Given the uneasiness that people have about hydrogen canisters and potential explosions, does anyone else think it is a bit odd that the promo shots feature exploding "Coming Soon!" signs?
...and since max sustained data rate from most hard drives is about 40MB/s, unless you are using raid it does not really make that much difference how fast your drive bus is.
A non moose cow's "UI with security" commandments:
1. Use logical security defaults. Users should not be burdened with security issues unless they want to be.
2. If a user chooses to look at or modify their security settings, options should be kept simple through massive abstraction, but should intuitively depict the meaning of the settings
3. All aspects of the UI should function the same way regardless of security settings.
Well, I tried to come up with more.. but that pretty much covers it. I guess I could make another list of "logical security defaults". That would be things like: If a remote entity requests a secure transaction, it should be granted without local user interaction.
The other points in the "10 principles" list really either don't apply to security or don't apply to the UI.
******
Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie-Roll Pop?
These "10 principles" are fair as a whole, but it seems like they were more concerned with making the number of principles be 10 than they were with making the principles be unique, distinct, and useful.
look at how similar these are:
--Visibility. The interface should allow the user to easily review any active actors and authority relationships that would affect security-relevant decisions.
--Identifiability. The interface should enforce that distinct objects and distinct actions have unspoofably identifiable and distinguishable representations.
It would be very difficult to follow one of these without following the other by default. Then when you get to the principle of Expressiveness you get a two-fer.
Most of the principles overlap so badly into each other that I'm not sure how they decided to draw the lines.
I guess they were going for some "magic number" that would feel powerful... like the 10 commandmants. I would be embarassed to have my name associated with that list.
"in essence - life first, cells second and the atmosphere playing a role"
Is this right? The accepted theories for the origin of cells are based on life first, then cells? WTF does that mean? Without cells, how do you define "life"?
(the following is a slightly modified email that I sent to the people who did the study. I did get a response, but I will not post it since I didn't ask for permission.)
******
It occured to me that this is only interesting because of the very large number of potentially affected people. If the same study was done about filtering in the country of, say, Morocco, I probably would not have bothered to read it. As such, I feel that the analysis sort of begs the question. How many people in China actually have Internet access, and what parts of the society are they in?
If only 1% of the country uses the Web on a regular basis, and 90% of those are "well to do", then the filtering has much less significance because the potential impact of Internet access is already minimalized.
(I have made the assumption that "well to do" citizens are less likely to want to modify the status quo, meaning that Web content would have minimal impact on their actions, filtered or not.)
Does an increase in filtering correalate in any way to an increase in Chinese Internet users?...Or perhaps to an increase of users in a particular layer of Chinese society?
******
(The gist of the response was that the study was not concerned with any implications of the filtering, just the filtering itself.)
I can get rid of my floppy/zip DOS bootup combo with its freakish combo of memory managers and drivers. I spent two days putting this jerry rig together just so I could reminisce.
Fine, I accept that they have the ability to show me ads based on what I am listening to on the radio. What does that tell them about me? I see a few big problems with this concept...
1. People are forcefully aggregated into classes of stereotypes based on a radio station. If someone listens to country music, and the result is that they only ever see ads for pickup trucks and farm equipment on billboards that claim to "know them", I think that they might get a bit pissed after a while.
2. What does a radio station actually tell about me? the only stratification I can really see is age... the music for the young kids that can't drive yet, and the music of older people. Personally, I have presets for EVERYTHING. I listen to R&B, classic rock, classical, alternative, country, talk-radio, and sometimes I even listen to the aural assult of the young-kid stations. (what I would really like is an ambient groove station) So which ad is appropriate for me, and how would they know?
