Re:TV Product Placement is Illegal
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Linux in Movies?
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· Score: 1
Actually, in the US product placement on television is prohibited under the FCC sponsorship identification requirements of 47 U.S.C. 317 and 508, and 47 C.F.R. 73.1211. My wife used to be Director of Marketing of a well known consumer goods manufacturer. She says that back in her day TV placement for gratis product was already common, but the shows didn't even ask for money, probably more because it devalued advertising slots than because they were afraid of the FCC. Apparently this is no longer the case.
Indeed it doesn't seem to be the case any more.
Over the summer, NBC ran a reality show called "The Restaraunt". This show was blatantly paid for by American Express, Coors, and Mitsubishi -- products from these companies would be gratuitously dropped into the show every few minutes, and most / all of the commercials were from these three names. But don't take my word for it.
The show got reasonably good ratings, which was fantastic for NBC: reality shows, with their convenient lack of professional writers & actors, are already much cheaper than traditional shows. Getting some companies to foot the relatively small bill just made it an even better deal for them. Even if the ratings were bad, the show would probably have been profitable, but the fact that it was successful meant that it's likely to be a trendsetter.
And indeed, this year's season of "24" is sponsored by Ford as a promotion for one of their trucks. Tonight's episode was bracketed by two extended length (five minute or so) commercials for Ford, the show was prefixed by a pitch for the product by Keifer Sutherland, and the truck showed up in the episode itself -- as, I'm sure, it will for the rest of the year.
I wasn't aware of the law you cite, but something has clearly changed in recent months. One widely cited reason for the shift is the rise of commercial-skipping video recorders like the Tivo -- you may be able to skip the commercial breaks, but if the sponsorship is part of the show itself then it's a lot harder to avoid. Did the FCC rules change, or is this just some kind of corporate civil disobedience, flouting the law knowing that Michael Powell's FCC is unlikely to do anything to stop them? I don't know, but it would be illuminative to find out if the Ralph Nader suit you cite goes anywhere. Chances are, nowhere, but we'll see...
This story had me wondering if the SOHO satellite at the 1st LaGrange Point was at risk, but I guess NASA has already adressed that:
The high level of energetic particles have caused two SOHO instruments to take precautionary measures: CDS has stopped taking science, and is continually reading out ("draining") their detectors to prevent damage. UVCS ramped down their high voltages and turned of the high voltage supply. Other instruments are less affected, although the onslaught of particles is quite noticeable for some. The "snow" in EIT and LASCO images is not just making it difficult to spot new CMEs, it is also making their on-board compression algorithm less efficient - over time, their observations lag behind the schedule because images take longer to downlink, and their buffer fills up.
Fascinating. I suppose it makes sense to assume that any kind of space photography is mostly going to be of blackness, and so the image data should be highly compressable. But with an event like this, it must be like the satellite is being passed over by a misty fog, and the compression algorithms will break down.
But stilll, space is big. Fantastically big. And two billion tons of material? You may think that's a lot, but to space that's just doodley squat. </bad-hhgttg>
So with that in mind, how much of this material is likely to actually interact with SOHO? How much damage, if any, is the satellite likely to sustain in an event like this? It seems like losing that satellite would be almost as bad as losing Hubble...
No, the parent said what he meant -- Ed Yourdon was one of the pundits that was most visibly going off about the Y2K issue. I was taking a course in object-oriented software development in the fall of 1999, and the course textbook -- much to everyone's amusement, including that of the professor -- was written by Ed "the digits are about to hit the fan" Yourdon. We all had a hard time taking anything the guy had to say seriously, and I understand that the textbook was changed the next time the course was offered.
On the other hand, the grandparent is right too -- Peter de Jager was also one of the prominent Y2K pundits. He was much different from Yourdon though: where Yourdon was running around like a crazed apocalyptic nihilist ready to run for the hills at the stroke of midnight, de Jager was much more level headed about the situation, with a general tone of "this is the problem as it stands, but with a little bit of hard work it can and will be fixed."
The fact that the Y2K story got sensationalized out of all proportion wasn't de Jager's fault, but it can be (partly) blamed on Yourdon.
I remember seeing a press conference at the time on C-SPAN, with de Jager, Senator Bob Bennett, and a few others. It was the Center for Strategic and International Studies' 1998 conference, The Y2K Crisis: A Global Ticking Time Bomb?. Looks like the text of the proceeeds are still available on that page, if anyone is interested.
At that conference -- which Ed Yardini spoke at as well, by the way -- de Jager gave a sober but not sensational overview of the extent of the Y2K issue, the kinds of things that could (not "would") go wrong, and what kind of effort it would take to fix the problem.
At the time of that conference, 2 June 1998, the problem did seem alarming, and a degree of concern was prudent. However, the message was heard, the problem was largely corrected with plenty of time to spare, and a year later de Jager was on the record with remarks that showed much less concern than he was expressing in 1998.
By that point, the public relations damage was done, and people like Ed Yourdon weren't making it any better. By the summer of 1999, the previous couple of years of necessary scare mongering -- some measured, some alarmist -- had had two results: thee techies understood & fixed the problem, and the public was scared senseless. But at that point, the problem was fixed but the meme was still lodged in the public consciousness -- where, apparently, it's still stuck today.
Re:Random examples of movie computing
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Linux in Movies?
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· Score: 1
I don't describe "Hackers" as awful because I have a problem with willing suspension of disbelief (I mean, I like "Law & Order" in spite of the silly IP addresses, just to give one counterexample). No, I describe "Hackers" as awful because it's a really stupid movie, not meant for anyone more mature than a seventh grade boy.
It's possible to make a good "hacker" movie. To name the two I can think of, "Sneakers" and "Pi" were both pretty good -- clever, well written & acted, thoroughly enjoyable movies. If there are other examples like this, I can't think of them.
On the other hand, most of these movies are IMO garbage. "Hackers" and "Antitrust" were both just dumb, dumb, dumb. "The Matrix" gets passed off as some kind of weighty philosophical tract, but to me it has more in common with junk like "Blade": it's Action Porn, and the random nonsense that the cast spouts off between the Interesting Bits is much less central to the movie than, well, the Interesting Bits.
Terry Gilliam on the other hand is almost always fantastic, but then I can't think of any obvious use of computers in his movies, unless you count the Fresnel lens displays in "Brazil" or "12 Monkeys", but those were pretty obviously Not Meant To Be Taken Seriously:-)
Safari on the mac still can't even handle forms right. try tabbing to a drop down box and see what happens.
Actually, the "can't tab to all form elements" issue is a known one, and, according to David Hyatt, the primary developer of WebCore for Safari, a fix seems to be on the way:
And in case you're curious, here's what we've already got working post 1.1 in WebCore that you can look forward to:
(1) Support for the title attribute using tooltips
(2) The ability to tab to all controls in a Web page and to manipulate them from the keyboard.
(3) Support for table border collapsing.
(4) Support for the CSS cursor property.
... and a whole lot more...
So all we need now seems to be the Safari 1.2 release. The only question is when that will be...
A/k/a "requirements driven development", among other names. It's generally considered to be a sound development strategy for any kind of software development. First you figure out -- if only roughly -- what the software needs to do, then write tests that will verify that a given implementation will work, and only then do you start working on the actual system itself.
