Most likely it was something like a server-side include. If they're working properly you never see the HTML code that inserts the text into your page -- just the result. --
OK, so a US court makes reverse engineering illegal. It could happen, given the general cluelessness of the government to what's happening right under their noses. The Samba people are based out of Australia, where US courts don't have a lot of influence. Any company based anywhere in the world outside the US would be completely unaffected unless the US can persuade that country to go along with its decision, which is by no means certain.
Plus, if things get really draconian here, what would stop someone who really believed in the freedom of information from moving to Mexico, or Canada, or the Bahamas or Zimbabwe or the Faeroe Islands or someplace else and setting up shop someplace where US laws don't apply? (One member of the OpenSSH team did this already -- he's a German citizen living in Detroit who set up an office in Windsor, just across the Canadian border, so there would be no question the work he did on OpenSSH would be completely outside US jurisdiction.) And that's not even considering the many open-source partisans who already reside outside the United States.
Nope, I'm afraid the DVD people and the US courts are fighting a losing battle on this one, and they can't shut down DeCSS or reverse engineering any more than they can put toothpaste back in the tube. About all they could do would be to create huge opportunities for people outside the country similar to the ones that exist now for strong encryption, and make the US look foolish and backward (again, look at how the rest of the world views US encryption export policies). --
I think you may have hit upon it. With the traditional "straight key" the wrist is in more or less the same position you would use for typing, although you do have the advantage that you can adjust the amount of force and distance necessary to depress the key. I suspect if anything kept telegraph operators from getting RSI, it would be occasionally taking breaks to do things other than keying -- picking up a pencil to write down messages, for instance -- which is the same thing that keeps modern-day typists from getting RSI.
The side-to-side motion used with a bug or electronic keyer is a lot easier on the wrist, though I still wouldn't recommend doing it for hours at a time. --
The brief version (for those who don't care to click on the link the previous AC provided):
Go is a game played worldwide, but has the strongest "community" in the Orient, where there are Go professionals and professional Go commentators and writers (especially in Japan). The rules are fairly simple but unfortunately not simple enough to reproduce here (especially since I'm doing this from memory). Very briefly, it's played on the intersections of a 19x19 grid of lines with pieces called stones. Players alternate placing stones on the grid, attempting to capture as much territory as possible by making it impossible for the opposing player to place uncapturable stones inside the territory. A stone or group of stones is captured if it is completely surrounded by enemy stones, so if a group can't be surrounded it can't be captured. Captured stones count against a player at the end of the game, so efficiency is paramount, both in securing territory and in trying to attack it.
I remember reading a summary of a book written over 25 years ago comparing chess and go in the context of Eastern vs. Western military philosophy (this was toward the end of the Vietnam war). The author's thesis was that in chess, the object is to capture a particular piece, and a player can sacrifice as many of his pieces as necessary to capture the king. In go, the goal is not to capture particular pieces (in fact, every go stone is just as powerful as every other -- it's how groups of stones are deployed that make them weak or powerful), but to capture territory, and as I mentioned above, the more efficient you are at it, the better go player you'll be, --
or the free tool whose name I forget at the moment that works more or less the same way. No faffing necessary there, either. I do wonder whether MS might not be working on a floppy-based tool that will "prepare" your system for a Windows installation. Maybe I'll see if I can get transferred over to the UI group in charge of that project. I can write stuff like:
This disk will prepare your computer to:
Accept a Windows 2000 installation
Crash at random intervals
Run approximately 60% slower when it does run
Be locked into a set of proprietary protocols
Facilitate transferring money directly into Bill Gates' bank account
You wouldn't even need to do anything that elaborate. Of course they're going to have an MTV feed going into the bunker, right? You can even give them a computer, phone, etc. to communicate with the outside world. So OK, at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, the power in the bunker goes out. About two seconds later kick on the "emergency" lights (a different and maybe slightly dimmer set) and have the TV come on to static and the computer and phone go dead. After about three days, or when things get really dull (or maybe really interesting, like it becomes obvious someone is getting ready to commit murder) have the lights flicker, go out -- and then the door swings open.
