The way to handle this under the old MacOS9 days -- and to an extent today with OSX -- is to get around the problem by avoiding the transfer of raw files.
So for example if you had a Photoshop file to send, you'd use StuffIt to make a compressed.sit file, and even if the compression was nearly nil, you'd at least have your file's data & resource forks properly bundled together for transfer.
The other way, which seems more common now than it was then, is to create a disk image in the filesystem of your choice (nearly always HFS+, but in principle I don't see why it couldn't be UFS, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, ReiserFS, BeFS, etc) and then copy your files onto the disk image. It then could be compressed, transferred, and mounted on any remote machine with no loss of metadata, provided that an appropriate filesystem was chosen of course.
Really though, a lot of this enhanced filesystem stuff is just for keeping your own house in better order. If the trend is towards more RDBMS styled filesystems -- as seen with BeFS, Microsoft's Yukon project, new versions of ReiserFS, etc -- then one of the new lessons to be learned is that you'll have to change your habits & tools for transferring files from one machine to another. Just as you'd rarely transfer data from one database to another by simply copying over the raw data files when you can more easily generate a portable SQL dump of the relevant tables to use instead, the right way to transfer data from one of these next generation filesystems to another computer (that might or might not be running the same system) is going to have to be some enhanced transport -- like the disk image file or the SQL dump.
To me, these are secondary issues; the benefits of working with a modern filesystem are strong enough to make them worth the effort. I was a happy BeOS user a few years ago, and it still annoys me that none of the mainstream systems (Windows, Mac, or Linux) has really put together a package as nice as BeOS's BFS / Tracker pair. I've got high hopes for Apple to do something better someday, but it hasn't happened so far.
In which case, the unpatched version is resident in memory, and the patched version is sitting idle on your disc. What's the point of that? When you're ready to apply the patch (which, apparently, isn't right now), then just let the thing reboot & get the clean slate.
Yeah, but at that point you've gone so much of the way to bringing the system all the way down that you might as well just do the full reboot. You've just described 80% or so of the things that happen in the logout, shutdown, restart, log back in cycle. Unless you just can't have any service disruption in non-GUI software running on your Mac (Apache, MySQL, etc that other machines may be using), then what's the point in saving that 15 seconds & losing state in all your apps anyway? And if you are running services that can't be disrupted, why are you running them on a desktop platform?
If Gore had made any effort to differentiate himself from Dubya, I would have voted for him. I remember Gore's track record, as both VP, senator, and in his earlier run for the presidency, and I really did think that young-Gore would have been a president that I'd like. But in the 2000 campaign, Dubya kept him on the defensive the whole time, to the point that "left-wing" Gore was echoing all the same policy planks that right-wing
Bush was touting. Spineless.
As right on as your electoral calculus is -- and in general I don't disagree with what you're saying -- a vote for Nader was to me an expression of the fact that the democratic party cannot abandon its liberal wing. Conservatives like Bill O'Reilly (and all of Fox "News" for that matter) have done a shockingly good job of convincing the public that liberalism is dead, and that right-wing fundamentalist thinking is the "moderate" ground in the national political spectrum. Bullshit! Bullshit! If the democrats want to kowtow to that kind of bullying, then maybe they deserve to lose.
My hope is that the disaster that has been the Bush regime will cause the 2004 candidates to snap out of the haze and put up an actual fight back for the true middle ground, without giving in to the ultra-right --or, to be fair, to us lefties either: a government that truly reflects the diverity of opinion in this country would make me very happy. The current regime doesn't begin to qualify. Wake up!
ADX is the ad server used by NYTimes.com, it has nothing to do with page content.
If what you're posting comes from an article page's <head> section, you seem to be pasting more than you intended. Directives to ban archiving of ads isn't an editorial issue, but a business decision -- cached ads screw up the bookkeeping and, by extension, the bottom line on the balance sheet.
The practice of restricting cacheing of ad content is, presumably, common across the industry -- it's not just NYT that has an interest in forcing this.
