>how they ensure that spammers can't get addresses out of this database.
That is what I never understood about the concept of a "do-not-spam" list. If spammers don't have access to this list, how can they know which addresses they're not supposed to email? If they can access the list - to "check" email addresses - then don't they have a guaranteed source of valid emails? What's to stop them from spamming those addresses then? (yeah yeah, it's a criminal offence - how much does that affect them if they live outside of the States?)
Okay, granted, I assume it wouldn't be simply a list you can download from somewhere, rather a system to input addresses and verify whether they're on the list or not. Which still makes it an easy way, in my eyes, to purge out invalid addresses from the spammer's list.
Seems to me that the best protection against spam is still multiple addresses - a private one, and a couple used exclusively for signing up to websites or that can be posted anywhere.
The "do-not-spam" concept has been mentioned a LOT, and I simply feel that I'm missing something. Any help?
Shifty name, website written mostly in lowercase, black background...
At first glance this looks like a warez site even to me (ignoring the SourceForge URL), the **AA are gonna have a field day with this:)
On the other hand, if it's as effective as BitTorrent for large files, I can easily see this gaining widespread use for anime fansub distribution directly from the fansubbers... it seems to take care of the trickle-down effect needed for efficient distribution better than most solutions out there.
I remember using the DOS-based RAV in the mid-90s... naturally lost track of it when I moved away, switched to Norton/McAfee.
Everyone here seems to be taking this as a move by Microsoft to eliminate cross-platform antivirus programs... Maybe, maybe not... As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see a home-grown product get popular like this, to the point where it's good enough to be used by Microsoft (insert obvious jokes here. And yes, I do believe Microsoft's going to use it.)
I'm frankly surprised - pleasantly surprised - that RAV got this far. Depending on software retail sales is not exactly the easiest business model pretty much anywhere in Eastern Europe.
Even without knowing anything about how Intel works internally, it doesn't take much to guess that they produce and ship chips in pretty big batches... chips aren't produced sequentially, one by one, so there's no one "billionth" chip that can be sold on Ebay (hmm, I've just given myself an idea).
Would be interesting to know which batch went over the limit... but even then, there's probably batches of different processors produced more or less simultaneously at different locations.
You know, I think you're right! I don't use a Mac, but I could see why you'd be upset by the reviewer's choice of words. There's a clear anti-Apple bias here.
I'm sure the reviewer wouldn't have used those words if "Mac OS X Hints" contained hints for Linux or even Windows!
>I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones
Probably not worse than the millions of home phones that break down or are replaced by newer models. And DEFINITELY not worse than the millions of cell phones - and proprietary batteries - that are starting to be thrown out (what was the statistic I read? Kids in Japan who keep up with "fashion" replace their cell phone every 3 months, and in North America every 18 months? I know, I know, no link, no proof, etc... whatever.)
If I remember correctly (and please forgive me if I'm wrong, the recent LOTR craze hasn't induced me to run out and read his biography), Tolkien's day job was as a linguist, not a writer. You see that everywhere in Lord of the Rings (the books, not the movies) - he pays a great deal of attention to the languages, and, of course, there's the poems and songs that no one ever reads. But he has given a lot of thought to the languages of the world he's created, and that has a great impact on the coherence and believability of the cultures he presents. Heck, he INVENTED the languages. He definitely built the world and its culture on a solid foundation, so to speak... I should go back and read the appendices to the books.
That - because he's a talented linguist - is why I'd be interested in reading this, not because he's the author of LOTR.
As for the mentions of commercialization, it's been done recently, but I'm not sure how many people are aware of it. I'm referring to Michael Crichton's "Eaters of the Dead", an excellent take on the book. While not a translation, and fairly different from the original, it IS based on Beowulf and Crichton took it as a challenge to write a "modern" Beowulf. I think he's succeeded fairly well, the book is pretty good and it does have you guessing what's real and what's fiction. And, of course, it led to the movie "The 13th Warrior" with Antonio Banderas - not a masterpiece, perhaps, but a very good translation of Crichton's book to the big screen.
