"Nothing wrong with building one cheaply, but it's not a step forward."
Erh, then you totally missed the point. Key words, even in just the article stub, are "test", "plan", "stage" and "cheap".
The step forward is that their combination of off the shelf technologies - like the first stage launch platform, or baloon - and software all worked together from launch to landing, and that they were able to get support for all the neccessary legalities - like liability insurance, ATC clearance, etc.
It was a step forward the same way that Neil Armstrong, having just ridden a rocket into earth orbit, escaped to the moon, orbitted that and then landed a tiny little aluminum craft onto the surface of the first world to be visited by humans, took a step forward merely by stepping off a ladder.
As they pointed out - the complete project - which was a lot more than juts a baloon - cost less than your average sounding baloon.
That... Is a step forward, but a mere footnote on the checklist of the project.
Yes it is - it's exactly like WWII Online. After spending many months playing WWII Online this was an element that Sony's own PlanetSide team tried to recapture. It allows smaller numbers of players to create a larger apparent battle that continues its flow. In the same way that CoD continuously spawns replacements to give you that "big army" feel.
Clearly the name "CmdrTaco" is likely to be recognized by either Blizzard staff or/. readers who play WoW. It's entirely possible that one of your readers saw the name and reported it, because that tends to be how names get changed rather than Blizzard actively patrolling them. Perhaps a GM saw you walk past.
You said yourself you felt warm and fuzzy when the name was available. Knowing a few blizzard folk it's hard not to imagine someone proudly striking a blow *for* our beloved slashdoter. I like this spin because you can follow it up with the warm and fuzzy feeling that person must have felt the following day when he sat down with his coffee and pulled up slashdot. "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN! "
The little known Roxen webserver (http://www.roxen.com/) has an excellent CMS. It uses CVS to manage workflow and content revision, showing only the trunk-head to regular site visitors. It uses server-side XSLT and Roxen's 10 year mature caching systems. Roxen has had built-in browser-based "GUI" administration and configuration since it was called Spinner back in the early days of the web. It's only downfall has been that it was written in "uLPC", the language of MUDs, rather than pure "C".
The webserver (platform) is free/OpenSource (http://download.roxen.com/ and includes one of the easiest web-scripting languages around, RXML. The CMS is freely available but costs for commercial use.
Depends what you're using it for, and that is really what the UGO review says.
SB16 means more load on your CPU in producing sound playback, reduced quality level of sound - which is why a review like this is useful - do these cards actually do anything worth getting over an SB16.
If you're playing the odd game of quake or duke nukem on your box through a couple of Labtec 1995 $5 speakers, then you don't need more than an SB16.
If you're playing JediKnight 2 or WWII Online on headphones then you probably want something that will produce a higher quality sound at lesser cpu usage and with more "features".
When I play JK2 on my laptops sb16 soundcard, I usually quit playing on phones fairly quickly, it spoils the music. When I'm playing MP3s at home through my sound system, choosing between my laptop and my desktop (Fortissimo II card) makes a big difference.
How do you determine how complex a software system is? Are a dozen relatively simple routines a complex system, or is the complexity weighed by how they are employed?
The complexity of a piece of software deeply affects how it should be tested. Most software is modular and must thus be tested modularly. It can pay to start by using an automated testing system which requires functions to declare their modus-operandi, specifying constraints and boundary results, such that the testing software can determine a functional hierarchy in which to test program functionality.
But if you're not talking commercial, highgrade custom development, then the designers and developers need to keep testing in mind before, during and after their stages of the process. If you are one of those developers blessed with the ability to go straight from concept to code, testing is just one more system component you have to mentally track: the testing stack, or some such device.
Testing an entire system won't work - it will generate huge quantities of bugs - unless you have a testing methodology that is based on the model used to actually code the system. If your word processor works in bytes and somehow gets into writing two bytes at a time instead of one, all kinds of other problems will ensue.
While most testers do understand the concept of modular testing, its the notion of aligning the modularity of testing with the modularity of the code that most developers *and* most testers fail to recognise. The solution: design, develop and implement with testing in mind.
Those who are saying "Viruses only affect Windows" have fallen slap into the AV-Vendors PR campaign. No doubt the imminent anti-infection kits for Linux will be distributed seperately as Anti-virus and Anti-trojan. Keep feeding the confusion, Symantec needs you.
