML, and then figure out all the levels of CSS inheritance in my head. It must be quite a headache for their own web designers to make minor adjustments. I think a lot of Dvorak's (and my) gripes with CSS would be assuaged with the availability of a 'CSS Debugger' that would let you, say, select a piece of the page, and show exactly which portions of CSS were controlling the layout of that piece. Like how Firefox lets you select text and "view selection source", except it would show you the CSS styling, including all the levels of inheritance.
This is the cue for Microsoft to roll out a new! improved! disk directory format.
I think it's great that Linux has gotten this far with NTFS reading/writing reverse engineering. I've used the shaky NTFS support for quite a while. One key use is when you forget the Admin password on Windows, and you're either locked out of the system or have only user-level privileges, you can use a Linux bootdisk the open the (otherwise hidden) password file and blank it out. The NTFS drivers have always had dire warnings about writing to NTFS possibly resulting in corruption, so this step forward is great.
However, I think you're exactly right – one way or another, MS will find a way to tweak the filesystem, probably in Vista, maybe even as an auto-updated "security fix" to XP, that will make compatibility even harder. Look at how long it's taken us to get this far. Linux has been working on NTFS support since.. at least Win2k, which is a looong time. And now we have to worry about MS putting us back to square one.
I think it's a little sad that Linux has to waste so much time being compatible with MS software (.doc support, NTFS support, FAT support, samba). I'm not in any way saying we shouldn't be doing this, since everyone wants compatibility, but it's a real PITA we have to waste so much time playing catch-up with MS. Imagine where OpenOffice et al. would be today if they didn't have to worry about reverse engineering the miserable.doc format. We could wish that MS would play nice and ues open standards, but there's a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. They know exactly what they're doing, and how much it sets us back. Perhaps someday MS will be forced to play catch-up with us for a change. I guess you could say the IE team is doing that right now, but it's not like we're implementing non-standard features in our browser.
Actually, I've already had a chance to use a program similar to this, and find it fairly useful. Laundryview was made available to my campus recently – it's great for a shared environment, like a dorm laundry room, or any other laundromat, where you have to worry about whether machines are free before you lug all your clothes down there. LV also lets you know if your clothes are done yet – in theory you could just keep track of the time, knowing e.g. it takes 40 mins/load, but this gets tricky with multiple loads, or if the machine's internal clock is wonky.
Allowing other people who you don't even know to use your internet connection is just plain dumb. Downloading music is the least of the problems you could face: what if they downloaded kiddie porn or used your connection to communicate with "terrorist groups"?
Am I the only one that's saddened that the Internet has come to this point? I remember, not so long ago, before the *AA and Homeland Security and god knows who else started poking their noses in the Internet, that it was much more of a friendly place. Sure, there were and will always be scourges like spammers and viruses, but it's just sad that you can't even be generous with your WiFi connection these days without worrying about legal troubles.
Meanwhile, the telecom monopolies are tightening their squeeze, threatening to hold VoIP packets and anything else that threatens their business model hostage (not in so many words, but what do you think net neutrality is really about?). The Internet has such great potential to be a distributed network run by us, for us, but there's all these ridiculous obstacles in the way. Not surprisingly, these "obstacles" are set up by aging monopolies with no sense of how to make money in an age where Internet connectivity is approaching ubiquity, and people are learning how to make use of it.
The obvious solution is a physically separated, anonymous network ("Freenetwork") , set up by us geeks, privacy advocates, pirates, and anyone else with some backbone – perhaps a mesh WiFi network + short ethernet links, starting in densely populated geek-happy regions like SoCal, or the Northeast. Some brave souls could set up Internet -> 'Freenetwork' gateways, perhaps the gateways to the Internet could be set up in a distributed, load-balanced fashion themeselves, like the current Tor network. You could get LAN speeds within the 'Freenetwork', and the pirates could play all they wanted to without fear of getting caught (If it got really big the *AA might come sniffing, but they'd need real hardware skill to track down anonymous WiFi mesh network users. They seem to be a lot better at manipulating the court systems than doing stuff like that). And, of course, it could even be set up to use onion routing within the network (like Tor), or perhaps even like Freenet. Boom, true anonymity and privacy.
The other alternative is for existing networks like Freenet, mute-net, and others, to improve to the point of genuine usability (Tor is already there, but it's good only for web browsing at this point). A comforting fact is that, barring the outright prohibition of them by our friendly Congressmen, they will expand into usefulness. It might take a while, but it will happen. Computers get faster, hard drives get bigger, and Internet connections slowly get faster. That's enough.
