There is an exact distance required between each speaker, and also a lot of speakers involved as well. According to the article, we're talking 300 to 400 small speakers in a grid spread out over the space of the entire theater room.
Of course it's much easier to make a virtual point from which the sound is coming from when you have so many real points that the sound can start at to play with.
One thing IT geeks need to remember is that if a user is bothering us, something in the system is broken. Even if it's the user that's malfunctioning, they're still a part of the system. They can be repaired via retraining and also replaced via human resouce departments.
There's a term in Washinton DC that comes straight into play here. "Unfunded mandate". When a government agency is told it has to do something it doesn't presently do, and not given a matching budget increase to cover the cost of that task, it's a big problem.
One of two things has to happen. A: Existing programs are going to get slashed in order to move the money from existing projects to fund the new one. B: The mandated project isn't going to go very well due to having not enough funding to get it done right.
While Democrats get accused of being "tax and spend" types at times, the Bush Administration seems to have taken on a "forget to tax but spend anyway" policy. NASA's budget just doesn't match its assignments right now, and that's what's leading to half-baked projects coming out of there.
NASA's got to get the shuttle program that's currently grounded back on its feet, meanwhile the Hubble Telescope is in need of a scheduled service visit and the IIS isn't completed yet. On top of that, Bush wants them working on a people to Mars project they didn't ask for. The Mars request didn't exactly come with a budget attached...
Would you like your taxes low or would you like NASA funded properly? It doesn't seem like you can have both.
It's a security term that's existed for years. An Improvised Explosive Device is basically any homemade bomb that's put into the case of something harmless so that it just might slip by security.
Basically, the problem here is that if a "winning" Coke can is brought to any security checkpoint of any kind, the X-Ray is going to show a battery and wires conencted kind haphazardly inside something labled as a Coca-Cola can but clearly has no soda... which are exactly the warning signs for an IED.
So, what it comes down to is that if you bring a winning can to the airport, or anywhere else that your bag is going to be X-rayed to get in, you're going to get pulled aside because it looks like you may have a bomb in your bag. Nothing criminal about doing that on accident, but you run the risk of getting blamed for causing a few thousand people's flights being delayed.
That would effectively make the software ransomware, which is allowed by the GPL. Remember, you don't have to distribute your GPL modification code if you're not distributing the binary yet either.
No it isn't. You just have to buy your disks from a disk seller who's giving you a rebate, or you own.
Since the entity doing the distributing is paying that rate, that's the cost, even if it's not the market price of the materials.
I was once the sys admin for an office supply retailer that sold to the state. Justifying the markup on the "5% over cost" contract was part of the report writing...
That's actually legal enough... you're basically being offered two licenses when you get the code, and you're allowed to pick you can either:
A: Take the GPL, and waive away your Sveasoft forum and subscriber rights. -or- B: Take the Sveasoft license, and agree to waive off the GPL rights you were offered.
I think this is right at the bleeding edge of where the GPL draws the line...
The GPL doesn't allow code modifiers to keep their code secret, but it doesn't reqire that the code be posted for free on the Internet either. They can charge a reasonable fee for the obtaining, making, and delivery of the disk and/or download service... you might be able to try to make a case that they're charging too much for such services, but the GPL doesn't say they have to provide such services at cost. This may be a bug in the GPL according to the purists, but the seem to be within the letter of the license.
However, here's the catch: The GPL requires that the people who get the software must also be given the GPL as a license option that they may apply to the copy they just got. (The redistributor can offer any other license they want too, but they have to give the striaght-up unmodified GPL as another option if they do.) Therefore, only one person needs to pay the fee, and then, they can post the code for free download.
No need to GNU/Worry. We'll be seeing this code being forked on Soureforge shortly I think.
The fact that such detectors give out a strength reading that can be used to determine distance gives the opportunity for three or more to be used together in a theater setup. A phone wouldn't even have to ring, just the session establishing contact with the towers is enough, at which point the circles could be drawn to find their intersect point and they'd know where to send an usher to prevent the mid-show interruption before it happens.
People don't get paid up front, why should the software company? That allows a timeframe for a "test drive" during which both parties can get benchmarks on the actual value of the software.
People usually get paid by the time period, not by how much work they actually accomplish in the hour or year. Only people in sales get a comission that's a direct percentage of the revenue that passes through them. For everybody else, pay doesn't usually directly get tied to actual performace.
Software vendors want to get paid even if their customers aren't making a profit from using the software... that's why they insist on a licensing fee up front rather than using any sort of "pay per use" in most cases.
However, monitoring will then become an issue. Right now, a program licenced to a 2-processor box can kick and scream if the OS is telling it there's four processors available to it.
The seperation between "logical processors" and "physical processors" is just not something software likes very much. If the software thinks there's four processors, the vendor's gonna want to charge by that unit.
