I have no idea where the author of the article got the idea that there was something risky about the stock split - unless it was some hype from the marketing department of Sony.
Stocks are split when they get too expensive, so that smaller players can buy in more easily
At $270 it costs $27,000 to buy a hundred shares - the "round lot" quantum on the markets, below which you are typically penalized with higher transaction fees. Splitting, say, 3-for-1 brings the stock price down to 90 and the ante down to $9,000. Many more players can buy in. Typically they do, and bid the price up a bit, which is why stocks typically climb just after a split. (And larger players take advantage of that by buying on news that the stock is going to split - which also bids the stock up a little before the split.)
$270 is way high, so a split is overdue. The split will almost certainly result in the stock going up. If the marketing droids can convince some fools that there is some risk to this and doing it is "daring", said fools will interpret the rise as a success for Sony.
As for any real risk from the move, the only one I can see is a psychological hit if the stock ends up trading at a very low number. But if they don't split it beyond 3-for-1 they'd have to lose half their value after the split to drop below even 45. If the stock value drops by 50% they have some other problem - big time.
The same could be said for many other jokes, of course.
I suspect that those who don't find User Friendy to be funny either don't have the necessary referrents or suffer from an excess of political correctness.
Regarding the former: Some User Firendly strips aren't stand-alone. You have to have seen quite a bit of the strip's history to get the running gag.
Regarding the latter: Of COURSE "children learning to read" are funny. It behoves a teacher not to ridicule them to their faces. But that doesn't mean the teacher has to ignore the humor. And one of the things about Tech Support is that an endless supply of users making the same ignorant and/or dumb mistakes can be frustrating. So a support person will from time to time WISH they could do what the characters in User Friendly do, when they come up with a snappy comeback, sabotage the luser, or otherwise blow off steam.
If you think the humor of User Friendly is occasionally black, try listening to medical workers or policemen some time.
Some things HAVE to be funny, because otherwise they'd be too painful.
Having said that, I agree with what you're saying. If the knowledge comes entirely from open, public sources, then there does seem to be something unethical about closing the compilation of that knowledge off and keeping it for commercial gain.
I have no problem with a company databasifying public data and charging for their compilation. Don't like it? Buy a different compilation from a competitor, or get the raw data and databaseify it yourself.
On the other hand, I have a BIG problem with a company and a government agency cutting a sweetheart deal such that only that ONE company gets to databaseify and sell that agency's public records. (This has happened with both the US Patent Office and the Library of Congress card catalog, though I'm not sure if either exclusive deal is still in effect.)
How would they know you had money?
on
Apocalypse Not
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· Score: 2
The big concern wasn't that the banks would be unable to pay you your money. (Though that could happen, too, if they lost track of who owed THEM money.)
The concern was that the banks' records would be so fouled up that they would have know way to know whether/how much they owed you.
If that had happened the FDIC would be no help - because THEY would have no idea whether / how much you were owed, either.
It isn't over yet. Lots of offices are still on vacation until Tuesday. There may be a lot of bugs that haven't yet been discovered - let alone reported.
I noticed when reading it that it made four claims. Three related to a linear array of "cameras" (i.e. lenses) working on a single strip of film. The fourth substituted "video storage means" for the film, apparently implying substituting video cameras for the row of lens/box "cameras".
The various descriptions on the web site gave me the impression that a series of independent film or video cameras would have even more potential: Varying spacing to accellerate/decellerate the pan, varying positioning to pan in 3-D, switching to full motion at varying speeds at selected intervals, etc. And the authors appeared to understand this potential. So I wondered at the omission in the patent.
Then I checked some of the references, and discovered that such (at least with film) had already been patented before - far enough back that the patents are expired.
So it looks like doing this with an array of independent film cameras is prior art. Video cameras in any configuration except evenly-spaced along a straight or curved line (which is covered by claim 4) also appears to be open, and you might break claim 4 by treating it as a special case of the previous expired patent with the obvious substitution of video cameras for film cameras.
Essentially all the patent covers is a camera with many lenses and synchronized or sequenced shutters, projecting onto a common film strip, along with a multiple-video-camera model of it.