Its true, Windows boxes are the primary targets of Windows viruses. There are no two ways about it.
A virus is really just another name for a 'crack' or 'hack'. It is a means of obtaining unauthorised access to execute code on a remote machine, although "Virus" usually infers the infections ability or tendency to pass on the infection.
There have been countless Apache, Sendmail, CNews, NTPd, Inetd, NFS and etc exploits that have allowed people to hack into machines. Unlike a virus, they don't often try to spread themselves automatically to other hosts. Perhaps we should call them Bacterium? A great many rootkits do install some bootstrap tools for you to spread your rooting to the next hop... Not unlike the common cold which waits for you to sneeze/cough/belch in the face of your enemy, erm, I mean victim.
Certainly Windows wasn't the innovator in the invention of Worms. Its convenient to call them Virii when they affect windows so as to divorce them from Christmas Tree and its friends.
Where Unixes have the advantage is in their variety. There are far more variants of Unix platforms and their software than there are Windows platforms. That makes it harder to re-use an infection/crack/exploit - meaning that replication isn't as easy. And instead of being automated tends to occur through the gift of 'scripting'.
And before anyone declares that yet another victory for Unix, security by obscurity and excellent through incompatability are arguments that sound wonderful until you see that everyone is looking at you very oddly and you realise what you've just said:)
I've done a lot of web development, in a variety of languages. I've been working in the ISP sector since 1993 - I wrote tools and utils for AmiTCP in-between increasing the dogearedness of my pink-cover first version camel book.
PHP suffers from the same issues as JSP when it comes to building webapps and toys. It's also not really the most efficient system around either.
Much as I love Perl, and have always enjoyed knocking out CGI systems - including one of the first "fansite"s which offered people free custom emails and URLs (warbirds.org), and I've had lots of fun with PHP, I have personally found Roxens built in RXML mark-up language to be one of the most efficient systems for developing web applications in terms of design, implementation and operation.
Roxen was born "Spinner" back around, if not before. In all those years since, I've yet to find a good or compelling reason to use Apache, Perl or PHP instead of Roxen beyond the head-count factor. The Roxen developers make their money through 'value adding' their open source webserver platform, but never really tried to market themselves.
Especially recently, he does seem to have become somewhat embittered, and maybe I just don't read enough Stallman but gone seem to be the older, more glamorous days of Stallman fighting wrongs and injustices and come are the days of Stallman looking for a fight with anyone who isn't on his wagon yet. Macro-focus has been replaced with Micro-focus.
I don't think its fair to accuse him of empire building, I honestly think Mr Stallman thinks he is on a just campaign.
But seeing Richard attack something like this makes you wonder who else is on this campaign with him.
In $ world terms, Mr Stallman is so entrenched in negative energies that it is difficult to see how he can still be a positive motivator...
And that may hold true for schools now. But it doesn't cover all fields or realms. Where it tends to work is in tools that people use, rather than "toys" (no offense) like P2P networks.
Many strange products that should have died early in their lifetimes have lived long and prosperous lifespans because they managed to get their foot in the educators door...
I would argue that calling it the "Network Effect" is wildly misleading. Just because an orange grows on a tree does not make it an apple. And this effect extends well beyond network-centric developments.
Why do people have different priorities for their choice of operating system? Why do people have different priorities for choice of monitor?
If you want the real answer to "why", ask yourself, and I ask non-faecetiously: Why did you not adopt and support an existing P2P protocol instead of writing your own?
Sometimes people adopt something because they share a belief system with the author - qMail is a good example. Other times it is because they have a need the authors are catering for - exim is a good example. Whilst other times it is because "better the devil you know" - sendmail is a large example.
You could ask why the Roxen webserver (which predated Apache in its incarnation as 'Spinner') is virtually unknown - when its XML-like server-side scripting system, its performance and sophisticated caching systems would seem to make it todays ideal candidate. (http://www.roxen.com)
In today's environment, however, the answer is usually that there are too many choices and not enough differences. We don't have time to do a complete study of all the options for each and every program for our requirement. We look at the first paint program that supports 'dongleberry' format and learn our way around that. We try three 'ldap' capable mail systems and go with the one that installed man pages not tex files that Wouldn'tBuildHere(TM). We choose our programmers editor based on the "summary" in the first results page returned by google, and we choose our P2P network by asking Harry where he got that awesome new Britney Strips video.