I guess the point I'm getting at, is that true Privacy is something that's really needed online. I suspect that once the general population gets a taste, they'd love it. The legal and political ramifications of this are quite large, but I for one think it's up to the legalities to catch up to us rather than the other way around. As I said before, it's a technological certainty that the existing Freenet and others will eventually get big enough to work, even if my dreams of 'Freenetwork' never come to pass. Distributed, anonymous communication thanks to strong encryption is already a reality. The legal system, thankfully, hasn't even begun to consider the ramifications of this. Let's hope they stay away for good. (Even if they wanted to, they'd have to more or less openly establish a police state to really quash something like 'Freenetwork'. That's a whole different can of worms.).
The only question is how long it will take for something like this to really get off the ground. I guess that's up to me, us. Thoughts?
If you'd like to pitch in yourself and help the LHC project, running LHC@Home is a great way! They use your CPU cycles to simulate particles traveling in the LHC. The server might be out of work units at the moment, but there are, of course, other cool projects that use the same BOINC client that you might not have heard of, like Einstein @ Home that helps the LIGO project searching for gravity waves.
Sorry, but the Zaurus still fits in your pocket, has a usable keyboard, and lasts 7 hours at a time.
In the article, they showed a picture of the Zaurus SL-C3200, which you can get for a mere $600, as opposed to something like $1800 for the Vaio they're touting. The Zaurus runs Linux, has built in 802.11b, 6 GB hard drive, and is plain cool. Why Sharp doesn't market it more here in the U.S. (apparently they've just barely gotten the programs + OS translated from Japanese to English..) is a mystery. It might be a little slower than the fancy schmancy Vaio, but for a little handheld, do you really need all that power? It's not like you're going to be running Seti@Home continuously on the damn thing. Not to mention the point about battery life. But then Sharp is known for having really cool gadgets that they manage to kill.
Although I don't even have the $400 at the moment, I've known a few tech-savvy folks that absolutely love the Zaurus, and am hoping to get one soon. By the way, Mom, if you're reading this, my birthday's coming soon...
We also have CTrax available free at my school. Not many people use it, mainly because of the crippling DRM and crappyp interface. First, it requires you to use Windows + Internet Explorer + Activex plugins + Flash plugin + new Windows Media Player. That rules out a lot of students, myself included (though I tried for a short time). Then, of course, their whole clunky interface is done in Flash, is terribly slow, and just a general pain in the ass to use. They let you 'download' the WMA files from their service, but to actually play them, Media Player has to go through a godawful slow authentication process every single time you play the track. I assume the tracks will play in one of those ridiculous "Plays for Sure" portables, but I don't know anyone who has one (seriously.. who buys that crap!?).
I got so fed up with their stupid DRM that I even wrote a guide on how to get around it using Audacity (clunky, but effective). Even with the ability to rip the tracks to mp3s using Audacity or similar, it just wasn't worth the hassle of their terrible interface in order to access their limited track selection. I remember at least a few letters in our school paper complaining about the service and what a waste of money it is (apparently some "anonymous donor" funded it.. ). It's too bad Apple are so stringent with their pricing, or they could work out great deals with Unis that people wouldn't hate so much. Maybe CDigix have cleaned up their act in the year or so since I've used their service, but I doubt it, and I don't see myself going back even though it is free.
I'm taking it upon myself to get some solar panels, an inverter, and a nice bank of batteries. Even if they ever stabilize the grid, I'll still save a few bucks on my power bill.
Just a note for anyone else who's thinking of doing this — you can get a nice tax deduction of up to $4000 for installing solar panels in your house. I'm thinking about doing it myself once I scrape together enough cash. They're expensive, but it's a nice DIY project. You don't even have to make a huge setup to run your house off of. Without bothering with the inverter and a huge array of panels, you can run some 12V garden lights off a panel or two, a 12V battery, and a timer. Linked article also suggests that you can claim a tax credit just for making your house energy efficient, which is pretty cool! Who said the Bush tax cut is only for the rich.
I always pay up at the coffee pot, for I fear one day there won't be any!
Indeed, most people are this honest. That's not just a gut feeling either. According to an extensive study cited in the book Freakanomics done with the help of bagel salesmen Feldman who would leave bagels with a locked donation box next to them in many office buildings, and have a sign asking for a dollar, roughly 89% of office workers would pay up. 89% is not bad at all for payment when no one is watching. Their detailed analysis of what makes people pay more (9/11) or less (big, unfriendly offices) was interesting. See Freakonomics, p. 48 (can use Amazon's 'search inside' for the quick fix).
So why does the article say the pay rate "trebled"? Probably because they weren't asking correctly in the first case -- i.e. they just had a sign saying "pitch in whatever you feel like" instead of "Please pay $0.50 for each cup or we won't be able to provide it any longer".
If I did my math right, isn't that like 9-something-billion per year in fines? And doesn't MS generate something like 40 billion per year in revenue? I say they won't even notice....
No, it's $912,500,000 a year in fines. I would say Microsoft doesn't *like* to throw away a billion dollars a year on fines, but it certainly wouldn't put them out of business.