The (apparent) <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOARCHIVE"> tag you cite should be wholly separate from the ad server code.
On the contrary, the Parrot runtime engine is reasonably complete, and useful.
Just to give one current, more or less viable Parrot application that I know of, the virtual machine been embedded as mod_parrot, which can in principle allow you to run Parrot bytecode in Apache. Why would anyone want to write web applications in what amounts to assembly code? Well of course, most people wouldn't, but as Perl6 matures this could become a viable competitor to mod_perl...and mod_python, mod_tcl, mod_scheme, etc.
More to the point, the development of Parrot has forced a cleanup of the Perl API. The current situation where the reference implementation is the only implementation has never been theoretically clean -- other languages, like Python, C, and Java, have long had multiple implementations, and this has consistently been a healthy thing for the evolution of the language. Abstracting out the virtual machine layer will allow Perl6 to have a pluggable runtime layer (e.g. replace runtime compilation & execution of bytecode into, say, dynamic execution of precompiled bytecode (as Python does), or direct compilation from source to executable machine code (as C does). More recently & concretely, abstracting out the VM layer has been the motivation for Ponie -- an effort to re-implement Perl5 to run on Parrot, and in the process give Perl that abstracted alternate implementation that most other languages have. This will be a very healthy thing, both for Perl5 and for Perl6.
If there has been a dropoff in contributions, it isn't due to Parrot work. Dan Sugalski et al have done excellent work here, and I think most people in the community recognize this. If there has been a dropoff, the much more mundane explanation is probably just the taking economy: a whole lot of people just don't have the spare cash to give these days.
If you think Reagan was "pro-big-government", then you obviously have no idea what he stood for.
That or he's making the effort to look past the great communicator's wall of verbal smoke to see what was actually the result of Reagan's years. Conservatives from Reagan through the Bushies and from Limbaugh to O'Reilly have an amazing knack for saying one thing while working very hard to accomplish the exact opposite. Reagan's boasted love for small government was in direct opposition to the huge defence buildup he sponsored, just as Dubya's current boasts about big boosts to African AIDS spending are not at all backed up by the budget as allocated by his pocketed republican congress. It's all hypocrisy, and the only mystery is why people keep falling for it.
25% Insightful
75% Funny (laughing "at", not "with")
I'm with this guy: bringing
up a Star Wars analogy is the best way to scuttle an otherwise strong argument. Where in the past
silly Usenet arguments could be halted abruptly with a good Nazi-Godwin reference, now we also have
the Lucas-Godwin to go along with it. Man...:-)
And in case the comment db holding the snarky reply gets slashed:
I'm sure the *New York Times* runs for cover everytime/. links one of it's stories. I heard they just upgraded from 128k DSL to 384k cable, so maybe they can handle it this time. If they can't you have them covered, don't you?
Be glad you're not a Mac user. While it is of course fun to use iSync to coordinate with iCal while listening to music in iTunes and editing photos from your last vacation in iPhoto & iMovie so that you can copy them over to your iDisk or use iDVD to make a hard copy...after a while iYou iHate iThe iFucking iLetter iI.
Editing documents in groups can be a challenge. Versioning systems like cvs or subversion can help your group to keep a consistent copy of your document, but don't go that extra mile. Wouldn't it be great to edit the same document, live, in realtime, together with everyone in your group?
Time for Hydra
With Hydra you can. The idea of collaborative editing has been researched for years, with notable results. But now for the first time it has been implemented in a way you actually want to use: A sophisiticated technique allows all users to type anywhere in the text without locking parts of the text for other users, making Hydra just as easy to use as a traditional text editor.
Everyone's invited
Using Mac OS X 10.2's unique Rendezvous features you don't have to edit long lists of preferences anymore, configuring servers and clients. It's as easy as editing a local file, just click the share button and type away.
Programming extreme
Hydra has been developed with the developer in mind. It has features that support your all day coding work, like syntax coloring, indenting, etc. and can be used as editor for Apple's Project Builder. While it works perfectly well as a traditional editor, its real power unfolds when programming in teams. Pair programming or extreme programming are taken to the next level with multiple input foci, text coloring and other cool awareness features.
