One particular film/song is successful so they just clone it and flog the same formula to death because they have no imagination whatsoever.
Hollywooods' latest non-idea seems to be re-making 70s TV series and films...badly
And this summer it seems that ALL the releases - or at least all those with a significant advertising budget - are exactly such remakes.
At last the critical media are beginning to question how much, if any, of the studios' financial downturn is actually due to "piracy".
(Combine that with the recent story about how the people who file-share also BUY several times more records than the typical record customer and perhaps some clues will begin to penetrate.)
As with any disruptive mechanism, the original value proposition is driven lower and lower to the point where it is as commodity as the market it surplanted...
While the original article was talking about relatively low-level stuff such as call centers, that has already happened there in the engineering outsourcing.
The insistance of venture capitaliasts on startups having an "offshoring story" led to the last round of startups building up with their archetectural core teams in the US and the bulk of their engineering workforce offshore - principally in India. The result was to hire-up the available qualified professionals, and to bid up their wages as the supply dried up - to the point where they're paid nearly on a par with similar pros (at least those here on H1 visas), or even higher. Thus the engineering talent is being sought elsewhere.
Meanwhile, back in the US, you hear screams of agony as managment tries to hire back some of the old pros and discovers that they've gone to companies, like Google, who gave them comfy, rewarding jobs paying enough to keep the mortgage payments up and the car gassed. Now that they have a comfy seat that didn't dry up in the crunch it takes a BIG premium to lure them back into the no-downward-loyalty rat race.
I am thinking a dot.bangalore crash may be just around the corner.
Could be.
And we are yet to see the real long term negative effects of short-sighted, cost driven offshoring.
We're seeing some of it already. Like whole engineering teams getting the product design jelled, then deserting to form a competing company - under Indian, rather than US, IP law. B-)
Also a blackmail attempt by a data-entry person threatening to publish customer medical records.
(Of course you're already familiar with what accent and cultural barriers do to helpdesk communication.)
All of this will recur in spades with outsoucing to China (where armies of engineers clone the tech sent there to be assembled and set up competing companies). Ditto in Eastern Europe (currently in a "robber baron" period where membership in organized crime is a prerequisite for corporate success).
As someone who was involved with trying to get startup funding over the last couple years, I can tell you one thing: It was not Google that made it hard for startups to get funding. It was Sand Hill Road - the roost of the vulture capitalists. Approximately 90% of the capital granted during that period had a string attached:
To even be considered for funding you had to have an "outsourcing story". You had to put most of your workforce outside the US and justify every employee that you wanted to be local. Result: Only a handfull of core-team stars with well-known reps could find startup work and the bulk of the talent - the "early hire" masses of talented people who know how to turn hairbrained schemes into functional products (and bust their butts doing so) - got to sit on their thumbs.
So while the Valley was experiencing a depression, Google created a friendly working environment and picked these people up at bargain prices. And now the vultures - who tried to leave them homeless while they bought up (and bid up) all the talent in places like India - are crying because they have to pay more to get them to come back.
Aren't they supposed to publish accepted applications as well?
If you want something to be a trade secret, you don't file a patent on it; You keep it a secret.
But they normally want to be the only one that can use the innovation (or license it to others).
Keeping it secret is good for that. Getting a patent is better. So trading in the secret for a government-enforced lock is a good deal.
But applying for a patent, NOT getting it, AND losing the secret as the result of applying for the patent, is worse than not applying at all. So with patent apps published a company has to be darned sure their patents will go through - and have the resources to keep pushing once they start. (Patent examiners routinely bounce the initial app, citing some prior art that sounds vuagely like what is claimed.)
As a self professed GEEK it appears obvious that the product with the best feature list wins my vote.
And if it had worked that way with videotape, Beta would have won.
Beta had the better tech. VHS had the big prerecorded film library - and also reved sooner to add speeds with even lower quality in a tradeoff for longer play time.
Beta lost.
Do they really think that because we're all going to buy next summers blockbuster hit that we'll willing purchase it on an inferiour product?
... it may be essential to at least attempt to patent every new idea because if the competition files first, then your "invent first" defense may not work anymore. I wonder how that conflicts with other free trade rules.
As I recall they now can publish denied applications. If that's correct, this would create a double-bind that destroys trade secret.
... Patent Reform Act of 2005, HR 2795 is supposed to make the system work 'more efficiently' and be 'less prone to litigation.'
Since a patent is nothing more than a license to sue, making the system "work 'more efficiently'" implies making it MORE "prone to litigation".
IMHO if they want to "harmonize" it with the rest of the world's systems, they should start by making both business methods and software unpatentable.
We also need a rule: A program which simply automates or simulates a well-known process (absent something truly novel and innovative about the WAY it automates that well-known process) should fail the test of being novel and innovative. Straightforward automation and simulation are techniques "Well known to people versed in the art" (of computer programming).
The entire POINT is that it doesn't have, or need, a screen. It uses the massive and standardized infrastructure of whatever it's plugged into.
I don't see the value of having a handheld linux server that has to plug into a computer usb slot (over a usb memory chip with linux on it)
A) What if you can't get the machine to boot from your pluggable USB meory?
B) Becuse you carry your CPU around you have no archetecture limits on what you plug it into. Power PC, Alpha, X86, ARM, MIPS, whatever. Your binaries always work. And your performance is always the same, even if you plugged it into something ancient and pokey.
