They never argued that driving at 100 mph was safe or that people could handle it. Just because the design of the road doesn't prohibit it, that doesn't mean it's OK.
Maybe technology will still make driving at 100 MPH safe. If everything on the roads were computer driven with awareness and coordination between them, maybe sports cars could go 100 mph safely. I'm still glad they left a little leeway in the design of the roads, because rebuilding them all to accommodate higher speeds would be such a monumental project that it probably wouldn't happen. If we otherwise had cars that could handle 100 MPH safely, their speed would have been arbitrarily capped by freeway design.
I have a book (but it's in a box in my Mom's attic and I can't remember its name, so I can't link to it or anything) which includes an interview with one of the engineers who designed the interstate highway system. In the 1950's when they were considering it, standard consumer automobiles had routinely gotten faster and more powerful ever since they were invented, and the designers didn't know where that trend would end. There was much discussion about what the ultimate speed of cars would be. In the end, they set standards for curves, banking, etc. based on an assumption of travel at 100 MPH, hoping it wouldn't go significantly over that, and not wanting to have engineered the largest public works project in history only to find out it was significantly deficient twenty years later if they'd designed it for 75 MPH and everyone wanted to go 95.
I remember that interview also had the information that at least back then, they determined the speed limits for entrance and exit ramps not with measurement of the radius of curves, slopes of embankments, and equations, but by driving a mid-level Ford sedan to every single ramp and driving around it in circles over and over, slightly faster each time. On the first pass where the tires slipped, they'd halve the speed they were traveling, round to the nearest 5 MPH and post that as the speed limit.
I wish I had the source to point you all to. I think it was from a collection of some "answer person's" newspaper column from the 70's and 80', but I don't recall.
Exactly. In fact, the summary has the story exactly wrong:
he spent more than $200,000 and emerged victorious
When someone publishes a book with their objective findings on a subject, and their findings run counter to someone else's interests, giving the author an option between paying $200,000 or paying a fine and issuing a retraction means that they've already lost. Which of those two options they choose is much less important than the fact that either option is an intolerable affront to justice, more in line with The Spanish Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials than the relatively high degree of freedom of most modern democracies. Referring to either outcome as a "victory" misses the point that the righteous are put into lose-lose scenarios by British libel law.
The sort of society engendered by allowing the wealthy to cause immense harm to their critics regardless of the merits of their claims is not the kind of society reasonable people want to live in.
If you legalize prostitution, pimping is a moot point. Prostitutes only need pimps because prostitution is illegal. Since prostitution is illegal, prostitutes can not rely on the regular societal means of safety, contract enforcement, and law enforcement that every legal business uses, so they are stuck with some sleazy criminal who will go kneecap deadbeat johns and stop other pimps from muscling in on their girls. In exchange for an absurd share of what would otherwise be sizable profits for the worker. May prostitutes work under fear and intimidation from their pimps.
Do prostitutes in Amsterdam or Vegas have pimps? No. Can the business people who run brothels take all the prostitute's money and abuse them? No, the prostitutes are free to go to work for competitors who will treat them better. Are there crime problems or drug problems disproportionate with other low-end but legal lines of work? Nope. Just legalizing prostitution does a lot to improve the problem of prostitutes being trapped in desperate circumstances.
Android's market share isn't close to #1, it's #4 in the US (unless it's passed Windows Mobile, which should be happening right around now), and that's higher than its worldwide share.
I think you are confusing market share with new phone sales. Market share is how much of the market is using a particular manufacturer's product. New sales is how many new customers in a certain, recent period bought a manufacturer's product. Last quarter, Android rocketed ahead of iOS in new sales, but it still doesn't even have half the market share, in the US or worldwide.
In the US, market share is:
RIM 35%
Apple 28%
Microsoft 15%
Android 13%
And while Apple's percentage of new sales did drop last quarter, they still had worldwide sales growth up 61% for the quarter. Market share percentage fell because Android sales grew by 886% in the quarter. The point that Android sales are doing really well is true, but they're no where near #1 in market share yet.
Have you tried sitting around on the couch browsing the web, watching video, and looking through your pictures on an iPad and on your netbook? Because the iPad is just way better at those things.
I was in the market for a netbook, but I waited until the iPad came out to see what it was. You know what? It's really cool, but it doesn't meet my primary needs as well as a netbook. I often need to do things like commander whatever large monitor is available at someone else's house or workplace, plug it into my netbook, and edit a large spreadsheet. I also do a lot of typing, some with the machine on my lap, and the iPad just gets killed by netbooks. So I went with a Hackintosh Dell Mini 10v. For my needs, it kills the iPad. But I also recognize that my needs aren't everybody's needs, and I've played with the iPad, and for some things, it's a way better experience. Yes, netbooks can do nearly everything iPads do, plus much more, but iPads do certain things better. If those are the only thing you do...
