I'm not sure it would work. So many buyers/sellers just don't take the time to fill the short feedback form. What happens with your proposition when only one party leaves feedback?
From my point of view, this is a good thing to remove negative feedback for buyers. My personal experience three years ago is when I gave a 'neutral' feedback to a seller that inflated the shipping price after the bid's closing, with no mention at all of the extra fees in the item description, that seller gave me my only negative feedback. I fought for a long while, and realized eBay support sucks and they're not really helping, and then, disgusted, stopped shopping on eBay except on rare occasions (prices are generally higher on eBay than elsewhere and the purchase is somehow riskier, but sometimes you find things hard to find anywhere else).
It's hard to be a "bad buyer", either you pay the amount, either you don't. No?
Anyway you are definitely going to need help from a change management specialist, human resources, etc. The related science is called Knowledge Management afaik. I've read an excellent book on the subject called Knowledge management in Theory and Practice, which Google Books provide exerts. I searched the thread and no one specifically named the science behind the problem at stake as far as I understand it.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this seems like the kind of application we should be supporting. I agree, without much analysis, to me it seems Walmart is pushing their partners in the right direction: enhanced efficiency for everyone.
Let me act as a karma whore (not that I care about virtual karma). Last May Walmart was announcing their embrace of the RFID tech, underlining the "green" component of this tech. Then,/. discussed in October Walmart's faltering RFID initiative. (Flash map of Walmart stores) And today, great news, Walmart is deep into RFID. Technology itself is neutral, it is what we do with it that makes it good or bad.
Other RFID stories that I find pertinent: a successful implementation of RFID tags at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Washington Navy Yard. Don't forget we discussed over/. the use by Microsoft of RFID for marketing in groceries. If Microsoft is using it, it must have great potential?;-) I won't lie that I'm amazed at passive RFID chips being as small as 0.15mm x 0.15mm x 0.0075mm (Hitachi), enabling rather conspiracy-theory applications of the tech. India and China seems are seriously looking at RFID. Well, you get the idea, more stories about RFID here. We live in interesting times. Technology is evolving at an exponential rate... now I wonder if we, as a civilization, will successfully cope with the realities of our resources-limited planet... (I'll stop here, I'm getting off-topic;-)
Trying to learn more about it, I followed the project's website link on the sourceforge page to simon-listens.org, but it's german only, found no english (or other language) info. Anyone has an advice?
And collaborative mapping is big deal. Google recently launched Google Our Maps, which is basically Google My Maps but with collaboration capabilities.
The latest version of Sauerbraten, 2007-09-04 TA is a little late. There's a new Sauerbraten available since a few days, and it is significantly improved over the previous available one. (don't ask me why this group doesn't use version numbers...)
(I don't have an iPhone and don't want one, aside from the fact that they're not available in Canada anyway;-) (and oh, I think we're kind of losers of focusing on the bad sides of the new update instead of also discussing the new good features)
I suppose if every one of these systems provides a precise enough location, for most purposes it won't matter if they all conflict with one another by a meter or so. For your curiosity, one can use GPS signal to get a precision of 2mm. No this isn't an error or bullshit (and it is not DGPS), it's "phase resolution". In short, you use the GPS signal's phase from multiple GPS satellites to get a 2mm spatial resolution. Whether Selective Availability is on or not doesn't matter, but you can do this only in post-processing mode however, not real-time (afaik). A friend was doing his PhD on this. There are a few great applications, such as doing GPS phase-resolution for bridges, thus knowing by how much they move due to traffic, temperature, lateral wind, etc. The funny thing is we don't even know the position of the satellite at such a precision, but it does not matter, we're using the phase of multiple satellites here, not the content of the signal. (I'm not a professional of GPS phase resolution myself, anyone with more knowledge is welcomed to correct me, I'll appreciate:-)
Anyone avid of GPS-related news is welcomed here (this is the GPS topic on Slashgeo, yeah, a plug, but hey, it's right on topic no? And there's no ads whatsoever;-). Happy holiday time.