The story on the IBM site linked from the slashdot story claimed 100Ghz chips within two years (although we're talking comms chips)
"IBM expects the new transistor will result in communications chips at speeds of 100 GigaHertz (GHz) within two years -- five times faster and four years sooner than recently-announced competitive approaches."
So naturally I was curious what that might mean in terms of regular chips.
Oliver
Since the slashdot article about IBM 210Ghz transistors I've not seen any further mention of these super-transistors or the possibility of building chipsets from the technology...
And yes, I mean 210Ghz not 210Mhz.
Quite true, but it would be most interesting to know whether it is possible to determine the presence of microbial life in the Jovian atmosphere by detecting exact variations between the observed and predicted patterns?
I know a lot of people find ergonomic keyboards unpleasant, uncomfortable or just plain unuseable. For myself, I swear by them. I just don't swear anyone else to or by them.
Maybe its something about my physiology (size of my hands?) but I find it far more comfortable having a keyboard that is convex rather than concave.
With an ergo keyboard (convex, the keyboard curved towards you) the keyboard seems to meet my hands, whereas with a normal keyboard (usually flat or curving invwards) I have to make significant wrist/hand posture changes to adjust for different keys.
My personal experience of ergos was that the first week of using them was unpleasant - on occasions verging on painful. I've been using them for around 3 years now. The odd cramps and twinges I was getting in my wrist-area and mid-upper hands are gone.
I used to find myself wringing my hands to iron out what you might call kinks regularly - no more.
A few days back on a Sun or HP keyboard and I start feeling the key impacts when typing things like "number", and the twinges come back.
Do I think Ergo keyboards are a magic cure-all? No. Keyboards are unattural things. Our digits aren't that far divorced from their branch grasping origins. I do think that ergo keyboards better suit some people, and I do think if you're an ergo person that the difference between and ergo and a non are dramatic.
The BBC are running an article on a theory that microbes may play a significant part in terresterial weather patterns.
If this theory pans out, it could offer a potentially interesting lead to the search for ET (or mET or uET, if you prefer =). If the Great Red Spot is being maintained by microbes, does that mean it actually qualifies as Space Acne?
NVRAM is the memory that needs to come down in prices for solid-state devices to become practical.
With normal memory, heat would be an issue if you put, say, 60gb worth of 512mb chips into a device.
You could, of course, use a derivative of RAID to provide a secure backup.
Any company that develops such a technology is going to have fluctuating memory prices to cope with during the development time, and likely investors are probably wary that during the time to market memory prices could easily go up again.
Or just as easily, DDR RAM might come crashing down during time to market, leaving the device at risk of being obselete as soon as it is released.
How is IBM doing with it's spin-based memory technology?
Actually, it just shows when you out-grew Doctor Who. Sylvester McCoy did an equally good job of presenting the character of the Doctor, you (and I) had just grown up enough by then to realise it. A few years earlier and you'd have been complaining (as you will often see) about the previous doctor(s) instead.
I actually know people 10 years older than me who say 'Doctor who was ok till that twat Tom Baker ruined it'.
If you've worked on a help-desk or in a customer-service type role (hostmaster? customer-facing webmaster? tech-support?) then how many times have you had a customer tell you "but I got an email that told me xyz"??
8-9 years ago I needed a way that a bunch of people in different departments could present a coherent front to customers through email and eventually hopefully link it to any system our support teams developed. So I invented "automaster".
We copied all of our corporate emails to the automaster by cc'ing it, and in-house built a simple search engine that would do lookups for us so that if I was dealing with CustomerA on Wednesday and someone else needed to on Friday, they could pick up where I'd left off, even if the customer didn't quote me in his next email.
Naturally at first they were all a bit worried that this was big brother in action, but the fact is in the long term it shouldn't put any more pressure on you that taking your role seriously does.
Our folks would point out the odd mistake to each other and the level of competence of our staff went up massively. It wasn't long before most of the other UK ISPs were copying the idea, and it spread fairly rapidly beyond after that.
What Altavista is providing is an excellent tool. And if it means that management can see how you deal with their customers, well, they pay you, surely they are entitled to know just exactly what they are paying you for. And if the company is willing to spend enough money on people to sit around and read all your emails then thats just less money in the CEOs pocket.