After being down with Pneumonia for the three weeks when I INTENDED to do this stuff, I recovered enough to do my Y2K upgrading about Christmas eve.
So Sun Dec 26 went down to Fry's with the wife and got a copy of Red Hat 6.1 and his-and-hers Compaq 5888s. (Didn't get monitors - had some old ones and am expecting a big price break on LCDs this spring.)
Loaded Linux onto mine on Mon and started configuring on Tue. Had to patch the ethernet driver to suport the diamond "homenet" / ethernet card. (Stock Red Hat driver is hardcoded to use it in the "homenet" mode - 10-base-T port dead and trying to do a 1Mbps link on the telephone wiring.) Winmodem is dead of course, I don't think the install found the DVD drive (though the CD/R is working), and the power button is software driven so I have to unplug it to shut it down until I get that configured, but it's close enough for now.
Reason for the migration: I'd been running my home network on an old Sparc with SunOS 4.1.3, and didn't want to drop mail on the floor. Hung an external modem on the serial port. Beat my head against sendmail.cf for a while. Taylor UUCP's automatic config file translator worked beautifully. Finally got it all working and cut over at 9:10 PM New Year's Eve. (Had also copied all the files from the SunOS to the new machine for safekeeping and salvage. Old disk was 2G and hitting the wall. Whole thing takes up Shut everything down (to guard against crossing-the-boundary bugs) and went out to party.
1/1/2000 turned things back on again - and discovered that shutting down had been the last straw for the old Mitac monitor. B-( Horizontal oscilator won't even start with the video in 640x480 mode. (Played musical monitors to check that the computer was OK.)
So back to Fry's and dropped another $400 plus tax on a new 19" Princeton Ultra95e. (NICE, SHARP display. Time to get new glasses so I can take advantage of it.)
The most annoying part, of course, is that SunOS 4.1.3 came up fine and said the date was Jan 1 2000. So it probably would have kept working well enough to handle the mail after all.
Oh, well. At least it gave me an excuse to cut the whole home network over to an Open Source OS and my workstation to a 700 Mhz Athlon.
(Sometimes you hear computer science-types speculate about the possibility of automatic software validation, i.e. the possibility of developing a new language where it's possible to mathematically prove that your software is is correct. I'm not holding my breath.)
Me neither. Consider:
Suppose you have an automatic software validation system. It will require as input a specification of the correct behavoir of the software, in a formal language that it can parse. Rendering the specification into the formal language amounts to writing a program. How do you prove THAT is correct?
Therefore a general formal correctness prover is impossible. You micht be able to automatically prove that two expressions of a program are equivalent, or that a particular program matches a particular formal specification. But you can't prove that the program is "correct".
Which is not to say that such tools are useless. I have yet to see a method of testing a program that doesn't amount to expressing the program and/or its requirements in two languages - as distinct as possible - and then comparing the two. Typically this will be the code versus a human-readable spec, pseudocode, or profuse comments, and the comparison will be done by humans: a team of programmers or software QA engineers. The process might include code walkthroughs, writing and running automated tests, coverage analysis, etc. But an automated tool comparing code against a formal spec would be a very useful labor-saver, or an additional tool in the kit.
The important thing is that expressing the program in two distinct languages results in two distinct sorts of thinking as the two expressions are written. Most bugs tend to occur only in one of the thinking modes, and are thus exposed when the diverse expressions of the program are compared.
I see how my post could be read to imply a literal failure return from the write service itself, rather than a failure indication on a later attempt to read. Sorry 'bout that.
While I'm at it, I also see that I wasn't clear that this is a story told me by someone else, not something I have personal experience with.
Thanks for the correction.
A view through mud-colored glasses.
on
The Timekeeper
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· Score: 2
A century ago, one historian wrote that the age of conquest was about to yield to "an age of glory and enlightenment. Aluminum will be the shining symbol of that age. The houses and cities of men, built of aluminum, shall flash in the rising sun with surpassing brilliance."
Today we use aluminum for soda cans.
And for aluminum siding.
Katz continues to provide views into the Liberal Arts / Mainstream Fiction mindset - where progress is pollution, net improvements are to be judged only by their downside components, and no matter how bad things are you should not try to fix them because you'll only make them worse. It is no surprise that he identifies with the Wells "Time Machine" vision of the future/our present, preferring it to those of Verne or Disney.
