Don't know if it's been said before, but I for one am grateful for the daily compilation of stories, delivered to my inbox. It keeps me in touch with what's going on, even if I don't have the time to venture to the website - and I can duck out of moderation/meta-moderation without actually making myself unavailalbe;-)
As far as I know, radio waves and light propogate at the same speed, approx 186,000 miles/sec. The speed gain is in the higher frequency mentioned in the article, allowing greater data throughput, or bandwidth as you put it (from the article):
"Because of the shorter wavelength, lasers can transmit more data than radio signals in the same period of time. Lasers can also be far more accurately aligned with the receiver than radio waves, and therefore require less power for data transmission."
I don't understand how it is that we get a story like this, set in Middle America... reported by an English newspaper. Isn't there something just a little suspicious there? Or is it just too small a story for the USA papers to bother with? Or is Dept. of Homeland Security controlling the US press... back in a minute, there's a knock at the doo.......
The existence of a company as a legal entity does not make it a person, just an entity capable of owning property. The only "personhood" involved is the share-holders (however far removed through holding companies) and they are the only persons who can decide who gets to "inherit upon death of the owner"... a company cannot.
So, whether a robot or a company... it's still doesn't have as many property rights as a human being. Maybe you should'nt have believed what you saw in "The Bi-centenial Man".
For some years now, I've been able to buy the end-of-life hardware from the Government office I work for. Best deal I ever got was a Pentium 2 - 400mhz Compaq for $33.00... complete with keyboard, mouse, monitor the lot. I already had a retail copy of Windows ME, so the PC currently running it got shelved, and that's where the Windows ME went. That disc cost me $220.00.
Do the math... did I buy another copy of Windows for the next PC I got? That was the point where I decided it was time to try running only Linux on my great purchases from the office.
I'm typing this on a HP d530 with a 2.8 ghz Pentium D chip, 512MB RAM that cost me $185.00 : running Ubuntu 7.04 for maximum value:-) The same is going to apply for new hardware, if it is possible to buy without Windows being already installed, as long as people know about the possibility. I'm telling anyone who will listen. And Dell is now selling PCs and laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled!
Back in the day when I got my first sparkling new Windows PC, it had this great feature called an address book, built in and waiting eagerly to save all the email addresses of the friends I sent email to. At the same time I got that Windows PC onto the internet by the new modern 32kb/sec dialup connection I had, I was hearing/reading about how viruses could be used to "read" the contents of my address book for infecting/spamming purposes.
So I never used it.
I apply the same principle to web browsers of all flavours which offer to "save" my passwords. Not hard is it? If you really, seriously can't remember UID/Passwords for websites, keep a small notebook handy (and safe).
We had a branch of ACS (Australian Computer Society) here, and it was abandoned after there were no nominations for the Executive positions two years running.
The idea of a micro-lug was brought up in the Linux Australia mailing list, and I suspect if I try anything here in the distant coastal city I live in (on the coast of Queensland), it will be that. I've already got a "gmail address" for it! But that email address might be all there ever is to prove it's existence. If push comes to shove, and I actually get a response, I guess I can demo with a laptop, or hold a meeting in my living room. I've been talking about Linux for a couple of years now, to anyone who'll listen, and I've actually got the attention of four people...
I work for a government office, that receives documents that must have a date&time stamp of receipt for legal reasons.
Back in the 90's the department set up a networked computer system all controlled by a server in a secured site in our capital city. The particular brand of server had a hardware clock reset button, common for a 'nix box in those days.
A couple of years after all this started, one day I got a label printed with the time shown as 00:12. I didn't think anything of it at first, until I realised the date underneath was something like 01/01/1980 I paniced, talked to my manager then phoned HQ to advise them what I'd seen...
Needless to say it took 2 days of a few hundred general staff sitting on their hands waiting, before the whole mess could be sorted by the IT people, and management could figure out a work around for the hundreds of documents received statewide, in the 20 minutes or so it took to tell everyone "Stop taking documents!".
I heard later that someone, who should have known better, had wondered "What does that button do?" and tried it out.
I suggested this to someone the other day : if you get an unsolicited fax, and it has the originating number on the top edge, send a reply.
Make sure it's on an extra long piece of paper, and once the leading edge feeds out of the scanner, flip it back over and sticky tape it to the bottom edge... to form a loop.