Hi, this is a mee too post. Power Grid and Puerto Rico were a revelation to me in the sense of the surprising and positive evolution of boardgames since my childhood. I really like it when no luck is involved. Those two games, not related to war or killing anyone, are somewhat girlfriend-friendly (well, at least my wife enjoyed Puerto Rico while she's not the game type of girl at all).
I haven't tried Ra, I'll look it out at your advice. I can tell you about Iliade which is very good and has the advantage of being relatively short (a full game in much less than an hour).
I don't see any functional difference there: the equivalent Gnome and KDE apps also allow you to use "the same multimedia files" across all apps. Just after writing my first comment, I thought I should have been a little more explicit on that phrase: I'm pretty convinced there's no app *yet* on Linux as easy/fun to use (as as well integrated with the other apps) as iMovie / iDVD and many other iApps (I use Picasa on Linux as an iPhoto alternative, iPhoto is much better in my opinion, but Picasa is ok enough). One day one day maybe... but my point is we're not there yet.
I'm surprised no one on the thread (that I found) emphasize on the applications. At work I'm on Debian, but at home, it's Leopard. I *want* to switch to Ubuntu, but sorry, the iApps have no equivalent to my knowledge. The ability to use the same multimedia files from iPhoto, to iMovie, to Mail, to iWeb, etc make the significant difference. I don't doubt both Ubuntu/Leopard are "good" OS, but as a customer, that's not what matters, what matters is the overall experience in regards to my needs. In my case, the iApps are an important part of my use of a computer.
(otherwise, I'm a fan of Spotlight, but there's Beagle on Linux which (more or less) does the same thing)
A few other very interesting features were released this week for Google Maps... and I'm sorry that this story is all we got on/. so far. Here's a copy from the site in my sig.
Google Maps Adds Terrain Google Lat Lon Blog announces the addition of terrain to their free Google Maps site. In addition to adding the Terrain button, they've removed the Hybrid button. They explain, "You may notice in this screenshot that the handy "Hybrid" button, which shows satellite images overlaid with labels and roads, seems to have gone missing. Don't worry -- this view can now be accessed by clicking the "Satellite" button and checking the "Show labels" check box that will appear under the "Satellite" button."
New Google Maps Features Launched Including Collaborative Mapping In addition to the important new terrain layer announced yesterday, Google Maps received a few significant updates, first, Google Maps searches are now providing a thumbnail of the related street view photo, second, the My Maps feature somehow becomes Our Maps, allowing to collaborate directly on someone else's My Maps, this has a lot of potential of getting big, and last, you can more easily share KML and KMZ files and GeoRSS feeds through My Maps. From the Our Maps announcement: "Just click the "Collaborate" link and enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite. They'll receive an email invitation with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they should be able to edit it, as long as they are signed into a Google Account that's associated with that email address. You can also open your map to the world so anyone can edit it by selecting the "Allow anyone to edit this map" checkbox."
Hi, nice to find another cringing from light fellow. I admit I'm not aware of everything that goes on with the variants. But even if Vanilla "kicked off again", it has no major release since May 2002. As for your Unangband variant, never tried it or heard of it (I'm no reference here, just a man who used to love Moria/Angband, maybe I'm the one on the side of the track not knowing about your variant...:-). ToME is doublessly more advanced than Angband, that's why I was "redirecting" potential new players to a "modern" variant instead of the old Vanilla:-)
'Crowdutainment' Depends on why you contribute. In my community of practice (see sig) contributing is not necessarily done for fun, but might actually happen for job-related reasons. The same could be said of open source, my team participates at open source software projects because we directly benefit from these specific projets. Example; some commercial applications use OpenStreetMap data.
(and to answer the anonymous coward who replied to my parent post, OSM is the best map crowdsourcing project, no one said it's the best map project)
amateur (Angband)? Instead of Angband, try Tales/Troubles of Middle Earth instead (on wikipedia). Angband has been mostly frozen for years, while TOME, amongst the numerous Moria/Angband spinoffs, is the most advanced and active.