>machines in first-year labs that used to boot from either Windows or Linux have been changed to Linux only.
That sounds like a LOT of hassle for the admins in the first place... University of Toronto has separate Linux Redhat, Win2000 with Netware, and (still a few) Solaris labs. Separate rooms, separate operating systems, just go where you need based on what you need to do. The Windows machines are even more "locked down" than the Linux ones - you can't even change the wallpaper, for example. Can't move/remove icons, can't change the start menu, can't (really) install programs. I've never seen a trashed Windows machine, whereas I've seen Linux machines that have gone belly-up with a rather pissed off admin trying to fix it. Then again, I spend more time in the Linux labs.
The dual-boot idea for a public lab makes very little sense to me in the first place - if the university's THAT desperate to save money, maybe it's not the best place to go. More likely though, the admins realized the way they were doing things wasn't really the best way, and changed to something more logical and easier to manage (and not all that new or innovative at that) - how does that constitute news??
Re:Over 30 comments posted...
on
Web Zeitgeist
·
· Score: 1
Or maybe most people know they can find Microsoft at (oddly enough) www.microsoft.com.
Then again, Kazaa being #2 might disprove my whole whacky "people are logical" theory.
Interesting
on
Web Zeitgeist
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Interesting that Prom Dresses (39) is followed directly by Anorexia (40).
I am still amazed by the north american values that sex and nudity are BAD, and should be kept away from children at any cost, whereas violence is not...
Interesting article nonetheless, and fairly balanced. Seems Brin is using something that's in short supply nowadays - common sense. And there is (surprise surprise) a reference to Slashdot as well. To all those who generally just read the article summary and start posting, do read the article this time - it's fairly long, but it's worth it.
My guess would be that this would be useful because scent, unlike appearance, is harder to alter. A wanted criminal can just put on some different clothes, maybe grow a beard, etc, and he won't be easily recognized - wear shades, a hat, and he won't be very easy to recognize with any sort of automated system. Other methods of identification - fingerprints or retinal scan - are difficult to apply without the target noticing (and cooperating). I could see machines at airports or bus terminals that "sniff out" anyone who passes by, and if the smell matches with any in its database, bingo... IF the technology works, it could be far more reliable than current methods.
Of course, all this hinges on the idea that slapping on some cheap cologne won't confuse the machine. And I won't go into the privacy/1984/control etc. arguments...
I doubt Adobe is concerned about the actual pirated e-books. They're not protecting "peanuts" like e-books versus the more expensive Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. They're protecting the validity and usefulness of their ebook technology - I am not very familiar with it, but it stands to reason that if it becomes extremely easy to circumvent, publishers won't even think about using it to "securely" distribute e-texts, Adobe won't get paid, and they'll basically be left with a technology they spent a lot of money on that no one wants to use.
That is very different from Adobe worrying about some 14-year-old downloading the latest Photoshop. They're probably smart enough to realize that they're generally not losing sales revenue through that, they are, if anything, gaining market share by having a growing self-trained user base (which in turn leads to businesses hiring the 14-year-old a few years down the road and buying another legit license).
>Striking up conversations with strangers is becoming more and more hazardous - emotionally and, sometimes, physically - and less and less fulfilling.
Precisely WHY I don't have a lot of hope for this technology... maybe it will change the way we interact, maybe it won't - but the point is, it won't affect or improve the millions of reasons in today's society WHY many people are isolated and often have little opportunity for meaningful interactions.
I'm still in university, so I find it relatively easy to talk to new people, feeling fairly confident that they won't pull out a knife and stab me, or harass me for the rest of my life, or god knows what. I know I can just have a decent conversation, have fun for a bit, and that's that - and I am a fairly shy person by nature. I have no idea what social interaction will be like once I come out of university - but work-commute-home sure doesn't sound that great.
