Ya know, a camera like this would be pretty good for situations where you want to sneak into a place, get some photos, and sneak out without having to be afraid of some security guard or bureaucrat taking your film or memory card. I'm thinking here of things like "60 Minutes" reports, Michael Moore style documentaries, etc. The ability to automagically upload images as they are takeen could be a great safety net.
Granted, much of that would already be possible with camera cell phones, but the image quality of a high end Nikon would be far better than the cheap plastic lens on a Nokia.
On the other hand, getting a high end Nikon confiscated would be much more painful than that Nokia -- that's a risk to be evaluated.
Possible downside: wireless security is awful, and sniffing beamed images out of the air might be trivial if you know what you're doing. You could end up at the security checkpoint at Exxon/Ashcroft-corp/etc and be confronted with someone saying "we know you sent a picture of these documents, what are you up to?"
NOTE: I am not advocating that anyone do anything illegal. I'm just entertaining the idea that a camera with these capabilities -- whether Nikon or Nokia -- could be an interesting tool for people in certain lines of work (journalists, activists, etc).
Another random thought, unrelated to the above: the filesize on images for cameras with resolution this high must be pretty significant. Is 802.11b going to be slow? Would 802.11g have made sense, or does it draw even more power? How does the bandwidth of Bluetooth compare to 802.11b's ~11mbit? I've never actually seen a bandwidth rating for Bluetooth -- I've just read that it's "fast", and that it consumes "minimal power" -- whatever that means, quantitatively, I don't know.
Interestingly, the radio age is probably extremely short-lived: signal compression, etc, should make any advanced race's radio look like noise to observers.
Here's an ironic twist then: if all highly compressed, possibly encrypted signals are essentially indistinguishable from static, then how do we know that we aren't already soaking in intelligent signals?
Put another way, what if the snow static on your TV is the HDTV of Alpha Centauri?
There has to be a way to differentiate things like this from true background radiation noise. At a guess, a compressed/encrypted signal would still have to appear directional to us: we get background noise from all directions, but a particularly loud burst of it from any particular direction should still be a giveaway, even if we can't hope to decipher it. The trick is probably to allow that such signals may well be spread-spectrum, erratic, and possibly very short in duration.
It may be a needle in a haystack, but if we're lucky it might be a hot pink needle that makes lots of noise if you know what to listen for...
For [animated] movies that are perhaps more morally challenging than Pixar's films, how about Hayao Miyazaki's movies? I'm no particular fan of anime, but I thought "Spirited Away" was wonderful, and after seeing it I went back to see "Princess Mononoke", which was also pretty good. I'm told that Miyazaki's other movies are also good ("Kiki's Messenger Service", "Castle in the Sky").
"Spirited Away" & "Princess Mononoke" both had an interesting, shifting, relativistic sense of morality that seemed more nuanced than most standard Western children's movies I can think of. In Miyazaki's movies, it is as if all the characters are essentially good on some level, but they have different motivations that drive them to behave in ways that might or might not seem "good" or "evil": the scary woman that runs the spa is just trying to maintain her successful business, the demon that eats half the staff is just thriving on people's greed, etc.
I'd also be interested in a wider list of more challenging children's movies. While the Pixar film may be about as one-dimensional as the average Disney film, they still tend to be impeccably well done. I'd like to see that kind of talent applied to more nuanced storytelling, but where is it? (And nevermind books for now, we all know books are better than movies...:-)
This effectively stops banner-ad companies from tracking your movement between sites using persistent cookies, since you never _requested_ to look at their banners.
Note: as someone who until recently worked on the advertising systems for a major US newspaper, a big part of the way cookies were used was almost the opposite of this. This came as a big surprise to me, but it was actually done in the user's interest: some of the third party advertisers would be putting out the same popunder ad across many different sites, and would set a cookie not to gather more user data (at least, not as a primary goal), but to prevent that user from being bombarded by the same ad many times per day. The motivating goal was to keep the ads as unobtrusive as possible; users without cookies would get the same ad over & over again, both on our site and when they went to others that had that advertiser as a client.
Now arguably, letting non-cookie users get annoyed could be seen as a kind of incentive to turn on cookies, throttle back the ad, and oh yeah help out with the data collection & analysis. While that makes sense, I'm not aware of anywhere that these advertisers made any effort to making that line of thought clear to the public, and without actually explaining "you are getting all these ads because you don't use cookies", the argument loses quite a bit of momentum.
But anyway, the point -- as has been made many times before, in different ways by different people -- is that cookies have pros & cons, but that not every application of them is done just to screw over the site visitor. Obviously complex transactional sites couldn't work without the preservation of state that cookies (or URL embedding) provide, but even in less obvious areas where it seems like cookies are generally used in someone else's interests, there can still be a positive reason for the users to want them.
What about hashing the raw e-mail body ASCII before doing OCR? That way, the hash could be compated against a database of known hashed-and-determined-to-be-spam e-mails. Since 90% of the e-mail on the net is spam, this will save the time of having to OCR a good majority of the e-mail.
The problem with that approach is what has been called the "Chinese menu" or "Mad Libs" approach to spam message generation: create a framework with a series of variables, then snap them together randomly to create a ridiculously large variety of permutations out of a very small collection of variables & values. So to use this as a spam author, come up with a general template for your message, such as this pseudo-XML-ish one:
>salutation/<,
>appeal<
>pitch<
>testimonials1<
>offer<
>testimonials2<
>purchace<
And then you come up with a handful of things to use for each position in the template. In this example, where I've defined just seven positions, setting just five options for each of those positions would yield 7^5 combinations, or 16,807. Setting a sixth option for everything yields 117,649 combinations; setting a seventh yields 823,543.