Hydra is not bloated
While being a full fledged editor, we promise that Hydra will never become a bloated piece of software like other text editors. Our goal is a high performance, sleek editor, with features that make your work even faster. This is possible due to Mac OS X's Aqua interface, which allows tools to get out of the way, while enabling you to do what you want.
The editor for the rest of us
Hydra is not just for developers. With its highly adjustable architecture it can become the central tool of your group activities. Imagine meetings with collaborative minute taking or writing your TV/film script or book together with your co-authors.
We've had quite a few request for this already. However we are relying heavily on the Cocoa Framework, including but not limited to Rendezvous, Addressbook and the some networking code. So real "porting" is out of question with Cocoa only available on Mac OS X and GNUStep being quite incomplete in the above mentioned fields.
We'd asume a complete rewrite for another platform without Cocoa would take at least 5 times the time it took to write it with Cocoa (which is 8 weeks), leaving beside the fact that none of us really knows or wants to develop with MFC, GTK and the like...
Really, getting a Mac seems like the right approach:-)
Pretending for a minute that there are no privacy downsides to RFID (obviously they exist, and they may be significant to scuttle public acceptance of the technology), why is all the RFID hype targeted at inventory control? That's a topic that I'd assume is only of interest if you happen to work in retail or manufacturing. How about an application that would appeal to actual consumers: point of sale systems?
Around here, all the supermarkets and a lot of other stores are beginning to install self-service checkout machines. They're popular with retail of course, since if they catch on it'll save them a lot on payroll costs. Consumers on the other hand seem a little iffy, mainly because the machines are royal pain in the ass to use -- they're very picky about how you move items from your basket, across the scanner, and into the shopping bag; things have to be done in a rigid order; mistakes are all too easy & very frustrating. Said one customer in a test conducted by the Boston Globe, "why am I doing all this work?"
RFID seems to me like a natural solution to at least part of this problem. If everything in Home Depot or CVS had an RFID tag, then I can picture a situation where a specially made checkout lane would allow me to simply push my cart or basket through the register, then present me with an inventory of what was accounted for. All I'd have to do would be to swipe my debit card & move the goods into a bag to bring home. The only place this seems to really break down is items like supermarket produce, where each individual item is unlikely to be tagged -- do you want to eat a tomato with a microchip in it? But still, it seems like for most products this would work, and in the worst case you'd have to manually enter part of your purchase into the machine, but most could be recorded automatically.
My hunch is that if such a system could be put into use, the increased convenience would be valuable enough to many people that they could accept the privacy tradeoff. My hunch is that improved inventory control will never be enough, by itself, to win over the public -- it's all stick, no carrot.
Am I missing something, or is this potential use of RFID never really mentioned?
When I use the term "suspension of disbelief", I'm referring to the fact that every story ever told has involved some amount of implausible fiction to it.
That can be anything from the surreality of an "Alice in Wonderland" to the verisimilitude of things like documentaries, biographies, etc. For the latter, the people telling the story get to pick & choose what facts they present, and so always leave out other aspects of the truth; for the former, the storyteller has fun & doesn't bother with reality.
As far as I can tell, every story ever told must fit somewhere along that spectrum. They all, always throw out rules when those rules are inconvenient -- or are you saying that every movie you've ever enjoyed was done with a single cut and a single camera and so no un-scientific violations of the normal flow of time & space?
The goal isn't to never violate the rules of real life -- they all do that, from start to finish, without exception -- but to find some balance between adhering to & ignoring those rules in order to tell a good story. After all, what is the point here: to tell an entertaining & even compelling story, that maybe raises some allegorical points about the world we live in -- or to teach us about epidemiology? Considering how badly this story seems to work as a science lesson, it's hard to believe that that's what they were trying to do. I can't fault that.
