That's the weird thing about the place. It's considered basically uninhabitable by humans. Yet nature as a whole seems entirely unfazed by the radition and is thriving in the absence of humans.
Yeah, but nature doesn't get all sentimental or up-in-arms if critters are born with birth defects or die early from cancer. As long as the critters live long enough to reproduce at a growing rate, then that's all that's needed.
Humans are a bit pickier about that pesky "quality of life" issue.
The differences between TMI and Chernobyl are essentially those of design and the ways in which they affected the disaster.
Unlike TMI, Chernobyl almost seemed to be "how dumb can we be and get away with it". (See the quote: "like airplane pilots experimenting with the engines in flight".)
Would't it be much simpler if companies just dissallowed their employees to install applications on their machines?
Allowing users to download & install 'anything' poses problems way beyond spyware.
Would love to... except that when Microsoft designed (yeah, right) Windows, security took a back seat to backwards compatibility and ease-of-use. End result is a system that is devilishly difficult to secure and 90% of the time requires that the user have administrative access in order to get any work done.
And because it's so difficult to lock-down without breaking all of your applications, only companies who roll out 100+ desktops at a time have the resources to even attempt the task. (Those of us supporting less then 100 desktops, where only 3 or 4 might have been bought at the same time, with a mix of O/S versions, really don't have the dozens or hundreds of hours to invest.)
USENET actually isn't that bad currently, most of the groups I follow only see 1-2 spam messages per day. I do have a rule that kills off anything cross-posted to more then 5 groups though. Of course, now that I've said something we all know how that's going to turn out!
So either the stuff is getting cancelled or the spammers have moved on to richer pastures. Not too many people use USENET anymore (percentage-wise), web-based forums like phpBB and SlashDot have a bigger draw then an old crufty text-based forum.
As an employee at Microsoft I had TWO of the top of the line PocketPCs : I played quake on them, wrote some C programs, and put them away as toys. I need to do WORK, as a technical person, not a salesman. All I need is digital paper.
That's because the PocketPC is a game, or at least all flash and no substance. The PocketPC is not a PDA, it's an attempt at fitting a laptop's functionality into the size of a handheld - or maybe an attempt to become the next GameBoy.
Try a real PDA like ones based on the PalmOS, you know, the PDA that is designed to do PDA well at the expense of having every bell-n-whistle known to man?
Get a used Palm III, runs for 1-4 weeks on a single set of batteries.
I'm pretty pissed off, I now have to figure out how the hell I can prevent this happening in the future on their computer.
Gee, ever hear of backups?
External USB drives are pretty cheap and so is a good sync program like Second Copy 2000. If your data isn't important enough to be bothered to do backups, then it's not important enough to get pissed when you lose said data.
I really wish I knew what causes the screen problems with the Vaios, because they're awesome machines otherwise.
Suffering from the "flimsy-factor"? IIRC, VAIOs claim-to-fame is that they're super-thin unlike the IBM ThinkPads and the Toshiba Tecras which are more brick-like.
We have quite a few Toshiba Satellite/Tecras and they seem to hold up well. I also fondly remember some Compaq 486 laptops from a few years ago as being pretty darn sturdy.
Either way you know it's bad news when the manufacturers claimed battery life is only "up to 1.0 hour life depending on configuration and usage"!
That's no battery, that's a built-in UPS!
The old luggables were interesting. I remember a Compaq that used an 84-key keyboard, a plasma screen (think it was 640x350 monochrome or grayscale), and was about the size of the keyboard and around 4" deep with 1 or 2 ISA slots. Wasn't a bad form-factor and it had a nice keyboard. I don't even think it had a built-in battery, but could be wrong.
Which is exactly how this lad got himself caught. His prospective date decided to search his name on the web and got a nice hit from the FBI's wanted list.
I read about this system in Business 2.0 at least a month or two ago. (Threw it out when done so can't give an exact reference.)
The article submitter obviously has their tin-foil hat screwed on too tight because nowhere in the article do they say that they're tracking individual purchases. This is all dealing with the supply-chain, finding out how effective marketing campaigns are, twisting the arms of the local distributer to make sure product placment is such that it will increase sales.
But my old university, that has 40000 users, this has completely defeated their Bayesian filters.
Frankly that doesn't surprise me. Using a single Bayesian database for 40k users is not going to work long-term because there are 40,000 divergent ideas about what is spam/ham. Bayesian is very good at the individual level and moderately useful at a small group level (2-50 people roughly). Individuals are generally consistent about what they classify as ham/spam, and a small group of related people is also likely to be self-consistent about spam/ham classifications. (One person's spam is another person's ham.)