It appears the issuant of the case has not correctly gathered his facts. He sites "kam.com" as an example. A quick lookup on the whois database indicates that the record for the domain was last modified 21-Oct-1999.
I have to question how he gets his data on cancelled domains. More than likely he's basing it on either "insider knowledge" of the original owner of the domain, or on some output from one of the Whois systems, and the output is erroneous.
I hope this case goes to court - NSI could use some extra funds. =)
. Putting your card behind the bar
. Shopping someplace you have an account card
Both of these patents should really be covered by "obvious usage" if they don't merely cover/how/ the server side is implemented.
.. The same way you can perhaps patent how you achieve lift with a new wing or engine, but you can't patent flight as a result of not being on the ground.
One-Click as a user-interface feature as a means to conducting commerce probably has hundreds of 'proveable earlier uses' predating either of these patents.
Firstly - how is EthernalQuest going to be protected against people cheating using things like "ShowEQ" or finding new exploits in the EternalQuest server and stealing other players' items.
Cheats in a single player game tend to take most of the fun out of the game, or turn it into a "tour" mode.
Cheats in a multi-player game? How long would you play chess against someone who reserved the right to undo the last move or two any time he chooses, such as when you win.
Lastly, is it legal? No. There are lots of ways Verant can come at Ashran over this, many of which are covered by international laws, most of which are readily supported by section 16 of the license agreement, and plenty of which are covered by the legal angle being taken in the DeCSS case, since Verant's servers are providing a service, and the clients are simply the means of accessing that service.
Service impersonation is just one angle they could use. Regardless that your service is free, infact even more so, regardless that the author declares it non-comercial. It directly attacks the service being provided by the EQ Client/Server combination, and does so by impersonation of the service provider.
Pretty good legal basis for a case.
Anyone who counsels Ashran that "Nobody will take this case" or that "they'd have to push that through international courts" hasn't really thought about just how many different aspects of law this touches on, and how few aspects of solid defense it covers.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like someone wanted to make some clickthru money from /. ?
"Nothing wrong with building one cheaply, but it's not a step forward."
Erh, then you totally missed the point. Key words, even in just the article stub, are "test", "plan", "stage" and "cheap".
The step forward is that their combination of off the shelf technologies - like the first stage launch platform, or baloon - and software all worked together from launch to landing, and that they were able to get support for all the neccessary legalities - like liability insurance, ATC clearance, etc.
It was a step forward the same way that Neil Armstrong, having just ridden a rocket into earth orbit, escaped to the moon, orbitted that and then landed a tiny little aluminum craft onto the surface of the first world to be visited by humans, took a step forward merely by stepping off a ladder.
As they pointed out - the complete project - which was a lot more than juts a baloon - cost less than your average sounding baloon.
That... Is a step forward, but a mere footnote on the checklist of the project.
Perhaps an Anousheh Barbie? :)
Yes it is - it's exactly like WWII Online. After spending many months playing WWII Online this was an element that Sony's own PlanetSide team tried to recapture. It allows smaller numbers of players to create a larger apparent battle that continues its flow. In the same way that CoD continuously spawns replacements to give you that "big army" feel.
Clearly the name "CmdrTaco" is likely to be recognized by either Blizzard staff or /. readers who play WoW. It's entirely possible that one of your readers saw the name and reported it, because that tends to be how names get changed rather than Blizzard actively patrolling them. Perhaps a GM saw you walk past.
! "
You said yourself you felt warm and fuzzy when the name was available. Knowing a few blizzard folk it's hard not to imagine someone proudly striking a blow *for* our beloved slashdoter. I like this spin because you can follow it up with the warm and fuzzy feeling that person must have felt the following day when he sat down with his coffee and pulled up slashdot. "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
The little known Roxen webserver (http://www.roxen.com/) has an excellent CMS. It uses CVS to manage workflow and content revision, showing only the trunk-head to regular site visitors. It uses server-side XSLT and Roxen's 10 year mature caching systems. Roxen has had built-in browser-based "GUI" administration and configuration since it was called Spinner back in the early days of the web. It's only downfall has been that it was written in "uLPC", the language of MUDs, rather than pure "C".
The webserver (platform) is free/OpenSource (http://download.roxen.com/ and includes one of the easiest web-scripting languages around, RXML. The CMS is freely available but costs for commercial use.