You're right that Vamus wasn't wrong to nitpick over the science, and I don't blame him for finding fault. Never see a movie about your personal area of expertise -- you'll always be disappointed in the depiction, and that's exactly what Vamus is really telling us:-). Also interesting was Roger Ebert's critique of the same movie -- he also brought up apparent Darwinian inconsistencies, but ultimately concluded that he always has nits to pick, but in this case those problems weren't enough to change his mind about how essentially entertaining this movie was to him:
Darwinians will observe that a virus that acts within 20 seconds will not be an efficient survivor; the host population will soon be dead--and along with it, the virus. I think the movie's answer to this objection is that the "rage virus" did not evolve in the usual way, but was created through genetic manipulation in the Cambridge laboratory where the story begins.
Not that we are thinking much about evolution during the movie's engrossing central passages. [snip]
It's a movie. Suspend your disbelief, have fun. Then go back to the textbooks:-)
Did you read the original question? One of his selection criteria had to do with the fact that the Toshibas & Compaqs he saw were "grossly over-decorated", and yet these machines are like an elegant Frank Lloyd Wright construction when compared to the tacky monsters that Alienware specializes in.
Are you saying that Alienware has a "still good quality but doesn't look like a pro wrestler's sunday suit" section of their catalog that they just don't, for whatever reason, care to share with the web-browsing public? Or they really all that ugly?
David Cantrell > Acme-Pony-1.1.2 > Acme::Pony
Module Version: 1.1.2 Source
NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
DIAGNOSTICS
AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
NAME Acme::Pony - An encoding scheme for Silly People
SYNOPSIS use Acme::Pony;
print "Hello world";
DESCRIPTION The first time you run a program under use Acme::Pony, the module removes all that nasty text stuff from your source file, turning it into a lovely ASCII-art rendition of a pony. In the spirit of other london.pm modules, the ASCII-art will consist entirely of the characters matching/[buffy]+/i, thus fulfilling Greg, Leon and Dave's fantasy of seeing Buffy riding a Pony.
DIAGNOSTICS
Can't pony '%s'
Acme::Pony couldn't access the source file for modification.
Can't unpony '%s'
Acme::Pony couldn't access the source file for execution.
AUTHOR David Cantrell
This is based on Leon Brocard's 'Buffy' module and inspired by Damian Conway's brief talk on his Bleach module.
Leon contributed the code for scaling a vector Pony and filling it, replacing the bitmap Pony from the previous versions.
COPYRIGHT Copyright (c) 2001, David Cantrell. The Artistic Licence applies.
I don't think I need to mention that Leon Brocard works for Fotango, and that Fotango owns up to adding their share of silly libraries to CPAN.
And now they've gotten to Larry Wall himself....:-)
So, is there a URL for the State of the Onion talk this year then?
Is it worthwhile to have a single-purpose device like this? The Google-cached version of the product page indicates that it never needs to be turned off (so how fast does it go through batteries?) and that it is continually updated. I'm not sure that's enough to convince me it's a good idea. How much does it cost, for the device & for the subscription to the service? How often do you have to replace the batteries? What happens when it breaks -- would you even know until you're stuck in traffic when it claims things are moving great?
It seems like, aside from the continual updates thing, a nicer idea would be to have a PalmOS or WinCE version that would be updated either at sync time or, hardware allowing, continually via wi-fi, modem, or Bluetooth circuitry. Better still, if your PDA had GPS abilities, then getting current traffic info (and, why not, weather as well) for your current location would be even better. By going to a traditional PDA, you lose the real-time updates that the dedicated device seems to provide, but you also lose one more gadget to have to carry around (or, I suppose, just leave in your glovebox), and you also gain a good deal of flexibility.