But have things really gotten worse, or better? I don't know about you, bunkie, but as I look back over my half-century of life I see an enormous net improvement in quality of life - not just for me, but for humans in general.
And the biggest fly I see in this ointment is government interference in the lives of the people. And one of the most useful tools of the control freaks in power is the distorted mindset that Katz so aptly demonstrates.
There's a distinction between Science Fiction and Mainstream Fiction that corresponds: Science Fiction is the art of the techie, and it has a central theme: If it's useful you can do it. If it's broken you can fix it. Even the cautionary tales are a variant: Be careful, because if you break it THIS way you could break it so bad you CAN'T fix it. But even that is upbeat, because it assumes the power and decision-making is in the reader's responsiblehands. Mainstream fiction, on the other hand, is art for the serfs: It's all going to hell. But don't try to change it, or you'll make it worse. Just be thankful you're not going to hell as fast as those other people. (But while you're going to hell, you might as well try to spike the wheels of anybody who's trying to fix things. After all, if they do manage to change anything they'll just get you to hell faster.)
Decompressing it to a raw bitmap and then recompressing it is going to cause it to lose another generation in quality (due to lossy compression).
That's not necessarily true. Information was lost in the original compression because there was more information than the compressed form could hold. The expanded form contains exactly the same amount of information as the compressed form, and if it's intercepted as a digital stream (so it hasn't been distorted) the original compressed form (or another that would produce exactly the same output) can in principle be regenerated.
Now that might or might not happen with stock compression code. But if the stock stuff doesn't work well enough, a hack could be written that would do the job.
Reminds me of a copy protection scheme used on a game program for the Apple ][
The copy-protected disk had been scratched with a pin so that track 3 was damaged. The game would try to write on track 3, and if it got an error it would consider the copy OK.
If it succeeded, it would run ONCE, and erase the disk as it went. So copiers would make their copy, try it out, and take it home, only to find out it didn't work.
A problem came up when it went to distribution, however. There were three revs of the Apple ][ firmware in the field. Two of them would give the correct indication of write failure to the game, but the third would not. So a legitimate original would run once and self-destruct when run on such a machine.
Needless to say the game company got a very bad rep very quickly.
This and similar incidents may have been significant factors in the decisions of most game manufacturers to abandon copy-protection schemes.
The purpose of a trade secret [laws] is to provide a legal means of prosecuting when somebody "spills the beans" and discloses stuff they've seen
... provided they have agreed to keep the secret. If somebody who has NOT entered such a contract with the secret's owner figures out the secret (by himself, with no "guilty knowlege" obtained from someone else who violate such a contract), he is under no obligation to remain silent.
Patents give a government-enforced limited-time monopoly in return for disclosure of the invention. (They exist to encourage the development and disclosure of such ideas.)
Trade secrets can last longer, but they last only as long as the secret is kept. After that they pop like a bubble. The only thing left once the cat is out of the bag is a legal claim against the person who let it out - IF he obtained the secret in violation of an agreement or from an agreement violator.
Ghandi did a lot of good. But the effectiveness of his nonviolent tactics are greatly overrated.
For instance: He used them in South Africa for years before trying them in India. You'll note that South Africa's Apartheit system didn't fall until long after Ghandi's death.
A major power block in Britain, on the other hand, was looking to unload India from the British Empire. It was very expensive to keep it under control, and they could use the money at home. Ghandi gave them the excuse they needed to cut India loose.
Ghandi's prescription for how Jews should handle their oppression in Nazi Germany amounted to going peacefully to the ovens, the better to make the Nazis look bad.
Similarly, Martin Luther King's Ghandi-inspired non-violent protests set the stage for the extension of full civil rights to Blacks in the US. But for years Black protesters (along with non-black civil rights marchers) were beaten, jailed and killed, while the rights were still denied.
The extension of civil rights for real came right after the riots of '68 - when the Blacks (having obtained the moral high ground via years of ineffective non-violent protests) finally made it clear that there would be no more mister nice guy.