Once development is under way, the goal should always be to make it correct first -- and you know it's correct because it passes the tests (provided that they are well written & robust) -- and, once the operation of the system is correct, then you can go back & optimize subsystems to improve performance.
From reading David Hyatt's "Surfin Safari" blog, it can be inferred that this is the development strategy that Apple is using for at least Safari, if not all their software. People have been submitting pages that mis-render on Safari, and Hyatt or other people come up with reductions of the page in question that still produce the bug in question. The reduced version of the bug is added to Safari's test suite, and Safari is then rewritten to correct the error. In the future, the reduction is still part of the test suite, so if future development versions cause the error to come back up, the error will be detected and fixed again.
Additionally, I've read that they have a performance policy which mandates that no software patch can ever make an application run more slowly: if a necessary patch to one subsystem causes performance of that subsystem to degrade, the developer has to either rewrite the patch to optimize performance, or produce an additional patch to a different system that cancels out the degradation resulting from the first patch. In this way, it's guaranteed that every patch to the system either maintains or improves the performance of the system overall. But significantly, note that this performance optimization is built into the patch / test phases of development, not the original development work. That is, they're paying attention to the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" maxim, and putting correctness before speed. Note that, as an apparent result of this policy, every version of OSX has been generally faster than the one that proceeded it -- compare & contrast this with Windows:-)
But yeah, test first, and come up with mechanisms for good tests first. It's a very good idea, and applies not just to web systems but to pretty much all software development.
Re:Random examples of movie computing
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Linux in Movies?
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· Score: 1
Actually, I'm pretty sure about the IP as I quoted it. I've noticed that a couple of episodes have mentioned IP addresses now, and generally they have been a set of four numbers (always with at least one of them larger than 255), but this particular one jumped out at me because it was only two numbers, not four.
And I agree with you that this kind of IP address is deliberately fake, exactly like the 555 phone number prefix -- which, by the way, seems to be a legit prefix in some areas now, making decades of phony phones no longer quite so phony...
Random examples of movie computing
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Linux in Movies?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Obvious references to Linux/Unix/X11 still seem pretty rare to me. Some movies have featured them prominently, but unless the computer is itself part of the plot, the interface is usually made to melt into the background. Here's some examples I can think of where the *nix interface seems obvious:
The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful, but I'm willing to give it a pass not because of the silly computer displays, but because it has Penn Jillette in a small role, Hal (which automatically scores points for the 2001 reference). And the reason it's cool that Penn is in there is, well, because it's Penn, and he's really "in" on this silly little subculture. Witness his snarky comments on Richard Stallman, the comedic potential of the Turing Test and Markov chains ("Mark V. Shaney" -- get it?), the math behind public key encryption, and -- most of all -- is chummy with Unix co-designer Rob Pike, and has even pulled pranks on Nobel laureats with him. So, short of putting in someone like Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, or Linus Torvalds, putting Penn Jillette in a geek role in a movie is pretty much close enough for me.
"Jurassic Park" had a famous scene where the girl sits down at a terminal, looks things over, then exclaims "This is Unix! I know Unix!". Silly, but then it was real, sort of: the screen shots were of an experimental 3D file manager from SGI. There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.
There are other examples of Linux in movies, but unfortunately most of the movies are awful (Antitrust, Swordfish, <troll> The Matrix </troll>, etc).
As has been noted all over, Macs show up a lot in movies & tv shows. This probably isn't a coincidence: the machines may look nicer than the typical beige box PC, but the product placement was probably paid for (also see here, at the bottom) in most cases, just as it would be for any other identifiable consumer product in a show. That said, random Mac sightings I can think of include:
Carrie's laptop in recent seasons of "Sex and the City" is an old black Powerbook G3 running OS9. Before that she had an older Powerbook. She was given a clamshell iBook as a gift when the G3 crashed, but returned it & fixed the Powerbook.
Harry Connick Jr's character had a G4 tower & cinema display on his desk in a recent "Will & Grace". The display wasn't up, so no idea what it was running.
In the movie "Zoolander", Apples show up all over the place. The funniest example was probably when Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson are told to break into an office & steal some files off someone's iMac: after staring blankly at it for a while, they call for help and are told that the files are "inside the computer". Like wisdom dawning on the apes in 2001, they get the idea -- and start beating on the case trying to break it open and cause the files to spill out.
In my favorite example, it has been observed that on the show "24", all the good guys use Macs and all the bad guys use Dells. An awareness of this pattern would have uncovered a turncoat who ended up betraying people at the end of the first season.
A lot of shows have hard to identify OSes. Probably on purpose.
I'm not bashing Apple (I really want a 17" powerbook and a G5), just making a correction. Windows has a quick launch bar on the taskbar that you can add applications to by dragging them. This is roughly equivalent to the taskbar in OS X. Also, the Windows XP Power Tools are a free download from Microsoft, and they include the Virtual Desktop Manager app.
The Windows Power Toys [sic -- "toys", not "tools"] kit is really the key thing here. Microsoft has provided it in some form since at least Win98 or Win95, and some of the apps that they've been providing, such as TweakUI, are really fantastic if you want to "fix" the interface on a Windows machine. Why the Power Toys are only available as a separate download instead of bundling with the OS, I have no idea, but they're free, they're "official", and they can be absolutely essential for making Windows just a little bit less insane to use.
The XP edition of Power Toys includes, as you note, a virtual desktop management tool, but more to the point at hand, it offers an enhanced alt-tab switcher. If Apple ripped off anybody, the Microsoft tool is a more prominent candidate than the Proteon one, by a wide margin.
The one feature that the Proteon switcher seems to be unique in -- if the XP one supports this, I've forgotten & can't check at the moment -- is that it allows switcher functionality other than just putting the selected app in the foreground: you can hide, quit, minimize, etc. That seems to be a new insight, but a minor one: once you've got the hook to put additional functionality into the switcher, it's not so interesting which particular functionality does or does not make it in.
I think another precedent was the BeOS switcher ("twitcher"? I forget what they called it at this point...). Like Proteon, they also allowed functionality in the switcher -- in particular, I seem to remember that you could drag icons around in the window that popped up, so that you could control the order in which applications would be called next by repeated alt-tab presses. This isn't as evolved as what Proteon or Panther do, but it demonstrates the basic idea of "switching doesn't just have to be a bridge -- you can do things along the way". While not many consumers used BeOS, it seems to me that a lot of OS designers did -- Microsoft is ripping off ideas from the Be File System in their uberfilesystem project Yukon, while the guy that designed that file system is now an Apple employee. Various aspects of the Aqua & XP interfaces feel to me like echoes of the BeOS, and the new Panther switcher could well be one too.
So functionally, I'm willing to accept that Apple may have borrrowed the "functionality hooks" idea from Proteon's LiteSwitch, but as for the specifics of the visual implementation, I just don't see it. The Panther implementation's appearance borrows as much from XP and the XP Power Toy switcher (and before that, the switcher dialog that goes back at least as far as Win95 or Win3.1) as any other implementation, and there's only so many ways that this idea could be implemented in OSX that it would be harmonious with similar aspects of the Aqua interface -- in particular, the dim grey overlay icons that you get when you hit eject or the volume control keys.
I would love to see tabbed browsing in IE, though. Of course, while I'm wishing, I'd like a job where I don't have to use Windows at all...