There seems to be a popular misconception on Slashdot that, since Microsoft has a lot of cash on hand ($33B to be exact) and makes a good chunk more every year, that they don't give a damn about small potatoes like $1B/year in EU fines, Xbox subsidization losses, and other stupid business moves costing them money.
Obviously, none of you have ever owned stock before. Take a look at Microsoft's historic stock prices. Notice a trend? Zooooooom until 2000, and they've been in a slump ever since. Yes, they're still quite profitable (32% profit margin is astronomical), but the investors clearly see blood in the water. MSFT shareholders are actually pretty pissed at the company's stupid moves, especially with the Vista fiasco, and are working hard to ensure Microsoft doesn't slowly kill itself. If you really think Microsoft is some unbeatable juggernaut, put your money where your mouth is and jump on their stock right now while it's at the bottom of a 5.5 year slump. Nothing can stop them, not even fines from the EU, right? If you're like me, and see them not as unbeatable but as slowly evolving into irrelevance in an OS-agnostic world, sell 'em short or stay away. Mark my words, Microsoft, Sun, SCO, and similar big players with no plan for the future are all headed down the same path.
While I do see some potential for misuse with CPA, by both publishers and advertisers, I think it's great that Google's at least trying some new things to combat all the fraud that goes on. Right now, in addition to click fraud that Google has to be (overly?) aggressive in fighting, the current Cost-per-Click model has started to really piss off publishers.
Right now, sleazy web sites using MFA ("Made for Adsense") sites with little to no real content, but heavily loaded with high-paying adsense keywords, are buying up cheap advertising space on other sites running Adsense, and turning a profit on the traffic they siphon from legitimate sites. This unscrupulous behavior drives down the market price for adsense keywords, turns advertisers away from using Adsense, turns publishers away from using Adsense because of the resulting low pay -- generally hurts everyone involved, except the MFA'ers, who make a quick buck, and GOOG who of course get their cut. Incidentally, people are fighting back with blacklists, but it's a stopgap measure -- though some claim that they instantly double+ their daily revenue after blacklisting the MFA'ers from their site.
At any rate, I'm glad Google is offering an alternative to CPC. I would have really liked to see them go after MFA'ers with a heavy fist, but I guess they're too addicted to the rake from the MFA sites to care. Going after the dime today instead of the dollar tomorrow, so to speak. I can see both CPC and CPA having their places, and having choice will benefit all involved.
"Triple X" first came out in 2002. Coincidentally, Kazaa was becoming extremely popular at the time for swapping movies.
My friends and I came up with a theory as to why they named the movie "XXX" -- so that users searching for it on Kazaa would come up with nothing but porn. Note: since there's no way in hell I would even waste downstream on that movie, I haven't seen it, so maybe they came up with some flimsy background for the naming. *Shrug*
I'm trying to find some kind of a side job that pays whatever money, and has deadlines
Doesn't sound like pitching in to an open-source project would really be your thing. It's rare to find one that runs on any sort of stringent deadlines, and rarer still to find one that pays.
I do have a few suggestions in the line of open source work, though. If you'd like to earn some money, you could try looking for exploits in Firefox and earn $500 a pop with Mozilla's Bug Bounty program. In addition, Launchpad lists a number of other open-source bounties for various projects.
If you're looking for something more formal, check Craigslist. Under the 'gigs' -> 'computer' section of your city, you should see a bunch of small projects people are looking to have done. Most of 'em are web design work, though I see a fair amount of DB programming, C++/Java etc. work offered. If you have a decent resume, it shouldn't be too hard to land one of those gigs on the side.
Just keep in mind that a lot of fairly small projects that you could do on the side for a fee could also be outsourced for a fraction of the cost. Working locally through Craigslist gigs is a great way to steer clear of that trap.
There's a good reason that we're not using high-voltage, large capacitors currently to run our electrical devices: price. (In addition to storage space, of course, but let's pretend the carbon nanotube thingy could take care of that). The potential energy stored in a capacitor, U, is defined by
U = 1/2 * C * V^2
Where C is the capacitance, in Farads, and V the Voltage. For comparison's sake, a typical 1.5 Volt AA battery is rated for around 2000 milliamp-hours (why they use this ridiculous measurement, I don't know, but it's all I can find). So a tiny AA battery stores the potential energy
Or, it stores 11,000 Joules. Now, searching for big capacitors on froogle, I came up with a link from Autotoys for a 1 Farad capacitor, on sale for a mere $42 (which is actually really cheap for one of those bad boys, but anyways..). It claims to have a "surge voltage" of 20V. So, assuming it's charged to 20V, the potential engergy in the capacitor is
U_cap =.5 * 1 Farad * (20V)^2
So this $42, huge capacitor stores 200 Joules, in comparison with our AA battery that stores 11,000 Joules. In addition to the problems of price, miniscule total energy storage, storage space (making impractical for electrical car use.. you'd need a TON to power a car for an hour.. 100 HP = 75kW, for an hour, that's 270 MJ.. that's a lot of capacitors), in order to get the most out of capacitors you have to charge to a very high voltage (since U goes up with V^2), so you need a high voltage DC power supply, and finally, unlinke batteries, capacitors' voltage goes down exponentially with time, so you need clever (i.e. large, complicated) circuitry get out a constant voltage from a capacitor bank.