Many people in large cities feel disconnected and purposeless - I doubt that technology will alter or eliminate the social structure and reasons behind that.
Then again, I doubt anything, at this point, can - there's no way we can go back to the way people interacted, say, two hundred years ago (there was a lot of bad, but also a lot of good) - so maybe something like this idea/technology is a way to overcome the difficulties we've introduced for ourselves, and create a new - maybe not better, just different - way to interact, and social purpose. Hope?
Thank you for voicing my exact thoughts after reading that article.
Seems to me people are more and more afraid to interact with others, and this would not be a step in the correct direction to solve that. When's the last time you took a chance and struck up a conversation with a person you've never met before? What makes you think you would if you had that technology?
("you" meant in the general sense, not to refer to the parent poster)
Wrong. Bad acting, poor direction or lousy scripts is (arguably) a matter of taste - some people might hate the script, while others might find it okay. Same with food that tastes lousy - chances are it's, again, a matter of personal opinion. Food made in unsanitary conditions that gets half the customers sick, however, while the restaurant maintains nothing is wrong and refuses to clean its kitchen, IS basis for legal action.
Judging from the screenshots posted, the DVD is obviously defective - the colours from the theatre version were amazing, these are anything but. If Buena Vista admitted to their mistake, pulled the DVD from shelves and fixed the problem before selling more, there would be little grounds for a lawsuit - but they seem to be knowingly selling a defective product, while claiming nothing's wrong with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this... could this... could this be the mythical Beowulf Cluster talked of in Slashdot posts of yore? Could such a beast truly exist?
Isn't "QBASIC Programming for Dummies" a bit redundant?
Apparently not, didn't you read the review? You need to be a dummy with a PhD!
>how they ensure that spammers can't get addresses out of this database.
That is what I never understood about the concept of a "do-not-spam" list. If spammers don't have access to this list, how can they know which addresses they're not supposed to email? If they can access the list - to "check" email addresses - then don't they have a guaranteed source of valid emails? What's to stop them from spamming those addresses then? (yeah yeah, it's a criminal offence - how much does that affect them if they live outside of the States?)
Okay, granted, I assume it wouldn't be simply a list you can download from somewhere, rather a system to input addresses and verify whether they're on the list or not. Which still makes it an easy way, in my eyes, to purge out invalid addresses from the spammer's list.
Seems to me that the best protection against spam is still multiple addresses - a private one, and a couple used exclusively for signing up to websites or that can be posted anywhere.
The "do-not-spam" concept has been mentioned a LOT, and I simply feel that I'm missing something. Any help?
Or to paraphrase Apu,
"Hey, hey! I have asked you rudely not to mangle my copyrights. You leave me no choice but to ask you rudely again."
Shifty name, website written mostly in lowercase, black background...
:)
At first glance this looks like a warez site even to me (ignoring the SourceForge URL), the **AA are gonna have a field day with this
On the other hand, if it's as effective as BitTorrent for large files, I can easily see this gaining widespread use for anime fansub distribution directly from the fansubbers... it seems to take care of the trickle-down effect needed for efficient distribution better than most solutions out there.
I remember using the DOS-based RAV in the mid-90s... naturally lost track of it when I moved away, switched to Norton/McAfee.
Everyone here seems to be taking this as a move by Microsoft to eliminate cross-platform antivirus programs... Maybe, maybe not... As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see a home-grown product get popular like this, to the point where it's good enough to be used by Microsoft (insert obvious jokes here. And yes, I do believe Microsoft's going to use it.)
I'm frankly surprised - pleasantly surprised - that RAV got this far. Depending on software retail sales is not exactly the easiest business model pretty much anywhere in Eastern Europe.
Even without knowing anything about how Intel works internally, it doesn't take much to guess that they produce and ship chips in pretty big batches... chips aren't produced sequentially, one by one, so there's no one "billionth" chip that can be sold on Ebay (hmm, I've just given myself an idea).