C) Unplugging saves the entire state - window position, cursor position, open documents, applications in progress... Plugging in picks up exactly where you left off. Be editing a document. Stop with some keystroke at the office/school/library, make your next keystroke at home two hours later and fifty miles away. Try THAT with a memory stick.
Target was to make the small config for under $100 in bulk for schoolkids, maybe $200 in a big one with postage-stamp hard drive for the rest of us.
And I wouldn't sweat the price miss - this is the early adopter version. I expect that, if it catches on, it will become the next key-fob flash drive, be everywhere, and cost next to nothing.
(And why not? It does what you REALLY wanted to do with the flash drive fob, doesn't it?)
Anyone want to see if they can look at the way this thing boots and come up with software to load on a bare flash drive an do something similar? B-)
Why would anyone really need a pocket-sized server in their pocket anyways? People are just throwing new, pointless, mini-sized devices out everyday these days....
The idea is that you carry your computer around with you, session and all. You can use any PC (with Windows, Linux, BSD,...) / Mac / whatever for a screen, keyboard, and network connection.
Be in the middle of a session at work. Unplug it, go home, plug it in. You're right back in your session. Unplug, go to class, plug in, ditto. Unplug, go to library, plug in. Unplug, go to iternet cafe, plug in. Unplug, go to China, plug in...
If you were editing a document it's ready for the next keystroke. If you were reading mail you're still in the mail reader, still looking at the same letter at the same point in the scroll buffer. If you were browsing the web you are still on the same page with the same brower history. And so on. Your files came with you. Your state came with you. Your whole computer came with you - or at least the parts of it that are important for preserving your state. Screen, keyboard, mouse, video card, internet connection - use whatever is handy. They're heavy. They'll work just fine for this service for several generations after the machine they are attached to went obsolete. Why buy new ones? Why tie yourself to a particular one at a particular site?
Pull it out, it senses the loss of connection and saves anything still in RAM to a non-volatile memory (flash or disk if they can get it) before it runs out of the power in the onboard capacitor. Plug it in and it boots up, recovers state, and sweet-talks the new machine into giving it a full-screen window and the use of keyboard, mouse, and comm stack.
The designers brought this out for licensing to manufacturers (using a slightly-hacked BSD onboard) over a year ago. I saw their booth at Supercom in Las Vegas back then. (Target was to make the small config for under $100 in bulk for schoolkids, maybe $200 in a big one with postage-stamp hard drive for the rest of us.) It's nice to see a version finally on the market - and with Linux yet.
Why do people care so much about VOIP? I keep hearing about it, but I don't see the big deal.
Because it's:
- part of the "digital convergence",
- the main factor in the currently occurring total reorganization of the telecommunications / networking industry,
- a major factor in the network stock collapse a few years ago,
- a major driver of the current archetectural changes in network routing equipment, and so on.
The tellcos have been selling 64Kbps connections full of audio by the minute at exhorbitant rates for half a century. Now people have fat pipes nearly everywhere via the internet for flat rates. Competitors are transporting phone connections that way and undercutting the tellcos (and the tellcos themselves are using it internally). Internet routers are being rehacked to give telephone-quality reliability (drop rate, jitter, and latency limits) to designated streams and ISPs are negotiating such Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees so their customers can get it end-to-end. Compressed audio can make it even over a 56K dialup line, and an ADSL link can handle several calls simultaneously and still have bandwidth for browsing the web or downloading. With phone signals delivered to your home or handset in computer-accessable packets "value-added" services the tellcos charge you for are replaced by software you own on your machine. And you get to have a phone wherever you can connect to the net - at home, at a hotspot, from a wireless carrier's internet cell sites, or whatever.
It's finally rolling out. It interacts with the legacy dialup network. People are migrating. The industry is being turned on its head.
So it's one of the biggest things in tech this year. Of COURSE you here a lot about it. B-)
WiMax, another name for the 802.16 standard for wireless broadband, [...]
Close but no cigar.
The WiMAX forum is a separate organization from the IEEE 802.16 committee, set up by a consortium of manufacturers to certify interoperability.
WiMAX is the subset of the 802.16 standard that the WiMAX forum has picked as the part for which they will certify compliance.
As with WiFi, if you see a WiMAX brand on your adapter, wireless router, laptop, or whatever, it means it was type-certified to talk to all OTHER similarly-branded devices, regardless of manufacturer, using the SUBSET of 802.16 that the WiMAX forum chose to certify.
Racial/ethnic/religious tolerance would consist of identifying other humans as on the near side of the valley despite markers like [...].
Or on the FAR side of it BECAUSE of them.
Think of how US Liberals and Conservatives are at each other's throats much of the time, while both (though perhaps in separate ways) may avoid attacking and provide support for Islamic cultures and their governments and people.
The concept you are describing has been dubbed the "Uncanny Valley" and has been studied since the late 70s.
I wonder if this relates to xenophobia.
I have speculated that humans (like many other animals) may have a drive to attack competitors for their eco niche - either divergent populations of the same species or members of other species (ala cats-and-dogs, or the way bobcats try to wipe out all other peredators in their territories).
If such a drive exists it would involve attacking those that are "similar but somewhat different" while avoiding those that are "really close".
This could help explain the ease with which tribal warfare and racial conflict can be incited, along with the tendency of propaganda to dehumanize the targets, characterizing them as animal-like (thus in the valley rather than the nearby peak), in preparation for inciting violence against them. Racial/ethnic/religious tolerance would consist of identifying other humans as on the near side of the valley despite markers like language/accent, color and shape differences, and culture-driven behavioral distinctions.