Trust me, the absence of any communication with the outside world would set their imaginations in motion, creating scenarios in their minds much worse than anything that could be conjured up by sound effects or images on TV. This was true in the days of big-time radio theater, and I'm sure it would be true even among those whose imaginations have been impaired by MTV
I know, you could never do this in real life, but there's certainly nothing wrong with just thinking about it. --
One of the problems with getting older is that there are so many more f*&^ed-up things that used to be cool than there were when you were young. For instance, I can remember times when Saturday Night Live, Nehru jackets and the Beach Boys were cool, and that's not even reaching back into my first childhood.
And now it's time for some AC to come on and say it remembers when/. was cool, I suppose. --
Mr. Calculator tells me $18 million a day equates to $6,570,000,000 a year. If there was a web site making that much money we'd be hearing about it. OTOH for a company to be making a mere $100 million a year they would only have to take in somewhere on the order of $275,000 a day which is still a significant amount of money to see lost just because someone wanted to prve how 1337 they are. --
Why police don't just stand there with their shields and arrest people, I don't know.
There are actually very good reasons why they might not want to do that. Most of them boil down to discipline.
For example, police stationed in front of the Westin Hotel had a particular assignment, i.e. to guard the delegates staying at the Westin. There are some pretty high-ranking people staying there (including at the moment, IIRC, President Clinton) and their job is to guard the building and protect those people. Sure they can see the Starbucks across the street being torn apart, but stop and think of what might happen if they left their post to intervene. Much as it might sound like I've read too many Tom Clancy novels, I wouldn't put it beyond the same group of radicals inciting the violence (and yes, it was a relatively small group) to storm the hotel once it was unguarded and wreak havok among some Very Important People. I'm afraid the trashing of a Starbucks and a few broken windows at Nordstrom's pales alongside the possibility of an international incident or worse.
Also, the police force was stretched thin enough as it is. Let's face it, Seattle is no more prepared for domestic violence than Atlanta is for a blizzard. If they have to divert ten officers from the line at Pine and Melrose to arrest 20 people (I don't know if they pointed this out, but the skirmish that happened about 7 last night in front of the funeral home was only about 3-4 blocks away from the Convention Center), that's ten fewer officers to hold the line against the thousands who might be preparing to storm their position.
It's painful to watch this happen, but I shudder to think what might have happened if the police hadn't reacted in much the same way. I'm just worried about what's going to happen today. The police are doing 20-hour shifts. They're battle fatigued. I could hear it in one officer's voice in a radio interview last night. The hooligans who are using the protest as an excuse to riot are keyed up. I'm just afraid something we're all going to regret might happen. I don't want Seattle to go down as the Kent State of the nineties. --
This thing reminds me of a list from the "Weekly World News" someone posted in their office window several years back, of "How to tell if someone is a space alien." The list included such warning signs as "seems out-of-place" and "uses objects inappropriately (e.g. trying to eat soup with a fork)".
I remember looking at that list and thinking I didn't know anyone I couldn't prove was from outer space based on that list, including myself and members of my immediate family (even the relatively normal ones).
Likewise, I think most of the people I would have voluntarily associated with in high school had at least a couple of these characteristics, not to mention half the people I work with now. I suppose it depends in some measure on how you define your terms. Are you going to say a kid is "fascinated by cults" because he's a Christian Scientist (yes, some people think they are a cult)? How about "interested in weapons" because he works out at a dojo after school? "Unstable self-esteem" sounds to me like as good a definition of being a high school student as any you could come up with.
OK, maybe the perpetrators of recent school violence fit this profile, but someone needs to run anyone using a profiler like this through an elementary course in set theory. Just because a few of the members of the intersection of SMART and DIFFERENT have decided to, um, take matters into their own hands doesn't mean that all, or most or even more than a statistically insignificant few, of the members of that particular intersection are going to do so.
I wonder if anyone has really looked at how likely people who fit this profile are to commit violence. I wouldn't be surprised to see a result similar to one found over a dozen years ago when someone decided to see whether role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons made kids more likely to commit suicide. Not only could they not find one single suicide that was directly attributable to roleplaying, they found that the suicide rate among gamers was actually less than for the control group! Someone should start looking into this. It might turn out after all that being a geek is good for you! --
Not to start a round of the Grandpa Game, but . . .
My first BBS experiences were with a TRS-80 and a 300 baud acoustic modem (the one you would fit your telephone headset in). Back in those days (1980) you could comfortably fit every known BBS in the world on both sides of an 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper in Courier 12 type. I once dialed into a board in England from Colorado just to prove I could do it (stayed all of about a minute ).