We actually have a lower rate of recreational drug use than the States, according to a report aired on CBC Radio yesterday, despite a much lower rate of enforcement and sentencing. Can you provide a reference? Not that I want to contradict you, I want to understand why the national news source claim the contrary, it's in French, but numbers and country names are easy to understand: "16,8 % des Canadiens ont dit avoir fumé au moins une fois de la marijuana en 2004. C'est ce que révèle l'édition 2007 du Rapport mondial sur les drogues. Par comparaison, 12,6 % des répondants américains ont admis avoir pris de la marijuana"
When RFID chips are widely used for stock control, it will be difficult to avoid buying things that contain them, and they can't be turned off. Robust identification could be provided by the "cloud" of RFID chips carried by each person. Did you know about RFID "powder"? (it was discussed on/. earlier this year) In short, RFID so small it will stick to people's hair if sprayed on a crowd. In forensics, you can thus know who was in the crowd with simple RFID scanners. There's much more applications, of course. (shameless plug; selected RFID stories here)
Thanks first for the opportunity. Montréal's Slash party was nice. Maybe we were about 25 slash enthusiasts at the climax. Here's my summary right after the party (with alcohol still running in my veins): "Interesting to see a sample of Slashdot readers. Most were very friendly, some were rather shy (as we expect nerds to be?), some were "older" but some were also very young! And the discussions about 1.5D, 2.5D, 3.5D, surfing in Hawifi, this North Korean drum-driven CD and three-way code merge were definitely worthy of a Slash-like party, and that barmaid reading the Slash book. Yeah. We should have more of this. Life still has surprises. Thanks."
One of the pictures on Picasa web album is a barmaid which accepted to play our game and be photographed while faking reading the cryptic "Running web logs with Slash" book (I happen to run a small slash-based website, that's why a bought a copy of the book). As good slash users, pictures were copied on the web even as the event occurred by people at the party:-)
these ultra-high resolution GPS trackers Misleading. The article is clearer: "The change is powered less by new technologies than the artful combination of existing ones, mainly the Internet, cellphones and G.P.S. satellites."
Some info. GPS receivers, which most of them use U.S. 'GPS' satellites -and- Russian GLONASS satellites (and eventually Europe's GALILEO and China's COMPASS 'GPS' systems), don't really have multiple spatial resolutions, only one. But yes, there are differences. In the article's case, they mix it with other spatial data to get a better precision. The other options are rather simple. With a simple GPS, since the Clinton administration removed the voluntary signal noise (called selective availability), anyone gets about 18m accuracy (xy, coz in z, the spa rez is lower). But, if you live in North America, most modern GPS receivers are WAAS compatible and provides a spa rez of about 4m.
Now, how can you improve accuracy to higher levels? You can do DGPS. This will suit most needs. But, it can get even better, using the phase of the GPS signal and not the content of the signal itself, you can get an accuracy of 2mm !!! Yes, that's true and great, useful to monitor bridges (movements due to wind, traffic, temperature) at high resolution as friend did for his PhD. The caveat with these techniques is that they require serious post-processing (well, that was the case a few year ago, maybe this changed?) so there's no such thing as "real-time freaking high resolution GPS", but there is "real freaking high resolution GPS" geolocation possible. (and to finish with a shameless plug, see sig for news on that kind of stuff)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure it would work. So many buyers/sellers just don't take the time to fill the short feedback form. What happens with your proposition when only one party leaves feedback?
From my point of view, this is a good thing to remove negative feedback for buyers. My personal experience three years ago is when I gave a 'neutral' feedback to a seller that inflated the shipping price after the bid's closing, with no mention at all of the extra fees in the item description, that seller gave me my only negative feedback. I fought for a long while, and realized eBay support sucks and they're not really helping, and then, disgusted, stopped shopping on eBay except on rare occasions (prices are generally higher on eBay than elsewhere and the purchase is somehow riskier, but sometimes you find things hard to find anywhere else).
