I work for a hosting enabler company providing services for entities ranging from individuals to organisations to companies to Telcos. Part of that entails generating e-mails to account holders for Welcome Letters, Job Responses and for various hosting/accounting events.
Up until recently everyone has been happy to use text-only e-mails and they have been simple to generate. With all of the phishing e-mail getting around, though, at the Telcos requests we have had to implement HTML-mail so that "branding" can be applied to e-mail to help alleviate concerns from the end-users. That has been a complete pain-in-the-ass for the guys who've had to implement it: following the "standards" for multi-part HTML messages yields different results in mail agents (like Eudora, Outlook Express, Outlook and Thunderbird) than it does it web-mail UI's (like Yahoo and G-Mail). Heck, even Outlook Express and Outlook render differently even though they're both supposed to be using MS-IE for the job.
Bottom line: HTML mail is fragile enough already. If Outlook 2007 wants to use Word to do its HTML rendering I'm all for it - it will help to drive users away from MS!
There's an active user base. The University of Florida went iPhone.
Sorry, not buying this one: the linked Quick Reference Guides for the phones all use "Cisco IP Phone" when describing their products. Not that UoF is an authoritive source but they also use "IPhone" instead of "iPhone" when describing them, with one other reference to "I-Phone".
The Eugenics Wars predate Academy by about 200 years - they were supposed to have occured in the 1990's as I recall. They were touched-on again during a few episodes of Enterprise when Brent Spiner reprised his role as a Soong (Arik, presumably the father/grandfather of Noonien), but finished-up with him deciding to drop genetics in favour of robotics and androids.
I think one story we're likely to be (depressingly) greeted with is of how Kirk defeated the Kobayashi Maru simulation as was introduced in the Wrath of Kahn.
The Tech might be your idea of the Spirit of Trek but I doubt everyone would share that version. I certainly don't.
Although set in the future, for me Trek stories aren't supposed to be about the Tech. They're supposed to be about people, how they deal with each other, and how they deal with new types of situations presented to them when meeting other races our there in the galaxy(ies). And to provide some hope for us that we'll survive as a species and get out into space instead of blowing ourselves to Kingdom-come with nuclear weapons, bio-weapons or Grey Goo.
The Tech provides tools so that the writers can concentrate on the stories and the characters. Tech like the transporter was introduced to help accelerate story lines: it would get pretty boring if in every episode you had to spend five minutes in the shuttle getting from the ship to a planet and back again. Shields were introduced to give the crew some modicum of protection - otherwise in a "reality-based" show the hull would getting punctured by meteorites all the time. FTL travel (warp engines) was introduced so that the ship could get from A to B fairly quickly, otherwise it would be Planet Trek and we'd be limited to stories within our own solar system.
Wesley episodes always bugged me: Let's have Wesley save the ship again with some new-fangled technology he comes-up with on the spot but never run with it and actually deploy it across the Federation.
I preferred episodes like Shuttlepod One (which was admittedly a bit rough) that concetrated on two or three characters in adverse situations, where the characters were allowed to introduce some of their histories and flesh themselves out as people instead of something on a flat screen.
Tech-wise, I think Enterprise has had a very tough time as a series. It's set before TOS but couldn't really be made to have an appearance predating that of TOS. In many ways the technology of today has surpassed that which was available for TOS. Flat-panel displays have been common for years now, as have touch screens (heck they're installed as Information Booths in shopping centres), mobile phones and hand-held computers. In TOS a lot of the displays were Gels and backlit panels, with any needed animations put in during post production. Communicators were lumps of painted plastic (nowadays the communicators and phasers are still non-functional props but at least can be self-illuminated and have blinkin lights). It would have been unreasonable to have anything much less devolved than TOS in-use for this series, it would have killed believability. But avid Trek fans will have seen all the other series and not be so impressed by the lack of high-tech weaponry and super-fast ships. A tough balancing act, but I think the producers did OK.
I reckon he'll cameo as the aging groundskeeper at the academy, Boothby. Everyone knows Boothby's been there for centuries, and he'll probably catch the younger Kirk trying to carve his initials into his prized Elm tree.