So if you don't "get it," seriously, have you ever tried doing the thing the iPad's good at on an iPad? Because I don't see how you could try it and not enjoy it, it's really smooth. I mean, the iPhoto experience on the iPad just kills my netbook.
The "article" is an absurd troll. The popularity of the iPad is not going to destroy the netbook category. Macs and iPhones are both selling really well too, but no one's complaining that they're about to destroy all other phones or computers. iPads for some, netbooks for others. Get what you want, nothing to see here.
I agree. I had a weird charge show up on my phone bill from Qwest years and years ago. I called customer service to dispute it, and they apologized and said it would go away. Well, next month the exact same charge is on my bill. It's not like they've accidentally added a new monthly charge, it's some charge with a number and time and date, and it's the same charge I didn't pay and contested before that's come back again. So I call again, they apologize, say it'll go away. Next month same thing. I explain to customer service that every %@! month this same charge that they say I don't owe comes back. They say it's "weird" and are very confused on the phone and never solve this, even when I talk to a call center supervisor.
So I google-fu up an email address for the CFO, and just clearly document the whole thing. He has some intern who calls me back that day and checks it all out and says he'll figure out what's going on and find a solution.
He calls me back and tells me that they can't stop it. I mean they can't stop their system from re-generating this bizarre thing on my bill until it's been marked as paid, which is somehow tied to some accounting system that they can't just trick and make it think it's paid. So his resolution - this actually happened - was that Qwest mailed me a company check for the amount in question so I could deposit it and then pay the bill. Also, it was now a known bug for their software developers to get fixed, just not it time to fix my situation.
Anyway, higher ups, if you can just get through to them, will sometimes really research stuff and figure out what's going on and make things right somehow or other. There's no way any customer service rep or their superiors would have EVER taken the shortcut of having Qwest mail me a check to use to pay their own billing mistake, or to get a message through to the developers to fix the bug.
When OCR gets so good that recaptcha becomes pointless, my idea for the next step of harder-for-AI captchas is to stop using line art and start using gradients. That is, currently, they use text, which is line art, and then warp it, chop it up, and run miscellaneous clutter through it. It's getting harder and harder for people to read, and machines are still catching up.
I propose that if you start with a photograph, make a selection that's block text, feather the edges, than shift the colors in the selection (Hue, saturation, inversion, remapping, whatever) that it's going to be easier for humans and harder for computers than some of the stuff we've got now. But generating it can be automated just as easily, I scripted Photoshop to make these in a few minutes.
Sometimes "improved" technical security makes the social aspect worse, too. Systems departments frequently have the incentive to make sure there are no *technical* exploits to the systems, but if total security is decreased by social security being decreased when technical security is increased, that's not their problem when something goes wrong. I can quickly list three examples from a previous employer:
- They decided to "increase security" by forcing people to use stronger passwords and to change their passwords ever month. Admittedly, before this change, many people's passwords were names of people in their family or pets, birthdates, cars they drove, or other low security passwords. Still, actually guessing one wasn't particularly probable. But then they made them include capitals and lower case, letters and numbers, be at least 9 characters, and no dictionary words over 2 letter could be present as any subset. And you had to change it every month, and there was some sort of algorithm to determine if you'd changed it "enough," so you couldn't just increment some number in the password every month. The effect? Everyone's password was suddenly on a post-it note on their monitor, or maybe in their top desk-drawer, or under their telephone.
- They decided to lock down access permissions in the computer, so people could only access the limited subset of systems and data they actually needed for their jobs through their login. Good in theory, but many employees there got pulled into working on all sorts of internal "management consulting" type projects to improve the place, and everyone's ability to access data was extensive and ever-changing. But getting things changed with systems was too much of a headache, and even then people frequently ran up against "absolute" privilege limits, such as that people below a certain level couldn't export data sets. But they needed to frequently. suspect the company policy was that you had to get someone at the appropriate level to run the database query and save the file for you, but it reality, to get access to the right data and the ability to export data, everyone just shared passwords all the time, people would put lists of passwords with appropriate access inside the covers of project folders. Everyone at my level had their boss's password because of the data export privilege. Way to improve security.
- They decided that emailing sensitive data was off limits, because email was insecure. Password protecting files wasn't good enough, and implementing encryption was deemed too complex. So the solution was that when we did things like employee reviews that were "sensitive," they all had to be handled as physical copies. So instead of turning on password protection on a Word document and emailing it to my boss, I'd have to print it - on a shared network printer about 100 feet from my desk, a giant laser printer that constantly spewed dozens of documents a minute all day long. By the time I got from my computer to the printer, several other things had printed, and there was constantly a crowd of people standing around picking through documents and sorting stuff out. The review, or a page of it, was likely to end up in someone else's hands just by accident, but if anyone at the printer saw another employee's review go by, they could easily grab it, and then what? I wouldn't know who to blame, or if it was even just a printer error. Then I get the printed copy and go put it either on top of my boss's inbox, a wire basket hanging on the outside of his desk where things sit horizontally in the aisle, or else set it out on top of his desk. Then he makes comments and comes back and puts it on my desk, I make revisions, and we repeat the process. Which is more likely, that a curious gossip is going to read part of it or grab it or go make a copy on the copier when it's sitting around at the printer or out on someone's desk, or that someone there is going to hack the mail system and break the password on a Word file? Yes, they are correct that both Microsoft Exchange and Word password protection are NOT secure. They're just way more secure than the alternative they made us use.
iPhone has really been successful at attracting just the hobbyist, or the one- or two-person company, or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing.
iPhone has really been successful at attracting developers of all sizes including the hobbyist, or the one- or two-person company, or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing.