3. The ads will not be personalized for "me". They will be personalized to the strongest signal that the billboard gets from the passersby, i.e. the average for the current group of traffic. How often would this average station actually change? Wouldn't it be easily defined by the demographic of the neighborhoods around that region of the freeway? Don't regular billboards already do this? Whenever I drive through the "not so great" areas of Dallas, I see an abundance of ads for planned parenthood and the like. If these were the magic "I know you" billboards, it is unlikely that my one car playing classical music would have enough signal to override the predominant signal in that area. (And if it did, I would be in fear for my life as some snooty opera advertisement pops up and everyone starts looking for the guy who is in the wrong neighborhood).
I guess if I was looking for an advantage, if you had a bunch of these things all over the country, then you could just upload your stereotype-based ads to a nationwide database, and the billboards automatically pick the ad for their area based on their data. You could skip the process of geographic demographic data collection. I doubt many people will ever actually see the board change for them as they drive by.
Talking head: Sony has finally opened it's aural decoder implant clinics across the U.S. The long awaited clinics are expected to be very popular among audiophiles who have been deprived of all music for the last 7 years due to confusing incompatabilities in technology.
The new implant chips allow an encoded stream of music data to remain encoded until it actually enters the human brain, where the chip turns the data into high fidelity music. One music industry spokesperson states, "These implants will be a great benefit to society. We can essentially save the public from itself by preventing people from becoming thieves. "Sharing" music with a friend hurts society because the government makes less money on tax revenues that would be realized from an actual purchase of music."
The implants work by being uniquely coded for each individual. If a person wishes to hear music from a particular artist, they register their ID to buy the album, and their own personally encoded copy will be made available for purchase via download or through UPS. Of course, because of the wide range of music available, the customer must have the appropriate implants installed. Implants that enable a person to hear music of the current decade are expected to be the most expensive, and to be less expensive for older decades. For example, implants that enable the listening of music from the 1970's are expected to cost around $320 USD.
The current issue facing the music industry is the public outcry about the secondary ability of the implants to automatically accept advertising broadcasts from wireless networks.
...In other news, the Transmeta purchase of Microsoft has been approved by...
Ok, so let's say that Verizon does arguably have some sort of "right" to use personal information of their customers.
Let's also say that consumers certainly have the right to not allow some other entity to use their personal data.
Let's say that those rights are equal in the eye of the law.
Let's say that the weight of the rights of the entity 'Verizon' is equal to the number of people that make up that entity (all Verizon employees and shareholders).
Let's say that the weight of the rights of the Verizon customer base is equal to the number of those customers
Now, put one group on each side of a balance scale.
Two questions:
Who would have more weight?
Who should have more weight?
1. If I want to be able to control these things remotely, why would I want to be restricted to a 1 block radius?
2. What if something you want to interact with needs more than just a tap and drag interface? You will need to lug around a keyboard with the monitor.
If I wanted to make one of these, I would just take a 5 year old laptop, remove the keyboard and affix a touch screen where the keyboard was, but facing out. Install a wireless lan card. Configure it to only run Microsoft Terminal Server to my desktop machine. Wow!! A remote wireless touch-screen display!!
I do like the ideas you listed, but I think the implementation of something like this will eventually be realized in another, less direct way.
I'd like to see how well these new displays handle a game of Unreal.
Ok, so I take a seat in the campus computer lab. They have just installed these marvels of market coersion wireless screens.
1. Instead of comfortably resting my hand over the mouse I have to do John Madden calesthenics to move things around on the screen "Boom!"
2. I don't really know if the screen I'm looking at is actually showing me the image from the computer where I am sitting.
3. I discover that it doesn't really matter that I am not looking at "my" computer, as long as nobody else sees the one I am using... until I try to use the keyboard.
4. It's all OK because although I'm not using my computer, I have a wireless keyboard, and it happens to be typing on the computer whose image I'm seeing.
5. I notice while I'm using this computer, that there is a lot of personalized stuff, and in fact I am using the computer of my accounting professor from his office on the floor below. I sneekily email his next test to myself.
6. Feeling smug about the test, I finish typing my report, print it, and reset my station, inadvertently destroying the work of a really cute girl on the other side of the lab.