I can't help you with the job, but for the other point you're in luck, sort of. Just as Mozilla is a thin XUL layer wrapped around a crunchy Gecko core, Internet Explorer is a thin.EXE program that calls on a crunchy handful of.DLL libraries. Ergo, it should be easy to replace iexplore.exe with an program that offer
Re:Pro. vs. Consumer cameras (more than megapixels
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Digital 35mm SLRs?
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· Score: 1
The D100 lets you shoot 4 frames and then you have to wait a minute for it to write the frames to the CF card.
Ahh, now that's a good point. The digicam I've got now -- a three or so year old Olympus D-360 -- needs a good five seconds to warm up for each shot, and isn't ready to take another for another several seconds. This makes the thing nearly useless for taking any kind of deliberate pictures of moving objects. As long as the lead-in time isn't too bad, I could deal with times like you describe here.
Sort of along the same lines, it seems like most of the cameras -- except maybe Sony models and possibly some of the high end ones -- use only USB for the transfer interface. For some of these high end cameras, where the image sizes are presumably going to be pretty big, a faster bus like Firewire seems worthwhile. I seem to remember the D100 having USB1 only, and no Firewire; not sure about the high end models.
Also, if you plan on shooting under physically rough conditions, you might want a rugged magnesium body that will survive dropping and getting water splashed on it. The D100 is fine for people like me or you, but if I were a professional journalist a plastic body might not take the beating a pro's camera is subjected to in the field.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for being lightweight. My old cameras & their lenses are all metal & glass, and carrying around a bag with the two cameras and three or four lenses can be pretty heavy after a while. I can't help but wonder if a ruggedly built plastic camera body might make a welcome difference in that department.
As to long-term valuation, in 5 years I expect my D100 to take as good pictures as it does now. I haven't sold any of my film cameras and probably will not sell the D100 when I eventually buy a new body, so what's the problem with valuation?
Touche.
I guess what I'm getting at is the accumulation of little things that bug me about my current low end digital point & shoot camera, and how much they are going to be a factor on a contemporary (yet reasonably affordable) digital SLR. Like the USB transfer speed. Like the ceiling on how quickly you can take photos. Like the capacity of a reasonably affordable memory card -- I'm not totally opposed to lugging around my iBook when taking photos all day, but the less often photos need to be downloaded the easier things will be.
Or -- maybe most of all at this point -- like the fact that the smaller "negative" on the low end d-SLRs means that a standard 50mm length lens is effectively an 80mm length zoom lens, a 24mm wide angle lens is a ~40mm "roughly normal" lens, and to get an actual wide angle lens you'll need a very short lens indeed. The fact that the same glass won't behave the same way on contemporary f-SLRs and d-SLRs bugs me, maybe enough to hold me off until this is resolved in future models.
So I guess I'm not talking about valuation in the sense of "a camera bought today will be half as useful in a year" -- as you say, that's not likely to be true -- but in the sense of "if I wait a year, will I be able to find that much more camera for the same money?" Because at this point I could still wait another year or three before taking the plunge, and I'm not yet sure what qualities I'm looking for that will prove to be the "now's the time" tipping point. More disposeable income might be able to grease the decision, I suppose:), but more tangibly it would be nice to see a d-SLR that works out some of the kinks noted above (and others that I'm not thinking of -- I don't have an exhaustive list of my personal pros & cons or anything).
Still, if I had a few thousand disposeable bucks laying around, I think I could overlook some of these annoyances. But since I don't, at least at the moment, "wait & see" seems prudent for now. In the meantime, maybe I'd be better off getting a more modern film camera body & lenses (I don't think 30 year old lenses are fully compatible with modern gear -- even if the lens mount fits, autofocus won't work for one thing, and exposure may not either).
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...damned threads that make me want to spend money. Must resist...
Just get a high-end digital viewfinder and use the LCD when you need precise framing.
Ahh, interesting suggestion -- I wasn't aware of these. How much would something like this cost, and what sorts of benefits would it provide? I'm assuming that it may not be compatible with my old cameras, but I'm thinking of a new film camera body anyway, so that's not a showstopper.
But then, a decent camera body should have a mechanism that allows you to preview the image as it will be exposed. So for example both of my cameras let you set up the shot based on a wide open aperture, but you can hold down a button to close the aperture down to wherever you currently have it set, and everything gets darker and the focus shifts accordingly.
Pretty much the only unaccounted for variable at that point is exposure time -- is this where a digital viewfinder can help? I'm trying to find examples on Google, but not having much luck.
The top few hits are for some rinky-dink looking "digital viewfinder camera" which, because it seems to be there as the result of some kind of Google-astroturfing, I refuse to link to. Then there are several hits for camera reviews where the digicam's viewfinder is discussed, which doesn't sound like what you're talking about. The closest thing I see seems to be this thing, but it seems to be meant to attach to some kind of digital video camera (the note about being for cinematographers is a tipoff).
Can you cite a product or two along the lines of what you're describing here? Thanks:-)
Re:There is one important limitation.
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Digital 35mm SLRs?
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· Score: 1
The catch there though is enlargement: the large format may have far higher fidelity than even the sharpest human eye can discern at typical enlargement ranges, but what if you want a ridiculously big enlargement (billboards, theatre screens, large installment art settings) or you want to get an enlargement of just part of the negative (a 4x6in negative is equivalent to, what, 40 or so 35mm negatives?)?
It's mostly silly to worry about this sort of manipulation of an audio signal -- almost nobody wants audio "enlargements" (what would that even be? playing it really slowly at high volume?) or "zoomed crops", fractally zooming in on just a sliver of a snippet of sound. Sure, there might be certain specialists who would want such capabilities -- audio engineers, sonar operators, psychotic recording engineers -- but generally this is well into niche territory.
On the other hand, enlarging & zooming are perfectly natural things to want to do to a photographic negative, whether that negative is large format, 35mm, or digital. And in any form that that negative takes, all increases in fidelity will contribute to higher quality material for manipulation later in the process.
I'll concede that for most uses we're coming up on that perceptual ceiling beyond which most people won't know the difference -- because the finished prints they're looking at are enlarged within the bounds of what their negative substrate of choice is capable of. However, I suspect that there will be a niche for ever higher sensitivity for quite a while to come, if only because some people -- and a group much larger than the sonar engineers, I suspect -- will want to do more with their photos than just full-frame 4x6 postcard sized prints.
Yes, but then all indications are that Spike Lee's entire career has been superior to SpikeTV -- which is why he tried to sue them to change the name. The suit was dropped, but the point was made: the teevee station has nothing to do with the director, and vice versa.
I've been using a pair of Nikon SLR cameras since I took a photography class in college and got to use my parent's circa 1970 Nikkormat cameras. The "new" one was built at a point when auto-shutter speed was a novelty, but you still had to set the aperture yourself; the other one is fully manual. Learning photography on equipment like this really made me come to enjoy the balance among shutter speed, focal length, etc, and even if I'm just poking around I'd rather work with something like than any modern point & shoot.
On the other hand, I've got a little digital camera now, and the convenience of it does have a lot of appeal. I took this camera to take pictures of a Man or Astroman concert a few years ago, and it was very educational to be able to "shoot from the hip", get instant feedback on what was & wasn't working (hint: at a rock concert, there's plenty of light, so don't bother with the flash, and have fun with any camera shake you end up with). The picture quality might not be as great as film, but the flexibility is a gift in itself.