Actually, a human adult generally experiences about 10,000 oxidative lesions to their DNA per cell per day* due to free radicals randomly interacting chemically with our DNA . So using the estimate of 50 trillion cells in the human body, with no particular radiation exposure, we're talking about 500 quadrillion "breakdowns" in a typical person's DNA each day.
So eat your anti-oxidants.
*Ames, B. N., Shigenaga, M. K. and Hagen, T. M. (1993) Oxidants, Antioxidants, and the Degenerative Diseases of Aging. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 90, 7915-7922
"then surely since the Government is for the people and doing nothing is against the people, the Government must step in"
I'm not sure that logic is compelling, since when the government steps in, they almost always make things worse.
People often make stupid decisions, but that's not an ironclad argument that freedom should be revoked and tyranny instituted. The people managing the tyranny would also be humans, the same category of people who's decisions I don't always like. Plus in making the decisions for other people, they loose their personal stake in the outcomes of the decisions.
It's always sad to see a once-great company die, but it's especially sad with Palm right now because they came so close to turning things back around at the last minute, which is rarely the case for long-dying companies. The writing had been on the wall for Palm since before the iPhone even came out, and the mere existence of the iPhone looked like the last nail in the coffin for Palm. Then, stunningly, when it seemed like they'd lost their pulse, Palm come out with an entirely new operating system with some really compelling aspects on a brand new competitive hardware platform. If they'd had a little more capital left to keep up a few rounds of hardware and software revisions, maybe they could still make it. Also, the Pre alone might have saved them if they weren't in one of the fastest-evolving, most competitive consumer electronics markets there's ever been, with the iPhone, Android OS, HTC Hero, Motorola Droid, Blackberry Storm2, etc.
I still use a Sony Clie PEG-N710C running PalmOS for word-processing on the go. No current smartphone can compete with its docking and folding Stowaway keyboard, its reflective color TFT screen that I can see in direct sunlight at the park or on the beach, Documents to Go to seamlessly sync any word processing documents back and forth with my computer, and the ability to mount its Memory Stick as an external drive via a USB cable with any computer so I can copy my files to others on the go. Of course, it would get killed by modern devices on nearly any other task, but for ultra-portable word processing, it still kills anything else I've found.
Bridgeport makes beautiful dinosaurs. Nine out of ten knee mills these days are Bridgeport knock-offs/clones, but they're only for tool rooms, maintenance, rework, small job shops - any serious production these days is done on CNC machining centers, and Bridgeport is a tiny bit player in that market.
Cincinnati ruled industrial milling for years, they were THE leader, the go-to company in the entire world from around 1900 well into the 1970's. I run a beautiful dinosaur- a 1970's Cincinnati Milacron 5-axis, 3-spindle gantry milling machine with a 120 foot long bed. In its day it would have people "oohing" and "ahing" more than that Daishin video.
But calling either Bridgeport or Cincinnati a leader today would be grossly wrong - they both dominated their fields in the past, so thoroughly they helped to define them, and their ancient machines are of such high quality they're still running today, but they are now tiny niche players in the industry (Cincinnati having been purchased by MAG), and certainly NOT leading anything.
American machining manufacturers aren't just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Among many, Hurco and Haas have been making similar 5-axis CNC machines with some combination fo B-Axis heads, rotary tables, and trunnion beds similar to the Daishin machine shown. Here's a video of a Hurco CNC making something of similar complexity, and here's a Haas making a turbine in one setup.
The Daishin machine is marginally more impressive. It's also mislabeled in the video as a 5-axis machine, it's clearly got more - the linear Z and Y axes are on the head, the linear X is on the table, there's three. There's a rotary table, that's 4. Then the cutting head does a rotation on an axis on a 45 degree angle to the Z plane, allowing it to come down to cut with the cutter rotation concentric with the X axis. That's 5. And that's not accounting for at least 2 things the table is doing- it seems to also be on a 45 like the head, plus it's tilting on another axis. From the video it's hard to tell exactly, so much stuff is moving around, but it looks like a 7 axis machine. I'm not entirely sure they're doing anything with those 7 axes that couldn't be cut on a trunnion bed/rotary table 5-axis machine. But it sure looks awesome moving around.