And it seems to me that the continued lionization of Ghandi and King, and their non-violent protests, combined with the near purging of such people as Malcom X or Charlie Thomas from the historical record, is very convenient for those who would like to detour any future opposition political movements into a decade of ineffective posturing.
Voice and natural language may not be an efficient / effective way of communicating with software elements in a computer.
Perhaps natural language may not be efficient for computer control. But that's a separate issue from voice recognition input.
We've been programming and controlling computers using UNnatural, contrived languages for a long time - and directing other machines, domestic animals, and human work teams ditto since long before comptuers - or even recorded history. Think about driving a horse - or a car, military command-and-control, coordinating a crew of sailors, or calling a football play.
Voice recognition technology give us a way to capture, lex, and parse vocal gestures. Whether we try to decode the vocal gestures as a natural or a contrived language is an issue that doesn't arise until the parser level.
Using handwriting recognition rather than typing would slow me down enormously, and also raise the error rate. (My handwriting is so awful I often can't read it myself, while my typing is darned good.)
The only thing a handwriting input device buys me is the possibility of a smaller machine. Voice recognition, on the other hand, gives me computer input in contexts where my hands are busy - such as while driving. It also allows for an even smaller machine - since the input interface can be a pinhole rather than a surface at least the size of a Postit note. And I can usually speak faster than I can write.
But while voice recognition may strike me as more enabling than handwriting recognition, it's not an either-or issue. They each add a unique capability. Pick either one, and I'm sure there will be a number of applications where it's a better fit than any other input mode.
Handwriting recognition seems like the ideal input mode, for instance, for paper computers. Imagine a pad of Postits, each running PalmOS. B-)
Also: If they ever come up with a handwriting recognition program that can read my writing better than I can, I've got a lot of old notes around here that I wish I could read...
This "Gathering" sounds like the nobles getting together to figure out how best to exploit the serfs and to standardize the methods. An interesting view into the management mindset.
WHAT readme file? They're up and running at 640x408 and have no CLUE about README files, let alone the one associated with the X windows system.
go to xfree web site and read the jump start guide.
So what's this "xfree"? Where are they supposed to learn:
That there is something called "xfree" that has something to do with their screen resolution.
That they should go to a web site to learn how to configure it.
We are talking appliance user here, not programmer.
It comes back to this: The online documentation MUST quickly vector the naive user to the answer to the question, or the system is "hard to use". For screen resolution questions, Linux distributions don't do this.
It isn't just during initail install that it's a problem. Newbies can usually get something configured, with the help of the probe.
The problem is that they get some minimal default configured. Now that they're up, they'd like to use the whole screen.
How do they CHANGE it?
How do they FIND OUT how to change it?
Pretend you know NOTHING about X. You're fresh from Mac or Windows. You have a machine that has a multi-megapixel monitor running 640x480 and want to make more use of it. Your old environment had a graphic monitor config tool, that's what you're used to.
What do you do?
Hunt for a tool. No tool.
Hunt for online documentation. Try "monitor". Try "resolution". Nothing.
Consider the appliance user, with his new Linux install. He just wants to adjust the resolution of his monitor. He looks for a menu item. No menu item. He looks in the man pages. No help there, either.
Even if he figures out that he's got to twiddle a file himself, how the HELL is he supposed to know that the magic word is "modeline"?
And if he does find out that word, just try looking it up in the man pages.
The problem isn't that it's hard to adjust the resolution (though that is a problem, too). The problem is that the newbie has no obvious way to find out how to do it.
Windows and Mac both make it easy. Linux stock distributions make it arcane. So the new Linux user is stuck with some minimalist stock install resolution until he fights this battle for himself or gets help from somebody else.
THAT's why Linux gets a rep for being hard to use, requiring a geek under the hood at all times.
One big part of Linux's reputation for being hard to configure is that the online documentation lacks connections leading from obvious keywords to the monitor configuration tools or information.
For instance, try to figure out how to change your monitor resolution in less than an hour, starting from "resolution" or "monitor".
Perhaps just a boycott of companies that have been found at fault by a judge.
Then suppose some department of Squeaky Clean Software screws up (or the government does), and gets a fine, leaving CorruptSoft (which are scum but haven't been convicted) as the only remaining supplier?