If the order of elements in the template can happen randomly, the number of possible combinations rises even faster. My math skills lose a bit of steam here, but I'm guessing it will be figures like you see above, multiplied by the factorial of the template size -- which for a 7 element template as here, is 5040. So 16,807 & 5040 or 84,707,280 for the five values scenario, 117,649 & 5040 or 592,950,960 for the six values scenario, and 823,543 & 5040 or 4,150,656,720 for the seven values scenario. (Corrections to my math welcome, but I'm pretty sure that my general approach here is sound.)
And that's just a trivial way to scramble the contents of one spam.
If spammers were to use tricks like this -- and they do -- then hashing techniques are only going to be partially effective. That's not to say that they are useless -- I understand that the DCC, Razor, and Pyzor spam tools all use checksums, and they do help. But it seems to me that the "Chinese menu" approach is ultimately going to defeat any strategy where hashing is the main or only component. That's why SpamAssassin allows you to optionally use one or more checksum tools as an auxilliary to the suite of tests that are already applied, allowing checksums to lend or remove confidence from a spam estimate, but never enough to decide by just that criteria.
Incidently, my understanding of the way Bayes works is that it's a checksum technique exactly suited to the Chinese menu problem: decompose the message into a set of "features", each of a couple of words or so, and then come up with a confidence value for each of those features. (This is also the approach used by Bill Yerazunis' CRM114 & MailFilter tools.) The average value for all your message's features is calculated, resulting in an overall confidence percentage which can then be -- in SpamAssassin's case -- passed off for use as part of the overall evaluation.
But anyway, I don't see how bringing OCR into the picture helps at all. It's still a huge amount of overhead to be using, and I'd argue that the results it comes up with can't be any more reliable than standalone checksums &/or Bayes analysis. The additional work might be worthwhile IFF you stand a reasonable chance of coming up with a definitive answer by doing so, but I don't think that's likely to happen -- Bayes itself isn't bulletproof, and I wouldn't expect Bayes analysis of possibly mis-scanned text to be any more reliable than analysis of plaintext.
Of course, then you have the additional problem of loading the actual images...sometimes e-mai
Surely you aren't suggesting that it makes sense to OCR all the massive volume of mail that the average email server has to process every day, are you? That's like advocating a tactic that is bigger, slower, and not likely to be much more effective than just calling in a couple of lightweight Perl modules to get the same result.
The main problem that OCR would solve is when the text is contained in an image file, but it really wouldn't solve it. OCR would break down for the same reasons that the new wave of "a word appears in distorted text in this image, type that word below to proceed" filters that some sites are beginning to use: picking text out of an image file can be a very tricky problem if that image wasn't made for readability (as most web graphics aren't). Rather, I'd argue that the very presence of one big image & no supporting text is a strong spam indicator, and you can go with that assumption without having to bring in the heavy OCR machinery (which might or might not be right anyway).
I've been thinking that, if the idea is for spam filters to work on what the human sees, then the natural tool to use would be the standard html renderer that already is fine tuned for turning html (even wacky html) into rendered text. Rather than OCR, find a way to hook Gecko or KHTML into SpamAssassin and take it from there.
The problem with this though is the same as the OCR problem, though I'm guessing not as extreme: embedding a full featured html engine inside of a network level spam filter is a massive amount of overhead to add to a process that needs to be able to handle massive realtime throughput.
A more clever approach is to skip it and say that HTML itself is a spam indicator, if not an absolute one. But then there's a fine line to be found in determining which HTML mails are kosher & which aren't without resorting to a very heavy & still imperfect solution like Gecko or OCR. If it's all an image, trash it, but anything in between is going to take some strategy (and anything in between shouldn't need OCR).
One of my favorite internet quotes is apropos here:
Only an idiot doesn't go into his e-mail preferences and specify Plain Text instead of HTML. This is such a sane use of resources I believe it was actually mentioned in the Kyoto Accord.
HTML rendering was added to Pine only fairly recently. Given the quantity of HTML spam out there, it might have been a mistake.
Skimming over the changelog, it appears that Pine has had support for HTML rendering since the release of version 4.00, 8 July 1998. That's a bit over five years now.
In any case, my hunch is that rendering html in a text based mail client like Pine or Mutt should be pretty harmless. The biggest danger in rendering of html is pulling in all the images, and by so doing announce to the spammers that you are alive, well, and eager to read their mail. Pine will attempt to do a sensible layout of the HTML content, but it won't download any images.
IMO that's only a good thing -- the messages don't look like gibberish when you get html mail (whether that mail is spam or whether it's another email forward from your AOL using mom), and your privacy is still safe unless you actually follow one of the links. There's really no downside, and it short circuits a lot of the earnest but silly mailing list debates over the evils of html mail: of course html mail is evil, but with Pine (or if they ever add similar support, Mutt), you are innoculated from the risks.
The VP of the company sent me an e-mail back saying (THE SALES GUY) IS DOING A GOOD JOB GETTING THE NAME OUT THERE SO BUY SOME PRODUCTS FROM US. (no lie - all caps).
Sounds like Oracle. A couple of jobs & a couple of years back, my company was thinking of changing their little brochure site to a little database driven site. The two candidates for this were MySQL & Oracle. Oracle was way overkill for what they needed, but at the same time they were doing a lot of software development around SQL Server, and figured that maybe they could move that stuff to Oracle once they had an instance to work with. But that of course was a silly idea, we went with MySQL, and from the looks of it the site is still running it today.
Not that the Oracle sales guys made this decision any easier. Somehow they got my number around this time, and kept calling asking if there was anything I could do to speed along the decision their way. There wasn't, and eventually I told them so, but the calls still kept coming in, along with random crap in the mail. The most recent twist was a "complimentary" six month subscription to Oracle magazine which of course I never asked for and definitely don't intend to pay for if they ever send me a bill.
There is also a port of Mac OS X for Intel processors being maintained in parallell, mainly because it CAN be done very easilly with minimal effort. Covering all bases...