I think the most interesting thing about this application is the excellent data representation of in the WA-DOT map. I'd like to see this traffic map style replace some of the other, clumsier traffic sites that I'm used to, with their breakdown of a region in arbitrary ways ("well, my route takes me from this section, across part of that one, and ends up at this third one..."), under-descriptive icons, pages of text ("wait, where the hell is Frontage Road? OH, the so-and-so landmark on interstate $foo..."), useless webcams that are greyed by smog and blocked by obstacles, and maps that don't attempt to tell you anything at all. Compare this to the WA-DOT's system, which tell you conditions between each exit, attempts to explain data holes ("no data" / "no equipment"), and even provides archives of maps at earlier times ("what the hell was going on last Thursday?"). Nice!
But I don't think I want a device dedicated to receiving that information.
Not that you're wrong, but I think it's the comparison itself that holds interest, not the idea that the items being compared are really interchangeable. By way of comparison, the B-2 Stealth Bomber has been claimed to be worth something like seventeen times its weight in gold (followed by dumb jokes about "well then why not build a fleet 17 times bigger by using planes of pure gold?").
It's not that weapons of [democratic] mass destruction and shiny lumps of malleable yellow metal are in any way interchangeable to most people, but that most people somehow perceive a far higher value in one kind of item (champagne or gold) and are startled to learn that a far more mundane or less useful item seems to be worth far more.
It's correlation without causation or for that matter any kind of useful relation, but in this context that's okay, because the real lesson is that it instructs us to question assumptions about whether we're getting a good deal or not.
For a paltry $80,000 outlay, you too can fight back against the punk kids blasting gangsta rap from their Honda Civics.
For a minute there I thought this guy was offering to take out an eighty grand hit on the hot rod punks, and while murder is a bit extreme, I can see where people would sympathize with an idea like this.
But no, he's suggesting that we might want to slink down into the gutter for them for that fair & reasonable price.
Sorry, I think option A might be more popular with more readers...:-)
Go rent City of Lost Children, a French ["Freedom"?] film from many of the same people that made 2001's Amelie and 1991's Delicatessen. All of these movies are wonderful, but CoLC in particular makes excellent use of CG effects. One of the more prominent characters, for example, is a flea who has been trained as an assassin, who will on command seek out his quarry, climb onto his scalp, and inject him with poison -- and none of these sequences could have been filmed they way they are if digital effects didn't exist.
Go rent David Fincher's most recent movies, Panic Room and Fight Club. Again, these non-scifi movies make very creative use of digital special effects to enhance the cinematography, allowing the camera to move through the handle of a coffee pot, or transforming a condominium living room into an animated page from an IKEA catalog.
Both of these directors get it. They are using CG effects not for the over the top explosions (though of course they are part of the toolkit if necessary), but rather as a way to do things that a traditional camera was never able to do, moving it around in creative ways, splicing together scenes that are separated by time & space, and doing everything they can to not draw attention to themselves while they're busy making the impossible look natural.
Crap like Terminator, Star Wars I&II, and Matric? I agree with you, it's too much candy and not enough substance. But better examples of how to do use CG are out there, if you're paying attention. I think guys like Fincher & Jean-Pierre Jeunet are showing us how, as digital effects become cheaper & more seamless, they're going to start becoming a standard part of every mainstream director & cinematrographer's toolkit, just as things like camera lenses & lighting arrangments were in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
So for example if you had a Photoshop file to send, you'd use StuffIt to make a compressed .sit file, and even if the compression was nearly nil, you'd at least have your file's data & resource forks properly bundled together for transfer.
The other way, which seems more common now than it was then, is to create a disk image in the filesystem of your choice (nearly always HFS+, but in principle I don't see why it couldn't be UFS, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, ReiserFS, BeFS, etc) and then copy your files onto the disk image. It then could be compressed, transferred, and mounted on any remote machine with no loss of metadata, provided that an appropriate filesystem was chosen of course.
Really though, a lot of this enhanced filesystem stuff is just for keeping your own house in better order. If the trend is towards more RDBMS styled filesystems -- as seen with BeFS, Microsoft's Yukon project, new versions of ReiserFS, etc -- then one of the new lessons to be learned is that you'll have to change your habits & tools for transferring files from one machine to another. Just as you'd rarely transfer data from one database to another by simply copying over the raw data files when you can more easily generate a portable SQL dump of the relevant tables to use instead, the right way to transfer data from one of these next generation filesystems to another computer (that might or might not be running the same system) is going to have to be some enhanced transport -- like the disk image file or the SQL dump.