And once Feet Of Clay software has had their hand slapped and can't sell to the government market, what incentive do they have not to go sour?
The suggestion seems like the current criminal justice system, where people who don't have consciences and thus can only learn to be "good" through enlightened self-interest are locked out of most of the rewards of being law-abiding, and thus have no incentive to reform.
Yes, if they behave improperly when obtaining contracts, it would certainly be a good idea to watch them carefully when they bid on future contracts.
But if you intend to punish them by locking them out of contracts, temporarily or permanently, as a punishment for an earlier misbehavior, they have to know before deciding to commit that misbehavior that if caught they may recieve that punishment. Otherwise there's no incentive for them to play nice.
Ex-post-facto isn't unconstitutional just because it's unfair. It's also unconsitutional because it doesn't work.
... what appears to have happened was that the Labor Department insisted on several of Word's quirkier features (e.g., macro language) which almost nobody uses.
Looks like the Department of Labor thinks susceptability to macro virus attacks is a feature
Slashdot Mirror
Stocks are split when they get too expensive, so that smaller players can buy in more easily
At $270 it costs $27,000 to buy a hundred shares - the "round lot" quantum on the markets, below which you are typically penalized with higher transaction fees. Splitting, say, 3-for-1 brings the stock price down to 90 and the ante down to $9,000. Many more players can buy in. Typically they do, and bid the price up a bit, which is why stocks typically climb just after a split. (And larger players take advantage of that by buying on news that the stock is going to split - which also bids the stock up a little before the split.)
$270 is way high, so a split is overdue. The split will almost certainly result in the stock going up. If the marketing droids can convince some fools that there is some risk to this and doing it is "daring", said fools will interpret the rise as a success for Sony.
As for any real risk from the move, the only one I can see is a psychological hit if the stock ends up trading at a very low number. But if they don't split it beyond 3-for-1 they'd have to lose half their value after the split to drop below even 45. If the stock value drops by 50% they have some other problem - big time.
A) User Friendly is funny.
B) People who claim it's not funny don't get it.
The same could be said for many other jokes, of course.
I suspect that those who don't find User Friendy to be funny either don't have the necessary referrents or suffer from an excess of political correctness.
Regarding the former: Some User Firendly strips aren't stand-alone. You have to have seen quite a bit of the strip's history to get the running gag.
Regarding the latter: Of COURSE "children learning to read" are funny. It behoves a teacher not to ridicule them to their faces. But that doesn't mean the teacher has to ignore the humor. And one of the things about Tech Support is that an endless supply of users making the same ignorant and/or dumb mistakes can be frustrating. So a support person will from time to time WISH they could do what the characters in User Friendly do, when they come up with a snappy comeback, sabotage the luser, or otherwise blow off steam.
If you think the humor of User Friendly is occasionally black, try listening to medical workers or policemen some time.
Some things HAVE to be funny, because otherwise they'd be too painful.
I have no problem with a company databasifying public data and charging for their compilation. Don't like it? Buy a different compilation from a competitor, or get the raw data and databaseify it yourself.
On the other hand, I have a BIG problem with a company and a government agency cutting a sweetheart deal such that only that ONE company gets to databaseify and sell that agency's public records. (This has happened with both the US Patent Office and the Library of Congress card catalog, though I'm not sure if either exclusive deal is still in effect.)
The concern was that the banks' records would be so fouled up that they would have know way to know whether/how much they owed you.
If that had happened the FDIC would be no help - because THEY would have no idea whether / how much you were owed, either.
It isn't over yet. Lots of offices are still on vacation until Tuesday. There may be a lot of bugs that haven't yet been discovered - let alone reported.
The various descriptions on the web site gave me the impression that a series of independent film or video cameras would have even more potential: Varying spacing to accellerate/decellerate the pan, varying positioning to pan in 3-D, switching to full motion at varying speeds at selected intervals, etc. And the authors appeared to understand this potential. So I wondered at the omission in the patent.
Then I checked some of the references, and discovered that such (at least with film) had already been patented before - far enough back that the patents are expired.