Would be interesting to know which batch went over the limit... but even then, there's probably batches of different processors produced more or less simultaneously at different locations.
You know, I think you're right! I don't use a Mac, but I could see why you'd be upset by the reviewer's choice of words. There's a clear anti-Apple bias here.
I'm sure the reviewer wouldn't have used those words if "Mac OS X Hints" contained hints for Linux or even Windows!
...who finds the symbolism of technology further closing you in from the outside world ironic, and a bit disturbing? :p
>I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones
Probably not worse than the millions of home phones that break down or are replaced by newer models. And DEFINITELY not worse than the millions of cell phones - and proprietary batteries - that are starting to be thrown out (what was the statistic I read? Kids in Japan who keep up with "fashion" replace their cell phone every 3 months, and in North America every 18 months? I know, I know, no link, no proof, etc... whatever.)
If I remember correctly (and please forgive me if I'm wrong, the recent LOTR craze hasn't induced me to run out and read his biography), Tolkien's day job was as a linguist, not a writer. You see that everywhere in Lord of the Rings (the books, not the movies) - he pays a great deal of attention to the languages, and, of course, there's the poems and songs that no one ever reads. But he has given a lot of thought to the languages of the world he's created, and that has a great impact on the coherence and believability of the cultures he presents. Heck, he INVENTED the languages. He definitely built the world and its culture on a solid foundation, so to speak... I should go back and read the appendices to the books.
That - because he's a talented linguist - is why I'd be interested in reading this, not because he's the author of LOTR.
As for the mentions of commercialization, it's been done recently, but I'm not sure how many people are aware of it. I'm referring to Michael Crichton's "Eaters of the Dead", an excellent take on the book. While not a translation, and fairly different from the original, it IS based on Beowulf and Crichton took it as a challenge to write a "modern" Beowulf. I think he's succeeded fairly well, the book is pretty good and it does have you guessing what's real and what's fiction. And, of course, it led to the movie "The 13th Warrior" with Antonio Banderas - not a masterpiece, perhaps, but a very good translation of Crichton's book to the big screen.
Okay, enough rambling from me.
Do we start hating EA now?
No?
Yeah, didn't think it would make a lot of sense.
How about now?
>Linux machines don't just go "belly-up", and certainly not from normal usage
:p
I know, that's probably why the admins always look so annoyed
Almost got into trouble once because they thought I was the one who messed up a machine...
>machines in first-year labs that used to boot from either Windows or Linux have been changed to Linux only.
That sounds like a LOT of hassle for the admins in the first place... University of Toronto has separate Linux Redhat, Win2000 with Netware, and (still a few) Solaris labs. Separate rooms, separate operating systems, just go where you need based on what you need to do. The Windows machines are even more "locked down" than the Linux ones - you can't even change the wallpaper, for example. Can't move/remove icons, can't change the start menu, can't (really) install programs. I've never seen a trashed Windows machine, whereas I've seen Linux machines that have gone belly-up with a rather pissed off admin trying to fix it. Then again, I spend more time in the Linux labs.
The dual-boot idea for a public lab makes very little sense to me in the first place - if the university's THAT desperate to save money, maybe it's not the best place to go. More likely though, the admins realized the way they were doing things wasn't really the best way, and changed to something more logical and easier to manage (and not all that new or innovative at that) - how does that constitute news??
Or maybe most people know they can find Microsoft at (oddly enough) www.microsoft.com.
Then again, Kazaa being #2 might disprove my whole whacky "people are logical" theory.
Interesting that Prom Dresses (39) is followed directly by Anorexia (40).
Coincidence?
Probably.
I am still amazed by the north american values that sex and nudity are BAD, and should be kept away from children at any cost, whereas violence is not...
Interesting article nonetheless, and fairly balanced. Seems Brin is using something that's in short supply nowadays - common sense. And there is (surprise surprise) a reference to Slashdot as well. To all those who generally just read the article summary and start posting, do read the article this time - it's fairly long, but it's worth it.