To me, these are secondary issues; the benefits of working with a modern filesystem are strong enough to make them worth the effort. I was a happy BeOS user a few years ago, and it still annoys me that none of the mainstream systems (Windows, Mac, or Linux) has really put together a package as nice as BeOS's BFS / Tracker pair. I've got high hopes for Apple to do something better someday, but it hasn't happened so far.
I'm not buying it if it doesn't have DROP-SHADOWS.
YOW!
In which case, the unpatched version is resident in memory, and the patched version is sitting idle on your disc. What's the point of that? When you're ready to apply the patch (which, apparently, isn't right now), then just let the thing reboot & get the clean slate.
Yeah, but at that point you've gone so much of the way to bringing the system all the way down that you might as well just do the full reboot. You've just described 80% or so of the things that happen in the logout, shutdown, restart, log back in cycle. Unless you just can't have any service disruption in non-GUI software running on your Mac (Apache, MySQL, etc that other machines may be using), then what's the point in saving that 15 seconds & losing state in all your apps anyway? And if you are running services that can't be disrupted, why are you running them on a desktop platform?
As right on as your electoral calculus is -- and in general I don't disagree with what you're saying -- a vote for Nader was to me an expression of the fact that the democratic party cannot abandon its liberal wing. Conservatives like Bill O'Reilly (and all of Fox "News" for that matter) have done a shockingly good job of convincing the public that liberalism is dead, and that right-wing fundamentalist thinking is the "moderate" ground in the national political spectrum. Bullshit! Bullshit! If the democrats want to kowtow to that kind of bullying, then maybe they deserve to lose.
My hope is that the disaster that has been the Bush regime will cause the 2004 candidates to snap out of the haze and put up an actual fight back for the true middle ground, without giving in to the ultra-right --or, to be fair, to us lefties either: a government that truly reflects the diverity of opinion in this country would make me very happy. The current regime doesn't begin to qualify. Wake up!
If what you're posting comes from an article page's <head> section, you seem to be pasting more than you intended. Directives to ban archiving of ads isn't an editorial issue, but a business decision -- cached ads screw up the bookkeeping and, by extension, the bottom line on the balance sheet.
The practice of restricting cacheing of ad content is, presumably, common across the industry -- it's not just NYT that has an interest in forcing this.
The (apparent) <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOARCHIVE"> tag you cite should be wholly separate from the ad server code.
(Signed, a former employee of NYT digital...)
Cool! So what are your root passwords then?
Just to give one current, more or less viable Parrot application that I know of, the virtual machine been embedded as mod_parrot , which can in principle allow you to run Parrot bytecode in Apache. Why would anyone want to write web applications in what amounts to assembly code? Well of course, most people wouldn't, but as Perl6 matures this could become a viable competitor to mod_perl ...and mod_python , mod_tcl , mod_scheme , etc.
More to the point, the development of Parrot has forced a cleanup of the Perl API. The current situation where the reference implementation is the only implementation has never been theoretically clean -- other languages, like Python, C, and Java, have long had multiple implementations, and this has consistently been a healthy thing for the evolution of the language. Abstracting out the virtual machine layer will allow Perl6 to have a pluggable runtime layer (e.g. replace runtime compilation & execution of bytecode into, say, dynamic execution of precompiled bytecode (as Python does), or direct compilation from source to executable machine code (as C does). More recently & concretely, abstracting out the VM layer has been the motivation for Ponie -- an effort to re-implement Perl5 to run on Parrot, and in the process give Perl that abstracted alternate implementation that most other languages have. This will be a very healthy thing, both for Perl5 and for Perl6.
If there has been a dropoff in contributions, it isn't due to Parrot work. Dan Sugalski et al have done excellent work here, and I think most people in the community recognize this. If there has been a dropoff, the much more mundane explanation is probably just the taking economy: a whole lot of people just don't have the spare cash to give these days.