Basically, capacitors have their place (namely, smoothing voltages, or storing small amounts of power for quick discharge, i.e. camera flash), and batteries have theirs. The article is very light on specifics, but even if, say, the Cost / Farad goes down by an order of magnitude, and they manage to shrink the size as well.. I still don't see much changing. They also don't mention whether these things work at high-voltage. If they can't be charged up to 500+ Volts, they're not going to be able to store much energy. I'm not an expert on capacitor design, but if you look around for high-voltage capcitors (they go up to 10kV+), they pretty much all have tiny capacitances (e.g. 800pF, 10kV). I assume there must be some inherent difficulty in making them with both a large capacitance and high-voltage rating (or perhaps too dangerous.. who knows?). Don't get your hopes up just yet.
Windows Media Player is a great example of a piece of software that has reached maturity, and been going steadily downhill ever since. Everyone who's had to struggle with a slow computer with windows knows that version 6 (6.4 specifically, I think) was when WiMP essentially reached maturity. Really, what more possible features could you need in a media player other than the usual play, pause, rewind, etc. buttons, and some useful codecs (which, of course, Microsoft would never even dream of distributing, as they promote "piracy", or help alternative formats like Real).
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I'm even aware of at east one open source media player project based off the WiMP 6.4 design (has essentially the exact same look and feel, but is supplied with all the good codecs), namely "Media Player Classic" (here).
Since 6.4, which was last distributed with Win2k (though the auto-update features try their darndest to sneak the newer versions in), WiMP has gotten progressively worse. Version 9 was a disgrace, and 10 was even worse. Seems like the only innovation Microsoft has to offer in media players is bundling in more DRM features that no one wants, useless and ugly skins, and support for their own worthless WMV/WMA formats.
Please, don't use this new "feature"-laden crapware. Microsoft should take a hint from VLC or mplayer, and realize that we don't want the useless junk they're piling on. The reason why VLC and mplayer are so great is they do one thing and do it well: play media. Period.
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I think a nice letter to the Judge is a great idea. I'll do it. Anyone able to find the address?
The WSJ article mentions that spammers commonly have their Viagra ads sent as images (I get a lot myself, including a bunch of "stock tips" sent as attached images along with Gutentext).
Why don't spam filters simply use OCR technology to decipher such attached and better determine their spamminess? I've noticed that OCR must be getting really good as of late, since Captchas have been getting much more difficult.
Ah, but the difference here is that Windows is already by far the most popular OS in the world. Depending on what stats you believe, they've got 90-95% locked in already. That doesn't leave much room for conversion with their shiny new OS. From here on, the only direction Windows marketshare can go is down.
And yes, I realize that they could expand the number of installs without increasing percentage marketshare, with third world people etc. getting new computers for the first time. I don't think this is likely, especially with the $100 laptop taking off, and foreign governments being more Linux-friendly.
Let's not forget all sorts of crippling DRM, which is probably one of the main reasons movie execs are drooling over this crap. And this time, it's not just a joke like CSS. Lest we forget, according to Wikipedia HD DVD has sophisticated audio watermarking, HDCP downconversion, and other crap. Blu Ray is just as bad, with "dynamically-changing keys for the cryptographic protections", HDCP, digital watermarking, and so forth.
I think I'll stick to plain DVDs and save my money.
If you've been waiting to buy a fancy DLP because the prices are astronomical.. looks like they might just be starting to come down. Tigerdirect has a Samsung HL-R5078W 50" DLP with 1080p (yes, real 1080p!) for a mere $1600. Plus you can watch broadcast HDTV with the built-in tuner when no one's looking :)
Barring that, I'd go for a nice projector and a screen. Personally, I'm not such a huge fan of projectors, but they can be good with a proper setup (big, flat, custom-installed screen, everything aligned and focused correctly, etc.).
If you don't have thousands to invest, forget about stocks, mutual funds, etc. -- There are some great ways to earn ridiculous percentages on small amounts of money. See this site to get started. I'm in on the Bank of America deal where they give you $100 after two months just for opening an account, with additional 'Keep the Change' rewards for using your debit card. Keep your eyes out for similar incentives. Key Bank is offering a free 1 gig iPod nano for opening a checking account, etc.