Perhaps I am nieve or just old fashioned but whatever happened to CUSTOMER SATISFACTION.
That died when the stock market and big corporations became the norm and drove the local mom-and-pop stores out of business.
Companies exist to make money for their stock-holders. By and large, the stock holders really don't give a dirty rat tail as to the how that money is made. Ethics be damned and the last rat on the ship gets stuck holding the worthless stock when it all comes crashing down.
Oh, and since the mega-stores ran the local mom-and-pop places out of business - where is the "elsewhere" that the consumer is supposed to now turn to?
Definitely something to ponder as you do your daily shopping. Do I go to Wal*Mart / Lowe's / Home Depot and deal with the faceless corporation, or do I support a local mom-and-pop operation?
why not just hang up on the caller after one second?
Too obvious...
Either the supervisor of the call center or perhaps even the client paying for the call center would eventually catch on. (e.g. the client starts hearing about complaints and does some spot checking.)
Uh huh... yeah, you keep telling yourself (and the media companies that) please with one hand while the other hand is busy trying to make a read-write version of the media.
If we can read it into the computer, we can sure as heck copy it.
And if they don't manage to make it read-write by consumers; I predict, with a high degree of confidence, that it'll never take off. (Barring legislation or monopolistic, e.g. MPAA, activities.)
In addition, the amount of space they need to fit on a card is probably on the order of 25 or 50Gb in this day and age. A density that is 25x what they're currently showing. BluRay discs with 20-25Gb capacities will be here within a year or so. Media for those discs will probably start around $10-30 (guess? anyone know?) and quickly fall to under $5 within two years. The end result of course, is that any format of less then 1Gb is going to quickly start looking like the old 360K floppy; too small to bother with. (Hell, 4Gb DVD-R already looks tiny.)
Of course, this brings up the matter (again) of having media too small to find, and there's not much room for a label. "See this? It's going to replace CDs soon. I'll have to buy the White Album again."
Yep yep yep... SD and Sony Memory Sticks are probably on the "too small" side. Even 8cm CDs are tricky, because there's not much "label" area to write information on (I can fit around 30-50 handwritten characters on an 8cm CD, if I have a fresh fine-tip marker). OTOH, an 8cm square where I can write on the lower half is much easier to label.
Credit-card size is interesting, of course it would probably end up being a bit thicker then that due to some sort of protective shell. There might even be enough room for 2 or 3 sq in of media while still leaving enough room for a clumsy fellow like me to hold it.
Another advantage is that users are probably already used to putting credit-card sized things into slots end-wise (e.g. when you put your card into an ATM). Low training threshold?
I think the appropriate analogy here would be the early days of railroad. It used to be that each train company had their own standard for the width of the rails. The train engines and cars from one company could not fit on the rails from a competing railway.
In other words, the railroad companies agreed on a common standard with regards to the width of the rails, tunnel clearances, etc. Without designing in "incompatibilities" (e.g. switches that only worked with a particular engine model).
Integration is easy when products follow a published standard. It's as close to plug-n-play as it's possible to get without having to get sucked into a monopoly's monoculture.
Re:This would be in America. right?
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I don't know about US networks, but in the GSM network, emergency calls (112) have to get through even if you are on a different network, or haven't paid your subscription.
AFAIK, US is the same - in fact there are charities that will collect old, in-active, cell phones for use as portable 911 (our emergency number) phones.
or you can listen to all the crybabies screaming about nerfs and see-saw the game back and forth on a weekly basis.
Which is what SOE has been doing with EQ for the past 2 years. End-result is that cry-babies just cry harder when they don't get their way, and the griefers run rampant because everything is open to re-negotiation. (It's now a lot like dealing with a bunch of spoiled 5-year olds who are accustomed to always getting their way.)
The other problem that the SOE developers have is when they do implement a fix for a balance issue, they attempt to solve the entire problem at once. Which means that they usually go too far in the other direction and either have to dial it back over the next 3 patches or else it's such a drastic change that it affects a multitude of other classes. A dev team with a bit of common sense would realize that maybe changes should be gradual. So if class A is over-powered, instead of radically nerfing the class in a single-change, it should be planned out to take up to 6 months to implement everything. Do one change, see how it affects balance, tweak it a bit, then implement the 2nd change.