7. While waiting at the printer for an unusually long time, I realize that my report with my name on it has just been printed on my accounting professors personal laserjet... in his office.
8. Feeling less smug about the test, I wonder to myself... When did computers start to suck so bad?
At first I thought, "Wow, Avon has changed. I wonder what other cool stuff they have." But after looking through their site, they really only have this cool joystick, and tons of their stereotypical old fru-fru creams perfumes and crap. A magnetic dart-board and a stuffed SpongeBob is about as good as it gets.
It makes me leery of buying the joystick from them, but I did it anyway. (crossing my fingers)
... If Dell is doing this without the expectation of making lots of money. I think they see PDAs becoming more mainstream every year, and they are getting their feet wet now just so they don't have to play catch-up in a couple of years.
End users should have the leisure of clicking through software liscense agreements without reading them. These agreements were designed to protect the software companies from legal action by end users.
If this intent is to remain intact, end users need to be able to click through EULAs with the mental summary of, "Yeah, Yeah, whatever, I promise not to abuse your software or sue you frivolously", instead of "I wonder if I just allowed a software company to use my computer and my data any way they see fit".
This is not enforcable, any more than if you clicked through a EULA that "permitted" a company to have the contents of your refrigerator. No rational judge could agree that a EULA is designed for the purpose of giving a company the rights to use your property as they wish.
The EULA is a device intended to protect a software company from abuses by the customer. It is not intended as a permission slip that lets the software company do as they wish to the end user or their property (upon clicking "I agree" the user acknowledges that they must "bend over and take it" both figuratively and literally. Upon personal visitation by a member of the board of BigSoft Co., end user must bend over and submit as the end to be user'd by said BigSoft Co.'s board member's BigHard member upon the board member's request.").
As stated, this "greeting card" company's End User Liscence Agreement is actually an SCLA, or Software Company's Liscense Agreement that was written on the customers behalf by the software company. How thoughtful of them.
Taking nazi, etc. content offline does not stop the proliferation of the actual practice of it. All it does is hide it from the public. Why should people not be allowed to look up information about something that they are curious about?
It seems that it would be much better for curious people to be able to read about these things in the safety of their own home, rather than having to attend a fan-club meeting about it. Generally I believe that people are smart enough to make decisions for themselves about ideas like anti-semitism, because the fools that believe in such ideas tend to represent themselves poorly. Apparently Germany and France do not think their citizens are smart enough to make their own decisions.
Personally, I occasionally visit Communist and Socialist web sites. I don't do this because I believe in either philosophy, but because I am curious about why other people believe in them. What this typically ends up doing is re-affirming my notion that these ideas are inherently flawed (I'm not trying to start a debate, this is just my opinion). If I could not reach web information about these ideas because my government prevented me from doing so, what am I supposed to think? Is the government hiding these sites from me because there is some merit in their ideas?
1. Go To Vegas
2. Look for sex
3. Lower your standards to such that you will sleep with anything slightly better looking than a Ferengi.
4. Roll in the raunchy poon-tang
5. Brag about your exploits on/.
6. Get moderated to 5 -informative
7. W.T.F. ?
Whats the ticker symbol for the company that makes those Star Trek masks??
Lots of talk here about event horizons. Since the idea of the event horizon is based on "the" speed of light, does "event horizon" really mean anything now that we know that the speed of light is not a constant?
It seems that to open the drawer, you first have to disconnect the monitors (although that doesn't explain why the vid card is gone).
Wish I could have been there the first time the drawer was opened after everything was plugged in. The look of horror on this guys face as his two flat-screens get yanked off the back of the desk.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the uneasiness that people have about hydrogen canisters and potential explosions, does anyone else think it is a bit odd that the promo shots feature exploding "Coming Soon!" signs?
Maybe they are just trying to be prophetic.
I did not mean to post that anonymously.