The most impressive thing in that video for me was the software integration of all those axes - they had so many strange axes moving around at once to produce those smooth curves. If that's highly automated from their CAD/CAM to produce that sort of program with low programmer time, that's what's really impressive.
Also, I couldn't tell if this is just a show piece/prototype, or if they're actually selling these things now.
Yes, a lot of new laptops have neither a microphone nor line-level audio input jack. Most people will never use it.
One easy solution is just to get a USB line in adapter for around $40, rather than having to keep an entire dinosaur computer around for just one function.
I don't know how well it works, but here's a $10 adapter on Ebay that does video too. There are other similar products around.
Now that this is an "Ask Slashdot," I'm sure someone (who probably helped develop Xenix or something) will give you an exact answer. But in general, "what file system does Xenix use and will it interoperate with Linux/anything modern" is not a difficult sort of question to research, if you're willing to go beyond a Google search. Amazon has plenty of used Xenix books for cheap, and at least the Dallas and Cleveland (and based on that sample, I'm guessing most large city public) libraries have at least a title or two. Even Ebay has a Xenix manual up for sale.They should tell you whatever you need to know about Xenix, and then you can Google about support for it in modern OS's..
In fact, you may even be able to justGoogle it. No need to bother a million Slashdot readers.
Ack! You're right, it was egghead.com, not newegg.com. I had thought that Egghead had turned into Newegg as some sort of revamp, but researching that now, I see that is incorrect. The two have nothing to do with each other, egghead was aquired by Amazon, coincidentally around the time that Newegg showed up. Now I feel bad that I posted that with regard to Newegg, I wish I hadn't, I absolutely did NOT mean to bad-mouth the customer service of a company incorrectly.
But I did and still do have the same girlfriend, and the customer service experience is true. Thanks for correcting me, I really did get confused about the egghead/newegg thing, and need to be more careful in the future before badmouthing a company to make sure I am not in error. Sorry Newegg!
Wired recently had this article on Google's search algorithm, which mentioned how far ahead it was in parsing language for things like bi-grams to figure out what the meaning of the search was by "figuring out" the relationships between related words in a very human-like way. They have also built an impressive synonym system. These technologies, developed for search, strike me as really critical for good translation.
An exerpt from the article:
"People change words in their queries. So someone would say, 'pictures of dogs,' and then they'd say, 'pictures of puppies.' So that told us that maybe 'dogs' and 'puppies' were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it's hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance."
But there were obstacles. Google's synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy.
Do you ever deal with their customer service? My girlfriend bought a new computer from them and they lied about the specs. OK, maybe they "were mistaken." But we had the list of specs - it listed an Nvidia graphics card that wasn't in the case at all, it only had integrated Intel graphics. It didn't even have a card slot for a discreet graphics card. They'd listed the video RAM separately in the specs, with no mention of "shared" memory or anything, but it turned out it only had shared memory, so effectively much less RAM than they'd sold it with. Plus, this was back in 1997, it had a DVD-drive built in, but it could NOT play DVD's. It didn't have any video playback hardware that supported it, and the machine was not fast enough to handle software decoding, so out of the box, any DVD video would be unwatchably choppy, with the sound cutting in and out and only one frame per second or so.
So we called and complained, and they said we could return it, and get our money back... minus a 15% restocking fee. We said no, that they hadn't shipped us what we'd paid for, that we had the specs they'd advertised, still up on the web page, in the confirmation email they'd sent us, on the shipping receipt... they all matched each other and all did not match the computer. We argued till we were blue in the face, asked to talk to a manager, who gave us the same response, called and talked to someone else, same response, and tried emailing them, same response. A friend, who was a computer science major, didn't believe us that Newegg could be that bad, so HE tried calling, and he got the same response. They did NOT attempt to argue that they had shipped us a computer that matched the specs, or that we were somehow mistaken. They just said that, despite their significantly inaccurate description, if we returned it, we had to pay the restocking fee. And we hadn't waited to complain or anything, we were on the phone with them within 24 hours of delivery. This was about an $800 computer, so they wanted us to pay return shipping plus they kept a $120 "restocking" fee.
I encouraged my girlfriend to contest the charge with her credit card company, but she just paid it because she was so sick of the situation and mad about it, she just wanted it to be over.
As far as I'm concerned, Newegg are just a bunch of con-artists.
Best way to stay trouble free on Windows? Don't use IE. Or Outlook. Or IIS.
No no, the "forbidden key" approach is correct, they just haven't gone far enough with it yet. If you just exclude using all the keys, and the mouse, you won't have any trouble with Windows.
Gallileo said "I'm only as good as those shoulders I've stood on before,"
which nearly had me rolling around on the floor laughing.
I think he's trying to reference Newton's statement "If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
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They never argued that driving at 100 mph was safe or that people could handle it. Just because the design of the road doesn't prohibit it, that doesn't mean it's OK.