ActiveX is really just the packaging of an.exe file in another form. Anybody who has a copy of Visual Basic 6 knows that there isn't any difference at all between what you can do in a.exe and what you're allowed to do to the system in a.ocx file that you're going to embed into a webpage.
OSS's model is that if you run a program you can't see the source of, you're taking an unneeded risk. On the other hand, Windows has always been based on "closed source is okay as long as you trust whomever wrote it." model, and that's where the Verisign certificates come in...
It's two completely different ways of doing things, and I don't think either is "right" or "wrong", they're just different.
I don't know if either is more correct, but since most of the world is conditioned into expecting OK to come first, you'd better have a good reason for changing up the order or a lot of people are going to get annoyed, and having a reputation for annoying people is not a good thing.
Hey, it's on topic enough...
Add more marketing glitz and your get a smoother user presentation, but you've gotta pay more for it. Glitz is the enemy of the geek, but it does attract the mass public dependably...
Apple has since the begining of time brought in design consultants to work on every aspect of the user interface... meanwhile the geeks who design OSS projects absolutely want nothing to do with the design consultants. (The irony is that the stereotypical geek would love to date the stereotypical design consultant, but she won't go anywhere near him...)
In any menuing system, there is no rule that says that the menu has to be a true tree. There's nothing stopping you from having a main menu of "What are you here to do today?", and having the most popular functions being placed in more than one position on the interface.
Doing it that way might lead to a more confusing set of decisions at design time, but the user will more often than not find themselves one click away from what they want to do next if you do it right. Afterall, it's easier to find any given option if it's "hidden" in three places instead of just one.
The fact that Nielsen's web usage numbers disagre with Alexa whose numbers disagre with other sources, etc. just shows how hard measuring an audience really is.
Most TV networks don't particularly care how many people watch any given program. The program's just a honeypot to try to attract you into watching the ads. That's the key, that's what they get paid for, who is in the audience watching the ads. The key exception are the networks like HBO and Showtime, because they have no sponsors and they get paid by people who subscribe. Still, even they don't directly care how many people watch each show, they care how many people are willing to subscribe as a result of each show. How many people watched is a nice proxy for those numbers, but they're not the true money stats that the decision makers really want to know.
Since web business models vary, so is the metric that needs to be driven up so that the site makes money. Sometimes it's page views, sometimes it's ad clicks, sometimes it's sales... etc.
I don't think there's ever going to be a universially accepted metric for "most popular" website... nor will that ever be an important title to have money-wise.:)
6, 7 or 8 users might not get you that much more information than you'll get from a 5 user test... but it's when the public at large gets ahold of your program that it's really put to the test.
Like the article says, you need to hold a second testing group when there's a second classification of user who uses your program. And when you release you program to the public, if it's a truely good program than somebody will think of a situation in which to use the tool you made that you didn't antisipate.
Why bother? If you had any decent anti-virus product, or applied security patches like you were supposed to, Download.ject would not be your problem.
In short... the existing toolset would have protected us from this threat vector. It only was a threat at all because of all the people who didn't. The solution isn't creating a new security program, but getting the clueless to use the ones we're already running.
Slashdot was not one of the infected communities because we're not allowed to link to offsite graphics in HTML code on this site.
However, any community that does allow this, which is a factory-equipment feature in all of the major webboard packages, was at risk and most likely got hit. All it takes is one user posting an image on an infected server in a popular thread and that site would be spreading the virus to any reader who isn't running a properly protected computer.
Bottom line, the restaurant analogy is flawed... it wasn't anything done wrong in the kitchen, but rather it was a virus that was brought in and spread around by the customers. The solution to that would be a web equivilent of "No shirt, no shoes, no service" being that web boards shouldn't be allowing remote linking because of this possible threat vector... but, uh, try stuffing this genie back into the bottle.
eBay was among the notable victims because they allow remote image hosting. On the other hand, if they didn't they'd either be on the hook for all of the bandwidth or have to take the picture features out or at least scale it back. Since pictures are a key thing that makes action prices higher and eBay's revenue mostly come from taking a percentage of the auction result... I don't think that's gonna happen.
What, do you think child pron malware just makes one attempt to connect? Part of the purpose of such software is to create hundreds or thousands of unwanted connections to the site so that the heaviest users are unaware malware victims... a dead end for cops looking for the real criminals.
It's not that every 10th BT user is making one attempt. It's that the 1/10000th or so customers who are malware victims are making hundreds...
Slashdot Mirror
There is an exact distance required between each speaker, and also a lot of speakers involved as well. According to the article, we're talking 300 to 400 small speakers in a grid spread out over the space of the entire theater room.
Of course it's much easier to make a virtual point from which the sound is coming from when you have so many real points that the sound can start at to play with.