Now of course I can connect to demon.co.uk and not pay any more than I do to pull in/. It's like most things in life -- we remember the good old days with nostalgia for the communities and the adventure, but we forget the slow speeds and astronomical phone bills. --
I have no reason to doubt your source, since he's in the industry, but it's quite a turnaround from not that long ago when a large majority of voice work was handled by about a dozen actors. Paul Frees, Daws Butler, and the lovely and talented June Foray come immediately to mind.
Of course there were fewer cartoons back then... --
Perhaps, although I can think of two reasons why one might want to code a browser in Emacs Lisp:
1. I've corresponded with several people who are, depending on your point of view, either stuck with Emacs as their only environment or use Emacs all the time and hate to leave it. Primarily for the former, a browser you could use without leaving Emacs would make some sense. Especially if there's some sort of graphics capability. Reading User Friendly just sort of loses some of its appeal when you can't see the comics.
Perhaps because it will be easier to adapt a mobile processor for non-mobile uses than the other way around? Perhaps because mobile processing could involve anything from PDAs to supertankers? Perhaps because "mobile" could mean "moves from instruction set to instruction set" as well as (or instead of) "moves from place to place"?
You gotta hand it to Transmeta. Even when they tell us something they still keep us interested, and therefore hooked. --
Rather than just saying "you can only send 100 e-mails a day," I would set a policy that says, "unless specifically agreed upon by both parties in advance yadda yadda yadda, our e-mail servers will only send one piece of e-mail every five minutes from any given account. This shouldn't inconvenience anyone who is mailing the latest Internet joke to ten of their friends who've already heard it, God bless their pointy little heads. I send very little e-mail that would inconvenience me if it were delayed by a few minutes -- it's not all that important whether Grandma hears about my new truss now or tomorrow morning.
Of course there would be people who would want to be excepted from this rule. The primary legitimate exception would be for listservs and majordomo-style mailing lists, and there should be few enough of those that the sysadmin could easily monitor them for signs of abuse. There might be some other users who would need to send mail to be received in real-time, like people with e-mail aliases hooked to their pagers so they can jump on a stock opportunity immediately or know when the wife is going into labor. Again, the sysops would know who these people are and be able to monitor them.
Everybody else would have to wait for their mail to be sent (not received -- I can't think of a single reason to slow down incoming e-mail). Anyone who objects would be welcome to have a real-time sending account -- for a deposit of a ridiculously large sum of money, refundable when the account is closed UNLESS the perpetrator is caught sending UCE, in which case the RLSOM is forfeited to pay for the ISP's time and trouble in dealing with the aftermath.
In case you don't know what this could accomplish, spammers depend on being able to send thousands to millions of messages at one time. It's all volumes of scale -- if their response rate is 20 in a million (.002%) they have to send out 50,000 mails on average to get a single response. No one lazy enough to try to make a living through spamming will wait five months for a response to a mailing -- and besides, the complaints will start rolling in long before then.
I suppose there are technical flaws in this idea, chief among which would be that it's still far too easy to relay-rape misconfigured servers in Korea and Russia (not to single those two countries out, of course, but still . ..).It seems to me, though, that implementing a reverse teergrube like this -- especially if it were built into sendmail and similar programs -- would be a piece of cake compared to the ongoing nightmare of dealing with spam. --
Why, this is the third year running I've made their list of the "400 Richest Americans Living In The State Of Washington Whose Slashdot Alias Begins With The Letter 'O'". But do they print that list? No, of course not! This obviously indicates bias on their part, but whether it's against Slashdot posters, moles at Microsoft, people with barely enough cash to buy a Gartner Group report about smoking being bad for you, or just weirdos in general, I'm not sure. --
Maybe the next one of these Loki sets up should be a 72-hour playtest marathon. If they held a Civ:CTP marathon and ESR's government design is really that flawed (which it could be, I haven't looked at anything but what you just posted) it would probably become rapidly apparent toward the 70th hour when the Freedonians got stomped by the Mongols for the umpty-umpth time that day, or maybe when nobody wanted to play any of the other civs. --
Re:"Another well-researched", my fanny...
on
Gartner Slams Linux
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· Score: 1
I do believe the word Rob used only sounded like "well-researched," but it was difficult for me to tell because he was trying to talk around the tongue he had firmly implanted in his cheek.