...and since max sustained data rate from most hard drives is about 40MB/s, unless you are using raid it does not really make that much difference how fast your drive bus is.
A non moose cow's "UI with security" commandments:
1. Use logical security defaults. Users should not be burdened with security issues unless they want to be.
2. If a user chooses to look at or modify their security settings, options should be kept simple through massive abstraction, but should intuitively depict the meaning of the settings
3. All aspects of the UI should function the same way regardless of security settings.
Well, I tried to come up with more.. but that pretty much covers it. I guess I could make another list of "logical security defaults". That would be things like: If a remote entity requests a secure transaction, it should be granted without local user interaction.
The other points in the "10 principles" list really either don't apply to security or don't apply to the UI.
******
Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie-Roll Pop?
These "10 principles" are fair as a whole, but it seems like they were more concerned with making the number of principles be 10 than they were with making the principles be unique, distinct, and useful.
look at how similar these are:
-- Visibility. The interface should allow the user to easily review any active actors and authority relationships that would affect security-relevant decisions.
--Identifiability. The interface should enforce that distinct objects and distinct actions have unspoofably identifiable and distinguishable representations.
It would be very difficult to follow one of these without following the other by default. Then when you get to the principle of Expressiveness you get a two-fer.
Most of the principles overlap so badly into each other that I'm not sure how they decided to draw the lines.
I guess they were going for some "magic number" that would feel powerful... like the 10 commandmants. I would be embarassed to have my name associated with that list.
"in essence - life first, cells second and the atmosphere playing a role"
Is this right? The accepted theories for the origin of cells are based on life first, then cells? WTF does that mean? Without cells, how do you define "life"?
(the following is a slightly modified email that I sent to the people who did the study. I did get a response, but I will not post it since I didn't ask for permission.)
...Or perhaps to an increase of users in a particular layer of Chinese society?
******
It occured to me that this is only interesting because of the very large number of potentially affected people. If the same study was done about filtering in the country of, say, Morocco, I probably would not have bothered to read it. As such, I feel that the analysis sort of begs the question. How many people in China actually have Internet access, and what parts of the society are they in?
If only 1% of the country uses the Web on a regular basis, and 90% of those are "well to do", then the filtering has much less significance because the potential impact of Internet access is already minimalized.
(I have made the assumption that "well to do" citizens are less likely to want to modify the status quo, meaning that Web content would have minimal impact on their actions, filtered or not.)
Does an increase in filtering correalate in any way to an increase in Chinese Internet users?
******
(The gist of the response was that the study was not concerned with any implications of the filtering, just the filtering itself.)
I can get rid of my floppy/zip DOS bootup combo with its freakish combo of memory managers and drivers. I spent two days putting this jerry rig together just so I could reminisce.
Fine, I accept that they have the ability to show me ads based on what I am listening to on the radio. What does that tell them about me? I see a few big problems with this concept...
1. People are forcefully aggregated into classes of stereotypes based on a radio station. If someone listens to country music, and the result is that they only ever see ads for pickup trucks and farm equipment on billboards that claim to "know them", I think that they might get a bit pissed after a while.
2. What does a radio station actually tell about me? the only stratification I can really see is age... the music for the young kids that can't drive yet, and the music of older people. Personally, I have presets for EVERYTHING. I listen to R&B, classic rock, classical, alternative, country, talk-radio, and sometimes I even listen to the aural assult of the young-kid stations. (what I would really like is an ambient groove station) So which ad is appropriate for me, and how would they know?
3. The ads will not be personalized for "me". They will be personalized to the strongest signal that the billboard gets from the passersby, i.e. the average for the current group of traffic. How often would this average station actually change? Wouldn't it be easily defined by the demographic of the neighborhoods around that region of the freeway? Don't regular billboards already do this? Whenever I drive through the "not so great" areas of Dallas, I see an abundance of ads for planned parenthood and the like. If these were the magic "I know you" billboards, it is unlikely that my one car playing classical music would have enough signal to override the predominant signal in that area. (And if it did, I would be in fear for my life as some snooty opera advertisement pops up and everyone starts looking for the guy who is in the wrong neighborhood).