Which also means this technology will work in 0% of today's theaters without retrofitting, and will likely never be sold at the consumer level.
Nice idea... but I don't think this one's getting off the chalkboard.
Michael posting a story about annoying people in the IT industry. Isn't that just a bit ironic?
One thing IT geeks need to remember is that if a user is bothering us, something in the system is broken. Even if it's the user that's malfunctioning, they're still a part of the system. They can be repaired via retraining and also replaced via human resouce departments.
There's a term in Washinton DC that comes straight into play here. "Unfunded mandate". When a government agency is told it has to do something it doesn't presently do, and not given a matching budget increase to cover the cost of that task, it's a big problem.
One of two things has to happen.
A: Existing programs are going to get slashed in order to move the money from existing projects to fund the new one.
B: The mandated project isn't going to go very well due to having not enough funding to get it done right.
While Democrats get accused of being "tax and spend" types at times, the Bush Administration seems to have taken on a "forget to tax but spend anyway" policy. NASA's budget just doesn't match its assignments right now, and that's what's leading to half-baked projects coming out of there.
NASA's got to get the shuttle program that's currently grounded back on its feet, meanwhile the Hubble Telescope is in need of a scheduled service visit and the IIS isn't completed yet. On top of that, Bush wants them working on a people to Mars project they didn't ask for. The Mars request didn't exactly come with a budget attached...
Would you like your taxes low or would you like NASA funded properly? It doesn't seem like you can have both.
It's a security term that's existed for years. An Improvised Explosive Device is basically any homemade bomb that's put into the case of something harmless so that it just might slip by security.
Basically, the problem here is that if a "winning" Coke can is brought to any security checkpoint of any kind, the X-Ray is going to show a battery and wires conencted kind haphazardly inside something labled as a Coca-Cola can but clearly has no soda... which are exactly the warning signs for an IED.
So, what it comes down to is that if you bring a winning can to the airport, or anywhere else that your bag is going to be X-rayed to get in, you're going to get pulled aside because it looks like you may have a bomb in your bag. Nothing criminal about doing that on accident, but you run the risk of getting blamed for causing a few thousand people's flights being delayed.
That would effectively make the software ransomware, which is allowed by the GPL. Remember, you don't have to distribute your GPL modification code if you're not distributing the binary yet either.
No it isn't. You just have to buy your disks from a disk seller who's giving you a rebate, or you own.
Since the entity doing the distributing is paying that rate, that's the cost, even if it's not the market price of the materials.
I was once the sys admin for an office supply retailer that sold to the state. Justifying the markup on the "5% over cost" contract was part of the report writing...
That's actually legal enough... you're basically being offered two licenses when you get the code, and you're allowed to pick you can either:
A: Take the GPL, and waive away your Sveasoft forum and subscriber rights.
-or-
B: Take the Sveasoft license, and agree to waive off the GPL rights you were offered.
He's not saying he's a /. subscriber, he's talking about Svesoft's forums.
I think this is right at the bleeding edge of where the GPL draws the line...
The GPL doesn't allow code modifiers to keep their code secret, but it doesn't reqire that the code be posted for free on the Internet either. They can charge a reasonable fee for the obtaining, making, and delivery of the disk and/or download service... you might be able to try to make a case that they're charging too much for such services, but the GPL doesn't say they have to provide such services at cost. This may be a bug in the GPL according to the purists, but the seem to be within the letter of the license.
However, here's the catch: The GPL requires that the people who get the software must also be given the GPL as a license option that they may apply to the copy they just got. (The redistributor can offer any other license they want too, but they have to give the striaght-up unmodified GPL as another option if they do.) Therefore, only one person needs to pay the fee, and then, they can post the code for free download.
No need to GNU/Worry. We'll be seeing this code being forked on Soureforge shortly I think.
The fact that such detectors give out a strength reading that can be used to determine distance gives the opportunity for three or more to be used together in a theater setup. A phone wouldn't even have to ring, just the session establishing contact with the towers is enough, at which point the circles could be drawn to find their intersect point and they'd know where to send an usher to prevent the mid-show interruption before it happens.
People don't get paid up front, why should the software company? That allows a timeframe for a "test drive" during which both parties can get benchmarks on the actual value of the software.
People usually get paid by the time period, not by how much work they actually accomplish in the hour or year. Only people in sales get a comission that's a direct percentage of the revenue that passes through them. For everybody else, pay doesn't usually directly get tied to actual performace.
Software vendors want to get paid even if their customers aren't making a profit from using the software... that's why they insist on a licensing fee up front rather than using any sort of "pay per use" in most cases.
However, monitoring will then become an issue. Right now, a program licenced to a 2-processor box can kick and scream if the OS is telling it there's four processors available to it.