Depends what you're using it for, and that is really what the UGO review says.
SB16 means more load on your CPU in producing sound playback, reduced quality level of sound - which is why a review like this is useful - do these cards actually do anything worth getting over an SB16.
If you're playing the odd game of quake or duke nukem on your box through a couple of Labtec 1995 $5 speakers, then you don't need more than an SB16.
If you're playing JediKnight 2 or WWII Online on headphones then you probably want something that will produce a higher quality sound at lesser cpu usage and with more "features".
When I play JK2 on my laptops sb16 soundcard, I usually quit playing on phones fairly quickly, it spoils the music. When I'm playing MP3s at home through my sound system, choosing between my laptop and my desktop (Fortissimo II card) makes a big difference.
How do you determine how complex a software system is? Are a dozen relatively simple routines a complex system, or is the complexity weighed by how they are employed?
The complexity of a piece of software deeply affects how it should be tested. Most software is modular and must thus be tested modularly. It can pay to start by using an automated testing system which requires functions to declare their modus-operandi, specifying constraints and boundary results, such that the testing software can determine a functional hierarchy in which to test program functionality.
But if you're not talking commercial, highgrade custom development, then the designers and developers need to keep testing in mind before, during and after their stages of the process. If you are one of those developers blessed with the ability to go straight from concept to code, testing is just one more system component you have to mentally track: the testing stack, or some such device.
Testing an entire system won't work - it will generate huge quantities of bugs - unless you have a testing methodology that is based on the model used to actually code the system. If your word processor works in bytes and somehow gets into writing two bytes at a time instead of one, all kinds of other problems will ensue.
While most testers do understand the concept of modular testing, its the notion of aligning the modularity of testing with the modularity of the code that most developers *and* most testers fail to recognise. The solution: design, develop and implement with testing in mind.
Those who are saying "Viruses only affect Windows" have fallen slap into the AV-Vendors PR campaign. No doubt the imminent anti-infection kits for Linux will be distributed seperately as Anti-virus and Anti-trojan. Keep feeding the confusion, Symantec needs you.
:)
Its true, Windows boxes are the primary targets of Windows viruses. There are no two ways about it.
A virus is really just another name for a 'crack' or 'hack'. It is a means of obtaining unauthorised access to execute code on a remote machine, although "Virus" usually infers the infections ability or tendency to pass on the infection.
There have been countless Apache, Sendmail, CNews, NTPd, Inetd, NFS and etc exploits that have allowed people to hack into machines. Unlike a virus, they don't often try to spread themselves automatically to other hosts. Perhaps we should call them Bacterium? A great many rootkits do install some bootstrap tools for you to spread your rooting to the next hop... Not unlike the common cold which waits for you to sneeze/cough/belch in the face of your enemy, erm, I mean victim.
Certainly Windows wasn't the innovator in the invention of Worms. Its convenient to call them Virii when they affect windows so as to divorce them from Christmas Tree and its friends.
Where Unixes have the advantage is in their variety. There are far more variants of Unix platforms and their software than there are Windows platforms. That makes it harder to re-use an infection/crack/exploit - meaning that replication isn't as easy. And instead of being automated tends to occur through the gift of 'scripting'.
And before anyone declares that yet another victory for Unix, security by obscurity and excellent through incompatability are arguments that sound wonderful until you see that everyone is looking at you very oddly and you realise what you've just said
I've done a lot of web development, in a variety of languages. I've been working in the ISP sector since 1993 - I wrote tools and utils for AmiTCP in-between increasing the dogearedness of my pink-cover first version camel book.
PHP suffers from the same issues as JSP when it comes to building webapps and toys. It's also not really the most efficient system around either.
Much as I love Perl, and have always enjoyed knocking out CGI systems - including one of the first "fansite"s which offered people free custom emails and URLs (warbirds.org), and I've had lots of fun with PHP, I have personally found Roxens built in RXML mark-up language to be one of the most efficient systems for developing web applications in terms of design, implementation and operation.
Roxen was born "Spinner" back around, if not before. In all those years since, I've yet to find a good or compelling reason to use Apache, Perl or PHP instead of Roxen beyond the head-count factor. The Roxen developers make their money through 'value adding' their open source webserver platform, but never really tried to market themselves.