These guys are basically writing warm fuzzy pieces saying what they think IS managers want to hear -- namely, that they didn't waste their money going to NT. And let's face it, there is a certain amount of truth to this article, but the devil will tell a thousand truths if it will help him put a lie across.
As I read articles like this I get a mental picture. It's of a CNN interview with a guy in the mountains, Colorado or maybe Switzerland, saying that all the experts have agreed that there is no danger of an avalanche. If all you do is listen to what CNN tells you, you might believe there won't be an avalanche. But if you're doing your own research, thinking for yourself and watching closely, way back in the background behind the talking head, you can see the snow shift, just a little. --
Well, part of the problem is that lojban really doesn't resemble anything so much as an explosion in a type factory. Esperanto and Interlingua at least have the occasional Latin or Greek root that's worked itself into worldwide usage.
I guess the problem is that it's difficult to adapt a computer-friendly language to humans, or a human-friendly language to computers. But like teaching a computer to play chess, that doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile. --
Close, but not exactly. About the closest you might get in English would be "the coziness you feel when you're together with family and friends, or at a pub you're quite fond of." And even that isn't quite on the mark. --
If I remember my German, you're talking about something like
Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken
where "der" referes to "Hut". That's something that will have to be covered in the rules both for translation into and translation out of German, no matter what language you're using to go into or out of German. Otherwise you end up with the English translation being
My hat, the has three corners
where a proper English translation would of course be
My hat has three corners
Of course this is a very simplified example, but I think you get the idea.
I just think that for the foreseeable future (and, since this is computing, that could be, oh, say, six months) the best computers on the planet are the ones we carry around in our skulls. To me it would make more sense to have a single language that everyone would agree on, but then the problem is to agree on the language. All of the "evolved" languages carry their own cultural baggage, and few people seem to think that a "constructed" language is up to the task, even though certainly Esperanto and possibly Interlingua and a couple of others have proven that hypothesis wrong.
Of course just outside the foreseeable future everybody will be speaking Bocci anyway, so what the heck.:) --
Forget support for Esperanto -- just use Esperanto as the intermediary language it was designed to be. Somehow I don't think encouraging people to include support for ISO 8859-3 in operating systems, browsers, etc. is going to be any less difficult than making allowances for bi-directional text in any of a number of character sets, to say nothing of language nuances (quick, how would you translate "Gemütlichkeit" into anything but German?). Esperanto is not that hard to learn, even for non-Indo-European-language speakers (there have been, and presumably still are, significant Esperanto movements in Japan and China, for example). The grammar can be grasped in about 30 minutes and you can carry the essential vocabulary around in your wallet.
I know, I know, people are going to come up with reasons not to use Esperanto. But it seems like if a solution that will work exists, why not use it?
(Note: Even though I like and occasionally use Esperanto, I would welcome use of a similar language like Interlingua or Latino sine Flexione that would be equally easy to learn and do the job just as well.) -- Iun vi konfidas, kun ni li alig^as. --
Here's one for someone to submit if they can't think of one themselves, and something even the technologically disadvantaged can relate to:
Mr. Gates, a significant proportion of your workforce worldwide consists of employees contracted out from other organizations. These contractors are by and large dedicated, motivated individuals, committed to helping Microsoft create the best product it can. In light of this, and taking into account the U.S. Government's ruling that in many cases these workers are de jure Microsoft employees, why does Microsoft continue to treat its contract force like second-class citizens by denying them benefits given to full-time employees, excluding them from company functions, making them interview for their own jobs when those jobs are converted to full-time status and the like?
Amazingly enough, having Microsoft on your CV counts for extra points with recruiters and potential employers. I know enough ex-MS employees to be able to verify this handily. Personally, I assume it's like being in college for four years. Interviewers like to see a degree on your resume, but it indicates an ability to stick with something for four years more than it does that you might have actually learned something. Same with working for Microsoft, especially if you're a contractor (people around here know what Microsoft thinks of its contractors so you get sympathy points.)
I wouldn't recommend working for them unless your conscience would allow you to do so, of course. (And yes, I sleep quite well at night, but then I'm not working in Windows or marketing. ) --
Slashdot Mirror
Most likely it was something like a server-side include. If they're working properly you never see the HTML code that inserts the text into your page -- just the result.