It's hard to be a "bad buyer", either you pay the amount, either you don't. No?
For your curiosity, Google also has tentacules in touch screen technology through touchEarth. AFAIK, this is in Google's SoC and work is mostly open source related. (for the most interested in virtual globes touch screens, see this link)
Let me act as a karma whore (not that I care about virtual karma). Last May Walmart was announcing their embrace of the RFID tech, underlining the "green" component of this tech. Then,
Other RFID stories that I find pertinent: a successful implementation of RFID tags at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Washington Navy Yard. Don't forget we discussed over
Trying to learn more about it, I followed the project's website link on the sourceforge page to simon-listens.org, but it's german only, found no english (or other language) info. Anyone has an advice?
Is here, strait from Steve lombardi, the Virtual Earth program manager. See also other pertinent answers here.
This news item published today in French on the national news network made me aware of the Songswriters Association of Canada's proposal of 5$/month/Internet user for unlimited legal download of any music on any media. It is a very interesting read which includes several pertinent references and statistics (whatever stats are worth). On this page, you'll find support for the proposal from the Canadian Music Creators Coalition. It's nice to see pressure on the CRIA coming from many fronts. I don't know the SAC's importance in the industry, but since it made the national news, maybe it's not completely irrelevant.
OpenStreetMap can be loaded on the iPhone and here's the State of the Map Conference wrap up, the OpenStreetMap conference.
And collaborative mapping is big deal. Google recently launched Google Our Maps, which is basically Google My Maps but with collaboration capabilities.
From my previous comment: There's NAVTEQ's MapReporter tool to submit updates to NAVTEQ's data by the casual user, [and also] Tele Atlas' Map Insight and TomTom's MapShare.
(I don't have an iPhone and don't want one, aside from the fact that they're not available in Canada anyway
A little more related to GLONASS, there's COMPASS, the global positioning system of China. It's first satellite was successfully launched last February.
Here I provided (shameless but informative plug) news on Europe's Galileo, which somehow solved their important funding problems. As for GLONASS, Putin himself clearly stated he wants GLONASS back to full speed.
Anyone avid of GPS-related news is welcomed here (this is the GPS topic on Slashgeo, yeah, a plug, but hey, it's right on topic no? And there's no ads whatsoever
Hi, this is a mee too post. Power Grid and Puerto Rico were a revelation to me in the sense of the surprising and positive evolution of boardgames since my childhood. I really like it when no luck is involved. Those two games, not related to war or killing anyone, are somewhat girlfriend-friendly (well, at least my wife enjoyed Puerto Rico while she's not the game type of girl at all).
I haven't tried Ra, I'll look it out at your advice. I can tell you about Iliade which is very good and has the advantage of being relatively short (a full game in much less than an hour).
have fun
I mostly agree with you.
I'm surprised no one on the thread (that I found) emphasize on the applications. At work I'm on Debian, but at home, it's Leopard. I *want* to switch to Ubuntu, but sorry, the iApps have no equivalent to my knowledge. The ability to use the same multimedia files from iPhoto, to iMovie, to Mail, to iWeb, etc make the significant difference. I don't doubt both Ubuntu/Leopard are "good" OS, but as a customer, that's not what matters, what matters is the overall experience in regards to my needs. In my case, the iApps are an important part of my use of a computer.
(otherwise, I'm a fan of Spotlight, but there's Beagle on Linux which (more or less) does the same thing)
A few other very interesting features were released this week for Google Maps... and I'm sorry that this story is all we got on /. so far. Here's a copy from the site in my sig.
Google Maps Adds Terrain
Google Lat Lon Blog announces the addition of terrain to their free Google Maps site. In addition to adding the Terrain button, they've removed the Hybrid button. They explain, "You may notice in this screenshot that the handy "Hybrid" button, which shows satellite images overlaid with labels and roads, seems to have gone missing. Don't worry -- this view can now be accessed by clicking the "Satellite" button and checking the "Show labels" check box that will appear under the "Satellite" button."