My guess would be that this would be useful because scent, unlike appearance, is harder to alter. A wanted criminal can just put on some different clothes, maybe grow a beard, etc, and he won't be easily recognized - wear shades, a hat, and he won't be very easy to recognize with any sort of automated system. Other methods of identification - fingerprints or retinal scan - are difficult to apply without the target noticing (and cooperating). I could see machines at airports or bus terminals that "sniff out" anyone who passes by, and if the smell matches with any in its database, bingo... IF the technology works, it could be far more reliable than current methods.
Of course, all this hinges on the idea that slapping on some cheap cologne won't confuse the machine. And I won't go into the privacy/1984/control etc. arguments...
...from the hmm-it's-getting-boring-up-here-with-no-internet-a ccess dept. :)
Built-in obsolescence.
I doubt Adobe is concerned about the actual pirated e-books. They're not protecting "peanuts" like e-books versus the more expensive Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. They're protecting the validity and usefulness of their ebook technology - I am not very familiar with it, but it stands to reason that if it becomes extremely easy to circumvent, publishers won't even think about using it to "securely" distribute e-texts, Adobe won't get paid, and they'll basically be left with a technology they spent a lot of money on that no one wants to use.
That is very different from Adobe worrying about some 14-year-old downloading the latest Photoshop. They're probably smart enough to realize that they're generally not losing sales revenue through that, they are, if anything, gaining market share by having a growing self-trained user base (which in turn leads to businesses hiring the 14-year-old a few years down the road and buying another legit license).
...whether they took any action against any of the sites/people offering the 100,000 "pirated books".
Seems to me that Adobe is merely trying to find a scapegoat, but chose an entirely wrong example to set.
>Striking up conversations with strangers is becoming more and more hazardous - emotionally and, sometimes, physically - and less and less fulfilling.
Precisely WHY I don't have a lot of hope for this technology... maybe it will change the way we interact, maybe it won't - but the point is, it won't affect or improve the millions of reasons in today's society WHY many people are isolated and often have little opportunity for meaningful interactions.
I'm still in university, so I find it relatively easy to talk to new people, feeling fairly confident that they won't pull out a knife and stab me, or harass me for the rest of my life, or god knows what. I know I can just have a decent conversation, have fun for a bit, and that's that - and I am a fairly shy person by nature. I have no idea what social interaction will be like once I come out of university - but work-commute-home sure doesn't sound that great.
Many people in large cities feel disconnected and purposeless - I doubt that technology will alter or eliminate the social structure and reasons behind that.
Then again, I doubt anything, at this point, can - there's no way we can go back to the way people interacted, say, two hundred years ago (there was a lot of bad, but also a lot of good) - so maybe something like this idea/technology is a way to overcome the difficulties we've introduced for ourselves, and create a new - maybe not better, just different - way to interact, and social purpose. Hope?
Then again, the pessimist in me says "maybe not".
Thank you for voicing my exact thoughts after reading that article. Seems to me people are more and more afraid to interact with others, and this would not be a step in the correct direction to solve that. When's the last time you took a chance and struck up a conversation with a person you've never met before? What makes you think you would if you had that technology? ("you" meant in the general sense, not to refer to the parent poster)
Wrong. Bad acting, poor direction or lousy scripts is (arguably) a matter of taste - some people might hate the script, while others might find it okay. Same with food that tastes lousy - chances are it's, again, a matter of personal opinion. Food made in unsanitary conditions that gets half the customers sick, however, while the restaurant maintains nothing is wrong and refuses to clean its kitchen, IS basis for legal action.
Judging from the screenshots posted, the DVD is obviously defective - the colours from the theatre version were amazing, these are anything but. If Buena Vista admitted to their mistake, pulled the DVD from shelves and fixed the problem before selling more, there would be little grounds for a lawsuit - but they seem to be knowingly selling a defective product, while claiming nothing's wrong with it.