Maybe technology will still make driving at 100 MPH safe. If everything on the roads were computer driven with awareness and coordination between them, maybe sports cars could go 100 mph safely. I'm still glad they left a little leeway in the design of the roads, because rebuilding them all to accommodate higher speeds would be such a monumental project that it probably wouldn't happen. If we otherwise had cars that could handle 100 MPH safely, their speed would have been arbitrarily capped by freeway design.
I have a book (but it's in a box in my Mom's attic and I can't remember its name, so I can't link to it or anything) which includes an interview with one of the engineers who designed the interstate highway system. In the 1950's when they were considering it, standard consumer automobiles had routinely gotten faster and more powerful ever since they were invented, and the designers didn't know where that trend would end. There was much discussion about what the ultimate speed of cars would be. In the end, they set standards for curves, banking, etc. based on an assumption of travel at 100 MPH, hoping it wouldn't go significantly over that, and not wanting to have engineered the largest public works project in history only to find out it was significantly deficient twenty years later if they'd designed it for 75 MPH and everyone wanted to go 95.
I remember that interview also had the information that at least back then, they determined the speed limits for entrance and exit ramps not with measurement of the radius of curves, slopes of embankments, and equations, but by driving a mid-level Ford sedan to every single ramp and driving around it in circles over and over, slightly faster each time. On the first pass where the tires slipped, they'd halve the speed they were traveling, round to the nearest 5 MPH and post that as the speed limit.
I wish I had the source to point you all to. I think it was from a collection of some "answer person's" newspaper column from the 70's and 80', but I don't recall.
he spent more than $200,000 and emerged victorious
When someone publishes a book with their objective findings on a subject, and their findings run counter to someone else's interests, giving the author an option between paying $200,000 or paying a fine and issuing a retraction means that they've already lost. Which of those two options they choose is much less important than the fact that either option is an intolerable affront to justice, more in line with The Spanish Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials than the relatively high degree of freedom of most modern democracies. Referring to either outcome as a "victory" misses the point that the righteous are put into lose-lose scenarios by British libel law.
The sort of society engendered by allowing the wealthy to cause immense harm to their critics regardless of the merits of their claims is not the kind of society reasonable people want to live in.
If you legalize prostitution, pimping is a moot point. Prostitutes only need pimps because prostitution is illegal. Since prostitution is illegal, prostitutes can not rely on the regular societal means of safety, contract enforcement, and law enforcement that every legal business uses, so they are stuck with some sleazy criminal who will go kneecap deadbeat johns and stop other pimps from muscling in on their girls. In exchange for an absurd share of what would otherwise be sizable profits for the worker. May prostitutes work under fear and intimidation from their pimps.
Do prostitutes in Amsterdam or Vegas have pimps? No. Can the business people who run brothels take all the prostitute's money and abuse them? No, the prostitutes are free to go to work for competitors who will treat them better. Are there crime problems or drug problems disproportionate with other low-end but legal lines of work? Nope. Just legalizing prostitution does a lot to improve the problem of prostitutes being trapped in desperate circumstances.
Actually, I'm curious what kind of price used FUD goes for.
Android's market share isn't close to #1, it's #4 in the US (unless it's passed Windows Mobile, which should be happening right around now), and that's higher than its worldwide share.
I think you are confusing market share with new phone sales. Market share is how much of the market is using a particular manufacturer's product. New sales is how many new customers in a certain, recent period bought a manufacturer's product. Last quarter, Android rocketed ahead of iOS in new sales, but it still doesn't even have half the market share, in the US or worldwide.
In the US, market share is:
RIM 35%
Apple 28%
Microsoft 15%
Android 13%
And while Apple's percentage of new sales did drop last quarter, they still had worldwide sales growth up 61% for the quarter. Market share percentage fell because Android sales grew by 886% in the quarter. The point that Android sales are doing really well is true, but they're no where near #1 in market share yet.
Have you tried sitting around on the couch browsing the web, watching video, and looking through your pictures on an iPad and on your netbook? Because the iPad is just way better at those things.
I was in the market for a netbook, but I waited until the iPad came out to see what it was. You know what? It's really cool, but it doesn't meet my primary needs as well as a netbook. I often need to do things like commander whatever large monitor is available at someone else's house or workplace, plug it into my netbook, and edit a large spreadsheet. I also do a lot of typing, some with the machine on my lap, and the iPad just gets killed by netbooks. So I went with a Hackintosh Dell Mini 10v. For my needs, it kills the iPad. But I also recognize that my needs aren't everybody's needs, and I've played with the iPad, and for some things, it's a way better experience. Yes, netbooks can do nearly everything iPads do, plus much more, but iPads do certain things better. If those are the only thing you do...
So if you don't "get it," seriously, have you ever tried doing the thing the iPad's good at on an iPad? Because I don't see how you could try it and not enjoy it, it's really smooth. I mean, the iPhoto experience on the iPad just kills my netbook.