I guess if I was looking for an advantage, if you had a bunch of these things all over the country, then you could just upload your stereotype-based ads to a nationwide database, and the billboards automatically pick the ad for their area based on their data. You could skip the process of geographic demographic data collection. I doubt many people will ever actually see the board change for them as they drive by.
not impressed.
10 Years From Now...
...In other news, the Transmeta purchase of Microsoft has been approved by...
Talking head: Sony has finally opened it's aural decoder implant clinics across the U.S. The long awaited clinics are expected to be very popular among audiophiles who have been deprived of all music for the last 7 years due to confusing incompatabilities in technology.
The new implant chips allow an encoded stream of music data to remain encoded until it actually enters the human brain, where the chip turns the data into high fidelity music. One music industry spokesperson states, "These implants will be a great benefit to society. We can essentially save the public from itself by preventing people from becoming thieves. "Sharing" music with a friend hurts society because the government makes less money on tax revenues that would be realized from an actual purchase of music."
The implants work by being uniquely coded for each individual. If a person wishes to hear music from a particular artist, they register their ID to buy the album, and their own personally encoded copy will be made available for purchase via download or through UPS. Of course, because of the wide range of music available, the customer must have the appropriate implants installed. Implants that enable a person to hear music of the current decade are expected to be the most expensive, and to be less expensive for older decades. For example, implants that enable the listening of music from the 1970's are expected to cost around $320 USD.
The current issue facing the music industry is the public outcry about the secondary ability of the implants to automatically accept advertising broadcasts from wireless networks.
What is their slogan?
"let Vonage ownage your phonage."?
Ok, so let's say that Verizon does arguably have some sort of "right" to use personal information of their customers.
Let's also say that consumers certainly have the right to not allow some other entity to use their personal data.
Let's say that those rights are equal in the eye of the law.
Let's say that the weight of the rights of the entity 'Verizon' is equal to the number of people that make up that entity (all Verizon employees and shareholders).
Let's say that the weight of the rights of the Verizon customer base is equal to the number of those customers
Now, put one group on each side of a balance scale.
Two questions:
Who would have more weight?
Who should have more weight?
I think your points are a bit short sighted.
1. If I want to be able to control these things remotely, why would I want to be restricted to a 1 block radius?
2. What if something you want to interact with needs more than just a tap and drag interface? You will need to lug around a keyboard with the monitor.
If I wanted to make one of these, I would just take a 5 year old laptop, remove the keyboard and affix a touch screen where the keyboard was, but facing out. Install a wireless lan card. Configure it to only run Microsoft Terminal Server to my desktop machine. Wow!! A remote wireless touch-screen display!!
I do like the ideas you listed, but I think the implementation of something like this will eventually be realized in another, less direct way.
I'd like to see how well these new displays handle a game of Unreal.
Ok, so I take a seat in the campus computer lab. They have just installed these marvels of market coersion wireless screens.
1. Instead of comfortably resting my hand over the mouse I have to do John Madden calesthenics to move things around on the screen "Boom!"
2. I don't really know if the screen I'm looking at is actually showing me the image from the computer where I am sitting.
3. I discover that it doesn't really matter that I am not looking at "my" computer, as long as nobody else sees the one I am using... until I try to use the keyboard.
4. It's all OK because although I'm not using my computer, I have a wireless keyboard, and it happens to be typing on the computer whose image I'm seeing.
5. I notice while I'm using this computer, that there is a lot of personalized stuff, and in fact I am using the computer of my accounting professor from his office on the floor below. I sneekily email his next test to myself.
6. Feeling smug about the test, I finish typing my report, print it, and reset my station, inadvertently destroying the work of a really cute girl on the other side of the lab.