It might also explain why several higher apes can handle all human language skills except vocal speech: If talking aloud put them "in the valley" it might have incited competitor-for-niche-attack behavior from humans, selecting against vocal speech in those ape and hominid species where it was scattered and wiping out those where it was entrenched.
There's another uncanny valley - at least I think it's separate - in politics and religion: Sects that are closest fight the hardest. IMHO this easily explained as a malfunction of the social-pressure mechanisms that promote conformity within the group.
In a single group a member whose opinions have a divergence will be pressured to change the divergent opinion - "file down the rough spot" as it were. A holder of a divergent opinion on an "important issue" will find little social support, and is likely to question and change the divergence rather than abandon the group's support.
If there are two groups with NEARLY identical ideologies, members of each group are likely to interpret members of the other as members of their own with a divergent opinion, and bring social pressure to bear to correct the divergence. But the target has a social support network of his own. So he neither "corrects" the divergence nore abandons the other characteristics that identify him as a member of HIS group, and NEARLY a member of the other. Failure makes the social pressure escalate. Iterate over all interactions between members of the two groups. Eventually each interprets the other as a collection of heritics attempting to destroy their own core values. Thus the fight is on.
Members of groups whose ideologies are sufficiently different that they recognize themselves as divergent are beyond the valley: Other ideologies to be dealt with on friendly terms when this is useful but not evil/heritical/demonic cabals within one's own group attempting to destroy the group.
Teens and adults have different comm needs.
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E-mail Is For Old People
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Mouch of teens' communication is related to forming and strengthening social networks and finding their places in them. This requires a lot of rapid, short-term interaction. IM is a good match for this.
Adults (in general) have social networks that are well-established and don't require constant work. Their communication needs are more oriented to planning and coordination of longer-term projects, whether business, day-to-day "housekeeping", politics, skill-building, or any of a host of other things that are longer term and more asynchronous. Email is a good match for that.
"write" for line terminals, "talk" etc. for page-capable text terminals with a termcap defined.
Can somebody who has actually used "IM", "talk", and "write" tell me (and the other non-IM-using dinosaurs) whether
- IM is just a proprietary reimplementation of, say talk, or
- what IS its functionality that makes it different and "better".
(Notw that I consider builtin versions of things like nix's "is user george accessable?" commands to be convenient but not earthshattering.)
'write' came out many years after term-talk was standard on all CDC Plato systems. I really liked the per-character display of term-talk (and the chat rooms on)
And similar stuff (whose names I don't recall at the moment) on various DEC and other OSes, or applications running under them.
Just because it's patched, even if the patch is distributed, doesn't mean the patch is installed, or ever WILL be installed, in all the equipment out there.
There are a LOT of Cisco routers running a LOT of the net, administered by a LOT of people - carriers, corporations, and individuals. Many of whom have other things to do than spend their time vetting Cisco upgrades to make sure they won't break something and then installing them.
So that vulnerability will be out there - in a LOT of places - for some time to come. It may be exploited if it's obscure, but it WILL be exploited if it's useful and well-knwon. Cisco will be blamed, at least in part, for any harm that ensues. This will affect their future sales, their support expenses, and possibly their legal fees.
Now multiply that by the number of vulnerabilities that exist in Cisco routers and are eventually discovered by people Like Michael Linn.
Large companies would prefer to deploy these fixes quietly, in their own time. Perhaps to mitigate the harm - certainly to mitigate their own expense. (And of course some of them would love to ignore them as long as possible.)
This may not be the best thing for the users - and it may not even be the best thing for the company in the long run. But it is PERCEIVED by the company administration to be a useful option, and disclsure a forcing their hand on disclosure and scheduling, limiting their own options and not letting them chose the one they determine to be best. Further, exposure of a vulnerability makes them look bad, which also cuts into the bottom line.
So of course they want to inhibit such uncontrolled disclosure of their problems. If they can use the legal system to punish those who dsiclose in a way the legal system says is improper, they may chose to do so.
Does anyone know if the "tracking dots" are also printed on B&W laser printers?
Try printing a line of text on two overhead projection foils, then putting them one atop another on a white surface and seeing if any scattered grey dots tend to line up exactly.
Man in the middle is easy with VoIP
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VoIP Security
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· Score: 1
To be successful, it requires very good access to my ISP or the backbone carrier's network which is hard to do.
Actually it's trivial - by subverting the call setup negotiation. They don't even need to subvert the carrier's servers - replacing or inserting a SIP proxy via, for instance, DNS cache poisoning would do the job. With call setup corrupted the actual streams can be routed through any machines and paths they want.
Even if they can get that access all they can do is listen to my calls, have a chat with me and the other person or maybe hang up the call.
I take it you're OK with, say, a spook agency, police departnemt, business competitor, or foreign government agent recording all your conversations (and their endpoints) and feeding them through voice recognition algorithms to identify those of interest. Also with a phisher tapping your conversations with your bank and credit card company?
And with anybody with adequate tech carefully putting words in your mouth - but only as heard by the ear of the person you're talking to (or words apparently from THEIR mouth to YOUR ear)? Maybe your rival for the other person's affections? Or with a new COINTELPRO operation by the FBI convincing your Significant Other that you're cheating (as they did to a number of '60s/'70s activists)?
I could go on listing potential bad stuff all day. The more tech, the worse it gets.
bilingual education is usually a temporary measure that allows education in english as a practical language and mainstream subjects to be taught in parallel until the student can be moved to english-speaking classes.