This is a popular meme, and it seems to come up whenever Apple hardware does. But whenever someone makes this claim, it's always offered as a naked assertion, with no more proof offered than, well, you know, everybody knows that.
Care to cite a source?
This rumor has been going around for as long as OSX has, but not once have I for one ever encountered an authoritative citation for where it comes from. Can anyone offer such a reference? Even a "my best friend works for Apple, and she kind of hinted at it" would be more substantial than anything I've ever read before.
As an army of astute Slashdot users has already chimed in, of course the conclusion is bogus: [a] if you enter generic terms in a search engine, you shouldn't be surprised to get back generic results, and [b] seeing as MSN is setting themselves up to be a competitor ro Google, their analysis can hardly be considered unbiased.
Let's look at a more subtle aspect through:
Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists.
Is this verification that Google is vulnerable to astroturfing? If you assume that half of all web pages with the term "apple" are talking about the computer company and the other half are referring to the fruit, then it seems like a search for the term "apple" should bring up about equal numbers of computer & fruit hits. The fact that most top hits are about the company instead of the fruit probably suggests that at least some of the "ballot stuffing" tricks that companies try to bring up their ranking are effective, even against Google's famed efforts to avoid being astroturfed.
This example is probably bogus -- the computer company seems to be more popular than the fruit, or at least there's more for internet users to say about it, so pagerank is probably doing it's job well here. But in other cases, where the commercial alternative isn't as famous as Apple Computer but it still ranks higher in Google searches than non-commercial alternatives, that probably says something about astroturfing.
That or it just reiterates that the web went commercial a long time ago. Take your pick...
Keep an eye on sites like Craigslist. Every day, the classified ad section on Craigslist's Boston site has people selling old & not-so-old laptops like the one you describe -- IBM Thinkpad's have an excellent reputation, and I keep seeing them offered for as little as $400. I've been hoping to find a good deal on a iBook or G3 PowerBook, but the prices for each are still generally in the $600-$800 range for low-spec machines, and much more for high end ones.
It's weird, in the first year of ownership, computers lose 70% (or whatever) of their market value (more like 30% for Apple gear, *mumble* *grumble*), but they as long as you don't trash the thing they lose very little of their utility in the same time frame. It seems to me that the best way to get a reasonable deal is to buy used, for both desktops & laptops. I'd assume that most of the people that read Slashdot are savvy enough to nurse a possibly not-so-gently used machine back to health, and if you're not looking to play games or do similar computationally intensive work then there's little reason to pay the premium for cutting edge equipment.
Also...is it really usable as an integrated camera?
I think the point of this, as it is with Apple's new iSight camera, isn't for point & shoot photography, but for use as a webcam.
Of course, the iSight seems to be a pretty high quality piece of glass, with a fast f/2.8 aperture, standard 50mm focal length, and capable of taking in 30 frames per second of 640x480 video. The only thing the iSight is missing, really is storage: aside from the Firewire cable, it has no capability to record anything, which makes it useless without the six foot tether to your computer.
My guess is that Sony is thinking of the same sorts of usages that Apple has in mind for iSight. I doubt the quality is as good as Apple's product, but at the same time it should hopefully be better quality than the camera they're putting on PDAs like the NX-70V that I've got. That camera is fun to use (great for getting quick snapshots at times that I wouldn't have thought to bring a real camera with me, like the supermarket or subway), but the image quality is just terrible at a very hazy & low-contrast 320x480.
Hopefully this laptop is somewhere in the middle between the iSight & the Clie. Sony's product page doesn't seem to have camera specs, but something like a 1 or 2 megapixel still camera & 30fps video camera would be good for recording images to your hard drive, while a capacity to put out possibly lower quality stills & video over the web would be pretty nice.
Oh, and don't forget -- if it can do the webcam thing (which I think is natural for a laptop mounted camera), plan on it being a subscription service to unlock whatever proprietary software & hardware Sony put on there. They're notorious for that kind of thing.
Re:calling clueful car manufacturers
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Pods Unite
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Anyone listening to MP3s probably isn't obsessed with audio fidelity as much as they are in the usefulness of the format. I for one would like to be able to plug my Clie PDA into an AUX jack & use it through the car stereo, then get out to run errands and keep using the Clie as a Walkman, then later get back in the car & play the music through the speakers again. It's a convenience thing, not quality (if quality was my concern I'd have shelled out for an iPod and a non-crappy car...:-)
Re:Not only aux in, but what about cell phones?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
to make it even remotely usefull, youd have to have the ability to forward your cellphone to your onstar number. wouldnt it suck when you keep forgetting to unforward it, having everyone calling your car while you are no where near your car for very long periods of time....
And here's where the Bluetooth phone could shine, as the simple act of bringing the phone into or out of the car could magically set up forwarding for you.
And for that matter, if the car had Bluetooth to work with your phone, and your hypothetical third-generation iPod had Bluetooth support as well, then the need for the AUX jack would be very much diminished for you.
You're new here, aren't you? He has been making these SotA speeches for several years now, and the scattershot, surrealist, postmodern Zippy the Pinhead tone to them has become more or less a trademark of them.
I have no idea if Larry Wall is like this all the time, but in his annual State of the Onion speech, what you see here is normal, and I think generally seen as just a fun aspect of Perl culture. YMMV.
Microsoft is a lot of negative things, but stupid isn't one of them. So, for the sake of argument, let's consider that IE as a freestanding product has been not discontinued, but mothballed. No one seems to be working on it, no new versions are forthcoming, there is no roadmap for future development.
What happens then if Mozilla really does start to gain market share?
How threatened would Microsoft feel if Mozilla's user base hit 10%, 25%, or 50%? How high would the level have to get before they took action? My guess is that the first tactic would be to accelerate the next version of Windows, and provide incentives to make sure that the public upgrades (who says competition is a bad thing?). But if that's not enough, and Mozilla/Gecko use kept rising, how would they respond?