Other than small things like that, just live frugally, pay off your debt as soon as possible, and start investing for your future as soon as you can. Remember that the miracle of compound interest works best for you the sooner you start putting away. Want to retire by age 50? Start saving now! A great option for young people in the low/no income tax bracket is a Roth IRA. You put the money in at your current tax bracket (low if you're a student with little income) and it grows tax free until you take it out. You mentioned you'd like to have access to your money if you need it -- with a Roth IRA, you can take out your principal (though not any capital gains, unless it's for a house) any time you want without penalty.
More young people should think about their financial future, though for too many a never-ending cycle of credit card debt seems to be the norm. Best of luck to you.
Absolutely. Just take a look at some of Microsoft's current and upcoming projects. They're going to seriously change how we interact with computers and the world. Examples: Zune, Windows Live Local, Windows Live Search, the Aero Interface, IE 7, MSN Desktop Search, Security and Data Improvements in Vista
I could go on.. but you get the point. We should all thank Microsoft for being so generous with their R&D budget. That's MS.. always on the cutting edge.
Ah yes. But on the same note, how many traders do you know that got caught up in the heydays of the late 90s, and bought into some dot-com stars and ended up broke? There's something to be said for value investing. Might not make you rich (though Buffet et. al did quite well with it) overnight, but IMO it's a much better long-term strategy.
Or maybe it's because people that walk around listening to iPods can't hear what's going on around them and are oblivious to their surroundings, making them vulnerable targets for a mugging.
As someone who has just recently switched from old fashioned (hand-written, of course) HTML to CSS+XHTML, I've loved all that the new standards has to offer. I used to loathe formatting with tables in HTML.. it always struck me as idiotic to have to do formatting with these complicated tables. Then, when I read up on CSS I realized what a fantastic idea the separation of content and styling is.
The problem, as Dvorak complains, is that the CSS model can get really complicated, really quickly, and can be a pain in the ass to figure out. I respect the power of the inheritance model, and, provided that it's used correctly, it can be great. However, take a look at real-world CSS used by someone like Amazon. Looking at the CSS on their main page I count five in-page
declarations. There's easily over a hundred lines of CSS tucked away in there. Of course.. that's not necessarily a bad thing.. Amazon has a highly customized design, and it looks pretty nice.However, if I wanted to learn how to borrow some design element (e.g. the gradients) from the Amazon site.. imagine what a headache that would be, tracking first through the HTML, and then figure out all the levels of CSS inheritance in my head. It must be quite a headache for their own web designers to make minor adjustments. I think a lot of Dvorak's (and my) gripes with CSS would be assuaged with the availability of a 'CSS Debugger' that would let you, say, select a piece of the page, and show exactly which portions of CSS were controlling the layout of that piece. Like how Firefox lets you select text and "view selection source", except it would show you the CSS styling, including all the levels of inheritance.
I think it's great that Linux has gotten this far with NTFS reading/writing reverse engineering. I've used the shaky NTFS support for quite a while. One key use is when you forget the Admin password on Windows, and you're either locked out of the system or have only user-level privileges, you can use a Linux bootdisk the open the (otherwise hidden) password file and blank it out. The NTFS drivers have always had dire warnings about writing to NTFS possibly resulting in corruption, so this step forward is great.
However, I think you're exactly right – one way or another, MS will find a way to tweak the filesystem, probably in Vista, maybe even as an auto-updated "security fix" to XP, that will make compatibility even harder. Look at how long it's taken us to get this far. Linux has been working on NTFS support since.. at least Win2k, which is a looong time. And now we have to worry about MS putting us back to square one.
I think it's a little sad that Linux has to waste so much time being compatible with MS software (.doc support, NTFS support, FAT support, samba). I'm not in any way saying we shouldn't be doing this, since everyone wants compatibility, but it's a real PITA we have to waste so much time playing catch-up with MS. Imagine where OpenOffice et al. would be today if they didn't have to worry about reverse engineering the miserable .doc format. We could wish that MS would play nice and ues open standards, but there's a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. They know exactly what they're doing, and how much it sets us back. Perhaps someday MS will be forced to play catch-up with us for a change. I guess you could say the IE team is doing that right now, but it's not like we're implementing non-standard features in our browser.
Actually, I've already had a chance to use a program similar to this, and find it fairly useful. Laundryview was made available to my campus recently – it's great for a shared environment, like a dorm laundry room, or any other laundromat, where you have to worry about whether machines are free before you lug all your clothes down there. LV also lets you know if your clothes are done yet – in theory you could just keep track of the time, knowing e.g. it takes 40 mins/load, but this gets tricky with multiple loads, or if the machine's internal clock is wonky.
Am I the only one that's saddened that the Internet has come to this point? I remember, not so long ago, before the *AA and Homeland Security and god knows who else started poking their noses in the Internet, that it was much more of a friendly place. Sure, there were and will always be scourges like spammers and viruses, but it's just sad that you can't even be generous with your WiFi connection these days without worrying about legal troubles.