--
OK, so a US court makes reverse engineering illegal. It could happen, given the general cluelessness of the government to what's happening right under their noses. The Samba people are based out of Australia, where US courts don't have a lot of influence. Any company based anywhere in the world outside the US would be completely unaffected unless the US can persuade that country to go along with its decision, which is by no means certain.
Plus, if things get really draconian here, what would stop someone who really believed in the freedom of information from moving to Mexico, or Canada, or the Bahamas or Zimbabwe or the Faeroe Islands or someplace else and setting up shop someplace where US laws don't apply? (One member of the OpenSSH team did this already -- he's a German citizen living in Detroit who set up an office in Windsor, just across the Canadian border, so there would be no question the work he did on OpenSSH would be completely outside US jurisdiction.) And that's not even considering the many open-source partisans who already reside outside the United States.
Nope, I'm afraid the DVD people and the US courts are fighting a losing battle on this one, and they can't shut down DeCSS or reverse engineering any more than they can put toothpaste back in the tube. About all they could do would be to create huge opportunities for people outside the country similar to the ones that exist now for strong encryption, and make the US look foolish and backward (again, look at how the rest of the world views US encryption export policies).
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IMHO industry is the application of science for profit.
Internal combustion is science. Using the principle in an engine that powers automobiles is industry.
Zymurgy is science. Using zymurgy to create beer is industry.
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I think you may have hit upon it. With the traditional "straight key" the wrist is in more or less the same position you would use for typing, although you do have the advantage that you can adjust the amount of force and distance necessary to depress the key. I suspect if anything kept telegraph operators from getting RSI, it would be occasionally taking breaks to do things other than keying -- picking up a pencil to write down messages, for instance -- which is the same thing that keeps modern-day typists from getting RSI.
The side-to-side motion used with a bug or electronic keyer is a lot easier on the wrist, though I still wouldn't recommend doing it for hours at a time.
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The brief version (for those who don't care to click on the link the previous AC provided):
Go is a game played worldwide, but has the strongest "community" in the Orient, where there are Go professionals and professional Go commentators and writers (especially in Japan). The rules are fairly simple but unfortunately not simple enough to reproduce here (especially since I'm doing this from memory). Very briefly, it's played on the intersections of a 19x19 grid of lines with pieces called stones. Players alternate placing stones on the grid, attempting to capture as much territory as possible by making it impossible for the opposing player to place uncapturable stones inside the territory. A stone or group of stones is captured if it is completely surrounded by enemy stones, so if a group can't be surrounded it can't be captured. Captured stones count against a player at the end of the game, so efficiency is paramount, both in securing territory and in trying to attack it.
I remember reading a summary of a book written over 25 years ago comparing chess and go in the context of Eastern vs. Western military philosophy (this was toward the end of the Vietnam war). The author's thesis was that in chess, the object is to capture a particular piece, and a player can sacrifice as many of his pieces as necessary to capture the king. In go, the goal is not to capture particular pieces (in fact, every go stone is just as powerful as every other -- it's how groups of stones are deployed that make them weak or powerful), but to capture territory, and as I mentioned above, the more efficient you are at it, the better go player you'll be,
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I do wonder whether MS might not be working on a floppy-based tool that will "prepare" your system for a Windows installation. Maybe I'll see if I can get transferred over to the UI group in charge of that project. I can write stuff like:
Do you want to continue?
[ YES] [YES]
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You wouldn't even need to do anything that elaborate. Of course they're going to have an MTV feed going into the bunker, right? You can even give them a computer, phone, etc. to communicate with the outside world. So OK, at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, the power in the bunker goes out. About two seconds later kick on the "emergency" lights (a different and maybe slightly dimmer set) and have the TV come on to static and the computer and phone go dead. After about three days, or when things get really dull (or maybe really interesting, like it becomes obvious someone is getting ready to commit murder) have the lights flicker, go out -- and then the door swings open.
Trust me, the absence of any communication with the outside world would set their imaginations in motion, creating scenarios in their minds much worse than anything that could be conjured up by sound effects or images on TV. This was true in the days of big-time radio theater, and I'm sure it would be true even among those whose imaginations have been impaired by MTV
I know, you could never do this in real life, but there's certainly nothing wrong with just thinking about it.