No idea how well it would work, but it's possible you could use up quite a lot of their paper before they cut it off, maybe a whole roll if you sent it in the middle of the night.
There was a news story on TV here in Australia, about one or the other political parties proposing a ban on incandescent bulbs. Yeah, we have a Federal election this year. I had a think about that, and realised we didn't have a single incandescent bulb in any light fitting in the house, except for the refigerator. Every light fitting including my desktop lamp, has a CFL (aside from two flourescent tube fittings in kitchen and laundry). I bought them because I got sick and tired of changing burnt out incandescents. I bought two LED bulb torches, one about 2 years ago (3 or 4 sets of batteries), one last year (no battery change yet). I don't care what GE does about developing incandescent technology, if they can't match that sort of life-span/convenience. If the refrigerator light burns out, I'll have to hand the little man inside a candle and matches!
The roll-out of PayTV has been picking up speed over the last 3 or 4 years, here in Australia. Hell, it's even reached me, here out in the "boondocks". So, is it really any surprise that shows are being delayed longer and longer? The people installing satellite dishes or cable come around more often than the new shows!
5 minutes is too short a time, all you could really do is hand over a LiveCD and hope they know how to get it to boot.
I work in a Government office, where we have the opportunity to buy the "end of life" hardware that is no longer under warranty, and so replaced. Because of the contract the state government has with MS, the hard discs are wiped clean. The software is NOT transferable. Anytime I get one, I install Linux. But when my colleagues get one, they want to know where they can get their hands on a copy of Windows.
Recently a Public Folder was setup for "advertising" of items offered for private sale between staff. So, I had a brain-wave and put up an add, targeted at the winners of this "blank PC" lottery, asking "Wondering where you can get your hands on a copy of Windows? Wondering how much you'll have to pay?... Why Bother?" and so on.
I've had one taker, who walked up to me at my desk and dropped a dollar in my hand (CD replacement cost) and said "Funny you should mention Linux, I was just looking at a website..." This happened the day I posted the "advertisement"!
I'm hoping for some repeat trade, when the next "lottery" occurs... especially with the price of Vista!
I'll go out on a limb and say, it doesn't matter how educated OR stupid your users are, there's more involved than just the software or the people using it. The developer I read (down the page) who's "not allowed to visit the end users" is working blind. The people who have complained "end users don't know what they want" and "end users don't ask for the right things, then complain they didn't get what they asked for" are missing the point that the end users did not understand the question, especially as to it's scope.
How far can you get if you don't know what they do, and they don't know what you can do for them?
I work for a government department here in Queensland Australia, and amongst my fellows I'm a bit of a "computer geek". As we've used the same system since 1994 (with mods/improvement) even the most disinterested of my colleagues has developed a strong understanding of how to operate the mission critical client/server database application that we all use for our most important duties.
My knowledge of email, the web etc has rubbed off on all of them to the extent that I now sometimes have to clamp my mouth shut and listen for a couple of minutes when one of them is explaining something to someone else... because they do get it right in the end, they just don't explain it the way I do. Occasionally, I can help to straighten someone out on an especially tricky job, and they know who to ask!
They don't let me train someone new to the section because my view of our systems is extremely tech centric, and our work requires strong knowledge of correct procedures and some law. They need to know what to do and when to do it... and just exactly how far we can go! The computer systems are only a part of that.
To get to the finely tuned state we are in has taken over 20 years of testing, trialling software, using a reduced initial system that did only part of the job... and we recently held "think tank" meetings across the state to see if anyone could suggest ways to improve things, parts of the system that were no longer needed, parts that could be "short-circuited" without impacting the legal and procedural requirements we are all bound by. It was deemed a resounding success, with many RFCs generated!
Perhaps all developers need to be dragged back to the days of "flowcharts" as a developmental tool, so as to build in the actual function/business that the user carries out into the program. And the flowcharts have to be drawn up at meetings with users, not managers unless they promise to sit quietly at the back of the room and make a maximum of one sensible suggestion per hour.
Like for example win32pad, a notepad replacement: http://www.gena01.com/win32pad/ Just forget word and/or pretty formatting for a few days, and learn to spell!
So these people have descended from - putting every minute detail of their lives on MySpace, to prove they have one, - to buying the appearance of having lots of really great friends, to prove they have some.