Meanwhile, the telecom monopolies are tightening their squeeze, threatening to hold VoIP packets and anything else that threatens their business model hostage (not in so many words, but what do you think net neutrality is really about?). The Internet has such great potential to be a distributed network run by us, for us, but there's all these ridiculous obstacles in the way. Not surprisingly, these "obstacles" are set up by aging monopolies with no sense of how to make money in an age where Internet connectivity is approaching ubiquity, and people are learning how to make use of it.
The obvious solution is a physically separated, anonymous network ("Freenetwork") , set up by us geeks, privacy advocates, pirates, and anyone else with some backbone – perhaps a mesh WiFi network + short ethernet links, starting in densely populated geek-happy regions like SoCal, or the Northeast. Some brave souls could set up Internet -> 'Freenetwork' gateways, perhaps the gateways to the Internet could be set up in a distributed, load-balanced fashion themeselves, like the current Tor network. You could get LAN speeds within the 'Freenetwork', and the pirates could play all they wanted to without fear of getting caught (If it got really big the *AA might come sniffing, but they'd need real hardware skill to track down anonymous WiFi mesh network users. They seem to be a lot better at manipulating the court systems than doing stuff like that). And, of course, it could even be set up to use onion routing within the network (like Tor), or perhaps even like Freenet. Boom, true anonymity and privacy.
The other alternative is for existing networks like Freenet, mute-net, and others, to improve to the point of genuine usability (Tor is already there, but it's good only for web browsing at this point). A comforting fact is that, barring the outright prohibition of them by our friendly Congressmen, they will expand into usefulness. It might take a while, but it will happen. Computers get faster, hard drives get bigger, and Internet connections slowly get faster. That's enough.
I guess the point I'm getting at, is that true Privacy is something that's really needed online. I suspect that once the general population gets a taste, they'd love it. The legal and political ramifications of this are quite large, but I for one think it's up to the legalities to catch up to us rather than the other way around. As I said before, it's a technological certainty that the existing Freenet and others will eventually get big enough to work, even if my dreams of 'Freenetwork' never come to pass. Distributed, anonymous communication thanks to strong encryption is already a reality. The legal system, thankfully, hasn't even begun to consider the ramifications of this. Let's hope they stay away for good. (Even if they wanted to, they'd have to more or less openly establish a police state to really quash something like 'Freenetwork'. That's a whole different can of worms.).
The only question is how long it will take for something like this to really get off the ground. I guess that's up to me, us. Thoughts?
If you'd like to pitch in yourself and help the LHC project, running LHC@Home is a great way! They use your CPU cycles to simulate particles traveling in the LHC. The server might be out of work units at the moment, but there are, of course, other cool projects that use the same BOINC client that you might not have heard of, like Einstein @ Home that helps the LIGO project searching for gravity waves.
Sorry, but the Zaurus still fits in your pocket, has a usable keyboard, and lasts 7 hours at a time.
In the article, they showed a picture of the Zaurus SL-C3200, which you can get for a mere $600, as opposed to something like $1800 for the Vaio they're touting. The Zaurus runs Linux, has built in 802.11b, 6 GB hard drive, and is plain cool. Why Sharp doesn't market it more here in the U.S. (apparently they've just barely gotten the programs + OS translated from Japanese to English..) is a mystery. It might be a little slower than the fancy schmancy Vaio, but for a little handheld, do you really need all that power? It's not like you're going to be running Seti@Home continuously on the damn thing. Not to mention the point about battery life. But then Sharp is known for having really cool gadgets that they manage to kill.
Although I don't even have the $400 at the moment, I've known a few tech-savvy folks that absolutely love the Zaurus, and am hoping to get one soon. By the way, Mom, if you're reading this, my birthday's coming soon...
We also have CTrax available free at my school. Not many people use it, mainly because of the crippling DRM and crappyp interface. First, it requires you to use Windows + Internet Explorer + Activex plugins + Flash plugin + new Windows Media Player. That rules out a lot of students, myself included (though I tried for a short time). Then, of course, their whole clunky interface is done in Flash, is terribly slow, and just a general pain in the ass to use. They let you 'download' the WMA files from their service, but to actually play them, Media Player has to go through a godawful slow authentication process every single time you play the track. I assume the tracks will play in one of those ridiculous "Plays for Sure" portables, but I don't know anyone who has one (seriously.. who buys that crap!?).
I got so fed up with their stupid DRM that I even wrote a guide on how to get around it using Audacity (clunky, but effective). Even with the ability to rip the tracks to mp3s using Audacity or similar, it just wasn't worth the hassle of their terrible interface in order to access their limited track selection. I remember at least a few letters in our school paper complaining about the service and what a waste of money it is (apparently some "anonymous donor" funded it.. ). It's too bad Apple are so stringent with their pricing, or they could work out great deals with Unis that people wouldn't hate so much. Maybe CDigix have cleaned up their act in the year or so since I've used their service, but I doubt it, and I don't see myself going back even though it is free.