That has led me to start looking around for a new pair of SLRs, one film, one digital. Ideally, I'd like to be able to have the same set of lenses that could be mounted on both a film & a digital camera body, and since I've been happy with Nikon, I'd like to get their gear. But damn it's expensive -- the "low end" D100 lists from $1400 to 1700, and the high end ones -- which in some areas seem to have lower specs than the D100 -- can be more than double that price. Yow!
I've been told that Nikon compatible kit is sold under a variety of labels, including Fuji, but I don't know enough about the compatibles to have made any decisions yet -- and from what I've seen, they're just as expensive as Nikon anyway. Does it make sense to go with someone like Fuji, or is the quality any better with "genuine" Nikon? (I'm a few decades behind on this stuff....)
I think the thing that scares me off so far is the durability, not just in terms of how rugged or useful the equipment will be in the future, but in the value. For example, the Nikon D1, from 1999, could do roughly 2.6 megapixels, as does the current D1H -- but that's barely a third of what the D100 can do, and the price is double the D100. Why that is isn't entirely clear to me, but it is clear that 2.6 mpix isn't a particularly big number anymore, where 5 mpix or 6 mpix point & shoot cameras are available for just a few hundred bucks.
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So there's the thing, in a nutshell: should it be assumed that the long term valuation of digital cameras, including digital SLRs, will have a trend like computers, in that you can always get a lot more capability for a lot less money than was available a year before? Or will these digital SLRs retain their value & utility better, the way the 30 year old traditional SLRs I'm using are still useful instruments today? I'm ready to get some of this new equipment, but the depreciation seems like it's going to be so steep that it still seems worth it to wait for at least a couple more years.
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At this point my hunch is that whenever Nikon upgrades the D100, I'll end up getting either the replacement model, or I'll try to find a closeout or second hand D100 hoping for a decent discount on it.
That Zubrin essay is fantastic, thanks for posting it. Do you have the original URL for it?
For more material like this, it's worth reading his book The Case for Mars, which pretty much covers (a slightly earlier version of) the same turf, but at greater length & so in greater detail. He makes a very strong case for why the current shuttles & stations space program is such a waste of resources, and how easy it could be -- cheap, safe, and reliable -- to set up a long term, long duration Martian exploration program.
Where he describes the Apollo program as an impressive but hollow "footsteps & photographs" publicity stunt, the Martian plan as laid out would send advance supply ships to establish a beachhead, then once things are up & running with that mission, send along a manned version of the same ship. That crew would be able to spend months on the martian surface, and additionally would be setting up the foundation for the next mission, and that next mission would bring supplies for the one after it, and so on in this fashion. Eventually there could be a chain of bases on the Martian surface, each autonomously harvesting basic supplies (oxygen, water, raw materials for construction, etc) so that ramping up from these medium duration excusions to more permanent settlement should be feasible on the order of decades.
Finish reading this book, and then look at all the wasted effort going into the current space plan, and it's baffling why we aren't being more ambitious. Even if we're not thinking along the lines of Zubrin's grand plan for martian exploration & settlement, we could at least be thinking a bit more grandly than our own backyard. On some level, I've been hoping that some Chinese engineers have been reading Zubrin's books and writings, so that their space program can do this if nobody else will. National pride be damned, someone ought to be doing this, and if it's China instead of the United States, that's fine by me -- we squandered our lead, and deserve to be shown up now.
Interesting. I don't fly as much as you do -- a couple of round trips per year, I guess -- but I too have been "randomly" searched by security every time I fly. As in not just every flight, but as in every leg of every multi-leg flight (because you know there's no such thing as a direct flight to anywhere anymore). The weird thing though, in light of your comment, is that I don't seem to fit the profile you do: I've never bought a last minute ticket, I've never paid cash, and I've very rarely flown one-way (and not at all over the past few years). The only part we seem to have in common is that neither of us flies first class. $plebes++
I don't really mind being searched that much, in so far as I don't feel I have anything to hide, but it does bug me that this "random" flagging keeps getting me over and over when other people apparently aren't being searched at all.
I just don't get why I'm always flagged though. I don't have any kind of criminal record, aside from some old speeding tickets. I may be prone to being a wiseass, with gallow's humor about bombs & such, but I know to keep my mouth shut on FAA supervised turf. I'm always friendly with the airline & security staff, but I bite my tongue on questions about why I keep getting "randomly" selected.
For better or worse, I accept that airports are now police state zones, and the only thing for it is to untie my shoelaces before I get in any lines, because I know they're always going to inspect my socks. Every time, without fail.
Hmm. I wonder if having a public record (e.g. Slashdot) of saying things like "airports are now a police state" has anything to do with it. But it's not like I'm planning a coup against Emperor Buh and Consul Cheney or anything... (Note to self, quit joking around, I'm taking another airline trip at the end of the year...).
Another thing that is nice to know is how to do for loops from the command line in bash. Not that it's hard, it's just different from tcsh:
for n in 1 2 3; do echo $n; done
Out of curiosity, how would that loop be done in tcsh? I generally prefer tcsh as my interactive shell (the spell checker embedded in the tab-completion saves me from typos all the time), but if I want to do anything as complex as a loop construct, I always just drop into a bash shell to do it.
I think bash is the better shell for scripts (or semi-scripts, like this example) exactly because it seems easier to do constructs like this in bash than it does in tcsh. For general, mundane use though, tcsh just feels friendlier to me, even if it's not as flexible for doing more complex tasks.
Even if it's the less popular shell by Linux users, I still think that Apple made the right choice by making tcsh the default shell for OSX. They had a unusual, but very nice default setup for it, and it was very pleasant to work with. I hope that the defaults for their bash logins are as nice, or I'll just switch back to using tcsh again.
By calling themselves, "adware" they will forever malign the name "adware".
I can't help but think of this as a Pyhhric victory on Gator's part anyway. Great, so they convinced the court that in this case they should be called "adware" instead of "spyware" -- how does that get them ahead? What kind of person thinks that running system crippling "adware" that bombards them with popup ads for product "B" when they're trying to read about product "A" is a desirable thing?
It's widely recognized that Gator's software is only as widespread as it is because it piggybacks along with more obviously desirable software. How much of Gator's user base went out and installed Gator because they actually, directly, and specifically want Gator itself? Any of them? Somehow I doubt that the percentage can be more than a couple of percent of their user base, and I'd hazard a guess that most of the people that want Gator on their system only do because they're spyware researchers trying to analyze Gator, the better to write software that tries to neutralize it.
I realize that this is the argument that Gator has to make, but really, come on: arguing that they're marketing "adware" instead of "spyware" is like saying that they're "fascists" instead of "Nazis". (</godwin>) They may have won this semantic skirmish, but surely this kind of tactic will only lead to them losing the public opinion war.
What is needed is the ability to select roads *not* to use. This would make bicycle routing much more effective. It would also be useful for driving directions. You may know that a particular road is undesireable do to construction, predictable congestion, etc. It would be really handy to able to say "I know 101 is jammed, what's the next best way"
That is a fantastic idea. It would be really useful to have an online trip plotting service that could tap into realtime traffic congestion data. So for example, Mapquest or Yahooo could partner with a company like Smartraveler, so that they could do things like "the shortest route from Boston to Woburn is to take I-93 North for 10 miles, but there is an accident near the Stoneham exit that is backing up traffic for six miles, so here's how you can take Rt. 28 instead".