That's the demo version. Unfortunately (at least in California) it isn't used that way. Instead it is used as a new means for segregating the schools. The children are kept in bilingual classes indefinitely - and people of certain ancestry are put into them even if their families have been here for generations and speaking nothing but English the whole time. (Further, in at least the case of Spanish, the dialect taught in is one normally spoken by the working dirt-poor and organized criminals, rather than the educated classes back in the old country.)
Perhaps there is some advantage to teaching in their native language over the short term (provided, of course, that it really IS their native language and the teacher selected for speaking it is also competent to teach the subject matter - a big if.) But I've yet to see research showing that - conducted in a mode that models how bilingual is ACTUALLY done in public school settings.
But IMHO language skills are VERY important for future success, and immersion is the best way to teach a language - especially to the young. The short-term loss from taking a year or so of elementary-school level subjects in the "wrong" language is less crippling than the long-term loss of the opportunity to achieve fluency in English, along with an employer-acceptable accent, while young enough that the task is easy.
(I'll skip discussing moral relativism of some of the recent revisionist theories vs. older ones as getting too far off topic. But perhaps we can continue that if a suitable subject comes up. B-) )
Interesting note on the radio this morning, by the way: The latest results for the standardized tests just came in. This year's showed both the highest scores overall since the testing was begun decades back and the least difference between blacks and whites (with the blacks achieving the highest gain overall, though all are rising).
Note that this is under the "No Child Left Behind" rubric, falsifying claims that its effects are actually to wreck the schools and suppress the underclasses. Perhaps the problem is already being adequately addressed.
The problem is that the environment in the US is becoming hostile to science.
I'm with you there - though "becoming" implies something recent and this trend has been going on for decades. (Trust me. I lived through it.)
The religious extremists, greatly enheartened by a Fundementalist President's second term, are pursuing an agenda of undermining public education to replace science with nonsense like Intelligent Design and "teach the controversy."
But here I call BS.
The downfall of the US educational system predates both Bushes and has nothing to to with religious fundamentalism - unless you chose to label the "progressive" movement fundamentalist.
It it the result of a package of new-age ideologies that have formed into a meme strong enough to infect and unify nearly half the politically-active population of the US - including the entire administrative infrastructure of public school primary and secondary education (along with the professoriate of most of the institutions of "higher" learning, especially in the "liberal arts" part of the curriculum).
Some of the components:
- Look-say reading instruction - turning out functional illiterates.
- "New math", "Rain-forest Math", and other defective math and science teaching practices, turning out functional ilnumerates. (Note that the latter, while neglecting math skills, spends its time on story problems that amount to a political indoctrination course.)
- Bilingual education and "ebonics" - indellibly marking children as underclass via an accent and sabotaging their chance for higher education and employment above the burger-flipping level (at least in the legal economy).
- Self-esteem and "results-based" educational practices replacing grading on performance - removing incentive (actually producing a DISincentive) to learn.
- "Sensitivity" and "diversity" training misused to define gang activity as "black" and "latino" culture - and to require teachers ignore disruptive behavior by young gangsters as they block other kids from what little learning they could otherwise achieve in the dysfunctional institution.
- "Non-violent conflict resolution" that amounts to permitting the bullies to hit first to their heart's content, while drastically punishing anyone who attempts to defend by blocking a blow or hitting back.
- Revisionist history: Ad-Hominem flames of the founders as "Dead White Men" (whose anti-authoritarian principles and teachings can thus be dismissed), characterization of the constitution as "a living document" that can be stretched to allow anything rather than a limit on government, treating historical facts as matters of opinion, utterly failing to cover most of the most important events of the last several centuries, and a list of other misdeeds too long to go into here.
- Teacher retention, promotion, and pay scales based on seniority and tenure (in ELEMENTARY schools!) while totally blocking any consideration of qualification or performance.
- School-of-education curricula that consist entirely of political indoctrination and utterly ignore science, math, biology, and any sience except so-called "social science" (which has less to do with science than "creation science" and "Christian Science".)
And a host of other misdeeds, again too long to post here.
All having the effect of dumbing down the victims of the education system and turning them into a mass of easy-to-control (though not as productive as they might have been) sheep. And virtually all coming out of the ideology of the left.
Yes, there are some religious sects to the right of Joe Stalin who take issue with Darwin and make noise about it at school board meetings - especially when books are being selected. They get all the press - because the press itself is more than happy to turn its spotlight on its own opposition. This lets it blame its own side's destruction of science education on the other side. They've
A lock-out is the situation where the workers are ready to negotiate a deal, but management refuses to talk to them at all, and refuses to allow them work in the meantime under the old contract.
A strike is where management is ready to negotiate a deal, but the workers refuse to talk, and refuse to work in the meantime under the old contract.
Close. But I beg to differ.
A strike does not mean the workers are unwilling to negotiate. It just means they've stopped working during the negotiations.
A lockout means that the company won't let some or all of the union workers continue working under the old contract's terms. It might mean workers who struck (or took sick time) can't come back. It might mean anybody wanting to work gets paid on terms chosen by the company and not according to the old contract. It might mean that union employees are excluded from the site period.
Negotiations normally go on during strikes - with intermittent breakdowns. Negotiations more often break down during lockouts. (If the company is doing OK without the union workers it has little incentive to negotiate unless the union drastically drops its demands. Then it may find recovering the experienced employees is worth keeping the union around and paying more than they would pay newbies.)
Slashdot Mirror
One particular film/song is successful so they just clone it and flog the same formula to death because they have no imagination whatsoever.