I'm so glad I have enough dignity to avoid such crap, even if I don't actually have either a life or friends.
on a 8cm CD-R, so I can fit it in my pocket. I also built my own CD-R (again a 8cm disc) with AVG antivirus, Mozilla Firefox, Open Office 2, Acrobat reader etc install files. It's jam-packed, but I simply copy files off the CD when people say "my [name of software] doesn't work any more".
I work in a government office (Queensland, Australia) and we are in a semi-cubicle, semi-open plan environment. We have work spaces based on 5 to 10 people working in a particular "functional section" of the office, but with easy access to all other parts of the office, and corridors between them if you're simply trying to escape.
Though this might seem like an opportunity to suffer all the worst aspects of both, it's actually quite good, and does reduce noise & interference... while allowing some interaction, at least with the taller members of other sections!
To me the very phrasing of the suggested "alternatives" is discrimination against people who are not religious.
I hear about people being discriminated against for some aspect of their life-style or their actual bodily shape/colour/type all the time.
I've never heard anyone acknowledge that to someone who does not follow a religion, being called an atheist or agnostic, is a slight on their choice to follow principles of ethics and morality on purely logical or legal grounds.
What they believe or how they choose to believe is being defined simply as "not believing in God" or "not accepting the form of God accepted in most religions".
So why has Scott Adams put forward Bill Gates as an "atheist" candidate for the US presidency, and not a word of protest on those grounds in any post I've read?
From the article: The Internet Industry Association, which claimed last week that singing Happy Birthday could result in a $6600 fine, has already been forced to back down, admitting it got that example wrong because the song was not copyrighted in Australia.
Because when all the PCs of my workmates failed to come out of hibernate/suspend mode, then the network connections failed as well... the IT officers and I would get very heated, thereby taxing the air-conditioning to the point of overload!
Add to that a ban on touching a computer of any sort (a la Kevin Mitnick's 5 year ban), but in the case of a spammer, make it for life, with a years prison time per keystroke!
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know if it's been said before, but I for one am grateful for the daily compilation of stories, delivered to my inbox. ;-)
It keeps me in touch with what's going on, even if I don't have the time to venture to the website - and I can duck out of moderation/meta-moderation without actually making myself unavailalbe
(Only when pressed for time, honest!)
Without a space-suit? Quick, somebody "leak" the story to them!
As far as I know, radio waves and light propogate at the same speed, approx 186,000 miles/sec.
The speed gain is in the higher frequency mentioned in the article, allowing greater data throughput,
or bandwidth as you put it (from the article):
"Because of the shorter wavelength, lasers can transmit more data than radio signals in the same period of time.
Lasers can also be far more accurately aligned with the receiver than radio waves, and therefore require less power
for data transmission."
"Maybe public education should include classes in Critical Analysis of Ad Claims 101 and Weasel Word Composition"
... say until age 30. That should stick in their minds.
Nah, just teach Cynicism 101 throughout any childs developing years
I don't understand how it is that we get a story like this, set in Middle America ... reported by an English newspaper. Isn't there something just a little suspicious there? Or is it just too small a story for the USA papers to bother with? Or is Dept. of Homeland Security controlling the US press ... back in a minute, there's a knock at the doo .......
The existence of a company as a legal entity does not make it a person, just an entity capable of owning property. ... a company cannot.
... it's still doesn't have as many property rights as a human being.
The only "personhood" involved is the share-holders (however far removed through holding companies) and they are the only persons who can decide who gets to "inherit upon death of the owner"
So, whether a robot or a company
Maybe you should'nt have believed what you saw in "The Bi-centenial Man".
For some years now, I've been able to buy the end-of-life hardware from the Government office I work for. Best deal I ever got was a Pentium 2 - 400mhz Compaq for $33.00 ... complete with keyboard, mouse, monitor the lot. I already had a retail copy of Windows ME, so the PC currently running it got shelved, and that's where the Windows ME went. That disc cost me $220.00.
... did I buy another copy of Windows for the next PC I got? That was the point where I decided it was time to try running only Linux on my great purchases from the office.
:-)
Do the math
I'm typing this on a HP d530 with a 2.8 ghz Pentium D chip, 512MB RAM that cost me $185.00 : running Ubuntu 7.04 for maximum value
The same is going to apply for new hardware, if it is possible to buy without Windows being already installed, as long as people know about the possibility. I'm telling anyone who will listen. And Dell is now selling PCs and laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled!