"Don't go see it, Peter Jackson didn't direct it." would be a common phrase if New Line did it. At least that's what I'd tell everyone that would listen.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Rings Geeks like us might hold that viewpoint, but the Average Joe who just goes to the movies to be entertained won't know or care who directs the movie (or movies, since it sounds like New Line has another movie planned to slot in between The Hobbit and LOTR).
Making gross (and I mean horrible) estimates, Rings Geeks might account for 10% of the movie-going audience. Even if every single one of them boycotts a non-PJ-made Hobbit, New Line would still do exceedingly well out of it.
Personally, I hope that everyone New Line approaches to direct The Hobbit tells them where to stick it, that the rights will revert to Tolkien Enterprises and MGM so that they get PJ to make it for them. Take that, New Line!:)
For anyone who's forgotten, it's not just Peter Jackson who questioned New Line's creative accounting over the Rings movies - In 2004 (I think) Tolkien Enterprises also sued New Line for over $20 million in unpaid royalties for Fellowship of The Ring.
I think it's really funny coming from the company that schmoozed its way into Stanford to rip-off the multiprotocol router code that Bill Yeager had been developing.
Job's stance make sense to me, but not for the reasons he's being quoted on. Here's how I see it:
Cingular is going to want exclusivity on the US iPhone market for a good period, at least six to twelve months. From Cingular's point of view, allowing people to add their own extensions and applications is going to compromise their lock-in security. They don't want people to be able to "unlock" their phone and jump ship to other networks (two year contract be damned!).
Apple is going to have to tread carefully with the Cicso trademark dispute. The only way Apple can guarantee a win in the case is if their iPhone doesn't support VoIP: this is the only thing the Cisco (Linksys) iPhone is good for. If people are allowed to install their own apps and extensions on the iPhone the possibility of someone installing VoIP software exists - compromising Apple's position as a result (even if it is third-party).
Cisco's going to have an uphill battle winning this one in court: trademarks only need to be unique within their own market segments, as has been hashed-out in much case history. Apple (Records) vs. Apple (Computer), for example. Cisco won't have a case for as long as Apple doesn't (officially) support a VoIP solution on their iPhone.
I think this was a great technical achievement, but was ruined for me by the incompetance of the article. TFA kinda lost me with the opening paragraph:
A University of B.C. astronomer has discovered the farthest cluster of stars ever seen by a human eye -- a find he hopes will reveal secrets about the formation of the universe.
WTF? He used the Hubble! Did he grab a shuttle up to the Hubble, rip the sesnor pallet out and stick his head down the end of the OTA?
Also, the whole harping on about the light being a billion years old is kinda redudant. "one billion light-years." Think about it, there's a time component there.
You can't infer any correlation between CO2 and temperature with the limited dataset provided above. From general knowledge we know that electromagnetic (and thermal) fields fall off with an inverse-square of distance, so we can assume that Mars would be receiving less heat input from the sun than Earth, and Venus more.
My point is that there are more factors affecting temperature than the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
There might well be factors other than CO2 affecting the temperatures here on Earth, such as: a possible shift in our orbit around the sun; a possible weakening of the Van Allen Radiation Belts (allowing more radiation input); deforestation (trees help to cool things as well as absorb CO2 and product O2); Urban Heat Islands (ok, I don't buy this one myself since satellite measurements do actually show increases in some places away from urbanized areas and cooling over some others); and probably a whole bunch we haven't identified yet.
All we know for certain is that the global average temperature is increasing, but we don't actually know for 100% certain what's causing it. CO2 is just the most-likely suspect at the moment.
weather not seen on the planet since before the Ice Age began, 118,000 years ago.
Indeed. Southern hemisphere here and this is the first summer I *haven't* had to turn on the chiller on my aquariums to stop my fish from dying - it's been nowhere near as hot as it normally is.
Three reasons I see regularly that cause development not to be delivered "on time" and "on budget":
Specification - specifications given to developers are always incomplete. Something always gets left out, from subtle behaviours to business logic for whole subsystems.
Scheduling - although we're working on changing this, other people who have no hands-on development experience set the schedules. They either use some metric about lines-of-code-per-person-per-day that has no relevance in the real world, use a dart board, or just pull the figures out of their proverbial. (I'm thinking the last.)