Better still, you could include scheduled trip time to the search, so that if you plan to take your trip between (say) 7-9am or 4-7pm, the software can assume that highways will have rush hour traffic and you may want to try alternate routes for part or all of the trip. That should be pretty easy to plug into the system, and could possibly be done with no external data provider.
More clever, but possibly harder to implement and almost definitely reliant on external information, would be special event planning: "this route for a trip next Sunday afternoon from Museum of Science, Boston to Alewife T station, Cambridge avoids Memorial Drive in Cambridge, because the 'Head of the Charles' regatta will be delaying traffic on Memorial & Storrow Drives this weekend." (Well, last weekend, but pretend that the system is being predictive here.) Or "this route from South Station, Boston to Museum of Science, Boston is taking you down Mass Ave, across the Charles River, and then up Memorial Drive, because there's a Bruins game at the Fleet Center and traffic in that part of town will be at a standstill tonight, so it makes sense to drive twice as far to get where you're going because you won't want to be stuck in that traffic.
If any of these trip planning services could call on this kind of up to the minute -- or beyond -- information when making their route suggestions, the value of the service would go way up.
You may find the variouscolumns that Robert Cringely has written about getting a wireless DSL link to his house useful, or at least entertaining. His constraints sound similar to the ones here: it seems he lives in a valley with no local DSL service, and the nearest wired neighborhood is over ten miles away.
His first solution was to climb up a tree with a telescope, figure out the addresses of any homes he could get a clear line of sight to, and then go knocking on doors with the proposition that "I will buy you a high speed internet connection if you let me stick a directional antenna on your roof so that I can share it. This seems to work pretty well for him.
His next attempt played off the same idea, but instead used a pair of bidirectional Pringles can yagi antennae strapped to the top of a tree on the top of a nearby mountain. One end of each antenna points at his house, while the other points at a free wireless zone in a nearby downtown area. This gets him a full 2mbps channel, and he suggests that 5mbps or 11mbps might be feasible, and the parts were built for only $100 at Home Depot. He sounds a little iffy on the ethics of this scheme though, and claims not to be using it as his main connection until that gets sorted out, but in any event the connection technique has been demonstrated.
Maybe something like this could work in your area, with one of these bidirectional yagis strapped to one of the tall trees around your house, and the other end pointing to an uplink somewhere on the horizon. Got a telescope?
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed it doesn't seem to be the case any more.
Over the summer, NBC ran a reality show called "The Restaraunt". This show was blatantly paid for by American Express, Coors, and Mitsubishi -- products from these companies would be gratuitously dropped into the show every few minutes, and most / all of the commercials were from these three names. But don't take my word for it.
The show got reasonably good ratings, which was fantastic for NBC: reality shows, with their convenient lack of professional writers & actors, are already much cheaper than traditional shows. Getting some companies to foot the relatively small bill just made it an even better deal for them. Even if the ratings were bad, the show would probably have been profitable, but the fact that it was successful meant that it's likely to be a trendsetter.
And indeed, this year's season of "24" is sponsored by Ford as a promotion for one of their trucks. Tonight's episode was bracketed by two extended length (five minute or so) commercials for Ford, the show was prefixed by a pitch for the product by Keifer Sutherland, and the truck showed up in the episode itself -- as, I'm sure, it will for the rest of the year.
I wasn't aware of the law you cite, but something has clearly changed in recent months. One widely cited reason for the shift is the rise of commercial-skipping video recorders like the Tivo -- you may be able to skip the commercial breaks, but if the sponsorship is part of the show itself then it's a lot harder to avoid. Did the FCC rules change, or is this just some kind of corporate civil disobedience, flouting the law knowing that Michael Powell's FCC is unlikely to do anything to stop them? I don't know, but it would be illuminative to find out if the Ralph Nader suit you cite goes anywhere. Chances are, nowhere, but we'll see...
This story had me wondering if the SOHO satellite at the 1st LaGrange Point was at risk, but I guess NASA has already adressed that:
Fascinating. I suppose it makes sense to assume that any kind of space photography is mostly going to be of blackness, and so the image data should be highly compressable. But with an event like this, it must be like the satellite is being passed over by a misty fog, and the compression algorithms will break down.
But stilll, space is big. Fantastically big. And two billion tons of material? You may think that's a lot, but to space that's just doodley squat. </bad-hhgttg>
So with that in mind, how much of this material is likely to actually interact with SOHO? How much damage, if any, is the satellite likely to sustain in an event like this? It seems like losing that satellite would be almost as bad as losing Hubble...
No, the parent said what he meant -- Ed Yourdon was one of the pundits that was most visibly going off about the Y2K issue. I was taking a course in object-oriented software development in the fall of 1999, and the course textbook -- much to everyone's amusement, including that of the professor -- was written by Ed "the digits are about to hit the fan" Yourdon. We all had a hard time taking anything the guy had to say seriously, and I understand that the textbook was changed the next time the course was offered.
On the other hand, the grandparent is right too -- Peter de Jager was also one of the prominent Y2K pundits. He was much different from Yourdon though: where Yourdon was running around like a crazed apocalyptic nihilist ready to run for the hills at the stroke of midnight, de Jager was much more level headed about the situation, with a general tone of "this is the problem as it stands, but with a little bit of hard work it can and will be fixed."
The fact that the Y2K story got sensationalized out of all proportion wasn't de Jager's fault, but it can be (partly) blamed on Yourdon.
I remember seeing a press conference at the time on C-SPAN, with de Jager, Senator Bob Bennett, and a few others. It was the Center for Strategic and International Studies' 1998 conference, The Y2K Crisis: A Global Ticking Time Bomb?. Looks like the text of the proceeeds are still available on that page, if anyone is interested.
At that conference -- which Ed Yardini spoke at as well, by the way -- de Jager gave a sober but not sensational overview of the extent of the Y2K issue, the kinds of things that could (not "would") go wrong, and what kind of effort it would take to fix the problem.
At the time of that conference, 2 June 1998, the problem did seem alarming, and a degree of concern was prudent. However, the message was heard, the problem was largely corrected with plenty of time to spare, and a year later de Jager was on the record with remarks that showed much less concern than he was expressing in 1998.
By that point, the public relations damage was done, and people like Ed Yourdon weren't making it any better. By the summer of 1999, the previous couple of years of necessary scare mongering -- some measured, some alarmist -- had had two results: thee techies understood & fixed the problem, and the public was scared senseless. But at that point, the problem was fixed but the meme was still lodged in the public consciousness -- where, apparently, it's still stuck today.
I don't describe "Hackers" as awful because I have a problem with willing suspension of disbelief (I mean, I like "Law & Order" in spite of the silly IP addresses, just to give one counterexample). No, I describe "Hackers" as awful because it's a really stupid movie, not meant for anyone more mature than a seventh grade boy.
It's possible to make a good "hacker" movie. To name the two I can think of, "Sneakers" and "Pi" were both pretty good -- clever, well written & acted, thoroughly enjoyable movies. If there are other examples like this, I can't think of them.