So it looks like doing this with an array of independent film cameras is prior art. Video cameras in any configuration except evenly-spaced along a straight or curved line (which is covered by claim 4) also appears to be open, and you might break claim 4 by treating it as a special case of the previous expired patent with the obvious substitution of video cameras for film cameras.
Essentially all the patent covers is a camera with many lenses and synchronized or sequenced shutters, projecting onto a common film strip, along with a multiple-video-camera model of it.
So Sun Dec 26 went down to Fry's with the wife and got a copy of Red Hat 6.1 and his-and-hers Compaq 5888s. (Didn't get monitors - had some old ones and am expecting a big price break on LCDs this spring.)
Loaded Linux onto mine on Mon and started configuring on Tue. Had to patch the ethernet driver to suport the diamond "homenet" / ethernet card. (Stock Red Hat driver is hardcoded to use it in the "homenet" mode - 10-base-T port dead and trying to do a 1Mbps link on the telephone wiring.) Winmodem is dead of course, I don't think the install found the DVD drive (though the CD/R is working), and the power button is software driven so I have to unplug it to shut it down until I get that configured, but it's close enough for now.
Reason for the migration: I'd been running my home network on an old Sparc with SunOS 4.1.3, and didn't want to drop mail on the floor. Hung an external modem on the serial port. Beat my head against sendmail.cf for a while. Taylor UUCP's automatic config file translator worked beautifully. Finally got it all working and cut over at 9:10 PM New Year's Eve. (Had also copied all the files from the SunOS to the new machine for safekeeping and salvage. Old disk was 2G and hitting the wall. Whole thing takes up Shut everything down (to guard against crossing-the-boundary bugs) and went out to party.
1/1/2000 turned things back on again - and discovered that shutting down had been the last straw for the old Mitac monitor. B-( Horizontal oscilator won't even start with the video in 640x480 mode. (Played musical monitors to check that the computer was OK.)
So back to Fry's and dropped another $400 plus tax on a new 19" Princeton Ultra95e. (NICE, SHARP display. Time to get new glasses so I can take advantage of it.)
The most annoying part, of course, is that SunOS 4.1.3 came up fine and said the date was Jan 1 2000. So it probably would have kept working well enough to handle the mail after all.
Oh, well. At least it gave me an excuse to cut the whole home network over to an Open Source OS and my workstation to a 700 Mhz Athlon.
(Sometimes you hear computer science-types speculate about the possibility of automatic software validation, i.e. the possibility of developing a new language where it's possible to mathematically prove that your software is is correct. I'm not holding my breath.)
Me neither. Consider:
Suppose you have an automatic software validation system. It will require as input a specification of the correct behavoir of the software, in a formal language that it can parse. Rendering the specification into the formal language amounts to writing a program. How do you prove THAT is correct?
Therefore a general formal correctness prover is impossible. You micht be able to automatically prove that two expressions of a program are equivalent, or that a particular program matches a particular formal specification. But you can't prove that the program is "correct".
Which is not to say that such tools are useless. I have yet to see a method of testing a program that doesn't amount to expressing the program and/or its requirements in two languages - as distinct as possible - and then comparing the two. Typically this will be the code versus a human-readable spec, pseudocode, or profuse comments, and the comparison will be done by humans: a team of programmers or software QA engineers. The process might include code walkthroughs, writing and running automated tests, coverage analysis, etc. But an automated tool comparing code against a formal spec would be a very useful labor-saver, or an additional tool in the kit.
The important thing is that expressing the program in two distinct languages results in two distinct sorts of thinking as the two expressions are written. Most bugs tend to occur only in one of the thinking modes, and are thus exposed when the diverse expressions of the program are compared.
I see how my post could be read to imply a literal failure return from the write service itself, rather than a failure indication on a later attempt to read. Sorry 'bout that.
While I'm at it, I also see that I wasn't clear that this is a story told me by someone else, not something I have personal experience with.
Thanks for the correction.
Today we use aluminum for soda cans.
And for aluminum siding.
Katz continues to provide views into the Liberal Arts / Mainstream Fiction mindset - where progress is pollution, net improvements are to be judged only by their downside components, and no matter how bad things are you should not try to fix them because you'll only make them worse. It is no surprise that he identifies with the Wells "Time Machine" vision of the future/our present, preferring it to those of Verne or Disney.