Integration - Green Fields development is always easier. Extending old systems is always a pain in the proverbial due to the lack of accurate documentation. Even the perfect documentation becomes imperfect if it isn't kept up to date (or nobody knows where it is).
Overcomplex. Banks are issuing random number keyfobs to customers now so as to provide two-factor authentication on their Internet Banking web sites. Why not EFTPOS terminals using the same system?
Captured card number, PIN and seed values would be useless one minute later, minimizing (not eliminating) customer exposure.
Concept car this, concept car that, get back to us when it's about to roll off the production floor in maybe 2010 or 2012. The article also has this to say:
But the Volt is limited by battery technology and GM has no date for it to be available to the public. ...
GM officials stressed that development of the battery pack is critical to the concept vehicle reaching showrooms, and the technology likely won't be available until 2010 or 2012.
She should have passed on doing the interview if she didn't want it made public.
I don't think flying pensises would have been listed on the interview agenda. Even so, I think she's way out of line using DMCA to force take downs:
There's no way a DMCA take-down notice could work on published video of a public gathering in real life - why should work for Second Life?
She's the content owner of neither the video itself, nor the avatar and artwork, which were rendered using Second Life's proprietary engine and artwork.
She might have a chance at a general take-down notice for offensive content, but what's "offensive" to one person is hilarious to the rest of us.
It helps illustrate how untrustworthy proprietary software is by default and why you should not promote or run proprietary software. How many other things are proprietors leaving out of their changelogs (assuming they publish them at all)? With free software you don't have to guess because you're given the freedoms you need to do the work yourself or get someone else to help you.
Yes, absolutely, people deserve to have control of their own computer. But you're confusing "free" software (which can still be proprietary) with "open source" software!
Don't try to kid yourself or anyone else here that the majority of people using FOSS have the gnouse to grok the source code that makes it up. By far the majority of FOSS users are non-technical people looking for a cheap solution and never even glance at the source - they trust other people to check it over and (be *honest enough*) to report and/or fix the problems. People going over the source is usually limited to the core development team and a few people actually considering contributing features or fixes.
Server farms should locate next to large bodies of water to do this to save money and energy.
Sounds like a great idea, but good luck getting the environmentalists onboard with it.
Also, trying to balance the flows to hundreds (if not thousands) of servers would be a pain in the butt - ask the average aqaurium store owner how much fun they have balancing the flows from their shop-wide filtration systems to about 30-40 tanks.
I just mentioned that the 137GB patch exists the other day and got modded a Troll - this guy tells a blatant falsehood and gets Informative? What's with the Mods around here?
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a hosting enabler company providing services for entities ranging from individuals to organisations to companies to Telcos. Part of that entails generating e-mails to account holders for Welcome Letters, Job Responses and for various hosting/accounting events.
Up until recently everyone has been happy to use text-only e-mails and they have been simple to generate. With all of the phishing e-mail getting around, though, at the Telcos requests we have had to implement HTML-mail so that "branding" can be applied to e-mail to help alleviate concerns from the end-users. That has been a complete pain-in-the-ass for the guys who've had to implement it: following the "standards" for multi-part HTML messages yields different results in mail agents (like Eudora, Outlook Express, Outlook and Thunderbird) than it does it web-mail UI's (like Yahoo and G-Mail). Heck, even Outlook Express and Outlook render differently even though they're both supposed to be using MS-IE for the job.
Bottom line: HTML mail is fragile enough already. If Outlook 2007 wants to use Word to do its HTML rendering I'm all for it - it will help to drive users away from MS!
Sorry, not buying this one: the linked Quick Reference Guides for the phones all use "Cisco IP Phone" when describing their products. Not that UoF is an authoritive source but they also use "IPhone" instead of "iPhone" when describing them, with one other reference to "I-Phone".
Unfortunately, the image right beside it (a view of the phone from directly in front) does actually have the iPhone moniker above the keypad.
Interestingly, if you HEAD that image it was last modified on 19-Dec-2006:
Heh, yes it was a poor example (and I said that). I think one of my favourite TNG lines was Beverley with "right, out with it Jean-Luc." :)
The Eugenics Wars predate Academy by about 200 years - they were supposed to have occured in the 1990's as I recall. They were touched-on again during a few episodes of Enterprise when Brent Spiner reprised his role as a Soong (Arik, presumably the father/grandfather of Noonien), but finished-up with him deciding to drop genetics in favour of robotics and androids.