The seperation between "logical processors" and "physical processors" is just not something software likes very much. If the software thinks there's four processors, the vendor's gonna want to charge by that unit.
ActiveX is really just the packaging of an .exe file in another form. Anybody who has a copy of Visual Basic 6 knows that there isn't any difference at all between what you can do in a .exe and what you're allowed to do to the system in a .ocx file that you're going to embed into a webpage.
OSS's model is that if you run a program you can't see the source of, you're taking an unneeded risk. On the other hand, Windows has always been based on "closed source is okay as long as you trust whomever wrote it." model, and that's where the Verisign certificates come in...
It's two completely different ways of doing things, and I don't think either is "right" or "wrong", they're just different.
I don't know if either is more correct, but since most of the world is conditioned into expecting OK to come first, you'd better have a good reason for changing up the order or a lot of people are going to get annoyed, and having a reputation for annoying people is not a good thing.
Hey, it's on topic enough... Add more marketing glitz and your get a smoother user presentation, but you've gotta pay more for it. Glitz is the enemy of the geek, but it does attract the mass public dependably...
Apple has since the begining of time brought in design consultants to work on every aspect of the user interface... meanwhile the geeks who design OSS projects absolutely want nothing to do with the design consultants. (The irony is that the stereotypical geek would love to date the stereotypical design consultant, but she won't go anywhere near him...)
In any menuing system, there is no rule that says that the menu has to be a true tree. There's nothing stopping you from having a main menu of "What are you here to do today?", and having the most popular functions being placed in more than one position on the interface.
Doing it that way might lead to a more confusing set of decisions at design time, but the user will more often than not find themselves one click away from what they want to do next if you do it right. Afterall, it's easier to find any given option if it's "hidden" in three places instead of just one.
The fact that Nielsen's web usage numbers disagre with Alexa whose numbers disagre with other sources, etc. just shows how hard measuring an audience really is.
:)
Most TV networks don't particularly care how many people watch any given program. The program's just a honeypot to try to attract you into watching the ads. That's the key, that's what they get paid for, who is in the audience watching the ads. The key exception are the networks like HBO and Showtime, because they have no sponsors and they get paid by people who subscribe. Still, even they don't directly care how many people watch each show, they care how many people are willing to subscribe as a result of each show. How many people watched is a nice proxy for those numbers, but they're not the true money stats that the decision makers really want to know.
Since web business models vary, so is the metric that needs to be driven up so that the site makes money. Sometimes it's page views, sometimes it's ad clicks, sometimes it's sales... etc.
I don't think there's ever going to be a universially accepted metric for "most popular" website... nor will that ever be an important title to have money-wise.
6, 7 or 8 users might not get you that much more information than you'll get from a 5 user test... but it's when the public at large gets ahold of your program that it's really put to the test.
Like the article says, you need to hold a second testing group when there's a second classification of user who uses your program. And when you release you program to the public, if it's a truely good program than somebody will think of a situation in which to use the tool you made that you didn't antisipate.
Why bother? If you had any decent anti-virus product, or applied security patches like you were supposed to, Download.ject would not be your problem.
In short... the existing toolset would have protected us from this threat vector. It only was a threat at all because of all the people who didn't. The solution isn't creating a new security program, but getting the clueless to use the ones we're already running.
Slashdot was not one of the infected communities because we're not allowed to link to offsite graphics in HTML code on this site.
However, any community that does allow this, which is a factory-equipment feature in all of the major webboard packages, was at risk and most likely got hit. All it takes is one user posting an image on an infected server in a popular thread and that site would be spreading the virus to any reader who isn't running a properly protected computer.
Bottom line, the restaurant analogy is flawed... it wasn't anything done wrong in the kitchen, but rather it was a virus that was brought in and spread around by the customers. The solution to that would be a web equivilent of "No shirt, no shoes, no service" being that web boards shouldn't be allowing remote linking because of this possible threat vector... but, uh, try stuffing this genie back into the bottle.
eBay was among the notable victims because they allow remote image hosting. On the other hand, if they didn't they'd either be on the hook for all of the bandwidth or have to take the picture features out or at least scale it back. Since pictures are a key thing that makes action prices higher and eBay's revenue mostly come from taking a percentage of the auction result... I don't think that's gonna happen.
It, however, is much harder for malware to cause an unsuspecting user to download something they want over usenet, p2p, ftp, irc, etc.
This technology doesn't catch the bad guys, but it takes away an ability for the bad guys to try to lose themselves in a croud.
What, do you think child pron malware just makes one attempt to connect? Part of the purpose of such software is to create hundreds or thousands of unwanted connections to the site so that the heaviest users are unaware malware victims... a dead end for cops looking for the real criminals.
It's not that every 10th BT user is making one attempt. It's that the 1/10000th or so customers who are malware victims are making hundreds...