My hunch is that there is some threshold -- and I don't know what it is any more than anyone else does -- above which Microsoft would have no choice but to take IE out of mothballs, and the malarkey about "we can't improve IE without improving the underlying operating system." That's baloney, as should be obvious to anyone that has used any browser that has made a release since IE5/IE6 came out (Mozilla, Phoenix, Safari, Opera, OmniWeb, iCab, CrazyBrowser [which is even IE based!), etc).
So, if the sleeping giant stirs, and independent IE development is reactivated, how long would it take to ramp up work on it? It wouldn't surprise me if a point release (with atrophied features like popup management, maybe tabs) could be out in three to six months, and a full release within six months to a year. At a guess, obviously I don't know how long it would take to allocate people to work on it, get them familiar with the existing codebase, etc, but it wasn't that long ago that Netscape and Microsoft were release major browser upgrades on something like a nine month schedule, and maybe -- just maybe -- some stiff competition from Mozilla (and, to a lesser extent, Safari & Opera) can spur on another round of that.
gemal writes "We're very pleased to announce the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization that will serve as the new home for mozilla.org. The Mozilla Foundation will continue mozilla.org's work of coordinating the development of the Mozilla codebase. With an independent non-profit as the legal home for Mozilla, we will also promote the distribution and adoption of Mozilla applications and technologies. In addition, we will raise funds to ensure Mozilla's long-term survival."
What an enthusiastic way of saying "we all just got fired."
Or to put it in context, maybe they all got tshirts saying:
Our company gave up their lawsuit against Microsoft and all we got were these lousy pink-slips
As long as you're cool with the possibility / liklihood that you've only fixed part of the problem, that's fine. I'm just saying that, personally, I can afford to let the machine be down for the 90 seconds it would take to reboot, and doing so would give me the peace of mind that the problem is actually fixed. Doing it halfway is the approach that seems silly to me:-)
In the first week. I seem to remember it falling off pretty quickly after that. At the price of tickets these days, a seemingly big number doesn't translate into as many viewers as it used to, and as expensive as the production & marketing of a big modern summer movie is, I bet it won't be nearly as profitable as, say, "A Mighty Wind".
Not that profit is everything of course, but in this case I think there's a lot to be said for the smaller, more nuanced, and yes probably more profitable movie than the big summer "tits & explosions" kind of movie like Matrix or XXX.
YMMV of course, but then given your username, you might be slightly biased...:-)
This is more noteworthy because the DVD is being released less than 6 months after the movie first hit the theaters.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the movie more or less tanked in theatres. It was supposed to be the hit of the summer, and yet I can already go down to the second-run theatre and see it for a three dollar matinee.
If it had done better in the box office, that might have been justification to hold off, but it didn't -- a small handful of people were willing to pay for it at the threatre, and that small handful is going to be asked to pay for it again on DVD before being asked to pay for the third one in theatres (and then the third one on DVD, then them all in a box set, then them all in a "special edition" box set.
Who says you can't get blood from a stone?
Personally, even if I went to see it at that dollar theatre, I'm pretty sure I'd leave feeling like some jerk just stole a dollar from me...
Apparently, like the Grateful Dead, "The Matrix" is only enjoyable under the influence of pills or other similar substances. Hence the pill imagery, the pill icon on Slashdot, etc...
BFS was the RDBMS-esque filesystem used by BeOS; Tracker was its file manager, and so was comparable to the Finder on Macs or Explorer.exe on windows. BFS was the really cool half of the equation, but because the Tracker was the typical window into the filesystem, it also gets credit for making the system so wonderful to use.
BFS supported a very rich metadata system for all files, classified around standard interent MIME types. So for example, email messages would be files of type "message/rfc-822" or something like that (it's been a while), and files of type message/rfc-822 would have metadata properties like To, From, Cc, Subject, Attachment, etc, in addition to the file contents itself -- which would just be the body of the message. When opening up a directory full of these message files, the Tracker would automatically reconfigure itself to reflect that metadata, so that the file list view would add columns for mail-specific metadata fields, double-clicking such a file would open it up in a mail viewer (from which you could send replies right from the shell), etc. Very cool.
Likewise, MP3 files would be kept as files of type audio/mp3, and files of that type would inherit metadata fields like Artist, Song, Album, Year, Track, BitRate, etc. So just as the Tracker would go into email mode when opening a directory full of messages, it would go into an iTunes type view when opening a directory full of mp3 files.
But moreover, you could add or remove fields as you saw fit, so if you wanted to flag emails based on the mailing list they came from, you could add a field for that, or you could add a field to the MP3 file format to keep track of song Composer etc.
But then for the relational database aspect of it, the Tracker allowed you to do queries on these files, much like you can do SQL queries on a database. And like database views, these queries could be saved and their contents could be opened up much like any other folder view -- so I could so something very similar to a SELECT songname FROM/home/cdevers/music/* WHERE COMPOSER = 'miles davis' AND GENRE = 'soundtrack' to pull up a list of soundtracks that had Miles Davis songs. It wasn't really SQL -- it was all pointy-clicky -- but you could get similar results. And because that query could be saved, if I got some new albums later and then re-ran the query (that is, opened up the "folder" with that query label), the current results would reflect what was actually available on the disc.
Scot Hacker wrote a thousand page thick book on BeOS and it's aspects, such as BFS and the Tracker, but it's probably hard to find now and no you cna't have my copy:). You can however read his articles for Byte.com, such as this more or less relevant one. If BFS sounds interesting to you, he was pretty much the main guy writing about it at the time, so his articles are the best place to look.