New Google Maps Features Launched Including Collaborative Mapping
In addition to the important new terrain layer announced yesterday, Google Maps received a few significant updates, first, Google Maps searches are now providing a thumbnail of the related street view photo, second, the My Maps feature somehow becomes Our Maps, allowing to collaborate directly on someone else's My Maps, this has a lot of potential of getting big, and last, you can more easily share KML and KMZ files and GeoRSS feeds through My Maps. From the Our Maps announcement: "Just click the "Collaborate" link and enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite. They'll receive an email invitation with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they should be able to edit it, as long as they are signed into a Google Account that's associated with that email address. You can also open your map to the world so anyone can edit it by selecting the "Allow anyone to edit this map" checkbox."
Hi, nice to find another cringing from light fellow. I admit I'm not aware of everything that goes on with the variants. But even if Vanilla "kicked off again", it has no major release since May 2002. As for your Unangband variant, never tried it or heard of it (I'm no reference here, just a man who used to love Moria/Angband, maybe I'm the one on the side of the track not knowing about your variant... :-). ToME is doublessly more advanced than Angband, that's why I was "redirecting" potential new players to a "modern" variant instead of the old Vanilla :-)
(and to answer the anonymous coward who replied to my parent post, OSM is the best map crowdsourcing project, no one said it's the best map project)
NAVTEQ's MapReporter tool to submit updates to NAVTEQ's data by the casual user, Tele Atlas' Map Insight and TomTom's MapShare. But I won't lie, the best map crowdsourcing project is doubtlessly OpenStreetMap.org
Thanks first for the opportunity. Montréal's Slash party was nice. Maybe we were about 25 slash enthusiasts at the climax. Here's my summary right after the party (with alcohol still running in my veins): "Interesting to see a sample of Slashdot readers. Most were very friendly, some were rather shy (as we expect nerds to be?), some were "older" but some were also very young! And the discussions about 1.5D, 2.5D, 3.5D, surfing in Hawifi, this North Korean drum-driven CD and three-way code merge were definitely worthy of a Slash-like party, and that barmaid reading the Slash book. Yeah. We should have more of this. Life still has surprises. Thanks."
:-)
One of the pictures on Picasa web album is a barmaid which accepted to play our game and be photographed while faking reading the cryptic "Running web logs with Slash" book (I happen to run a small slash-based website, that's why a bought a copy of the book). As good slash users, pictures were copied on the web even as the event occurred by people at the party
Some info. GPS receivers, which most of them use U.S. 'GPS' satellites -and- Russian GLONASS satellites (and eventually Europe's GALILEO and China's COMPASS 'GPS' systems), don't really have multiple spatial resolutions, only one. But yes, there are differences. In the article's case, they mix it with other spatial data to get a better precision. The other options are rather simple. With a simple GPS, since the Clinton administration removed the voluntary signal noise (called selective availability), anyone gets about 18m accuracy (xy, coz in z, the spa rez is lower). But, if you live in North America, most modern GPS receivers are WAAS compatible and provides a spa rez of about 4m.
Now, how can you improve accuracy to higher levels? You can do DGPS. This will suit most needs. But, it can get even better, using the phase of the GPS signal and not the content of the signal itself, you can get an accuracy of 2mm !!! Yes, that's true and great, useful to monitor bridges (movements due to wind, traffic, temperature) at high resolution as friend did for his PhD. The caveat with these techniques is that they require serious post-processing (well, that was the case a few year ago, maybe this changed?) so there's no such thing as "real-time freaking high resolution GPS", but there is "real freaking high resolution GPS" geolocation possible. (and to finish with a shameless plug, see sig for news on that kind of stuff)
The official Google Lat Lon blog gives some more info, but also interesting are the Google Earth Blog showing us how to overlay the smoke plumes in Google Earth using MODIS and GOES data and here's more and even a time animation which illustrates the spread of the fire.