Back in the day when I got my first sparkling new Windows PC, it had this great feature called an address book, built in and waiting eagerly to save all the email addresses of the friends I sent email to. At the same time I got that Windows PC onto the internet by the new modern 32kb/sec dialup connection I had, I was hearing/reading about how viruses could be used to "read" the contents of my address book for infecting/spamming purposes.
So I never used it.
I apply the same principle to web browsers of all flavours which offer to "save" my passwords. Not hard is it?
If you really, seriously can't remember UID/Passwords for websites, keep a small notebook handy (and safe).
We had a branch of ACS (Australian Computer Society) here, and it was abandoned after there were no nominations for the Executive positions two years running.
...
The idea of a micro-lug was brought up in the Linux Australia mailing list, and I suspect if I try anything here in the distant coastal city I live in (on the coast of Queensland), it will be that.
I've already got a "gmail address" for it! But that email address might be all there ever is to prove it's existence.
If push comes to shove, and I actually get a response, I guess I can demo with a laptop, or hold a meeting in my living room. I've been talking about Linux for a couple of years now, to anyone who'll listen, and I've actually got the attention of four people
I work for a government office, that receives documents that must have a date&time stamp of receipt for legal reasons.
...
Back in the 90's the department set up a networked computer system all controlled by a server in a secured site in our capital city.
The particular brand of server had a hardware clock reset button, common for a 'nix box in those days.
A couple of years after all this started, one day I got a label printed with the time shown as 00:12.
I didn't think anything of it at first, until I realised the date underneath was something like 01/01/1980
I paniced, talked to my manager then phoned HQ to advise them what I'd seen
Needless to say it took 2 days of a few hundred general staff sitting on their hands waiting, before the whole mess could be sorted by the IT people, and management could figure out a work around for the hundreds of documents received statewide, in the 20 minutes or so it took to tell everyone "Stop taking documents!".
I heard later that someone, who should have known better, had wondered "What does that button do?" and tried it out.
I suggested this to someone the other day : if you get an unsolicited fax, and it has the originating number on the top edge, send a reply.
... to form a loop.
Make sure it's on an extra long piece of paper, and once the leading edge feeds out of the scanner, flip it back over and sticky tape it to the bottom edge
No idea how well it would work, but it's possible you could use up quite a lot of their paper before they cut it off, maybe a whole roll if you sent it in the middle of the night.
I'll never get them to use Linux, dammit!
There was a news story on TV here in Australia, about one or the other political parties proposing a ban on incandescent bulbs.
Yeah, we have a Federal election this year.
I had a think about that, and realised we didn't have a single incandescent bulb in any light fitting in the house, except for the refigerator.
Every light fitting including my desktop lamp, has a CFL (aside from two flourescent tube fittings in kitchen and laundry).
I bought them because I got sick and tired of changing burnt out incandescents.
I bought two LED bulb torches, one about 2 years ago (3 or 4 sets of batteries), one last year (no battery change yet).
I don't care what GE does about developing incandescent technology, if they can't match that sort of life-span/convenience.
If the refrigerator light burns out, I'll have to hand the little man inside a candle and matches!
The roll-out of PayTV has been picking up speed over the last 3 or 4 years, here in Australia.
Hell, it's even reached me, here out in the "boondocks".
So, is it really any surprise that shows are being delayed longer and longer?
The people installing satellite dishes or cable come around more often than the new shows!
5 minutes is too short a time, all you could really do is hand over a LiveCD and hope they know how to get it to boot.
... Why Bother?" and so on.
..." This happened the day I posted the "advertisement"!
... especially with the price of Vista!
I work in a Government office, where we have the opportunity to buy the "end of life" hardware that is no longer under warranty, and so replaced.
Because of the contract the state government has with MS, the hard discs are wiped clean. The software is NOT transferable.
Anytime I get one, I install Linux. But when my colleagues get one, they want to know where they can get their hands on a copy of Windows.
Recently a Public Folder was setup for "advertising" of items offered for private sale between staff. So, I had a brain-wave and put up an add, targeted at the winners of this "blank PC" lottery, asking "Wondering where you can get your hands on a copy of Windows? Wondering how much you'll have to pay?
I've had one taker, who walked up to me at my desk and dropped a dollar in my hand (CD replacement cost) and said "Funny you should mention Linux, I was just looking at a website
I'm hoping for some repeat trade, when the next "lottery" occurs
I'll go out on a limb and say, it doesn't matter how educated OR stupid your users are, there's more involved than just the software or the people using it.