If BFS does sound interesting, and you're as disappointed as I am that it's gone, the bright side is that the engineer that chiefly developed it for BeOS, Dominic Giampaolo, is now an Apple employee. One of his first things on the job was to introduce the journaling support that has been available since 10.2.2, and supposedly it will only get better in future versions. Although nothing I've read about Panther suggests that Apple is going to try anything as revolutionary as BFS in this version, it seems like they are at least going to keep expanding the journal support. My hope is that Giampaolo will eventually help come up with a new filesystem that uses BFS concepts in a backwards compatible replacement for both HFS+ and UFS, but only time will tell...
It's not [just] that you can log in by laughing, the system is intended to be more broadly biometric than that. If you actually read the article -- go on, it's short -- laughter is just one of the cues that the system will listen for:
Computer scientists at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, wanted to make it easier for staff to log onto networked computers. So they came up with SoundHunters, a program that recognises someone's voice or laughter and works out which computer is nearest to them. It could then be used to automatically log them on to the computer.
[....]
If the person is moving around the office, the agents can keep track of them by listening to their footsteps. "Once the agents have worked out the direction the person is going, they would even be able to stay one or two steps ahead," says researcher Arkady Zaslavsky. For example, the system could be used to follow an executive as they walked through an office, ensuring that their email was always available on the nearest computer.
So what they're really saying is that this is intended to be a general purpose system for tracking a person's movement around a building, by listening for each individual's voice, footsteps, laughter, and probably other sonic cues.
While that sounds pretty cool -- and is much less silly than the laughing aspect -- it has me wondering what happens when person A is hard at work at her computer, and boss B drops by to check in. Will A get booted & B get logged in? Will B be comfortable with her desktop showing up on random desks as she walks around the office?
Okay, so the people working on this probably aren't stupid -- zany, but not stupid (hey, it is Damian Conway's school...:-). The mere presence of person B at person A's desk shouldn't force a user switch if person A is still sitting there. But the description of the system still leaves open the aspect that, as the article put it, the executive's desktop is going to be racing around the office to keep up with him, gleefully leaping several cubicles ahead in anticipation of where he is about to walk next. Other people are going to be able to trivially eavesdrop on that executive's desk, whether or not they intended to. Sounds risky to me.
As cute as this idea is for some settings (Bill Gate's famed techno-home, for example), I think the corporate office or even a university department isn't the right place for it. As another commenter noted, logging into a machine should always be a deliberate act. Maybe it would be more prudent to replace the auto-logins with a new login screen saying "hello Doctor Falken, would you like to sign in?" At which prompt the user could reply "yes please, Hal" and if the voiceprint matches, he's all set.
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Granted, much of that would already be possible with camera cell phones, but the image quality of a high end Nikon would be far better than the cheap plastic lens on a Nokia.
On the other hand, getting a high end Nikon confiscated would be much more painful than that Nokia -- that's a risk to be evaluated.
Possible downside: wireless security is awful, and sniffing beamed images out of the air might be trivial if you know what you're doing. You could end up at the security checkpoint at Exxon/Ashcroft-corp/etc and be confronted with someone saying "we know you sent a picture of these documents, what are you up to?"
NOTE: I am not advocating that anyone do anything illegal. I'm just entertaining the idea that a camera with these capabilities -- whether Nikon or Nokia -- could be an interesting tool for people in certain lines of work (journalists, activists, etc).
Another random thought, unrelated to the above: the filesize on images for cameras with resolution this high must be pretty significant. Is 802.11b going to be slow? Would 802.11g have made sense, or does it draw even more power? How does the bandwidth of Bluetooth compare to 802.11b's ~11mbit? I've never actually seen a bandwidth rating for Bluetooth -- I've just read that it's "fast", and that it consumes "minimal power" -- whatever that means, quantitatively, I don't know.
Here's an ironic twist then: if all highly compressed, possibly encrypted signals are essentially indistinguishable from static, then how do we know that we aren't already soaking in intelligent signals?
Put another way, what if the snow static on your TV is the HDTV of Alpha Centauri?
There has to be a way to differentiate things like this from true background radiation noise. At a guess, a compressed/encrypted signal would still have to appear directional to us: we get background noise from all directions, but a particularly loud burst of it from any particular direction should still be a giveaway, even if we can't hope to decipher it. The trick is probably to allow that such signals may well be spread-spectrum, erratic, and possibly very short in duration.
It may be a needle in a haystack, but if we're lucky it might be a hot pink needle that makes lots of noise if you know what to listen for...
"Spirited Away" & "Princess Mononoke" both had an interesting, shifting, relativistic sense of morality that seemed more nuanced than most standard Western children's movies I can think of. In Miyazaki's movies, it is as if all the characters are essentially good on some level, but they have different motivations that drive them to behave in ways that might or might not seem "good" or "evil": the scary woman that runs the spa is just trying to maintain her successful business, the demon that eats half the staff is just thriving on people's greed, etc.
I'd also be interested in a wider list of more challenging children's movies. While the Pixar film may be about as one-dimensional as the average Disney film, they still tend to be impeccably well done. I'd like to see that kind of talent applied to more nuanced storytelling, but where is it? (And nevermind books for now, we all know books are better than movies... :-)
Note: as someone who until recently worked on the advertising systems for a major US newspaper, a big part of the way cookies were used was almost the opposite of this. This came as a big surprise to me, but it was actually done in the user's interest: some of the third party advertisers would be putting out the same popunder ad across many different sites, and would set a cookie not to gather more user data (at least, not as a primary goal), but to prevent that user from being bombarded by the same ad many times per day. The motivating goal was to keep the ads as unobtrusive as possible; users without cookies would get the same ad over & over again, both on our site and when they went to others that had that advertiser as a client.
Now arguably, letting non-cookie users get annoyed could be seen as a kind of incentive to turn on cookies, throttle back the ad, and oh yeah help out with the data collection & analysis. While that makes sense, I'm not aware of anywhere that these advertisers made any effort to making that line of thought clear to the public, and without actually explaining "you are getting all these ads because you don't use cookies", the argument loses quite a bit of momentum.