Especially recently, he does seem to have become somewhat embittered, and maybe I just don't read enough Stallman but gone seem to be the older, more glamorous days of Stallman fighting wrongs and injustices and come are the days of Stallman looking for a fight with anyone who isn't on his wagon yet. Macro-focus has been replaced with Micro-focus.
I don't think its fair to accuse him of empire building, I honestly think Mr Stallman thinks he is on a just campaign.
But seeing Richard attack something like this makes you wonder who else is on this campaign with him.
In $ world terms, Mr Stallman is so entrenched in negative energies that it is difficult to see how he can still be a positive motivator...
And that may hold true for schools now. But it doesn't cover all fields or realms. Where it tends to work is in tools that people use, rather than "toys" (no offense) like P2P networks.
Many strange products that should have died early in their lifetimes have lived long and prosperous lifespans because they managed to get their foot in the educators door...
I would argue that calling it the "Network Effect" is wildly misleading. Just because an orange grows on a tree does not make it an apple. And this effect extends well beyond network-centric developments.
Why do people have different priorities for their choice of operating system? Why do people have different priorities for choice of monitor?
If you want the real answer to "why", ask yourself, and I ask non-faecetiously: Why did you not adopt and support an existing P2P protocol instead of writing your own?
Sometimes people adopt something because they share a belief system with the author - qMail is a good example. Other times it is because they have a need the authors are catering for - exim is a good example. Whilst other times it is because "better the devil you know" - sendmail is a large example.
You could ask why the Roxen webserver (which predated Apache in its incarnation as 'Spinner') is virtually unknown - when its XML-like server-side scripting system, its performance and sophisticated caching systems would seem to make it todays ideal candidate. (http://www.roxen.com)
In today's environment, however, the answer is usually that there are too many choices and not enough differences. We don't have time to do a complete study of all the options for each and every program for our requirement. We look at the first paint program that supports 'dongleberry' format and learn our way around that. We try three 'ldap' capable mail systems and go with the one that installed man pages not tex files that Wouldn'tBuildHere(TM). We choose our programmers editor based on the "summary" in the first results page returned by google, and we choose our P2P network by asking Harry where he got that awesome new Britney Strips video.
Reason #1 is Belgian beer.
:)
Mmmm. Belgian Beer.
I knew I lived here for a reason. See reason #1 for why I'd forgotten
The story on the IBM site linked from the slashdot story claimed 100Ghz chips within two years (although we're talking comms chips) "IBM expects the new transistor will result in communications chips at speeds of 100 GigaHertz (GHz) within two years -- five times faster and four years sooner than recently-announced competitive approaches." So naturally I was curious what that might mean in terms of regular chips. Oliver
Since the slashdot article about IBM 210Ghz transistors I've not seen any further mention of these super-transistors or the possibility of building chipsets from the technology... And yes, I mean 210Ghz not 210Mhz.
Quite true, but it would be most interesting to know whether it is possible to determine the presence of microbial life in the Jovian atmosphere by detecting exact variations between the observed and predicted patterns?
I know a lot of people find ergonomic keyboards unpleasant, uncomfortable or just plain unuseable. For myself, I swear by them. I just don't swear anyone else to or by them.
Maybe its something about my physiology (size of my hands?) but I find it far more comfortable having a keyboard that is convex rather than concave.
With an ergo keyboard (convex, the keyboard curved towards you) the keyboard seems to meet my hands, whereas with a normal keyboard (usually flat or curving invwards) I have to make significant wrist/hand posture changes to adjust for different keys.
My personal experience of ergos was that the first week of using them was unpleasant - on occasions verging on painful. I've been using them for around 3 years now. The odd cramps and twinges I was getting in my wrist-area and mid-upper hands are gone.
I used to find myself wringing my hands to iron out what you might call kinks regularly - no more.
A few days back on a Sun or HP keyboard and I start feeling the key impacts when typing things like "number", and the twinges come back.
Do I think Ergo keyboards are a magic cure-all? No. Keyboards are unattural things. Our digits aren't that far divorced from their branch grasping origins. I do think that ergo keyboards better suit some people, and I do think if you're an ergo person that the difference between and ergo and a non are dramatic.