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One of the problems with getting older is that there are so many more f*&^ed-up things that used to be cool than there were when you were young. For instance, I can remember times when Saturday Night Live, Nehru jackets and the Beach Boys were cool, and that's not even reaching back into my first childhood.
/. was cool, I suppose.
And now it's time for some AC to come on and say it remembers when
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Mr. Calculator tells me $18 million a day equates to $6,570,000,000 a year. If there was a web site making that much money we'd be hearing about it. OTOH for a company to be making a mere $100 million a year they would only have to take in somewhere on the order of $275,000 a day which is still a significant amount of money to see lost just because someone wanted to prve how 1337 they are.
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Why police don't just stand there with their shields and arrest people, I don't know.
There are actually very good reasons why they might not want to do that. Most of them boil down to discipline.
For example, police stationed in front of the Westin Hotel had a particular assignment, i.e. to guard the delegates staying at the Westin. There are some pretty high-ranking people staying there (including at the moment, IIRC, President Clinton) and their job is to guard the building and protect those people. Sure they can see the Starbucks across the street being torn apart, but stop and think of what might happen if they left their post to intervene. Much as it might sound like I've read too many Tom Clancy novels, I wouldn't put it beyond the same group of radicals inciting the violence (and yes, it was a relatively small group) to storm the hotel once it was unguarded and wreak havok among some Very Important People. I'm afraid the trashing of a Starbucks and a few broken windows at Nordstrom's pales alongside the possibility of an international incident or worse.
Also, the police force was stretched thin enough as it is. Let's face it, Seattle is no more prepared for domestic violence than Atlanta is for a blizzard. If they have to divert ten officers from the line at Pine and Melrose to arrest 20 people (I don't know if they pointed this out, but the skirmish that happened about 7 last night in front of the funeral home was only about 3-4 blocks away from the Convention Center), that's ten fewer officers to hold the line against the thousands who might be preparing to storm their position.
It's painful to watch this happen, but I shudder to think what might have happened if the police hadn't reacted in much the same way. I'm just worried about what's going to happen today. The police are doing 20-hour shifts. They're battle fatigued. I could hear it in one officer's voice in a radio interview last night. The hooligans who are using the protest as an excuse to riot are keyed up. I'm just afraid something we're all going to regret might happen. I don't want Seattle to go down as the Kent State of the nineties.
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This thing reminds me of a list from the "Weekly World News" someone posted in their office window several years back, of "How to tell if someone is a space alien." The list included such warning signs as "seems out-of-place" and "uses objects inappropriately (e.g. trying to eat soup with a fork)".
I remember looking at that list and thinking I didn't know anyone I couldn't prove was from outer space based on that list, including myself and members of my immediate family (even the relatively normal ones).
Likewise, I think most of the people I would have voluntarily associated with in high school had at least a couple of these characteristics, not to mention half the people I work with now. I suppose it depends in some measure on how you define your terms. Are you going to say a kid is "fascinated by cults" because he's a Christian Scientist (yes, some people think they are a cult)? How about "interested in weapons" because he works out at a dojo after school? "Unstable self-esteem" sounds to me like as good a definition of being a high school student as any you could come up with.
OK, maybe the perpetrators of recent school violence fit this profile, but someone needs to run anyone using a profiler like this through an elementary course in set theory. Just because a few of the members of the intersection of SMART and DIFFERENT have decided to, um, take matters into their own hands doesn't mean that all, or most or even more than a statistically insignificant few, of the members of that particular intersection are going to do so.
I wonder if anyone has really looked at how likely people who fit this profile are to commit violence. I wouldn't be surprised to see a result similar to one found over a dozen years ago when someone decided to see whether role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons made kids more likely to commit suicide. Not only could they not find one single suicide that was directly attributable to roleplaying, they found that the suicide rate among gamers was actually less than for the control group! Someone should start looking into this. It might turn out after all that being a geek is good for you!
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Not to start a round of the Grandpa Game, but . . .
/. It's like most things in life -- we remember the good old days with nostalgia for the communities and the adventure, but we forget the slow speeds and astronomical phone bills.