But anyway, the point -- as has been made many times before, in different ways by different people -- is that cookies have pros & cons, but that not every application of them is done just to screw over the site visitor. Obviously complex transactional sites couldn't work without the preservation of state that cookies (or URL embedding) provide, but even in less obvious areas where it seems like cookies are generally used in someone else's interests, there can still be a positive reason for the users to want them.
The problem with that approach is what has been called the "Chinese menu" or "Mad Libs" approach to spam message generation: create a framework with a series of variables, then snap them together randomly to create a ridiculously large variety of permutations out of a very small collection of variables & values. So to use this as a spam author, come up with a general template for your message, such as this pseudo-XML-ish one:
And then you come up with a handful of things to use for each position in the template. In this example, where I've defined just seven positions, setting just five options for each of those positions would yield 7^5 combinations, or 16,807. Setting a sixth option for everything yields 117,649 combinations; setting a seventh yields 823,543.
If the order of elements in the template can happen randomly, the number of possible combinations rises even faster. My math skills lose a bit of steam here, but I'm guessing it will be figures like you see above, multiplied by the factorial of the template size -- which for a 7 element template as here, is 5040. So 16,807 & 5040 or 84,707,280 for the five values scenario, 117,649 & 5040 or 592,950,960 for the six values scenario, and 823,543 & 5040 or 4,150,656,720 for the seven values scenario. (Corrections to my math welcome, but I'm pretty sure that my general approach here is sound.)
And that's just a trivial way to scramble the contents of one spam.
If spammers were to use tricks like this -- and they do -- then hashing techniques are only going to be partially effective. That's not to say that they are useless -- I understand that the DCC, Razor, and Pyzor spam tools all use checksums, and they do help. But it seems to me that the "Chinese menu" approach is ultimately going to defeat any strategy where hashing is the main or only component. That's why SpamAssassin allows you to optionally use one or more checksum tools as an auxilliary to the suite of tests that are already applied, allowing checksums to lend or remove confidence from a spam estimate, but never enough to decide by just that criteria.
Incidently, my understanding of the way Bayes works is that it's a checksum technique exactly suited to the Chinese menu problem: decompose the message into a set of "features", each of a couple of words or so, and then come up with a confidence value for each of those features. (This is also the approach used by Bill Yerazunis' CRM114 & MailFilter tools.) The average value for all your message's features is calculated, resulting in an overall confidence percentage which can then be -- in SpamAssassin's case -- passed off for use as part of the overall evaluation.
But anyway, I don't see how bringing OCR into the picture helps at all. It's still a huge amount of overhead to be using, and I'd argue that the results it comes up with can't be any more reliable than standalone checksums &/or Bayes analysis. The additional work might be worthwhile IFF you stand a reasonable chance of coming up with a definitive answer by doing so, but I don't think that's likely to happen -- Bayes itself isn't bulletproof, and I wouldn't expect Bayes analysis of possibly mis-scanned text to be any more reliable than analysis of plaintext.
The main problem that OCR would solve is when the text is contained in an image file, but it really wouldn't solve it. OCR would break down for the same reasons that the new wave of "a word appears in distorted text in this image, type that word below to proceed" filters that some sites are beginning to use: picking text out of an image file can be a very tricky problem if that image wasn't made for readability (as most web graphics aren't). Rather, I'd argue that the very presence of one big image & no supporting text is a strong spam indicator, and you can go with that assumption without having to bring in the heavy OCR machinery (which might or might not be right anyway).
I've been thinking that, if the idea is for spam filters to work on what the human sees, then the natural tool to use would be the standard html renderer that already is fine tuned for turning html (even wacky html) into rendered text. Rather than OCR, find a way to hook Gecko or KHTML into SpamAssassin and take it from there.
The problem with this though is the same as the OCR problem, though I'm guessing not as extreme: embedding a full featured html engine inside of a network level spam filter is a massive amount of overhead to add to a process that needs to be able to handle massive realtime throughput.
A more clever approach is to skip it and say that HTML itself is a spam indicator, if not an absolute one. But then there's a fine line to be found in determining which HTML mails are kosher & which aren't without resorting to a very heavy & still imperfect solution like Gecko or OCR. If it's all an image, trash it, but anything in between is going to take some strategy (and anything in between shouldn't need OCR).
Skimming over the changelog, it appears that Pine has had support for HTML rendering since the release of version 4.00, 8 July 1998. That's a bit over five years now.
In any case, my hunch is that rendering html in a text based mail client like Pine or Mutt should be pretty harmless. The biggest danger in rendering of html is pulling in all the images, and by so doing announce to the spammers that you are alive, well, and eager to read their mail. Pine will attempt to do a sensible layout of the HTML content, but it won't download any images.
IMO that's only a good thing -- the messages don't look like gibberish when you get html mail (whether that mail is spam or whether it's another email forward from your AOL using mom), and your privacy is still safe unless you actually follow one of the links. There's really no downside, and it short circuits a lot of the earnest but silly mailing list debates over the evils of html mail: of course html mail is evil, but with Pine (or if they ever add similar support, Mutt), you are innoculated from the risks.
Sounds like Oracle. A couple of jobs & a couple of years back, my company was thinking of changing their little brochure site to a little database driven site. The two candidates for this were MySQL & Oracle. Oracle was way overkill for what they needed, but at the same time they were doing a lot of software development around SQL Server, and figured that maybe they could move that stuff to Oracle once they had an instance to work with. But that of course was a silly idea, we went with MySQL, and from the looks of it the site is still running it today.
Not that the Oracle sales guys made this decision any easier. Somehow they got my number around this time, and kept calling asking if there was anything I could do to speed along the decision their way. There wasn't, and eventually I told them so, but the calls still kept coming in, along with random crap in the mail. The most recent twist was a "complimentary" six month subscription to Oracle magazine which of course I never asked for and definitely don't intend to pay for if they ever send me a bill.