Oliver
The BBC are running an article on a theory that microbes may play a significant part in terresterial weather patterns. If this theory pans out, it could offer a potentially interesting lead to the search for ET (or mET or uET, if you prefer =). If the Great Red Spot is being maintained by microbes, does that mean it actually qualifies as Space Acne?
NVRAM is the memory that needs to come down in prices for solid-state devices to become practical.
With normal memory, heat would be an issue if you put, say, 60gb worth of 512mb chips into a device.
You could, of course, use a derivative of RAID to provide a secure backup.
Any company that develops such a technology is going to have fluctuating memory prices to cope with during the development time, and likely investors are probably wary that during the time to market memory prices could easily go up again.
Or just as easily, DDR RAM might come crashing down during time to market, leaving the device at risk of being obselete as soon as it is released.
How is IBM doing with it's spin-based memory technology?
Actually, it just shows when you out-grew Doctor Who. Sylvester McCoy did an equally good job of presenting the character of the Doctor, you (and I) had just grown up enough by then to realise it. A few years earlier and you'd have been complaining (as you will often see) about the previous doctor(s) instead.
I actually know people 10 years older than me who say 'Doctor who was ok till that twat Tom Baker ruined it'.
If you've worked on a help-desk or in a customer-service type role (hostmaster? customer-facing webmaster? tech-support?) then how many times have you had a customer tell you "but I got an email that told me xyz"??
8-9 years ago I needed a way that a bunch of people in different departments could present a coherent front to customers through email and eventually hopefully link it to any system our support teams developed. So I invented "automaster".
We copied all of our corporate emails to the automaster by cc'ing it, and in-house built a simple search engine that would do lookups for us so that if I was dealing with CustomerA on Wednesday and someone else needed to on Friday, they could pick up where I'd left off, even if the customer didn't quote me in his next email.
Naturally at first they were all a bit worried that this was big brother in action, but the fact is in the long term it shouldn't put any more pressure on you that taking your role seriously does.
Our folks would point out the odd mistake to each other and the level of competence of our staff went up massively. It wasn't long before most of the other UK ISPs were copying the idea, and it spread fairly rapidly beyond after that.
What Altavista is providing is an excellent tool. And if it means that management can see how you deal with their customers, well, they pay you, surely they are entitled to know just exactly what they are paying you for. And if the company is willing to spend enough money on people to sit around and read all your emails then thats just less money in the CEOs pocket.
K
It appears the issuant of the case has not correctly gathered his facts. He sites "kam.com" as an example. A quick lookup on the whois database indicates that the record for the domain was last modified 21-Oct-1999.
I have to question how he gets his data on cancelled domains. More than likely he's basing it on either "insider knowledge" of the original owner of the domain, or on some output from one of the Whois systems, and the output is erroneous.
I hope this case goes to court - NSI could use some extra funds. =)
Oliver
"one interaction"?
/how/ the server side is implemented.
How about:
. Putting your card behind the bar
. Shopping someplace you have an account card
Both of these patents should really be covered by "obvious usage" if they don't merely cover
.. The same way you can perhaps patent how you achieve lift with a new wing or engine, but you can't patent flight as a result of not being on the ground.
One-Click as a user-interface feature as a means to conducting commerce probably has hundreds of 'proveable earlier uses' predating either of these patents.
Oliver
Firstly - how is EthernalQuest going to be protected against people cheating using things like "ShowEQ" or finding new exploits in the EternalQuest server and stealing other players' items.
Cheats in a single player game tend to take most of the fun out of the game, or turn it into a "tour" mode.
Cheats in a multi-player game? How long would you play chess against someone who reserved the right to undo the last move or two any time he chooses, such as when you win.
Lastly, is it legal? No. There are lots of ways Verant can come at Ashran over this, many of which are covered by international laws, most of which are readily supported by section 16 of the license agreement, and plenty of which are covered by the legal angle being taken in the DeCSS case, since Verant's servers are providing a service, and the clients are simply the means of accessing that service.
Service impersonation is just one angle they could use. Regardless that your service is free, infact even more so, regardless that the author declares it non-comercial. It directly attacks the service being provided by the EQ Client/Server combination, and does so by impersonation of the service provider.
Pretty good legal basis for a case.
Anyone who counsels Ashran that "Nobody will take this case" or that "they'd have to push that through international courts" hasn't really thought about just how many different aspects of law this touches on, and how few aspects of solid defense it covers.
Oliver