So all those people are out of work after tomorrow's commissioning? That's a lot of unemployment...
I'm sure the *New York Times* runs for cover everytime /. links one of it's stories. I heard they just upgraded from 128k DSL to 384k cable, so maybe they can handle it this time. If they can't you have them covered, don't you?
iAnd iThe iFucking "iClever" iMis-iCapitalization iThing, iToo.
iYou iKnow iWhat iI iMean?
But the (apparently) relevant page on their site is just a walkthrough of the major system components, with a note saying
Which means that, apparently, the old ./configure && make && make test && sudo make install is unlikely to work here.
So -- has anyone tried this yet? Has anyone tried it on a non-Linux machine?
Hydra is fantastic -- check it out.
If you've got a Mac, give it a try!
Better still, if you've got another OS such as Linux, install Rendezvous (mDNS) support for your platform, and then help come up with a compatible client -- it sounds like they would appreciate any help:
Really, getting a Mac seems like the right approach :-)
Around here, all the supermarkets and a lot of other stores are beginning to install self-service checkout machines. They're popular with retail of course, since if they catch on it'll save them a lot on payroll costs. Consumers on the other hand seem a little iffy, mainly because the machines are royal pain in the ass to use -- they're very picky about how you move items from your basket, across the scanner, and into the shopping bag; things have to be done in a rigid order; mistakes are all too easy & very frustrating. Said one customer in a test conducted by the Boston Globe, "why am I doing all this work?"
RFID seems to me like a natural solution to at least part of this problem. If everything in Home Depot or CVS had an RFID tag, then I can picture a situation where a specially made checkout lane would allow me to simply push my cart or basket through the register, then present me with an inventory of what was accounted for. All I'd have to do would be to swipe my debit card & move the goods into a bag to bring home. The only place this seems to really break down is items like supermarket produce, where each individual item is unlikely to be tagged -- do you want to eat a tomato with a microchip in it? But still, it seems like for most products this would work, and in the worst case you'd have to manually enter part of your purchase into the machine, but most could be recorded automatically.
My hunch is that if such a system could be put into use, the increased convenience would be valuable enough to many people that they could accept the privacy tradeoff. My hunch is that improved inventory control will never be enough, by itself, to win over the public -- it's all stick, no carrot.
Am I missing something, or is this potential use of RFID never really mentioned?
That can be anything from the surreality of an "Alice in Wonderland" to the verisimilitude of things like documentaries, biographies, etc. For the latter, the people telling the story get to pick & choose what facts they present, and so always leave out other aspects of the truth; for the former, the storyteller has fun & doesn't bother with reality.
As far as I can tell, every story ever told must fit somewhere along that spectrum. They all, always throw out rules when those rules are inconvenient -- or are you saying that every movie you've ever enjoyed was done with a single cut and a single camera and so no un-scientific violations of the normal flow of time & space?
The goal isn't to never violate the rules of real life -- they all do that, from start to finish, without exception -- but to find some balance between adhering to & ignoring those rules in order to tell a good story. After all, what is the point here: to tell an entertaining & even compelling story, that maybe raises some allegorical points about the world we live in -- or to teach us about epidemiology? Considering how badly this story seems to work as a science lesson, it's hard to believe that that's what they were trying to do. I can't fault that.
You're right that Vamus wasn't wrong to nitpick over the science, and I don't blame him for finding fault. Never see a movie about your personal area of expertise -- you'll always be disappointed in the depiction, and that's exactly what Vamus is really telling us :-). Also interesting was Roger Ebert's critique of the same movie -- he also brought up apparent Darwinian inconsistencies, but ultimately concluded that he always has nits to pick, but in this case those problems weren't enough to change his mind about how essentially entertaining this movie was to him:
Darwinians will observe that a virus that acts within 20 seconds will not be an efficient survivor; the host population will soon be dead--and along with it, the virus. I think the movie's answer to this objection is that the "rage virus" did not evolve in the usual way, but was created through genetic manipulation in the Cambridge laboratory where the story begins.