Frickin' sales people...
This is a popular meme, and it seems to come up whenever Apple hardware does. But whenever someone makes this claim, it's always offered as a naked assertion, with no more proof offered than, well, you know, everybody knows that.
Care to cite a source?
This rumor has been going around for as long as OSX has, but not once have I for one ever encountered an authoritative citation for where it comes from. Can anyone offer such a reference? Even a "my best friend works for Apple, and she kind of hinted at it" would be more substantial than anything I've ever read before.
I'm starting to think this is an urban legend...
Let's look at a more subtle aspect through:
Is this verification that Google is vulnerable to astroturfing? If you assume that half of all web pages with the term "apple" are talking about the computer company and the other half are referring to the fruit, then it seems like a search for the term "apple" should bring up about equal numbers of computer & fruit hits. The fact that most top hits are about the company instead of the fruit probably suggests that at least some of the "ballot stuffing" tricks that companies try to bring up their ranking are effective, even against Google's famed efforts to avoid being astroturfed.
This example is probably bogus -- the computer company seems to be more popular than the fruit, or at least there's more for internet users to say about it, so pagerank is probably doing it's job well here. But in other cases, where the commercial alternative isn't as famous as Apple Computer but it still ranks higher in Google searches than non-commercial alternatives, that probably says something about astroturfing.
That or it just reiterates that the web went commercial a long time ago. Take your pick...
Okay, that was officially the funniest thing I've seen on Slashdot all year. Thank you!
Keep an eye on sites like Craigslist. Every day, the classified ad section on Craigslist's Boston site has people selling old & not-so-old laptops like the one you describe -- IBM Thinkpad's have an excellent reputation, and I keep seeing them offered for as little as $400. I've been hoping to find a good deal on a iBook or G3 PowerBook, but the prices for each are still generally in the $600-$800 range for low-spec machines, and much more for high end ones.
It's weird, in the first year of ownership, computers lose 70% (or whatever) of their market value (more like 30% for Apple gear, *mumble* *grumble*), but they as long as you don't trash the thing they lose very little of their utility in the same time frame. It seems to me that the best way to get a reasonable deal is to buy used, for both desktops & laptops. I'd assume that most of the people that read Slashdot are savvy enough to nurse a possibly not-so-gently used machine back to health, and if you're not looking to play games or do similar computationally intensive work then there's little reason to pay the premium for cutting edge equipment.
I think the point of this, as it is with Apple's new iSight camera, isn't for point & shoot photography, but for use as a webcam.
Of course, the iSight seems to be a pretty high quality piece of glass, with a fast f/2.8 aperture, standard 50mm focal length, and capable of taking in 30 frames per second of 640x480 video. The only thing the iSight is missing, really is storage: aside from the Firewire cable, it has no capability to record anything, which makes it useless without the six foot tether to your computer.
My guess is that Sony is thinking of the same sorts of usages that Apple has in mind for iSight. I doubt the quality is as good as Apple's product, but at the same time it should hopefully be better quality than the camera they're putting on PDAs like the NX-70V that I've got. That camera is fun to use (great for getting quick snapshots at times that I wouldn't have thought to bring a real camera with me, like the supermarket or subway), but the image quality is just terrible at a very hazy & low-contrast 320x480.
Hopefully this laptop is somewhere in the middle between the iSight & the Clie. Sony's product page doesn't seem to have camera specs, but something like a 1 or 2 megapixel still camera & 30fps video camera would be good for recording images to your hard drive, while a capacity to put out possibly lower quality stills & video over the web would be pretty nice.
Oh, and don't forget -- if it can do the webcam thing (which I think is natural for a laptop mounted camera), plan on it being a subscription service to unlock whatever proprietary software & hardware Sony put on there. They're notorious for that kind of thing.
Anyone listening to MP3s probably isn't obsessed with audio fidelity as much as they are in the usefulness of the format. I for one would like to be able to plug my Clie PDA into an AUX jack & use it through the car stereo, then get out to run errands and keep using the Clie as a Walkman, then later get back in the car & play the music through the speakers again. It's a convenience thing, not quality (if quality was my concern I'd have shelled out for an iPod and a non-crappy car... :-)
And here's where the Bluetooth phone could shine, as the simple act of bringing the phone into or out of the car could magically set up forwarding for you.
And for that matter, if the car had Bluetooth to work with your phone, and your hypothetical third-generation iPod had Bluetooth support as well, then the need for the AUX jack would be very much diminished for you.
Someday, maybe...
I have no idea if Larry Wall is like this all the time, but in his annual State of the Onion speech, what you see here is normal, and I think generally seen as just a fun aspect of Perl culture. YMMV.
What happens then if Mozilla really does start to gain market share?
How threatened would Microsoft feel if Mozilla's user base hit 10%, 25%, or 50%? How high would the level have to get before they took action? My guess is that the first tactic would be to accelerate the next version of Windows, and provide incentives to make sure that the public upgrades (who says competition is a bad thing?). But if that's not enough, and Mozilla/Gecko use kept rising, how would they respond?
My hunch is that there is some threshold -- and I don't know what it is any more than anyone else does -- above which Microsoft would have no choice but to take IE out of mothballs, and the malarkey about "we can't improve IE without improving the underlying operating system." That's baloney, as should be obvious to anyone that has used any browser that has made a release since IE5/IE6 came out (Mozilla, Phoenix, Safari, Opera, OmniWeb, iCab, CrazyBrowser [which is even IE based!), etc).