7. While waiting at the printer for an unusually long time, I realize that my report with my name on it has just been printed on my accounting professors personal laserjet... in his office.
8. Feeling less smug about the test, I wonder to myself... When did computers start to suck so bad?
I hate this idea
I agree!
At first I thought, "Wow, Avon has changed. I wonder what other cool stuff they have." But after looking through their site, they really only have this cool joystick, and tons of their stereotypical old fru-fru creams perfumes and crap. A magnetic dart-board and a stuffed SpongeBob is about as good as it gets.
It makes me leery of buying the joystick from them, but I did it anyway. (crossing my fingers)
I just hope it doesn't smell like grandma.
... If Dell is doing this without the expectation of making lots of money. I think they see PDAs becoming more mainstream every year, and they are getting their feet wet now just so they don't have to play catch-up in a couple of years.
any thoughts?
I forgot to say...
End users should have the leisure of clicking through software liscense agreements without reading them. These agreements were designed to protect the software companies from legal action by end users.
If this intent is to remain intact, end users need to be able to click through EULAs with the mental summary of, "Yeah, Yeah, whatever, I promise not to abuse your software or sue you frivolously", instead of "I wonder if I just allowed a software company to use my computer and my data any way they see fit".
This is not enforcable, any more than if you clicked through a EULA that "permitted" a company to have the contents of your refrigerator. No rational judge could agree that a EULA is designed for the purpose of giving a company the rights to use your property as they wish.
The EULA is a device intended to protect a software company from abuses by the customer. It is not intended as a permission slip that lets the software company do as they wish to the end user or their property (upon clicking "I agree" the user acknowledges that they must "bend over and take it" both figuratively and literally. Upon personal visitation by a member of the board of BigSoft Co., end user must bend over and submit as the end to be user'd by said BigSoft Co.'s board member's BigHard member upon the board member's request.").
As stated, this "greeting card" company's End User Liscence Agreement is actually an SCLA, or Software Company's Liscense Agreement that was written on the customers behalf by the software company. How thoughtful of them.
Now that I have discovered HomeStarRunner, I can never hear mention of the game Adventure without thinking about this
I disagree.
Taking nazi, etc. content offline does not stop the proliferation of the actual practice of it. All it does is hide it from the public. Why should people not be allowed to look up information about something that they are curious about?
It seems that it would be much better for curious people to be able to read about these things in the safety of their own home, rather than having to attend a fan-club meeting about it. Generally I believe that people are smart enough to make decisions for themselves about ideas like anti-semitism, because the fools that believe in such ideas tend to represent themselves poorly. Apparently Germany and France do not think their citizens are smart enough to make their own decisions.
Personally, I occasionally visit Communist and Socialist web sites. I don't do this because I believe in either philosophy, but because I am curious about why other people believe in them. What this typically ends up doing is re-affirming my notion that these ideas are inherently flawed (I'm not trying to start a debate, this is just my opinion). If I could not reach web information about these ideas because my government prevented me from doing so, what am I supposed to think? Is the government hiding these sites from me because there is some merit in their ideas?
What prevents French people from just using Google.com ?
Thank you for the first lucid explanation of this that I have seen.
Im not sure what to call this list...
/.
1. Go To Vegas
2. Look for sex
3. Lower your standards to such that you will sleep with anything slightly better looking than a Ferengi.
4. Roll in the raunchy poon-tang
5. Brag about your exploits on
6. Get moderated to 5 -informative
7. W.T.F. ?
Whats the ticker symbol for the company that makes those Star Trek masks??
Lots of talk here about event horizons. Since the idea of the event horizon is based on "the" speed of light, does "event horizon" really mean anything now that we know that the speed of light is not a constant?
It seems that to open the drawer, you first have to disconnect the monitors (although that doesn't explain why the vid card is gone).
Wish I could have been there the first time the drawer was opened after everything was plugged in. The look of horror on this guys face as his two flat-screens get yanked off the back of the desk.