I'm taking it upon myself to get some solar panels, an inverter, and a nice bank of batteries. Even if they ever stabilize the grid, I'll still save a few bucks on my power bill.
Just a note for anyone else who's thinking of doing this — you can get a nice tax deduction of up to $4000 for installing solar panels in your house. I'm thinking about doing it myself once I scrape together enough cash. They're expensive, but it's a nice DIY project. You don't even have to make a huge setup to run your house off of. Without bothering with the inverter and a huge array of panels, you can run some 12V garden lights off a panel or two, a 12V battery, and a timer. Linked article also suggests that you can claim a tax credit just for making your house energy efficient, which is pretty cool! Who said the Bush tax cut is only for the rich.
I always pay up at the coffee pot, for I fear one day there won't be any!
Indeed, most people are this honest. That's not just a gut feeling either. According to an extensive study cited in the book Freakanomics done with the help of bagel salesmen Feldman who would leave bagels with a locked donation box next to them in many office buildings, and have a sign asking for a dollar, roughly 89% of office workers would pay up. 89% is not bad at all for payment when no one is watching. Their detailed analysis of what makes people pay more (9/11) or less (big, unfriendly offices) was interesting. See Freakonomics, p. 48 (can use Amazon's 'search inside' for the quick fix).
So why does the article say the pay rate "trebled"? Probably because they weren't asking correctly in the first case -- i.e. they just had a sign saying "pitch in whatever you feel like" instead of "Please pay $0.50 for each cup or we won't be able to provide it any longer".
If I did my math right, isn't that like 9-something-billion per year in fines? And doesn't MS generate something like 40 billion per year in revenue? I say they won't even notice....
No, it's $912,500,000 a year in fines. I would say Microsoft doesn't *like* to throw away a billion dollars a year on fines, but it certainly wouldn't put them out of business.
There seems to be a popular misconception on Slashdot that, since Microsoft has a lot of cash on hand ($33B to be exact) and makes a good chunk more every year, that they don't give a damn about small potatoes like $1B/year in EU fines, Xbox subsidization losses, and other stupid business moves costing them money.
Obviously, none of you have ever owned stock before. Take a look at Microsoft's historic stock prices. Notice a trend? Zooooooom until 2000, and they've been in a slump ever since. Yes, they're still quite profitable (32% profit margin is astronomical), but the investors clearly see blood in the water. MSFT shareholders are actually pretty pissed at the company's stupid moves, especially with the Vista fiasco, and are working hard to ensure Microsoft doesn't slowly kill itself. If you really think Microsoft is some unbeatable juggernaut, put your money where your mouth is and jump on their stock right now while it's at the bottom of a 5.5 year slump. Nothing can stop them, not even fines from the EU, right? If you're like me, and see them not as unbeatable but as slowly evolving into irrelevance in an OS-agnostic world, sell 'em short or stay away. Mark my words, Microsoft, Sun, SCO, and similar big players with no plan for the future are all headed down the same path.
While I do see some potential for misuse with CPA, by both publishers and advertisers, I think it's great that Google's at least trying some new things to combat all the fraud that goes on. Right now, in addition to click fraud that Google has to be (overly?) aggressive in fighting, the current Cost-per-Click model has started to really piss off publishers.
Right now, sleazy web sites using MFA ("Made for Adsense") sites with little to no real content, but heavily loaded with high-paying adsense keywords, are buying up cheap advertising space on other sites running Adsense, and turning a profit on the traffic they siphon from legitimate sites. This unscrupulous behavior drives down the market price for adsense keywords, turns advertisers away from using Adsense, turns publishers away from using Adsense because of the resulting low pay -- generally hurts everyone involved, except the MFA'ers, who make a quick buck, and GOOG who of course get their cut. Incidentally, people are fighting back with blacklists, but it's a stopgap measure -- though some claim that they instantly double+ their daily revenue after blacklisting the MFA'ers from their site.
At any rate, I'm glad Google is offering an alternative to CPC. I would have really liked to see them go after MFA'ers with a heavy fist, but I guess they're too addicted to the rake from the MFA sites to care. Going after the dime today instead of the dollar tomorrow, so to speak. I can see both CPC and CPA having their places, and having choice will benefit all involved.
"Triple X" first came out in 2002. Coincidentally, Kazaa was becoming extremely popular at the time for swapping movies.
My friends and I came up with a theory as to why they named the movie "XXX" -- so that users searching for it on Kazaa would come up with nothing but porn. Note: since there's no way in hell I would even waste downstream on that movie, I haven't seen it, so maybe they came up with some flimsy background for the naming. *Shrug*
Doesn't sound like pitching in to an open-source project would really be your thing. It's rare to find one that runs on any sort of stringent deadlines, and rarer still to find one that pays.