But have things really gotten worse, or better? I don't know about you, bunkie, but as I look back over my half-century of life I see an enormous net improvement in quality of life - not just for me, but for humans in general.
And the biggest fly I see in this ointment is government interference in the lives of the people. And one of the most useful tools of the control freaks in power is the distorted mindset that Katz so aptly demonstrates.
There's a distinction between Science Fiction and Mainstream Fiction that corresponds: Science Fiction is the art of the techie, and it has a central theme: If it's useful you can do it. If it's broken you can fix it. Even the cautionary tales are a variant: Be careful, because if you break it THIS way you could break it so bad you CAN'T fix it. But even that is upbeat, because it assumes the power and decision-making is in the reader's responsiblehands. Mainstream fiction, on the other hand, is art for the serfs: It's all going to hell. But don't try to change it, or you'll make it worse. Just be thankful you're not going to hell as fast as those other people. (But while you're going to hell, you might as well try to spike the wheels of anybody who's trying to fix things. After all, if they do manage to change anything they'll just get you to hell faster.)
That's not necessarily true. Information was lost in the original compression because there was more information than the compressed form could hold. The expanded form contains exactly the same amount of information as the compressed form, and if it's intercepted as a digital stream (so it hasn't been distorted) the original compressed form (or another that would produce exactly the same output) can in principle be regenerated.
Now that might or might not happen with stock compression code. But if the stock stuff doesn't work well enough, a hack could be written that would do the job.
The copy-protected disk had been scratched with a pin so that track 3 was damaged. The game would try to write on track 3, and if it got an error it would consider the copy OK.
If it succeeded, it would run ONCE, and erase the disk as it went. So copiers would make their copy, try it out, and take it home, only to find out it didn't work.
A problem came up when it went to distribution, however. There were three revs of the Apple ][ firmware in the field. Two of them would give the correct indication of write failure to the game, but the third would not. So a legitimate original would run once and self-destruct when run on such a machine.
Needless to say the game company got a very bad rep very quickly.
This and similar incidents may have been significant factors in the decisions of most game manufacturers to abandon copy-protection schemes.
... of bueaucracies. B-)
... provided they have agreed to keep the secret. If somebody who has NOT entered such a contract with the secret's owner figures out the secret (by himself, with no "guilty knowlege" obtained from someone else who violate such a contract), he is under no obligation to remain silent.
Patents give a government-enforced limited-time monopoly in return for disclosure of the invention. (They exist to encourage the development and disclosure of such ideas.)
Trade secrets can last longer, but they last only as long as the secret is kept. After that they pop like a bubble. The only thing left once the cat is out of the bag is a legal claim against the person who let it out - IF he obtained the secret in violation of an agreement or from an agreement violator.
Caveat: I'm not a lawyer yadda yadda...
The FTP server in question doesn't accept anonymous transfers.
For instance: He used them in South Africa for years before trying them in India. You'll note that South Africa's Apartheit system didn't fall until long after Ghandi's death.
A major power block in Britain, on the other hand, was looking to unload India from the British Empire. It was very expensive to keep it under control, and they could use the money at home. Ghandi gave them the excuse they needed to cut India loose.
Ghandi's prescription for how Jews should handle their oppression in Nazi Germany amounted to going peacefully to the ovens, the better to make the Nazis look bad.
Similarly, Martin Luther King's Ghandi-inspired non-violent protests set the stage for the extension of full civil rights to Blacks in the US. But for years Black protesters (along with non-black civil rights marchers) were beaten, jailed and killed, while the rights were still denied.
The extension of civil rights for real came right after the riots of '68 - when the Blacks (having obtained the moral high ground via years of ineffective non-violent protests) finally made it clear that there would be no more mister nice guy.
And it seems to me that the continued lionization of Ghandi and King, and their non-violent protests, combined with the near purging of such people as Malcom X or Charlie Thomas from the historical record, is very convenient for those who would like to detour any future opposition political movements into a decade of ineffective posturing.
Perhaps natural language may not be efficient for computer control. But that's a separate issue from voice recognition input.