I think one story we're likely to be (depressingly) greeted with is of how Kirk defeated the Kobayashi Maru simulation as was introduced in the Wrath of Kahn.
The Tech might be your idea of the Spirit of Trek but I doubt everyone would share that version. I certainly don't.
Although set in the future, for me Trek stories aren't supposed to be about the Tech. They're supposed to be about people, how they deal with each other, and how they deal with new types of situations presented to them when meeting other races our there in the galaxy(ies). And to provide some hope for us that we'll survive as a species and get out into space instead of blowing ourselves to Kingdom-come with nuclear weapons, bio-weapons or Grey Goo.
The Tech provides tools so that the writers can concentrate on the stories and the characters. Tech like the transporter was introduced to help accelerate story lines: it would get pretty boring if in every episode you had to spend five minutes in the shuttle getting from the ship to a planet and back again. Shields were introduced to give the crew some modicum of protection - otherwise in a "reality-based" show the hull would getting punctured by meteorites all the time. FTL travel (warp engines) was introduced so that the ship could get from A to B fairly quickly, otherwise it would be Planet Trek and we'd be limited to stories within our own solar system.
Wesley episodes always bugged me: Let's have Wesley save the ship again with some new-fangled technology he comes-up with on the spot but never run with it and actually deploy it across the Federation.
I preferred episodes like Shuttlepod One (which was admittedly a bit rough) that concetrated on two or three characters in adverse situations, where the characters were allowed to introduce some of their histories and flesh themselves out as people instead of something on a flat screen.
Tech-wise, I think Enterprise has had a very tough time as a series. It's set before TOS but couldn't really be made to have an appearance predating that of TOS. In many ways the technology of today has surpassed that which was available for TOS. Flat-panel displays have been common for years now, as have touch screens (heck they're installed as Information Booths in shopping centres), mobile phones and hand-held computers. In TOS a lot of the displays were Gels and backlit panels, with any needed animations put in during post production. Communicators were lumps of painted plastic (nowadays the communicators and phasers are still non-functional props but at least can be self-illuminated and have blinkin lights). It would have been unreasonable to have anything much less devolved than TOS in-use for this series, it would have killed believability. But avid Trek fans will have seen all the other series and not be so impressed by the lack of high-tech weaponry and super-fast ships. A tough balancing act, but I think the producers did OK.
Dude, you made coffee come out my nose!
Thank you for posting such a funny link.
I reckon he'll cameo as the aging groundskeeper at the academy, Boothby. Everyone knows Boothby's been there for centuries, and he'll probably catch the younger Kirk trying to carve his initials into his prized Elm tree.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Rings Geeks like us might hold that viewpoint, but the Average Joe who just goes to the movies to be entertained won't know or care who directs the movie (or movies, since it sounds like New Line has another movie planned to slot in between The Hobbit and LOTR).
Making gross (and I mean horrible) estimates, Rings Geeks might account for 10% of the movie-going audience. Even if every single one of them boycotts a non-PJ-made Hobbit, New Line would still do exceedingly well out of it.
Personally, I hope that everyone New Line approaches to direct The Hobbit tells them where to stick it, that the rights will revert to Tolkien Enterprises and MGM so that they get PJ to make it for them. Take that, New Line! :)
For anyone who's forgotten, it's not just Peter Jackson who questioned New Line's creative accounting over the Rings movies - In 2004 (I think) Tolkien Enterprises also sued New Line for over $20 million in unpaid royalties for Fellowship of The Ring.
I think it's really funny coming from the company that schmoozed its way into Stanford to rip-off the multiprotocol router code that Bill Yeager had been developing.
I don't see the problem.
Cisco's going to have an uphill battle winning this one in court: trademarks only need to be unique within their own market segments, as has been hashed-out in much case history. Apple (Records) vs. Apple (Computer), for example. Cisco won't have a case for as long as Apple doesn't (officially) support a VoIP solution on their iPhone.