Not that we are thinking much about evolution during the movie's engrossing central passages. [snip]
It's a movie. Suspend your disbelief, have fun. Then go back to the textbooks :-)
Are you saying that Alienware has a "still good quality but doesn't look like a pro wrestler's sunday suit" section of their catalog that they just don't, for whatever reason, care to share with the web-browsing public? Or they really all that ugly?
:-)
I don't think I need to mention that Leon Brocard works for Fotango, and that Fotango owns up to adding their share of silly libraries to CPAN.
And now they've gotten to Larry Wall himself.... :-)
So, is there a URL for the State of the Onion talk this year then?
It seems like, aside from the continual updates thing, a nicer idea would be to have a PalmOS or WinCE version that would be updated either at sync time or, hardware allowing, continually via wi-fi, modem, or Bluetooth circuitry. Better still, if your PDA had GPS abilities, then getting current traffic info (and, why not, weather as well) for your current location would be even better. By going to a traditional PDA, you lose the real-time updates that the dedicated device seems to provide, but you also lose one more gadget to have to carry around (or, I suppose, just leave in your glovebox), and you also gain a good deal of flexibility.
I think the most interesting thing about this application is the excellent data representation of in the WA-DOT map. I'd like to see this traffic map style replace some of the other, clumsier traffic sites that I'm used to, with their breakdown of a region in arbitrary ways ("well, my route takes me from this section, across part of that one, and ends up at this third one..."), under-descriptive icons, pages of text ("wait, where the hell is Frontage Road? OH, the so-and-so landmark on interstate $foo..."), useless webcams that are greyed by smog and blocked by obstacles, and maps that don't attempt to tell you anything at all. Compare this to the WA-DOT's system, which tell you conditions between each exit, attempts to explain data holes ("no data" / "no equipment"), and even provides archives of maps at earlier times ("what the hell was going on last Thursday?"). Nice!
But I don't think I want a device dedicated to receiving that information.
Especially one targeted only at Seattle... :-)
It's not that weapons of [democratic] mass destruction and shiny lumps of malleable yellow metal are in any way interchangeable to most people, but that most people somehow perceive a far higher value in one kind of item (champagne or gold) and are startled to learn that a far more mundane or less useful item seems to be worth far more.
It's correlation without causation or for that matter any kind of useful relation, but in this context that's okay, because the real lesson is that it instructs us to question assumptions about whether we're getting a good deal or not.
For a minute there I thought this guy was offering to take out an eighty grand hit on the hot rod punks, and while murder is a bit extreme, I can see where people would sympathize with an idea like this.
But no, he's suggesting that we might want to slink down into the gutter for them for that fair & reasonable price.
Sorry, I think option A might be more popular with more readers... :-)
Uhh, I believe the tugging sense you feel is that of your leg being pulled... :-)
Go rent David Fincher's most recent movies, Panic Room and Fight Club. Again, these non-scifi movies make very creative use of digital special effects to enhance the cinematography, allowing the camera to move through the handle of a coffee pot, or transforming a condominium living room into an animated page from an IKEA catalog.
Both of these directors get it. They are using CG effects not for the over the top explosions (though of course they are part of the toolkit if necessary), but rather as a way to do things that a traditional camera was never able to do, moving it around in creative ways, splicing together scenes that are separated by time & space, and doing everything they can to not draw attention to themselves while they're busy making the impossible look natural.
Crap like Terminator, Star Wars I&II, and Matric? I agree with you, it's too much candy and not enough substance. But better examples of how to do use CG are out there, if you're paying attention. I think guys like Fincher & Jean-Pierre Jeunet are showing us how, as digital effects become cheaper & more seamless, they're going to start becoming a standard part of every mainstream director & cinematrographer's toolkit, just as things like camera lenses & lighting arrangments were in the past.
Yeah -- that is the solution to IT unemployment....