Of course, that requires someone with a "Vision" to act as a gatekeeper and a moderator. Both to keep the players from demanding changes that would damage the game, and to keep developers from changing things just because they can be changed.
Casual gamers who only play a few hours per week want a stable game where their hard work into a class isn't suddenly made away with when their class gets re-balanced. People love to complain about their class strengths/weakenesses, but if they *really* didn't want to deal with those plus/minuses, they'd have re-rolled another class. Changing the game to satisfy a whiner just means that everyone else will start whining.
And if they put in insanely hard content for the power-gamers, the casual crowd won't play it, and won't buy the expansions for it.
Here's where the bean counters get involved. A player-oriented decision would be to make a high-level expansion, realize that you will only sell it to half the playerbase, and make it a no-holds-barred high-level expansion. Instead, they try to add low-level features to market to the LCD so that the majority of the playerbase will buy it. So design time gets taken away from satisfying the high-end players (the original goal), and you end up with a lackluster expansion. Or else they make changes seemingly willy-nilly that end up causing huge balance issues that take months to work out.
I'm hopeful that we'll see portable DVD-R players as well, especially in a mini-DVD format (1Gb on an 8cm disc is handy).
As a wild guess, I'd say we might see one in 2005 - but it probably won't sell enough to take off, if it's not killed off on purpose. (Media companies want you listening to the new DVD-audio discs, not DVD-R discs full of MP3s)
There are now some camcorders that record onto mini DVD-Rs, so the technology for the heads/motors is now there. (Probably somewhat designed to be battery friendly as well.)
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it...
More like, "well, even though people complained the first time, we'll bet that fewer people complain the second time, and by the third time there will be so few that we can freely ignore them anyway".
Ah... yes, the Toshiba's have those too. And they used to make an odd-sized 1440x1050 15" (which is what I use). I was hoping you had the inside-track on a desktop LCD monitor.
Of course, I still wish IBM would mass-produce their 200dpi LCD monitors. (My laptop is 128dpi, yours is probably 140dpi at a guess.) A 2048x1536 display would be quite nifty in a 15" package or imagine a 3200x2400 17" monitor.
Hell, if they get to 300dpi, a dead pixel would probably not even be visible.
You therefore send your credit card number, unencrypted, over the Internet. Along the way it would have probably been logged at a proxy cache and would have certainly been logged at Google. You sure are a trusting fellow.
You could also search a few digits at a time, e.g. "+1234 +5678 +901" which won't be as conspicuous.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the weird thing about the place. It's considered basically uninhabitable by humans. Yet nature as a whole seems entirely unfazed by the radition and is thriving in the absence of humans.
Yeah, but nature doesn't get all sentimental or up-in-arms if critters are born with birth defects or die early from cancer. As long as the critters live long enough to reproduce at a growing rate, then that's all that's needed.
Humans are a bit pickier about that pesky "quality of life" issue.
The differences between TMI and Chernobyl are essentially those of design and the ways in which they affected the disaster.
Unlike TMI, Chernobyl almost seemed to be "how dumb can we be and get away with it". (See the quote: "like airplane pilots experimenting with the engines in flight".)
Would't it be much simpler if companies just dissallowed their employees to install applications on their machines? Allowing users to download & install 'anything' poses problems way beyond spyware.
Would love to... except that when Microsoft designed (yeah, right) Windows, security took a back seat to backwards compatibility and ease-of-use. End result is a system that is devilishly difficult to secure and 90% of the time requires that the user have administrative access in order to get any work done.
And because it's so difficult to lock-down without breaking all of your applications, only companies who roll out 100+ desktops at a time have the resources to even attempt the task. (Those of us supporting less then 100 desktops, where only 3 or 4 might have been bought at the same time, with a mix of O/S versions, really don't have the dozens or hundreds of hours to invest.)
SPAM has killed Usenet's usefullness for me.
USENET actually isn't that bad currently, most of the groups I follow only see 1-2 spam messages per day. I do have a rule that kills off anything cross-posted to more then 5 groups though. Of course, now that I've said something we all know how that's going to turn out!
So either the stuff is getting cancelled or the spammers have moved on to richer pastures. Not too many people use USENET anymore (percentage-wise), web-based forums like phpBB and SlashDot have a bigger draw then an old crufty text-based forum.
As an employee at Microsoft I had TWO of the top of the line PocketPCs : I played quake on them, wrote some C programs, and put them away as toys. I need to do WORK, as a technical person, not a salesman. All I need is digital paper.