The "article" is an absurd troll. The popularity of the iPad is not going to destroy the netbook category. Macs and iPhones are both selling really well too, but no one's complaining that they're about to destroy all other phones or computers. iPads for some, netbooks for others. Get what you want, nothing to see here.
I agree. I had a weird charge show up on my phone bill from Qwest years and years ago. I called customer service to dispute it, and they apologized and said it would go away. Well, next month the exact same charge is on my bill. It's not like they've accidentally added a new monthly charge, it's some charge with a number and time and date, and it's the same charge I didn't pay and contested before that's come back again. So I call again, they apologize, say it'll go away. Next month same thing. I explain to customer service that every %@! month this same charge that they say I don't owe comes back. They say it's "weird" and are very confused on the phone and never solve this, even when I talk to a call center supervisor.
So I google-fu up an email address for the CFO, and just clearly document the whole thing. He has some intern who calls me back that day and checks it all out and says he'll figure out what's going on and find a solution.
He calls me back and tells me that they can't stop it. I mean they can't stop their system from re-generating this bizarre thing on my bill until it's been marked as paid, which is somehow tied to some accounting system that they can't just trick and make it think it's paid. So his resolution - this actually happened - was that Qwest mailed me a company check for the amount in question so I could deposit it and then pay the bill. Also, it was now a known bug for their software developers to get fixed, just not it time to fix my situation.
Anyway, higher ups, if you can just get through to them, will sometimes really research stuff and figure out what's going on and make things right somehow or other. There's no way any customer service rep or their superiors would have EVER taken the shortcut of having Qwest mail me a check to use to pay their own billing mistake, or to get a message through to the developers to fix the bug.
When OCR gets so good that recaptcha becomes pointless, my idea for the next step of harder-for-AI captchas is to stop using line art and start using gradients. That is, currently, they use text, which is line art, and then warp it, chop it up, and run miscellaneous clutter through it. It's getting harder and harder for people to read, and machines are still catching up.
I propose that if you start with a photograph, make a selection that's block text, feather the edges, than shift the colors in the selection (Hue, saturation, inversion, remapping, whatever) that it's going to be easier for humans and harder for computers than some of the stuff we've got now. But generating it can be automated just as easily, I scripted Photoshop to make these in a few minutes.
Here's an example
Sometimes "improved" technical security makes the social aspect worse, too. Systems departments frequently have the incentive to make sure there are no *technical* exploits to the systems, but if total security is decreased by social security being decreased when technical security is increased, that's not their problem when something goes wrong. I can quickly list three examples from a previous employer:
- They decided to "increase security" by forcing people to use stronger passwords and to change their passwords ever month. Admittedly, before this change, many people's passwords were names of people in their family or pets, birthdates, cars they drove, or other low security passwords. Still, actually guessing one wasn't particularly probable. But then they made them include capitals and lower case, letters and numbers, be at least 9 characters, and no dictionary words over 2 letter could be present as any subset. And you had to change it every month, and there was some sort of algorithm to determine if you'd changed it "enough," so you couldn't just increment some number in the password every month. The effect? Everyone's password was suddenly on a post-it note on their monitor, or maybe in their top desk-drawer, or under their telephone.
- They decided to lock down access permissions in the computer, so people could only access the limited subset of systems and data they actually needed for their jobs through their login. Good in theory, but many employees there got pulled into working on all sorts of internal "management consulting" type projects to improve the place, and everyone's ability to access data was extensive and ever-changing. But getting things changed with systems was too much of a headache, and even then people frequently ran up against "absolute" privilege limits, such as that people below a certain level couldn't export data sets. But they needed to frequently. suspect the company policy was that you had to get someone at the appropriate level to run the database query and save the file for you, but it reality, to get access to the right data and the ability to export data, everyone just shared passwords all the time, people would put lists of passwords with appropriate access inside the covers of project folders. Everyone at my level had their boss's password because of the data export privilege. Way to improve security.
- They decided that emailing sensitive data was off limits, because email was insecure. Password protecting files wasn't good enough, and implementing encryption was deemed too complex. So the solution was that when we did things like employee reviews that were "sensitive," they all had to be handled as physical copies. So instead of turning on password protection on a Word document and emailing it to my boss, I'd have to print it - on a shared network printer about 100 feet from my desk, a giant laser printer that constantly spewed dozens of documents a minute all day long. By the time I got from my computer to the printer, several other things had printed, and there was constantly a crowd of people standing around picking through documents and sorting stuff out. The review, or a page of it, was likely to end up in someone else's hands just by accident, but if anyone at the printer saw another employee's review go by, they could easily grab it, and then what? I wouldn't know who to blame, or if it was even just a printer error. Then I get the printed copy and go put it either on top of my boss's inbox, a wire basket hanging on the outside of his desk where things sit horizontally in the aisle, or else set it out on top of his desk. Then he makes comments and comes back and puts it on my desk, I make revisions, and we repeat the process. Which is more likely, that a curious gossip is going to read part of it or grab it or go make a copy on the copier when it's sitting around at the printer or out on someone's desk, or that someone there is going to hack the mail system and break the password on a Word file? Yes, they are correct that both Microsoft Exchange and Word password protection are NOT secure. They're just way more secure than the alternative they made us use.
iPhone has really been successful at attracting just the hobbyist, or the one- or two-person company, or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing.