I think this was a great technical achievement, but was ruined for me by the incompetance of the article. TFA kinda lost me with the opening paragraph:
WTF? He used the Hubble! Did he grab a shuttle up to the Hubble, rip the sesnor pallet out and stick his head down the end of the OTA?
Also, the whole harping on about the light being a billion years old is kinda redudant. "one billion light-years." Think about it, there's a time component there.
Venus' atmosphere:
Earth's atmosphere:
Mars' atmosphere:
You can't infer any correlation between CO2 and temperature with the limited dataset provided above. From general knowledge we know that electromagnetic (and thermal) fields fall off with an inverse-square of distance, so we can assume that Mars would be receiving less heat input from the sun than Earth, and Venus more.
My point is that there are more factors affecting temperature than the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
There might well be factors other than CO2 affecting the temperatures here on Earth, such as: a possible shift in our orbit around the sun; a possible weakening of the Van Allen Radiation Belts (allowing more radiation input); deforestation (trees help to cool things as well as absorb CO2 and product O2); Urban Heat Islands (ok, I don't buy this one myself since satellite measurements do actually show increases in some places away from urbanized areas and cooling over some others); and probably a whole bunch we haven't identified yet.
All we know for certain is that the global average temperature is increasing, but we don't actually know for 100% certain what's causing it. CO2 is just the most-likely suspect at the moment.
Would certainly be a lot more compact than 550-watt's worth of solar panels - and wouldn't be affected by cloudy weather.
Mod parent up! Yes!
Three reasons I see regularly that cause development not to be delivered "on time" and "on budget":
- Specification - specifications given to developers are always incomplete. Something always gets left out, from subtle behaviours to business logic for whole subsystems.
- Scheduling - although we're working on changing this, other people who have no hands-on development experience set the schedules. They either use some metric about lines-of-code-per-person-per-day that has no relevance in the real world, use a dart board, or just pull the figures out of their proverbial. (I'm thinking the last.)
- Integration - Green Fields development is always easier. Extending old systems is always a pain in the proverbial due to the lack of accurate documentation. Even the perfect documentation becomes imperfect if it isn't kept up to date (or nobody knows where it is).
There's heaps more, but this is my top three.Overcomplex. Banks are issuing random number keyfobs to customers now so as to provide two-factor authentication on their Internet Banking web sites. Why not EFTPOS terminals using the same system?
Captured card number, PIN and seed values would be useless one minute later, minimizing (not eliminating) customer exposure.
Concept car this, concept car that, get back to us when it's about to roll off the production floor in maybe 2010 or 2012. The article also has this to say:
Guys, I hear Sony make hi-tech batteries. Smokin!
I don't think flying pensises would have been listed on the interview agenda. Even so, I think she's way out of line using DMCA to force take downs:
- There's no way a DMCA take-down notice could work on published video of a public gathering in real life - why should work for Second Life?
- She's the content owner of neither the video itself, nor the avatar and artwork, which were rendered using Second Life's proprietary engine and artwork.
She might have a chance at a general take-down notice for offensive content, but what's "offensive" to one person is hilarious to the rest of us.Yes, absolutely, people deserve to have control of their own computer. But you're confusing "free" software (which can still be proprietary) with "open source" software!
Don't try to kid yourself or anyone else here that the majority of people using FOSS have the gnouse to grok the source code that makes it up. By far the majority of FOSS users are non-technical people looking for a cheap solution and never even glance at the source - they trust other people to check it over and (be *honest enough*) to report and/or fix the problems. People going over the source is usually limited to the core development team and a few people actually considering contributing features or fixes.
The following article has a little more info than the original (and a dodgy artist's impression of a stellar-mass black hole):
Black hole boldly goes where no black hole has gone before
Sounds like a great idea, but good luck getting the environmentalists onboard with it.
Also, trying to balance the flows to hundreds (if not thousands) of servers would be a pain in the butt - ask the average aqaurium store owner how much fun they have balancing the flows from their shop-wide filtration systems to about 30-40 tanks.
WTF? Windows 2k SP3 and later *does* support drives bigger than 137GB. If you're not installing from an SP4 CD, make one with slipstreaming.
I just mentioned that the 137GB patch exists the other day and got modded a Troll - this guy tells a blatant falsehood and gets Informative? What's with the Mods around here?