I do have a few suggestions in the line of open source work, though. If you'd like to earn some money, you could try looking for exploits in Firefox and earn $500 a pop with Mozilla's Bug Bounty program. In addition, Launchpad lists a number of other open-source bounties for various projects.
If you're looking for something more formal, check Craigslist. Under the 'gigs' -> 'computer' section of your city, you should see a bunch of small projects people are looking to have done. Most of 'em are web design work, though I see a fair amount of DB programming, C++/Java etc. work offered. If you have a decent resume, it shouldn't be too hard to land one of those gigs on the side.
Just keep in mind that a lot of fairly small projects that you could do on the side for a fee could also be outsourced for a fraction of the cost. Working locally through Craigslist gigs is a great way to steer clear of that trap.
Shameless plug -- I'm currently trying to write a website about earning money on the side.
There's a good reason that we're not using high-voltage, large capacitors currently to run our electrical devices: price. (In addition to storage space, of course, but let's pretend the carbon nanotube thingy could take care of that). The potential energy stored in a capacitor, U, is defined by
.5 * 1 Farad * (20V)^2
U = 1/2 * C * V^2
Where C is the capacitance, in Farads, and V the Voltage. For comparison's sake, a typical 1.5 Volt AA battery is rated for around 2000 milliamp-hours (why they use this ridiculous measurement, I don't know, but it's all I can find). So a tiny AA battery stores the potential energy
U_battery = 2000E-3 Amps * 1.5V * 3600 seconds/hours
Or, it stores 11,000 Joules. Now, searching for big capacitors on froogle, I came up with a link from Autotoys for a 1 Farad capacitor, on sale for a mere $42 (which is actually really cheap for one of those bad boys, but anyways..). It claims to have a "surge voltage" of 20V. So, assuming it's charged to 20V, the potential engergy in the capacitor is
U_cap =
So this $42, huge capacitor stores 200 Joules, in comparison with our AA battery that stores 11,000 Joules. In addition to the problems of price, miniscule total energy storage, storage space (making impractical for electrical car use.. you'd need a TON to power a car for an hour.. 100 HP = 75kW, for an hour, that's 270 MJ.. that's a lot of capacitors), in order to get the most out of capacitors you have to charge to a very high voltage (since U goes up with V^2), so you need a high voltage DC power supply, and finally, unlinke batteries, capacitors' voltage goes down exponentially with time, so you need clever (i.e. large, complicated) circuitry get out a constant voltage from a capacitor bank.
Basically, capacitors have their place (namely, smoothing voltages, or storing small amounts of power for quick discharge, i.e. camera flash), and batteries have theirs. The article is very light on specifics, but even if, say, the Cost / Farad goes down by an order of magnitude, and they manage to shrink the size as well.. I still don't see much changing. They also don't mention whether these things work at high-voltage. If they can't be charged up to 500+ Volts, they're not going to be able to store much energy. I'm not an expert on capacitor design, but if you look around for high-voltage capcitors (they go up to 10kV+), they pretty much all have tiny capacitances (e.g. 800pF, 10kV). I assume there must be some inherent difficulty in making them with both a large capacitance and high-voltage rating (or perhaps too dangerous.. who knows?). Don't get your hopes up just yet.
Windows Media Player is a great example of a piece of software that has reached maturity, and been going steadily downhill ever since. Everyone who's had to struggle with a slow computer with windows knows that version 6 (6.4 specifically, I think) was when WiMP essentially reached maturity. Really, what more possible features could you need in a media player other than the usual play, pause, rewind, etc. buttons, and some useful codecs (which, of course, Microsoft would never even dream of distributing, as they promote "piracy", or help alternative formats like Real).
l I'm even aware of at east one open source media player project based off the WiMP 6.4 design (has essentially the exact same look and feel, but is supplied with all the good codecs), namely "Media Player Classic" (here).
Since 6.4, which was last distributed with Win2k (though the auto-update features try their darndest to sneak the newer versions in), WiMP has gotten progressively worse. Version 9 was a disgrace, and 10 was even worse. Seems like the only innovation Microsoft has to offer in media players is bundling in more DRM features that no one wants, useless and ugly skins, and support for their own worthless WMV/WMA formats.
Please, don't use this new "feature"-laden crapware. Microsoft should take a hint from VLC or mplayer, and realize that we don't want the useless junk they're piling on. The reason why VLC and mplayer are so great is they do one thing and do it well: play media. Period.
the underworld is abuzz with concern that, faced with enough evidence to put him in jail, Ralsky will squeal on his associates
I'm sure Mr. Ralsky's associates have nothing to fear. An upstanding, honest businessman such as himself would never rat on his friends.