We've been programming and controlling computers using UNnatural, contrived languages for a long time - and directing other machines, domestic animals, and human work teams ditto since long before comptuers - or even recorded history. Think about driving a horse - or a car, military command-and-control, coordinating a crew of sailors, or calling a football play.
Voice recognition technology give us a way to capture, lex, and parse vocal gestures. Whether we try to decode the vocal gestures as a natural or a contrived language is an issue that doesn't arise until the parser level.
The only thing a handwriting input device buys me is the possibility of a smaller machine. Voice recognition, on the other hand, gives me computer input in contexts where my hands are busy - such as while driving. It also allows for an even smaller machine - since the input interface can be a pinhole rather than a surface at least the size of a Postit note. And I can usually speak faster than I can write.
But while voice recognition may strike me as more enabling than handwriting recognition, it's not an either-or issue. They each add a unique capability. Pick either one, and I'm sure there will be a number of applications where it's a better fit than any other input mode.
Handwriting recognition seems like the ideal input mode, for instance, for paper computers. Imagine a pad of Postits, each running PalmOS. B-)
Also: If they ever come up with a handwriting recognition program that can read my writing better than I can, I've got a lot of old notes around here that I wish I could read...
This "Gathering" sounds like the nobles getting together to figure out how best to exploit the serfs and to standardize the methods. An interesting view into the management mindset.
WHAT readme file? They're up and running at 640x408 and have no CLUE about README files, let alone the one associated with the X windows system.
go to xfree web site and read the jump start guide.
So what's this "xfree"? Where are they supposed to learn:
That there is something called "xfree" that has something to do with their screen resolution.
That they should go to a web site to learn how to configure it.
We are talking appliance user here, not programmer.
It comes back to this: The online documentation MUST quickly vector the naive user to the answer to the question, or the system is "hard to use". For screen resolution questions, Linux distributions don't do this.
The problem is that they get some minimal default configured. Now that they're up, they'd like to use the whole screen.
How do they CHANGE it?
How do they FIND OUT how to change it?
Pretend you know NOTHING about X. You're fresh from Mac or Windows. You have a machine that has a multi-megapixel monitor running 640x480 and want to make more use of it. Your old environment had a graphic monitor config tool, that's what you're used to.
What do you do?
Hunt for a tool. No tool.
Hunt for online documentation. Try "monitor". Try "resolution". Nothing.
Now what?
The question is "Where do you start?"
Consider the appliance user, with his new Linux install. He just wants to adjust the resolution of his monitor. He looks for a menu item. No menu item. He looks in the man pages. No help there, either.
Even if he figures out that he's got to twiddle a file himself, how the HELL is he supposed to know that the magic word is "modeline"?
And if he does find out that word, just try looking it up in the man pages.
The problem isn't that it's hard to adjust the resolution (though that is a problem, too). The problem is that the newbie has no obvious way to find out how to do it.
Windows and Mac both make it easy. Linux stock distributions make it arcane. So the new Linux user is stuck with some minimalist stock install resolution until he fights this battle for himself or gets help from somebody else.
THAT's why Linux gets a rep for being hard to use, requiring a geek under the hood at all times.
For instance, try to figure out how to change your monitor resolution in less than an hour, starting from "resolution" or "monitor".
Then suppose some department of Squeaky Clean Software screws up (or the government does), and gets a fine, leaving CorruptSoft (which are scum but haven't been convicted) as the only remaining supplier?
And once Feet Of Clay software has had their hand slapped and can't sell to the government market, what incentive do they have not to go sour?
The suggestion seems like the current criminal justice system, where people who don't have consciences and thus can only learn to be "good" through enlightened self-interest are locked out of most of the rewards of being law-abiding, and thus have no incentive to reform.
Yes, if they behave improperly when obtaining contracts, it would certainly be a good idea to watch them carefully when they bid on future contracts.
But if you intend to punish them by locking them out of contracts, temporarily or permanently, as a punishment for an earlier misbehavior, they have to know before deciding to commit that misbehavior that if caught they may recieve that punishment. Otherwise there's no incentive for them to play nice.
Ex-post-facto isn't unconstitutional just because it's unfair. It's also unconsitutional because it doesn't work.
Looks like the Department of Labor thinks susceptability to macro virus attacks is a feature