... because they do get it right in the end, they just don't explain it the way I do. Occasionally, I can help to straighten someone out on an especially tricky job, and they know who to ask!
... and just exactly how far we can go! The computer systems are only a part of that.
... and we recently held "think tank" meetings across the state to see if anyone could suggest ways to improve things, parts of the system that were no longer needed, parts that could be "short-circuited" without impacting the legal and procedural requirements we are all bound by. It was deemed a resounding success, with many RFCs generated!
The developer I read (down the page) who's "not allowed to visit the end users" is working blind.
The people who have complained "end users don't know what they want" and "end users don't ask for the right things, then complain they didn't get what they asked for" are missing the point that the end users did not understand the question, especially as to it's scope.
How far can you get if you don't know what they do, and they don't know what you can do for them?
I work for a government department here in Queensland Australia, and amongst my fellows I'm a bit of a "computer geek".
As we've used the same system since 1994 (with mods/improvement) even the most disinterested of my colleagues has developed a strong understanding of how to operate the mission critical client/server database application that we all use for our most important duties.
My knowledge of email, the web etc has rubbed off on all of them to the extent that I now sometimes have to clamp my mouth shut and listen for a couple of minutes when one of them is explaining something to someone else
They don't let me train someone new to the section because my view of our systems is extremely tech centric, and our work requires strong knowledge of correct procedures and some law. They need to know what to do and when to do it
To get to the finely tuned state we are in has taken over 20 years of testing, trialling software, using a reduced initial system that did only part of the job
Perhaps all developers need to be dragged back to the days of "flowcharts" as a developmental tool, so as to build in the actual function/business that the user carries out into the program. And the flowcharts have to be drawn up at meetings with users, not managers unless they promise to sit quietly at the back of the room and make a maximum of one sensible suggestion per hour.
Like for example win32pad, a notepad replacement:
http://www.gena01.com/win32pad/
Just forget word and/or pretty formatting for a few days, and learn to spell!
So these people have descended from
- putting every minute detail of their lives on MySpace, to prove they have one,
- to buying the appearance of having lots of really great friends, to prove they have some.
I'm so glad I have enough dignity to avoid such crap, even if I don't actually have either a life or friends.
on a 8cm CD-R, so I can fit it in my pocket. I also built my own CD-R (again a 8cm disc) with AVG antivirus, Mozilla Firefox, Open Office 2, Acrobat reader etc install files. It's jam-packed, but I simply copy files off the CD when people say "my [name of software] doesn't work any more".
I work in a government office (Queensland, Australia) and we are in a semi-cubicle, semi-open plan environment. We have work spaces based on 5 to 10 people working in a particular "functional section" of the office, but with easy access to all other parts of the office, and corridors between them if you're simply trying to escape.
... while allowing some interaction, at least with the taller members of other sections!
Though this might seem like an opportunity to suffer all the worst aspects of both, it's actually quite good, and does reduce noise & interference
To me the very phrasing of the suggested "alternatives" is discrimination against people who are not religious.
I hear about people being discriminated against for some aspect of their life-style or their actual bodily shape/colour/type all the time.
I've never heard anyone acknowledge that to someone who does not follow a religion, being called an atheist or agnostic, is a slight on their choice to follow principles of ethics and morality on purely logical or legal grounds.
What they believe or how they choose to believe is being defined simply as "not believing in God" or "not accepting the form of God accepted in most religions".
So why has Scott Adams put forward Bill Gates as an "atheist" candidate for the US presidency, and not a word of protest on those grounds in any post I've read?
Poddies still crooks under copyright law, by Simon Hayes, The Australian Newspaper0 792269%5E27317%5E%5Enbv%5E15306-15319,00.html
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,2
From the article:
The Internet Industry Association, which claimed last week that singing Happy Birthday could result in a $6600 fine, has already been forced to back down, admitting it got that example wrong because the song was not copyrighted in Australia.
Because when all the PCs of my workmates failed to come out of hibernate/suspend mode, then the network connections failed as well ... the IT officers and I would get very heated, thereby taxing the air-conditioning to the point of overload!
Add to that a ban on touching a computer of any sort (a la Kevin Mitnick's 5 year ban), but in the case of a spammer, make it for life, with a years prison time per keystroke!
Fled, in terror, into another cosmos.
(Yeah, yeah, it's trite, but I love my scifi.)