Right, hobbyists like Microsoft, IBM, Accenture, Oracle, Computer Sciences Corporation, SAP, Yahoo!, Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, Take-Two...
iPhone has really been successful at attracting developers of all sizes including the hobbyist, or the one- or two-person company, or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing.
There, I fixed that for you.
How much water does it use, and also, if it were rolled out city-wide, how much would it increase local humidity on those hot, still days?
Actually, a human adult generally experiences about 10,000 oxidative lesions to their DNA per cell per day* due to free radicals randomly interacting chemically with our DNA . So using the estimate of 50 trillion cells in the human body, with no particular radiation exposure, we're talking about 500 quadrillion "breakdowns" in a typical person's DNA each day.
So eat your anti-oxidants.
*Ames, B. N., Shigenaga, M. K. and Hagen, T. M. (1993) Oxidants, Antioxidants, and the Degenerative Diseases of Aging. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 90, 7915-7922
"then surely since the Government is for the people and doing nothing is against the people, the Government must step in"
I'm not sure that logic is compelling, since when the government steps in, they almost always make things worse.
People often make stupid decisions, but that's not an ironclad argument that freedom should be revoked and tyranny instituted. The people managing the tyranny would also be humans, the same category of people who's decisions I don't always like. Plus in making the decisions for other people, they loose their personal stake in the outcomes of the decisions.
It's always sad to see a once-great company die, but it's especially sad with Palm right now because they came so close to turning things back around at the last minute, which is rarely the case for long-dying companies. The writing had been on the wall for Palm since before the iPhone even came out, and the mere existence of the iPhone looked like the last nail in the coffin for Palm. Then, stunningly, when it seemed like they'd lost their pulse, Palm come out with an entirely new operating system with some really compelling aspects on a brand new competitive hardware platform. If they'd had a little more capital left to keep up a few rounds of hardware and software revisions, maybe they could still make it. Also, the Pre alone might have saved them if they weren't in one of the fastest-evolving, most competitive consumer electronics markets there's ever been, with the iPhone, Android OS, HTC Hero, Motorola Droid, Blackberry Storm2, etc.
I still use a Sony Clie PEG-N710C running PalmOS for word-processing on the go. No current smartphone can compete with its docking and folding Stowaway keyboard, its reflective color TFT screen that I can see in direct sunlight at the park or on the beach, Documents to Go to seamlessly sync any word processing documents back and forth with my computer, and the ability to mount its Memory Stick as an external drive via a USB cable with any computer so I can copy my files to others on the go. Of course, it would get killed by modern devices on nearly any other task, but for ultra-portable word processing, it still kills anything else I've found.
Bridgeport makes beautiful dinosaurs. Nine out of ten knee mills these days are Bridgeport knock-offs/clones, but they're only for tool rooms, maintenance, rework, small job shops - any serious production these days is done on CNC machining centers, and Bridgeport is a tiny bit player in that market.
Cincinnati ruled industrial milling for years, they were THE leader, the go-to company in the entire world from around 1900 well into the 1970's. I run a beautiful dinosaur- a 1970's Cincinnati Milacron 5-axis, 3-spindle gantry milling machine with a 120 foot long bed. In its day it would have people "oohing" and "ahing" more than that Daishin video.
But calling either Bridgeport or Cincinnati a leader today would be grossly wrong - they both dominated their fields in the past, so thoroughly they helped to define them, and their ancient machines are of such high quality they're still running today, but they are now tiny niche players in the industry (Cincinnati having been purchased by MAG), and certainly NOT leading anything.
American machining manufacturers aren't just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Among many, Hurco and Haas have been making similar 5-axis CNC machines with some combination fo B-Axis heads, rotary tables, and trunnion beds similar to the Daishin machine shown. Here's a video of a Hurco CNC making something of similar complexity, and here's a Haas making a turbine in one setup.
The Daishin machine is marginally more impressive. It's also mislabeled in the video as a 5-axis machine, it's clearly got more - the linear Z and Y axes are on the head, the linear X is on the table, there's three. There's a rotary table, that's 4. Then the cutting head does a rotation on an axis on a 45 degree angle to the Z plane, allowing it to come down to cut with the cutter rotation concentric with the X axis. That's 5. And that's not accounting for at least 2 things the table is doing- it seems to also be on a 45 like the head, plus it's tilting on another axis. From the video it's hard to tell exactly, so much stuff is moving around, but it looks like a 7 axis machine. I'm not entirely sure they're doing anything with those 7 axes that couldn't be cut on a trunnion bed/rotary table 5-axis machine. But it sure looks awesome moving around.