Hollywooods' latest non-idea seems to be re-making 70s TV series and films...badly
And this summer it seems that ALL the releases - or at least all those with a significant advertising budget - are exactly such remakes.
At last the critical media are beginning to question how much, if any, of the studios' financial downturn is actually due to "piracy".
(Combine that with the recent story about how the people who file-share also BUY several times more records than the typical record customer and perhaps some clues will begin to penetrate.)
As with any disruptive mechanism, the original value proposition is driven lower and lower to the point where it is as commodity as the market it surplanted...
While the original article was talking about relatively low-level stuff such as call centers, that has already happened there in the engineering outsourcing.
The insistance of venture capitaliasts on startups having an "offshoring story" led to the last round of startups building up with their archetectural core teams in the US and the bulk of their engineering workforce offshore - principally in India. The result was to hire-up the available qualified professionals, and to bid up their wages as the supply dried up - to the point where they're paid nearly on a par with similar pros (at least those here on H1 visas), or even higher. Thus the engineering talent is being sought elsewhere.
Meanwhile, back in the US, you hear screams of agony as managment tries to hire back some of the old pros and discovers that they've gone to companies, like Google, who gave them comfy, rewarding jobs paying enough to keep the mortgage payments up and the car gassed. Now that they have a comfy seat that didn't dry up in the crunch it takes a BIG premium to lure them back into the no-downward-loyalty rat race.
I am thinking a dot.bangalore crash may be just around the corner.
Could be.
And we are yet to see the real long term negative effects of short-sighted, cost driven offshoring.
We're seeing some of it already. Like whole engineering teams getting the product design jelled, then deserting to form a competing company - under Indian, rather than US, IP law. B-)
Also a blackmail attempt by a data-entry person threatening to publish customer medical records.
(Of course you're already familiar with what accent and cultural barriers do to helpdesk communication.)
All of this will recur in spades with outsoucing to China (where armies of engineers clone the tech sent there to be assembled and set up competing companies). Ditto in Eastern Europe (currently in a "robber baron" period where membership in organized crime is a prerequisite for corporate success).
As someone who was involved with trying to get startup funding over the last couple years, I can tell you one thing: It was not Google that made it hard for startups to get funding. It was Sand Hill Road - the roost of the vulture capitalists. Approximately 90% of the capital granted during that period had a string attached:
To even be considered for funding you had to have an "outsourcing story". You had to put most of your workforce outside the US and justify every employee that you wanted to be local. Result: Only a handfull of core-team stars with well-known reps could find startup work and the bulk of the talent - the "early hire" masses of talented people who know how to turn hairbrained schemes into functional products (and bust their butts doing so) - got to sit on their thumbs.
So while the Valley was experiencing a depression, Google created a friendly working environment and picked these people up at bargain prices. And now the vultures - who tried to leave them homeless while they bought up (and bid up) all the talent in places like India - are crying because they have to pay more to get them to come back.
I cry crocodile tears.
They made their own bed. Let them lie in it.
Aren't they supposed to publish accepted applications as well?
If you want something to be a trade secret, you don't file a patent on it; You keep it a secret.
But they normally want to be the only one that can use the innovation (or license it to others).
Keeping it secret is good for that. Getting a patent is better. So trading in the secret for a government-enforced lock is a good deal.
But applying for a patent, NOT getting it, AND losing the secret as the result of applying for the patent, is worse than not applying at all. So with patent apps published a company has to be darned sure their patents will go through - and have the resources to keep pushing once they start. (Patent examiners routinely bounce the initial app, citing some prior art that sounds vuagely like what is claimed.)
As a self professed GEEK it appears obvious that the product with the best feature list wins my vote.
And if it had worked that way with videotape, Beta would have won.
Beta had the better tech. VHS had the big prerecorded film library - and also reved sooner to add speeds with even lower quality in a tradeoff for longer play time.
Beta lost.
Do they really think that because we're all going to buy next summers blockbuster hit that we'll willing purchase it on an inferiour product?
Why not? That's how it worked before.
... it may be essential to at least attempt to patent every new idea because if the competition files first, then your "invent first" defense may not work anymore. I wonder how that conflicts with other free trade rules.
As I recall they now can publish denied applications. If that's correct, this would create a double-bind that destroys trade secret.
... Patent Reform Act of 2005, HR 2795 is supposed to make the system work 'more efficiently' and be 'less prone to litigation.'
Since a patent is nothing more than a license to sue, making the system "work 'more efficiently'" implies making it MORE "prone to litigation".
IMHO if they want to "harmonize" it with the rest of the world's systems, they should start by making both business methods and software unpatentable.
We also need a rule: A program which simply automates or simulates a well-known process (absent something truly novel and innovative about the WAY it automates that well-known process) should fail the test of being novel and innovative. Straightforward automation and simulation are techniques "Well known to people versed in the art" (of computer programming).
Does it have have a screen?
The entire POINT is that it doesn't have, or need, a screen. It uses the massive and standardized infrastructure of whatever it's plugged into.
I don't see the value of having a handheld linux server that has to plug into a computer usb slot (over a usb memory chip with linux on it)
A) What if you can't get the machine to boot from your pluggable USB meory?
B) Becuse you carry your CPU around you have no archetecture limits on what you plug it into. Power PC, Alpha, X86, ARM, MIPS, whatever. Your binaries always work. And your performance is always the same, even if you plugged it into something ancient and pokey.