On the other hand, most of these movies are IMO garbage. "Hackers" and "Antitrust" were both just dumb, dumb, dumb. "The Matrix" gets passed off as some kind of weighty philosophical tract, but to me it has more in common with junk like "Blade": it's Action Porn, and the random nonsense that the cast spouts off between the Interesting Bits is much less central to the movie than, well, the Interesting Bits.
Terry Gilliam on the other hand is almost always fantastic, but then I can't think of any obvious use of computers in his movies, unless you count the Fresnel lens displays in "Brazil" or "12 Monkeys", but those were pretty obviously Not Meant To Be Taken Seriously :-)
I like how it's either "you can buy a ridiculously expensive television, or you can buy an obscenely extravagant car -- what's the big deal?"
You're a Republican, aren't you?
And as far as you're concerned, if someone doesn't want the silly teeveee or the silly humvee, they can Just Eat Cake, right?
Horses for courses, I guess, but the implication that either of these is practical or reasonable just seems silly to me, but hey whatever.... :-)
So all we need now seems to be the Safari 1.2 release. The only question is when that will be...
A/k/a "requirements driven development", among other names. It's generally considered to be a sound development strategy for any kind of software development. First you figure out -- if only roughly -- what the software needs to do, then write tests that will verify that a given implementation will work, and only then do you start working on the actual system itself.
Once development is under way, the goal should always be to make it correct first -- and you know it's correct because it passes the tests (provided that they are well written & robust) -- and, once the operation of the system is correct, then you can go back & optimize subsystems to improve performance.
From reading David Hyatt's "Surfin Safari" blog, it can be inferred that this is the development strategy that Apple is using for at least Safari, if not all their software. People have been submitting pages that mis-render on Safari, and Hyatt or other people come up with reductions of the page in question that still produce the bug in question. The reduced version of the bug is added to Safari's test suite, and Safari is then rewritten to correct the error. In the future, the reduction is still part of the test suite, so if future development versions cause the error to come back up, the error will be detected and fixed again.
Additionally, I've read that they have a performance policy which mandates that no software patch can ever make an application run more slowly: if a necessary patch to one subsystem causes performance of that subsystem to degrade, the developer has to either rewrite the patch to optimize performance, or produce an additional patch to a different system that cancels out the degradation resulting from the first patch. In this way, it's guaranteed that every patch to the system either maintains or improves the performance of the system overall. But significantly, note that this performance optimization is built into the patch / test phases of development, not the original development work. That is, they're paying attention to the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" maxim, and putting correctness before speed. Note that, as an apparent result of this policy, every version of OSX has been generally faster than the one that proceeded it -- compare & contrast this with Windows :-)
But yeah, test first, and come up with mechanisms for good tests first. It's a very good idea, and applies not just to web systems but to pretty much all software development.
Actually, I'm pretty sure about the IP as I quoted it. I've noticed that a couple of episodes have mentioned IP addresses now, and generally they have been a set of four numbers (always with at least one of them larger than 255), but this particular one jumped out at me because it was only two numbers, not four.
And I agree with you that this kind of IP address is deliberately fake, exactly like the 555 phone number prefix -- which, by the way, seems to be a legit prefix in some areas now, making decades of phony phones no longer quite so phony...
The Windows Power Toys [sic -- "toys", not "tools"] kit is really the key thing here. Microsoft has provided it in some form since at least Win98 or Win95, and some of the apps that they've been providing, such as TweakUI, are really fantastic if you want to "fix" the interface on a Windows machine. Why the Power Toys are only available as a separate download instead of bundling with the OS, I have no idea, but they're free, they're "official", and they can be absolutely essential for making Windows just a little bit less insane to use.
The XP edition of Power Toys includes, as you note, a virtual desktop management tool, but more to the point at hand, it offers an enhanced alt-tab switcher. If Apple ripped off anybody, the Microsoft tool is a more prominent candidate than the Proteon one, by a wide margin.
The one feature that the Proteon switcher seems to be unique in -- if the XP one supports this, I've forgotten & can't check at the moment -- is that it allows switcher functionality other than just putting the selected app in the foreground: you can hide, quit, minimize, etc. That seems to be a new insight, but a minor one: once you've got the hook to put additional functionality into the switcher, it's not so interesting which particular functionality does or does not make it in.
I think another precedent was the BeOS switcher ("twitcher"? I forget what they called it at this point...). Like Proteon, they also allowed functionality in the switcher -- in particular, I seem to remember that you could drag icons around in the window that popped up, so that you could control the order in which applications would be called next by repeated alt-tab presses. This isn't as evolved as what Proteon or Panther do, but it demonstrates the basic idea of "switching doesn't just have to be a bridge -- you can do things along the way". While not many consumers used BeOS, it seems to me that a lot of OS designers did -- Microsoft is ripping off ideas from the Be File System in their uberfilesystem project Yukon, while the guy that designed that file system is now an Apple employee. Various aspects of the Aqua & XP interfaces feel to me like echoes of the BeOS, and the new Panther switcher could well be one too.
So functionally, I'm willing to accept that Apple may have borrrowed the "functionality hooks" idea from Proteon's LiteSwitch, but as for the specifics of the visual implementation, I just don't see it. The Panther implementation's appearance borrows as much from XP and the XP Power Toy switcher (and before that, the switcher dialog that goes back at least as far as Win95 or Win3.1) as any other implementation, and there's only so many ways that this idea could be implemented in OSX that it would be harmonious with similar aspects of the Aqua interface -- in particular, the dim grey overlay icons that you get when you hit eject or the volume control keys.
I can't help you with the job, but for the other point you're in luck, sort of. Just as Mozilla is a thin XUL layer wrapped around a crunchy Gecko core, Internet Explorer is a thin .EXE program that calls on a crunchy handful of .DLL libraries. Ergo, it should be easy to replace iexplore.exe with an program that offer
Ahh, now that's a good point. The digicam I've got now -- a three or so year old Olympus D-360 -- needs a good five seconds to warm up for each shot, and isn't ready to take another for another several seconds. This makes the thing nearly useless for taking any kind of deliberate pictures of moving objects. As long as the lead-in time isn't too bad, I could deal with times like you describe here.
Sort of along the same lines, it seems like most of the cameras -- except maybe Sony models and possibly some of the high end ones -- use only USB for the transfer interface. For some of these high end cameras, where the image sizes are presumably going to be pretty big, a faster bus like Firewire seems worthwhile. I seem to remember the D100 having USB1 only, and no Firewire; not sure about the high end models.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for being lightweight. My old cameras & their lenses are all metal & glass, and carrying around a bag with the two cameras and three or four lenses can be pretty heavy after a while. I can't help but wonder if a ruggedly built plastic camera body might make a welcome difference in that department.
Touche.
I guess what I'm getting at is the accumulation of little things that bug me about my current low end digital point & shoot camera, and how much they are going to be a factor on a contemporary (yet reasonably affordable) digital SLR. Like the USB transfer speed. Like the ceiling on how quickly you can take photos. Like the capacity of a reasonably affordable memory card -- I'm not totally opposed to lugging around my iBook when taking photos all day, but the less often photos need to be downloaded the easier things will be.