The most impressive thing in that video for me was the software integration of all those axes - they had so many strange axes moving around at once to produce those smooth curves. If that's highly automated from their CAD/CAM to produce that sort of program with low programmer time, that's what's really impressive. Also, I couldn't tell if this is just a show piece/prototype, or if they're actually selling these things now.
Yes, a lot of new laptops have neither a microphone nor line-level audio input jack. Most people will never use it.
One easy solution is just to get a USB line in adapter for around $40, rather than having to keep an entire dinosaur computer around for just one function.
I don't know how well it works, but here's a $10 adapter on Ebay that does video too. There are other similar products around.
Now that this is an "Ask Slashdot," I'm sure someone (who probably helped develop Xenix or something) will give you an exact answer. But in general, "what file system does Xenix use and will it interoperate with Linux/anything modern" is not a difficult sort of question to research, if you're willing to go beyond a Google search. Amazon has plenty of used Xenix books for cheap, and at least the Dallas and Cleveland (and based on that sample, I'm guessing most large city public) libraries have at least a title or two. Even Ebay has a Xenix manual up for sale.They should tell you whatever you need to know about Xenix, and then you can Google about support for it in modern OS's. .
In fact, you may even be able to just Google it. No need to bother a million Slashdot readers.
Ack! You're right, it was egghead.com, not newegg.com. I had thought that Egghead had turned into Newegg as some sort of revamp, but researching that now, I see that is incorrect. The two have nothing to do with each other, egghead was aquired by Amazon, coincidentally around the time that Newegg showed up. Now I feel bad that I posted that with regard to Newegg, I wish I hadn't, I absolutely did NOT mean to bad-mouth the customer service of a company incorrectly.
But I did and still do have the same girlfriend, and the customer service experience is true. Thanks for correcting me, I really did get confused about the egghead/newegg thing, and need to be more careful in the future before badmouthing a company to make sure I am not in error. Sorry Newegg!
An exerpt from the article:
"People change words in their queries. So someone would say, 'pictures of dogs,' and then they'd say, 'pictures of puppies.' So that told us that maybe 'dogs' and 'puppies' were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it's hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance." But there were obstacles. Google's synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy.
they have a great reputation
Do you ever deal with their customer service? My girlfriend bought a new computer from them and they lied about the specs. OK, maybe they "were mistaken." But we had the list of specs - it listed an Nvidia graphics card that wasn't in the case at all, it only had integrated Intel graphics. It didn't even have a card slot for a discreet graphics card. They'd listed the video RAM separately in the specs, with no mention of "shared" memory or anything, but it turned out it only had shared memory, so effectively much less RAM than they'd sold it with. Plus, this was back in 1997, it had a DVD-drive built in, but it could NOT play DVD's. It didn't have any video playback hardware that supported it, and the machine was not fast enough to handle software decoding, so out of the box, any DVD video would be unwatchably choppy, with the sound cutting in and out and only one frame per second or so.
So we called and complained, and they said we could return it, and get our money back... minus a 15% restocking fee. We said no, that they hadn't shipped us what we'd paid for, that we had the specs they'd advertised, still up on the web page, in the confirmation email they'd sent us, on the shipping receipt... they all matched each other and all did not match the computer. We argued till we were blue in the face, asked to talk to a manager, who gave us the same response, called and talked to someone else, same response, and tried emailing them, same response. A friend, who was a computer science major, didn't believe us that Newegg could be that bad, so HE tried calling, and he got the same response. They did NOT attempt to argue that they had shipped us a computer that matched the specs, or that we were somehow mistaken. They just said that, despite their significantly inaccurate description, if we returned it, we had to pay the restocking fee. And we hadn't waited to complain or anything, we were on the phone with them within 24 hours of delivery. This was about an $800 computer, so they wanted us to pay return shipping plus they kept a $120 "restocking" fee.
I encouraged my girlfriend to contest the charge with her credit card company, but she just paid it because she was so sick of the situation and mad about it, she just wanted it to be over.
As far as I'm concerned, Newegg are just a bunch of con-artists.
Best way to stay trouble free on Windows? Don't use IE. Or Outlook. Or IIS.
No no, the "forbidden key" approach is correct, they just haven't gone far enough with it yet. If you just exclude using all the keys, and the mouse, you won't have any trouble with Windows.
Two Books by Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley:
Snowflakes in Photographs
Snow Crystals
Three books about Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley:
The Snowflake Man: A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley
My Brother Loved Snowflakes: The Story of Wilson A. Bentley, the Snowflake Man
Snowflake Bentley
Gallileo said "I'm only as good as those shoulders I've stood on before,"
which nearly had me rolling around on the floor laughing.
I think he's trying to reference Newton's statement "If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."