C) Unplugging saves the entire state - window position, cursor position, open documents, applications in progress... Plugging in picks up exactly where you left off. Be editing a document. Stop with some keystroke at the office/school/library, make your next keystroke at home two hours later and fifty miles away. Try THAT with a memory stick.
Target was to make the small config for under $100 in bulk for schoolkids, maybe $200 in a big one with postage-stamp hard drive for the rest of us.
And I wouldn't sweat the price miss - this is the early adopter version. I expect that, if it catches on, it will become the next key-fob flash drive, be everywhere, and cost next to nothing.
(And why not? It does what you REALLY wanted to do with the flash drive fob, doesn't it?)
Anyone want to see if they can look at the way this thing boots and come up with software to load on a bare flash drive an do something similar? B-)
Why would anyone really need a pocket-sized server in their pocket anyways? People are just throwing new, pointless, mini-sized devices out everyday these days....
...) / Mac / whatever for a screen, keyboard, and network connection.
The idea is that you carry your computer around with you, session and all. You can use any PC (with Windows, Linux, BSD,
Be in the middle of a session at work. Unplug it, go home, plug it in. You're right back in your session. Unplug, go to class, plug in, ditto. Unplug, go to library, plug in. Unplug, go to iternet cafe, plug in. Unplug, go to China, plug in...
If you were editing a document it's ready for the next keystroke. If you were reading mail you're still in the mail reader, still looking at the same letter at the same point in the scroll buffer. If you were browsing the web you are still on the same page with the same brower history. And so on. Your files came with you. Your state came with you. Your whole computer came with you - or at least the parts of it that are important for preserving your state. Screen, keyboard, mouse, video card, internet connection - use whatever is handy. They're heavy. They'll work just fine for this service for several generations after the machine they are attached to went obsolete. Why buy new ones? Why tie yourself to a particular one at a particular site?
Pull it out, it senses the loss of connection and saves anything still in RAM to a non-volatile memory (flash or disk if they can get it) before it runs out of the power in the onboard capacitor. Plug it in and it boots up, recovers state, and sweet-talks the new machine into giving it a full-screen window and the use of keyboard, mouse, and comm stack.
The designers brought this out for licensing to manufacturers (using a slightly-hacked BSD onboard) over a year ago. I saw their booth at Supercom in Las Vegas back then. (Target was to make the small config for under $100 in bulk for schoolkids, maybe $200 in a big one with postage-stamp hard drive for the rest of us.) It's nice to see a version finally on the market - and with Linux yet.
Why do people care so much about VOIP? I keep hearing about it, but I don't see the big deal.
Because it's:
- part of the "digital convergence",
- the main factor in the currently occurring total reorganization of the telecommunications / networking industry,
- a major factor in the network stock collapse a few years ago,
- a major driver of the current archetectural changes in network routing equipment,
and so on.
The tellcos have been selling 64Kbps connections full of audio by the minute at exhorbitant rates for half a century. Now people have fat pipes nearly everywhere via the internet for flat rates. Competitors are transporting phone connections that way and undercutting the tellcos (and the tellcos themselves are using it internally). Internet routers are being rehacked to give telephone-quality reliability (drop rate, jitter, and latency limits) to designated streams and ISPs are negotiating such Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees so their customers can get it end-to-end. Compressed audio can make it even over a 56K dialup line, and an ADSL link can handle several calls simultaneously and still have bandwidth for browsing the web or downloading. With phone signals delivered to your home or handset in computer-accessable packets "value-added" services the tellcos charge you for are replaced by software you own on your machine. And you get to have a phone wherever you can connect to the net - at home, at a hotspot, from a wireless carrier's internet cell sites, or whatever.
It's finally rolling out. It interacts with the legacy dialup network. People are migrating. The industry is being turned on its head.
So it's one of the biggest things in tech this year. Of COURSE you here a lot about it. B-)
WiMax, another name for the 802.16 standard for wireless broadband, [...]
Close but no cigar.
The WiMAX forum is a separate organization from the IEEE 802.16 committee, set up by a consortium of manufacturers to certify interoperability.
WiMAX is the subset of the 802.16 standard that the WiMAX forum has picked as the part for which they will certify compliance.
As with WiFi, if you see a WiMAX brand on your adapter, wireless router, laptop, or whatever, it means it was type-certified to talk to all OTHER similarly-branded devices, regardless of manufacturer, using the SUBSET of 802.16 that the WiMAX forum chose to certify.
The US government has to protect against all possible terror threats, whereas the terrorists only have to find one single way to break through.
Which is much of WHY, in a race between weapons and armor, weapons always eventually win.
Racial/ethnic/religious tolerance would consist of identifying other humans as on the near side of the valley despite markers like [...].
Or on the FAR side of it BECAUSE of them.
Think of how US Liberals and Conservatives are at each other's throats much of the time, while both (though perhaps in separate ways) may avoid attacking and provide support for Islamic cultures and their governments and people.
The concept you are describing has been dubbed the "Uncanny Valley" and has been studied since the late 70s.
I wonder if this relates to xenophobia.
I have speculated that humans (like many other animals) may have a drive to attack competitors for their eco niche - either divergent populations of the same species or members of other species (ala cats-and-dogs, or the way bobcats try to wipe out all other peredators in their territories).
If such a drive exists it would involve attacking those that are "similar but somewhat different" while avoiding those that are "really close".
This could help explain the ease with which tribal warfare and racial conflict can be incited, along with the tendency of propaganda to dehumanize the targets, characterizing them as animal-like (thus in the valley rather than the nearby peak), in preparation for inciting violence against them. Racial/ethnic/religious tolerance would consist of identifying other humans as on the near side of the valley despite markers like language/accent, color and shape differences, and culture-driven behavioral distinctions.