Or -- maybe most of all at this point -- like the fact that the smaller "negative" on the low end d-SLRs means that a standard 50mm length lens is effectively an 80mm length zoom lens, a 24mm wide angle lens is a ~40mm "roughly normal" lens, and to get an actual wide angle lens you'll need a very short lens indeed. The fact that the same glass won't behave the same way on contemporary f-SLRs and d-SLRs bugs me, maybe enough to hold me off until this is resolved in future models.
So I guess I'm not talking about valuation in the sense of "a camera bought today will be half as useful in a year" -- as you say, that's not likely to be true -- but in the sense of "if I wait a year, will I be able to find that much more camera for the same money?" Because at this point I could still wait another year or three before taking the plunge, and I'm not yet sure what qualities I'm looking for that will prove to be the "now's the time" tipping point. More disposeable income might be able to grease the decision, I suppose :), but more tangibly it would be nice to see a d-SLR that works out some of the kinks noted above (and others that I'm not thinking of -- I don't have an exhaustive list of my personal pros & cons or anything).
Still, if I had a few thousand disposeable bucks laying around, I think I could overlook some of these annoyances. But since I don't, at least at the moment, "wait & see" seems prudent for now. In the meantime, maybe I'd be better off getting a more modern film camera body & lenses (I don't think 30 year old lenses are fully compatible with modern gear -- even if the lens mount fits, autofocus won't work for one thing, and exposure may not either).
++++
...damned threads that make me want to spend money. Must resist...
Ahh, interesting suggestion -- I wasn't aware of these. How much would something like this cost, and what sorts of benefits would it provide? I'm assuming that it may not be compatible with my old cameras, but I'm thinking of a new film camera body anyway, so that's not a showstopper.
But then, a decent camera body should have a mechanism that allows you to preview the image as it will be exposed. So for example both of my cameras let you set up the shot based on a wide open aperture, but you can hold down a button to close the aperture down to wherever you currently have it set, and everything gets darker and the focus shifts accordingly.
Pretty much the only unaccounted for variable at that point is exposure time -- is this where a digital viewfinder can help? I'm trying to find examples on Google, but not having much luck.
The top few hits are for some rinky-dink looking "digital viewfinder camera" which, because it seems to be there as the result of some kind of Google-astroturfing, I refuse to link to. Then there are several hits for camera reviews where the digicam's viewfinder is discussed, which doesn't sound like what you're talking about. The closest thing I see seems to be this thing, but it seems to be meant to attach to some kind of digital video camera (the note about being for cinematographers is a tipoff).
Can you cite a product or two along the lines of what you're describing here? Thanks :-)
The catch there though is enlargement: the large format may have far higher fidelity than even the sharpest human eye can discern at typical enlargement ranges, but what if you want a ridiculously big enlargement (billboards, theatre screens, large installment art settings) or you want to get an enlargement of just part of the negative (a 4x6in negative is equivalent to, what, 40 or so 35mm negatives?)?
It's mostly silly to worry about this sort of manipulation of an audio signal -- almost nobody wants audio "enlargements" (what would that even be? playing it really slowly at high volume?) or "zoomed crops", fractally zooming in on just a sliver of a snippet of sound. Sure, there might be certain specialists who would want such capabilities -- audio engineers, sonar operators, psychotic recording engineers -- but generally this is well into niche territory.
On the other hand, enlarging & zooming are perfectly natural things to want to do to a photographic negative, whether that negative is large format, 35mm, or digital. And in any form that that negative takes, all increases in fidelity will contribute to higher quality material for manipulation later in the process.
I'll concede that for most uses we're coming up on that perceptual ceiling beyond which most people won't know the difference -- because the finished prints they're looking at are enlarged within the bounds of what their negative substrate of choice is capable of. However, I suspect that there will be a niche for ever higher sensitivity for quite a while to come, if only because some people -- and a group much larger than the sonar engineers, I suspect -- will want to do more with their photos than just full-frame 4x6 postcard sized prints.
Anyone who has updated Windows more than once is a glutton for punishment... :-)
Here's what I'm showing on one recently upgraded machine:
So yeah, it seems to be build 7B85.
Yes, but then all indications are that Spike Lee's entire career has been superior to SpikeTV -- which is why he tried to sue them to change the name. The suit was dropped, but the point was made: the teevee station has nothing to do with the director, and vice versa.
Gotta be the shoes, yanowhaddeyemeen?
I've been using a pair of Nikon SLR cameras since I took a photography class in college and got to use my parent's circa 1970 Nikkormat cameras. The "new" one was built at a point when auto-shutter speed was a novelty, but you still had to set the aperture yourself; the other one is fully manual. Learning photography on equipment like this really made me come to enjoy the balance among shutter speed, focal length, etc, and even if I'm just poking around I'd rather work with something like than any modern point & shoot.
On the other hand, I've got a little digital camera now, and the convenience of it does have a lot of appeal. I took this camera to take pictures of a Man or Astroman concert a few years ago, and it was very educational to be able to "shoot from the hip", get instant feedback on what was & wasn't working (hint: at a rock concert, there's plenty of light, so don't bother with the flash, and have fun with any camera shake you end up with). The picture quality might not be as great as film, but the flexibility is a gift in itself.
That has led me to start looking around for a new pair of SLRs, one film, one digital. Ideally, I'd like to be able to have the same set of lenses that could be mounted on both a film & a digital camera body, and since I've been happy with Nikon, I'd like to get their gear. But damn it's expensive -- the "low end" D100 lists from $1400 to 1700, and the high end ones -- which in some areas seem to have lower specs than the D100 -- can be more than double that price. Yow!
I've been told that Nikon compatible kit is sold under a variety of labels, including Fuji, but I don't know enough about the compatibles to have made any decisions yet -- and from what I've seen, they're just as expensive as Nikon anyway. Does it make sense to go with someone like Fuji, or is the quality any better with "genuine" Nikon? (I'm a few decades behind on this stuff....)
I think the thing that scares me off so far is the durability, not just in terms of how rugged or useful the equipment will be in the future, but in the value. For example, the Nikon D1, from 1999, could do roughly 2.6 megapixels, as does the current D1H -- but that's barely a third of what the D100 can do, and the price is double the D100. Why that is isn't entirely clear to me, but it is clear that 2.6 mpix isn't a particularly big number anymore, where 5 mpix or 6 mpix point & shoot cameras are available for just a few hundred bucks.
++++
So there's the thing, in a nutshell: should it be assumed that the long term valuation of digital cameras, including digital SLRs, will have a trend like computers, in that you can always get a lot more capability for a lot less money than was available a year before? Or will these digital SLRs retain their value & utility better, the way the 30 year old traditional SLRs I'm using are still useful instruments today? I'm ready to get some of this new equipment, but the depreciation seems like it's going to be so steep that it still seems worth it to wait for at least a couple more years.
++++
At this point my hunch is that whenever Nikon upgrades the D100, I'll end up getting either the replacement model, or I'll try to find a closeout or second hand D100 hoping for a decent discount on it.
</rambling>
That Zubrin essay is fantastic, thanks for posting it. Do you have the original URL for it?
For more material like this, it's worth reading his book The Case for Mars, which pretty much covers (a slightly earlier version of) the same turf, but at greater length & so in greater detail. He makes a very strong case for why the current shuttles & stations space program is such a waste of resources, and how easy it could be -- cheap, safe, and reliable -- to set up a long term, long duration Martian exploration program.