My first BBS experiences were with a TRS-80 and a 300 baud acoustic modem (the one you would fit your telephone headset in). Back in those days (1980) you could comfortably fit every known BBS in the world on both sides of an 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper in Courier 12 type. I once dialed into a board in England from Colorado just to prove I could do it (stayed all of about a minute ).
Now of course I can connect to demon.co.uk and not pay any more than I do to pull in
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I have no reason to doubt your source, since he's in the industry, but it's quite a turnaround from not that long ago when a large majority of voice work was handled by about a dozen actors. Paul Frees, Daws Butler, and the lovely and talented June Foray come immediately to mind.
Of course there were fewer cartoons back then...
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Perhaps, although I can think of two reasons why one might want to code a browser in Emacs Lisp:
1. I've corresponded with several people who are, depending on your point of view, either stuck with Emacs as their only environment or use Emacs all the time and hate to leave it. Primarily for the former, a browser you could use without leaving Emacs would make some sense. Especially if there's some sort of graphics capability. Reading User Friendly just sort of loses some of its appeal when you can't see the comics.
2. Because You Can (tm).
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Perhaps because it will be easier to adapt a mobile processor for non-mobile uses than the other way around? Perhaps because mobile processing could involve anything from PDAs to supertankers? Perhaps because "mobile" could mean "moves from instruction set to instruction set" as well as (or instead of) "moves from place to place"?
You gotta hand it to Transmeta. Even when they tell us something they still keep us interested, and therefore hooked.
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Rather than just saying "you can only send 100 e-mails a day," I would set a policy that says, "unless specifically agreed upon by both parties in advance yadda yadda yadda, our e-mail servers will only send one piece of e-mail every five minutes from any given account. This shouldn't inconvenience anyone who is mailing the latest Internet joke to ten of their friends who've already heard it, God bless their pointy little heads. I send very little e-mail that would inconvenience me if it were delayed by a few minutes -- it's not all that important whether Grandma hears about my new truss now or tomorrow morning.
.).It seems to me, though, that implementing a reverse teergrube like this -- especially if it were built into sendmail and similar programs -- would be a piece of cake compared to the ongoing nightmare of dealing with spam.
Of course there would be people who would want to be excepted from this rule. The primary legitimate exception would be for listservs and majordomo-style mailing lists, and there should be few enough of those that the sysadmin could easily monitor them for signs of abuse. There might be some other users who would need to send mail to be received in real-time, like people with e-mail aliases hooked to their pagers so they can jump on a stock opportunity immediately or know when the wife is going into labor. Again, the sysops would know who these people are and be able to monitor them.
Everybody else would have to wait for their mail to be sent (not received -- I can't think of a single reason to slow down incoming e-mail). Anyone who objects would be welcome to have a real-time sending account -- for a deposit of a ridiculously large sum of money, refundable when the account is closed UNLESS the perpetrator is caught sending UCE, in which case the RLSOM is forfeited to pay for the ISP's time and trouble in dealing with the aftermath.
In case you don't know what this could accomplish, spammers depend on being able to send thousands to millions of messages at one time. It's all volumes of scale -- if their response rate is 20 in a million (.002%) they have to send out 50,000 mails on average to get a single response. No one lazy enough to try to make a living through spamming will wait five months for a response to a mailing -- and besides, the complaints will start rolling in long before then.
I suppose there are technical flaws in this idea, chief among which would be that it's still far too easy to relay-rape misconfigured servers in Korea and Russia (not to single those two countries out, of course, but still . .
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Why, this is the third year running I've made their list of the "400 Richest Americans Living In The State Of Washington Whose Slashdot Alias Begins With The Letter 'O'". But do they print that list? No, of course not! This obviously indicates bias on their part, but whether it's against Slashdot posters, moles at Microsoft, people with barely enough cash to buy a Gartner Group report about smoking being bad for you, or just weirdos in general, I'm not sure.
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Maybe the next one of these Loki sets up should be a 72-hour playtest marathon. If they held a Civ:CTP marathon and ESR's government design is really that flawed (which it could be, I haven't looked at anything but what you just posted) it would probably become rapidly apparent toward the 70th hour when the Freedonians got stomped by the Mongols for the umpty-umpth time that day, or maybe when nobody wanted to play any of the other civs.
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I do believe the word Rob used only sounded like "well-researched," but it was difficult for me to tell because he was trying to talk around the tongue he had firmly implanted in his cheek.