It might also explain why several higher apes can handle all human language skills except vocal speech: If talking aloud put them "in the valley" it might have incited competitor-for-niche-attack behavior from humans, selecting against vocal speech in those ape and hominid species where it was scattered and wiping out those where it was entrenched.
There's another uncanny valley - at least I think it's separate - in politics and religion: Sects that are closest fight the hardest. IMHO this easily explained as a malfunction of the social-pressure mechanisms that promote conformity within the group.
In a single group a member whose opinions have a divergence will be pressured to change the divergent opinion - "file down the rough spot" as it were. A holder of a divergent opinion on an "important issue" will find little social support, and is likely to question and change the divergence rather than abandon the group's support.
If there are two groups with NEARLY identical ideologies, members of each group are likely to interpret members of the other as members of their own with a divergent opinion, and bring social pressure to bear to correct the divergence. But the target has a social support network of his own. So he neither "corrects" the divergence nore abandons the other characteristics that identify him as a member of HIS group, and NEARLY a member of the other. Failure makes the social pressure escalate. Iterate over all interactions between members of the two groups. Eventually each interprets the other as a collection of heritics attempting to destroy their own core values. Thus the fight is on.
Members of groups whose ideologies are sufficiently different that they recognize themselves as divergent are beyond the valley: Other ideologies to be dealt with on friendly terms when this is useful but not evil/heritical/demonic cabals within one's own group attempting to destroy the group.
Mouch of teens' communication is related to forming and strengthening social networks and finding their places in them. This requires a lot of rapid, short-term interaction. IM is a good match for this.
Adults (in general) have social networks that are well-established and don't require constant work. Their communication needs are more oriented to planning and coordination of longer-term projects, whether business, day-to-day "housekeeping", politics, skill-building, or any of a host of other things that are longer term and more asynchronous. Email is a good match for that.
"write" for line terminals, "talk" etc. for page-capable text terminals with a termcap defined.
Can somebody who has actually used "IM", "talk", and "write" tell me (and the other non-IM-using dinosaurs) whether
- IM is just a proprietary reimplementation of, say talk, or
- what IS its functionality that makes it different and "better".
(Notw that I consider builtin versions of things like nix's "is user george accessable?" commands to be convenient but not earthshattering.)
'write' came out many years after term-talk was standard on all CDC Plato systems. I really liked the per-character display of term-talk (and the chat rooms on)
And similar stuff (whose names I don't recall at the moment) on various DEC and other OSes, or applications running under them.
Adobe's PDF tools.
I am NOT Michael Lynn but I can make a guess.
Just because it's patched, even if the patch is distributed, doesn't mean the patch is installed, or ever WILL be installed, in all the equipment out there.
There are a LOT of Cisco routers running a LOT of the net, administered by a LOT of people - carriers, corporations, and individuals. Many of whom have other things to do than spend their time vetting Cisco upgrades to make sure they won't break something and then installing them.
So that vulnerability will be out there - in a LOT of places - for some time to come. It may be exploited if it's obscure, but it WILL be exploited if it's useful and well-knwon. Cisco will be blamed, at least in part, for any harm that ensues. This will affect their future sales, their support expenses, and possibly their legal fees.
Now multiply that by the number of vulnerabilities that exist in Cisco routers and are eventually discovered by people Like Michael Linn.
Large companies would prefer to deploy these fixes quietly, in their own time. Perhaps to mitigate the harm - certainly to mitigate their own expense. (And of course some of them would love to ignore them as long as possible.)
This may not be the best thing for the users - and it may not even be the best thing for the company in the long run. But it is PERCEIVED by the company administration to be a useful option, and disclsure a forcing their hand on disclosure and scheduling, limiting their own options and not letting them chose the one they determine to be best. Further, exposure of a vulnerability makes them look bad, which also cuts into the bottom line.
So of course they want to inhibit such uncontrolled disclosure of their problems. If they can use the legal system to punish those who dsiclose in a way the legal system says is improper, they may chose to do so.
Does anyone know if the "tracking dots" are also printed on B&W laser printers?
Try printing a line of text on two overhead projection foils, then putting them one atop another on a white surface and seeing if any scattered grey dots tend to line up exactly.
To be successful, it requires very good access to my ISP or the backbone carrier's network which is hard to do.
Actually it's trivial - by subverting the call setup negotiation. They don't even need to subvert the carrier's servers - replacing or inserting a SIP proxy via, for instance, DNS cache poisoning would do the job. With call setup corrupted the actual streams can be routed through any machines and paths they want.
Even if they can get that access all they can do is listen to my calls, have a chat with me and the other person or maybe hang up the call.
I take it you're OK with, say, a spook agency, police departnemt, business competitor, or foreign government agent recording all your conversations (and their endpoints) and feeding them through voice recognition algorithms to identify those of interest. Also with a phisher tapping your conversations with your bank and credit card company?
And with anybody with adequate tech carefully putting words in your mouth - but only as heard by the ear of the person you're talking to (or words apparently from THEIR mouth to YOUR ear)? Maybe your rival for the other person's affections? Or with a new COINTELPRO operation by the FBI convincing your Significant Other that you're cheating (as they did to a number of '60s/'70s activists)?
I could go on listing potential bad stuff all day. The more tech, the worse it gets.
bilingual education is usually a temporary measure that allows education in english as a practical language and mainstream subjects to be taught in parallel until the student can be moved to english-speaking classes.