Where he describes the Apollo program as an impressive but hollow "footsteps & photographs" publicity stunt, the Martian plan as laid out would send advance supply ships to establish a beachhead, then once things are up & running with that mission, send along a manned version of the same ship. That crew would be able to spend months on the martian surface, and additionally would be setting up the foundation for the next mission, and that next mission would bring supplies for the one after it, and so on in this fashion. Eventually there could be a chain of bases on the Martian surface, each autonomously harvesting basic supplies (oxygen, water, raw materials for construction, etc) so that ramping up from these medium duration excusions to more permanent settlement should be feasible on the order of decades.
Finish reading this book, and then look at all the wasted effort going into the current space plan, and it's baffling why we aren't being more ambitious. Even if we're not thinking along the lines of Zubrin's grand plan for martian exploration & settlement, we could at least be thinking a bit more grandly than our own backyard. On some level, I've been hoping that some Chinese engineers have been reading Zubrin's books and writings, so that their space program can do this if nobody else will. National pride be damned, someone ought to be doing this, and if it's China instead of the United States, that's fine by me -- we squandered our lead, and deserve to be shown up now.
Interesting. I don't fly as much as you do -- a couple of round trips per year, I guess -- but I too have been "randomly" searched by security every time I fly. As in not just every flight, but as in every leg of every multi-leg flight (because you know there's no such thing as a direct flight to anywhere anymore). The weird thing though, in light of your comment, is that I don't seem to fit the profile you do: I've never bought a last minute ticket, I've never paid cash, and I've very rarely flown one-way (and not at all over the past few years). The only part we seem to have in common is that neither of us flies first class. $plebes++
I don't really mind being searched that much, in so far as I don't feel I have anything to hide, but it does bug me that this "random" flagging keeps getting me over and over when other people apparently aren't being searched at all.
I just don't get why I'm always flagged though. I don't have any kind of criminal record, aside from some old speeding tickets. I may be prone to being a wiseass, with gallow's humor about bombs & such, but I know to keep my mouth shut on FAA supervised turf. I'm always friendly with the airline & security staff, but I bite my tongue on questions about why I keep getting "randomly" selected.
For better or worse, I accept that airports are now police state zones, and the only thing for it is to untie my shoelaces before I get in any lines, because I know they're always going to inspect my socks. Every time, without fail.
Hmm. I wonder if having a public record (e.g. Slashdot) of saying things like "airports are now a police state" has anything to do with it. But it's not like I'm planning a coup against Emperor Buh and Consul Cheney or anything... (Note to self, quit joking around, I'm taking another airline trip at the end of the year...).
Out of curiosity, how would that loop be done in tcsh? I generally prefer tcsh as my interactive shell (the spell checker embedded in the tab-completion saves me from typos all the time), but if I want to do anything as complex as a loop construct, I always just drop into a bash shell to do it.
I think bash is the better shell for scripts (or semi-scripts, like this example) exactly because it seems easier to do constructs like this in bash than it does in tcsh. For general, mundane use though, tcsh just feels friendlier to me, even if it's not as flexible for doing more complex tasks.
Even if it's the less popular shell by Linux users, I still think that Apple made the right choice by making tcsh the default shell for OSX. They had a unusual, but very nice default setup for it, and it was very pleasant to work with. I hope that the defaults for their bash logins are as nice, or I'll just switch back to using tcsh again.
I can't help but think of this as a Pyhhric victory on Gator's part anyway. Great, so they convinced the court that in this case they should be called "adware" instead of "spyware" -- how does that get them ahead? What kind of person thinks that running system crippling "adware" that bombards them with popup ads for product "B" when they're trying to read about product "A" is a desirable thing?
It's widely recognized that Gator's software is only as widespread as it is because it piggybacks along with more obviously desirable software. How much of Gator's user base went out and installed Gator because they actually, directly, and specifically want Gator itself? Any of them? Somehow I doubt that the percentage can be more than a couple of percent of their user base, and I'd hazard a guess that most of the people that want Gator on their system only do because they're spyware researchers trying to analyze Gator, the better to write software that tries to neutralize it.
I realize that this is the argument that Gator has to make, but really, come on: arguing that they're marketing "adware" instead of "spyware" is like saying that they're "fascists" instead of "Nazis". (</godwin>) They may have won this semantic skirmish, but surely this kind of tactic will only lead to them losing the public opinion war.
Amazing. Somehow, I've never come across Jeopardy quoting on Slashdot before, but now that evil spawn of Outlook is here, too. Astounding...
His lack of a reply suggests that his peers have applauded his ingenuity... :-)
That is a fantastic idea. It would be really useful to have an online trip plotting service that could tap into realtime traffic congestion data. So for example, Mapquest or Yahooo could partner with a company like Smartraveler, so that they could do things like "the shortest route from Boston to Woburn is to take I-93 North for 10 miles, but there is an accident near the Stoneham exit that is backing up traffic for six miles, so here's how you can take Rt. 28 instead".
Better still, you could include scheduled trip time to the search, so that if you plan to take your trip between (say) 7-9am or 4-7pm, the software can assume that highways will have rush hour traffic and you may want to try alternate routes for part or all of the trip. That should be pretty easy to plug into the system, and could possibly be done with no external data provider.
More clever, but possibly harder to implement and almost definitely reliant on external information, would be special event planning: "this route for a trip next Sunday afternoon from Museum of Science, Boston to Alewife T station, Cambridge avoids Memorial Drive in Cambridge, because the 'Head of the Charles' regatta will be delaying traffic on Memorial & Storrow Drives this weekend." (Well, last weekend, but pretend that the system is being predictive here.) Or "this route from South Station, Boston to Museum of Science, Boston is taking you down Mass Ave, across the Charles River, and then up Memorial Drive, because there's a Bruins game at the Fleet Center and traffic in that part of town will be at a standstill tonight, so it makes sense to drive twice as far to get where you're going because you won't want to be stuck in that traffic.
If any of these trip planning services could call on this kind of up to the minute -- or beyond -- information when making their route suggestions, the value of the service would go way up.
You may find the various columns that Robert Cringely has written about getting a wireless DSL link to his house useful, or at least entertaining. His constraints sound similar to the ones here: it seems he lives in a valley with no local DSL service, and the nearest wired neighborhood is over ten miles away.
His first solution was to climb up a tree with a telescope, figure out the addresses of any homes he could get a clear line of sight to, and then go knocking on doors with the proposition that "I will buy you a high speed internet connection if you let me stick a directional antenna on your roof so that I can share it. This seems to work pretty well for him.
His next attempt played off the same idea, but instead used a pair of bidirectional Pringles can yagi antennae strapped to the top of a tree on the top of a nearby mountain. One end of each antenna points at his house, while the other points at a free wireless zone in a nearby downtown area. This gets him a full 2mbps channel, and he suggests that 5mbps or 11mbps might be feasible, and the parts were built for only $100 at Home Depot. He sounds a little iffy on the ethics of this scheme though, and claims not to be using it as his main connection until that gets sorted out, but in any event the connection technique has been demonstrated.
Maybe something like this could work in your area, with one of these bidirectional yagis strapped to one of the tall trees around your house, and the other end pointing to an uplink somewhere on the horizon. Got a telescope?