These guys are basically writing warm fuzzy pieces saying what they think IS managers want to hear -- namely, that they didn't waste their money going to NT. And let's face it, there is a certain amount of truth to this article, but the devil will tell a thousand truths if it will help him put a lie across.
As I read articles like this I get a mental picture. It's of a CNN interview with a guy in the mountains, Colorado or maybe Switzerland, saying that all the experts have agreed that there is no danger of an avalanche. If all you do is listen to what CNN tells you, you might believe there won't be an avalanche. But if you're doing your own research, thinking for yourself and watching closely, way back in the background behind the talking head, you can see the snow shift, just a little.
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Well, part of the problem is that lojban really doesn't resemble anything so much as an explosion in a type factory. Esperanto and Interlingua at least have the occasional Latin or Greek root that's worked itself into worldwide usage.
I guess the problem is that it's difficult to adapt a computer-friendly language to humans, or a human-friendly language to computers. But like teaching a computer to play chess, that doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.
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Close, but not exactly. About the closest you might get in English would be "the coziness you feel when you're together with family and friends, or at a pub you're quite fond of." And even that isn't quite on the mark.
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to quote George Carlin :)
:)
If I remember my German, you're talking about something like
Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken
where "der" referes to "Hut". That's something that will have to be covered in the rules both for translation into and translation out of German, no matter what language you're using to go into or out of German. Otherwise you end up with the English translation being
My hat, the has three corners
where a proper English translation would of course be
My hat has three corners
Of course this is a very simplified example, but I think you get the idea.
I just think that for the foreseeable future (and, since this is computing, that could be, oh, say, six months) the best computers on the planet are the ones we carry around in our skulls. To me it would make more sense to have a single language that everyone would agree on, but then the problem is to agree on the language. All of the "evolved" languages carry their own cultural baggage, and few people seem to think that a "constructed" language is up to the task, even though certainly Esperanto and possibly Interlingua and a couple of others have proven that hypothesis wrong.
Of course just outside the foreseeable future everybody will be speaking Bocci anyway, so what the heck.
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Forget support for Esperanto -- just use Esperanto as the intermediary language it was designed to be. Somehow I don't think encouraging people to include support for ISO 8859-3 in operating systems, browsers, etc. is going to be any less difficult than making allowances for bi-directional text in any of a number of character sets, to say nothing of language nuances (quick, how would you translate "Gemütlichkeit" into anything but German?). Esperanto is not that hard to learn, even for non-Indo-European-language speakers (there have been, and presumably still are, significant Esperanto movements in Japan and China, for example). The grammar can be grasped in about 30 minutes and you can carry the essential vocabulary around in your wallet.
I know, I know, people are going to come up with reasons not to use Esperanto. But it seems like if a solution that will work exists, why not use it?
(Note: Even though I like and occasionally use Esperanto, I would welcome use of a similar language like Interlingua or Latino sine Flexione that would be equally easy to learn and do the job just as well.)
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Iun vi konfidas, kun ni li alig^as.
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Here's one for someone to submit if they can't think of one themselves, and something even the technologically disadvantaged can relate to:
Mr. Gates, a significant proportion of your workforce worldwide consists of employees contracted out from other organizations. These contractors are by and large dedicated, motivated individuals, committed to helping Microsoft create the best product it can. In light of this, and taking into account the U.S. Government's ruling that in many cases these workers are de jure Microsoft employees, why does Microsoft continue to treat its contract force like second-class citizens by denying them benefits given to full-time employees, excluding them from company functions, making them interview for their own jobs when those jobs are converted to full-time status and the like?
(Note: This is a hot topic among high-tech workers in the Northwest. The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers might be a good place to start researching the subject.)
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Amazingly enough, having Microsoft on your CV counts for extra points with recruiters and potential employers. I know enough ex-MS employees to be able to verify this handily. Personally, I assume it's like being in college for four years. Interviewers like to see a degree on your resume, but it indicates an ability to stick with something for four years more than it does that you might have actually learned something. Same with working for Microsoft, especially if you're a contractor (people around here know what Microsoft thinks of its contractors so you get sympathy points.)
I wouldn't recommend working for them unless your conscience would allow you to do so, of course. (And yes, I sleep quite well at night, but then I'm not working in Windows or marketing. )
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