That's the demo version. Unfortunately (at least in California) it isn't used that way. Instead it is used as a new means for segregating the schools. The children are kept in bilingual classes indefinitely - and people of certain ancestry are put into them even if their families have been here for generations and speaking nothing but English the whole time. (Further, in at least the case of Spanish, the dialect taught in is one normally spoken by the working dirt-poor and organized criminals, rather than the educated classes back in the old country.)
Perhaps there is some advantage to teaching in their native language over the short term (provided, of course, that it really IS their native language and the teacher selected for speaking it is also competent to teach the subject matter - a big if.) But I've yet to see research showing that - conducted in a mode that models how bilingual is ACTUALLY done in public school settings.
But IMHO language skills are VERY important for future success, and immersion is the best way to teach a language - especially to the young. The short-term loss from taking a year or so of elementary-school level subjects in the "wrong" language is less crippling than the long-term loss of the opportunity to achieve fluency in English, along with an employer-acceptable accent, while young enough that the task is easy.
(I'll skip discussing moral relativism of some of the recent revisionist theories vs. older ones as getting too far off topic. But perhaps we can continue that if a suitable subject comes up. B-) )
Interesting note on the radio this morning, by the way: The latest results for the standardized tests just came in. This year's showed both the highest scores overall since the testing was begun decades back and the least difference between blacks and whites (with the blacks achieving the highest gain overall, though all are rising).
Note that this is under the "No Child Left Behind" rubric, falsifying claims that its effects are actually to wreck the schools and suppress the underclasses. Perhaps the problem is already being adequately addressed.
The problem is that the environment in the US is becoming hostile to science.
I'm with you there - though "becoming" implies something recent and this trend has been going on for decades. (Trust me. I lived through it.)
The religious extremists, greatly enheartened by a Fundementalist President's second term, are pursuing an agenda of undermining public education to replace science with nonsense like Intelligent Design and "teach the controversy."
But here I call BS.
The downfall of the US educational system predates both Bushes and has nothing to to with religious fundamentalism - unless you chose to label the "progressive" movement fundamentalist.
It it the result of a package of new-age ideologies that have formed into a meme strong enough to infect and unify nearly half the politically-active population of the US - including the entire administrative infrastructure of public school primary and secondary education (along with the professoriate of most of the institutions of "higher" learning, especially in the "liberal arts" part of the curriculum).
Some of the components:
- Look-say reading instruction - turning out functional illiterates.
- "New math", "Rain-forest Math", and other defective math and science teaching practices, turning out functional ilnumerates. (Note that the latter, while neglecting math skills, spends its time on story problems that amount to a political indoctrination course.)
- Bilingual education and "ebonics" - indellibly marking children as underclass via an accent and sabotaging their chance for higher education and employment above the burger-flipping level (at least in the legal economy).
- Self-esteem and "results-based" educational practices replacing grading on performance - removing incentive (actually producing a DISincentive) to learn.
- "Sensitivity" and "diversity" training misused to define gang activity as "black" and "latino" culture - and to require teachers ignore disruptive behavior by young gangsters as they block other kids from what little learning they could otherwise achieve in the dysfunctional institution.
- "Non-violent conflict resolution" that amounts to permitting the bullies to hit first to their heart's content, while drastically punishing anyone who attempts to defend by blocking a blow or hitting back.
- Revisionist history: Ad-Hominem flames of the founders as "Dead White Men" (whose anti-authoritarian principles and teachings can thus be dismissed), characterization of the constitution as "a living document" that can be stretched to allow anything rather than a limit on government, treating historical facts as matters of opinion, utterly failing to cover most of the most important events of the last several centuries, and a list of other misdeeds too long to go into here.
- Teacher retention, promotion, and pay scales based on seniority and tenure (in ELEMENTARY schools!) while totally blocking any consideration of qualification or performance.
- School-of-education curricula that consist entirely of political indoctrination and utterly ignore science, math, biology, and any sience except so-called "social science" (which has less to do with science than "creation science" and "Christian Science".)
And a host of other misdeeds, again too long to post here.
All having the effect of dumbing down the victims of the education system and turning them into a mass of easy-to-control (though not as productive as they might have been) sheep. And virtually all coming out of the ideology of the left.
Yes, there are some religious sects to the right of Joe Stalin who take issue with Darwin and make noise about it at school board meetings - especially when books are being selected. They get all the press - because the press itself is more than happy to turn its spotlight on its own opposition. This lets it blame its own side's destruction of science education on the other side. They've
A lock-out is the situation where the workers are ready to negotiate a deal, but management refuses to talk to them at all, and refuses to allow them work in the meantime under the old contract.
A strike is where management is ready to negotiate a deal, but the workers refuse to talk, and refuse to work in the meantime under the old contract.
Close. But I beg to differ.
A strike does not mean the workers are unwilling to negotiate. It just means they've stopped working during the negotiations.
A lockout means that the company won't let some or all of the union workers continue working under the old contract's terms. It might mean workers who struck (or took sick time) can't come back. It might mean anybody wanting to work gets paid on terms chosen by the company and not according to the old contract. It might mean that union employees are excluded from the site period.
Negotiations normally go on during strikes - with intermittent breakdowns. Negotiations more often break down during lockouts. (If the company is doing OK without the union workers it has little incentive to negotiate unless the union drastically drops its demands. Then it may find recovering the experienced employees is worth keeping the union around and paying more than they would pay newbies.)