So, if the sleeping giant stirs, and independent IE development is reactivated, how long would it take to ramp up work on it? It wouldn't surprise me if a point release (with atrophied features like popup management, maybe tabs) could be out in three to six months, and a full release within six months to a year. At a guess, obviously I don't know how long it would take to allocate people to work on it, get them familiar with the existing codebase, etc, but it wasn't that long ago that Netscape and Microsoft were release major browser upgrades on something like a nine month schedule, and maybe -- just maybe -- some stiff competition from Mozilla (and, to a lesser extent, Safari & Opera) can spur on another round of that.
Rabbits wake up, you know...
What an enthusiastic way of saying "we all just got fired."
Or to put it in context, maybe they all got tshirts saying:
What grand news... :-(
As long as you're cool with the possibility / liklihood that you've only fixed part of the problem, that's fine. I'm just saying that, personally, I can afford to let the machine be down for the 90 seconds it would take to reboot, and doing so would give me the peace of mind that the problem is actually fixed. Doing it halfway is the approach that seems silly to me :-)
Not that profit is everything of course, but in this case I think there's a lot to be said for the smaller, more nuanced, and yes probably more profitable movie than the big summer "tits & explosions" kind of movie like Matrix or XXX.
YMMV of course, but then given your username, you might be slightly biased... :-)
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the movie more or less tanked in theatres. It was supposed to be the hit of the summer, and yet I can already go down to the second-run theatre and see it for a three dollar matinee.
If it had done better in the box office, that might have been justification to hold off, but it didn't -- a small handful of people were willing to pay for it at the threatre, and that small handful is going to be asked to pay for it again on DVD before being asked to pay for the third one in theatres (and then the third one on DVD, then them all in a box set, then them all in a "special edition" box set.
Who says you can't get blood from a stone?
Personally, even if I went to see it at that dollar theatre, I'm pretty sure I'd leave feeling like some jerk just stole a dollar from me...
Apparently, like the Grateful Dead, "The Matrix" is only enjoyable under the influence of pills or other similar substances. Hence the pill imagery, the pill icon on Slashdot, etc...
BFS supported a very rich metadata system for all files, classified around standard interent MIME types. So for example, email messages would be files of type "message/rfc-822" or something like that (it's been a while), and files of type message/rfc-822 would have metadata properties like To, From, Cc, Subject, Attachment, etc, in addition to the file contents itself -- which would just be the body of the message. When opening up a directory full of these message files, the Tracker would automatically reconfigure itself to reflect that metadata, so that the file list view would add columns for mail-specific metadata fields, double-clicking such a file would open it up in a mail viewer (from which you could send replies right from the shell), etc. Very cool.
Likewise, MP3 files would be kept as files of type audio/mp3, and files of that type would inherit metadata fields like Artist, Song, Album, Year, Track, BitRate, etc. So just as the Tracker would go into email mode when opening a directory full of messages, it would go into an iTunes type view when opening a directory full of mp3 files.
But moreover, you could add or remove fields as you saw fit, so if you wanted to flag emails based on the mailing list they came from, you could add a field for that, or you could add a field to the MP3 file format to keep track of song Composer etc.
But then for the relational database aspect of it, the Tracker allowed you to do queries on these files, much like you can do SQL queries on a database. And like database views, these queries could be saved and their contents could be opened up much like any other folder view -- so I could so something very similar to a SELECT songname FROM /home/cdevers/music/* WHERE COMPOSER = 'miles davis' AND GENRE = 'soundtrack' to pull up a list of soundtracks that had Miles Davis songs. It wasn't really SQL -- it was all pointy-clicky -- but you could get similar results. And because that query could be saved, if I got some new albums later and then re-ran the query (that is, opened up the "folder" with that query label), the current results would reflect what was actually available on the disc.
Scot Hacker wrote a thousand page thick book on BeOS and it's aspects, such as BFS and the Tracker, but it's probably hard to find now and no you cna't have my copy :). You can however read his articles for Byte.com, such as this more or less relevant one. If BFS sounds interesting to you, he was pretty much the main guy writing about it at the time, so his articles are the best place to look.
If BFS does sound interesting, and you're as disappointed as I am that it's gone, the bright side is that the engineer that chiefly developed it for BeOS, Dominic Giampaolo, is now an Apple employee. One of his first things on the job was to introduce the journaling support that has been available since 10.2.2, and supposedly it will only get better in future versions. Although nothing I've read about Panther suggests that Apple is going to try anything as revolutionary as BFS in this version, it seems like they are at least going to keep expanding the journal support. My hope is that Giampaolo will eventually help come up with a new filesystem that uses BFS concepts in a backwards compatible replacement for both HFS+ and UFS, but only time will tell...
So what they're really saying is that this is intended to be a general purpose system for tracking a person's movement around a building, by listening for each individual's voice, footsteps, laughter, and probably other sonic cues.
While that sounds pretty cool -- and is much less silly than the laughing aspect -- it has me wondering what happens when person A is hard at work at her computer, and boss B drops by to check in. Will A get booted & B get logged in? Will B be comfortable with her desktop showing up on random desks as she walks around the office?
Okay, so the people working on this probably aren't stupid -- zany, but not stupid (hey, it is Damian Conway's school... :-). The mere presence of person B at person A's desk shouldn't force a user switch if person A is still sitting there. But the description of the system still leaves open the aspect that, as the article put it, the executive's desktop is going to be racing around the office to keep up with him, gleefully leaping several cubicles ahead in anticipation of where he is about to walk next. Other people are going to be able to trivially eavesdrop on that executive's desk, whether or not they intended to. Sounds risky to me.
As cute as this idea is for some settings (Bill Gate's famed techno-home, for example), I think the corporate office or even a university department isn't the right place for it. As another commenter noted, logging into a machine should always be a deliberate act. Maybe it would be more prudent to replace the auto-logins with a new login screen saying "hello Doctor Falken, would you like to sign in?" At which prompt the user could reply "yes please, Hal" and if the voiceprint matches, he's all set.