That's because the PocketPC is a game, or at least all flash and no substance. The PocketPC is not a PDA, it's an attempt at fitting a laptop's functionality into the size of a handheld - or maybe an attempt to become the next GameBoy.
Try a real PDA like ones based on the PalmOS, you know, the PDA that is designed to do PDA well at the expense of having every bell-n-whistle known to man?
Get a used Palm III, runs for 1-4 weeks on a single set of batteries.
I'm pretty pissed off, I now have to figure out how the hell I can prevent this happening in the future on their computer.
Gee, ever hear of backups?
External USB drives are pretty cheap and so is a good sync program like Second Copy 2000. If your data isn't important enough to be bothered to do backups, then it's not important enough to get pissed when you lose said data.
I really wish I knew what causes the screen problems with the Vaios, because they're awesome machines otherwise.
Suffering from the "flimsy-factor"? IIRC, VAIOs claim-to-fame is that they're super-thin unlike the IBM ThinkPads and the Toshiba Tecras which are more brick-like.
We have quite a few Toshiba Satellite/Tecras and they seem to hold up well. I also fondly remember some Compaq 486 laptops from a few years ago as being pretty darn sturdy.
Either way you know it's bad news when the manufacturers claimed battery life is only "up to 1.0 hour life depending on configuration and usage"!
That's no battery, that's a built-in UPS!
The old luggables were interesting. I remember a Compaq that used an 84-key keyboard, a plasma screen (think it was 640x350 monochrome or grayscale), and was about the size of the keyboard and around 4" deep with 1 or 2 ISA slots. Wasn't a bad form-factor and it had a nice keyboard. I don't even think it had a built-in battery, but could be wrong.
Which is exactly how this lad got himself caught. His prospective date decided to search his name on the web and got a nice hit from the FBI's wanted list.
I read about this system in Business 2.0 at least a month or two ago. (Threw it out when done so can't give an exact reference.)
The article submitter obviously has their tin-foil hat screwed on too tight because nowhere in the article do they say that they're tracking individual purchases. This is all dealing with the supply-chain, finding out how effective marketing campaigns are, twisting the arms of the local distributer to make sure product placment is such that it will increase sales.
But my old university, that has 40000 users, this has completely defeated their Bayesian filters.
Frankly that doesn't surprise me. Using a single Bayesian database for 40k users is not going to work long-term because there are 40,000 divergent ideas about what is spam/ham. Bayesian is very good at the individual level and moderately useful at a small group level (2-50 people roughly). Individuals are generally consistent about what they classify as ham/spam, and a small group of related people is also likely to be self-consistent about spam/ham classifications. (One person's spam is another person's ham.)
Perhaps I am nieve or just old fashioned but whatever happened to CUSTOMER SATISFACTION.
That died when the stock market and big corporations became the norm and drove the local mom-and-pop stores out of business.
Companies exist to make money for their stock-holders. By and large, the stock holders really don't give a dirty rat tail as to the how that money is made. Ethics be damned and the last rat on the ship gets stuck holding the worthless stock when it all comes crashing down.
Oh, and since the mega-stores ran the local mom-and-pop places out of business - where is the "elsewhere" that the consumer is supposed to now turn to?
Definitely something to ponder as you do your daily shopping. Do I go to Wal*Mart / Lowe's / Home Depot and deal with the faceless corporation, or do I support a local mom-and-pop operation?
why not just hang up on the caller after one second?
Too obvious...
Either the supervisor of the call center or perhaps even the client paying for the call center would eventually catch on. (e.g. the client starts hearing about complaints and does some spot checking.)
Strike one for fair use.
/pendantic
Okay, to me that phrase means that "fair use" has struck a blow, or won.
"for" implies support
A better turn of phrase would be "Strike one against fair use."
I'm flabbergasted at the realization that someone got out a protractor to measure the fact that you have to hold the bottle at a 25 degree angle.
Well, actually, I'm not sure if that's worse then the "look here" arrow or not.
4) Copying of the media is very difficult;
Uh huh... yeah, you keep telling yourself (and the media companies that) please with one hand while the other hand is busy trying to make a read-write version of the media.
If we can read it into the computer, we can sure as heck copy it.
And if they don't manage to make it read-write by consumers; I predict, with a high degree of confidence, that it'll never take off. (Barring legislation or monopolistic, e.g. MPAA, activities.)
In addition, the amount of space they need to fit on a card is probably on the order of 25 or 50Gb in this day and age. A density that is 25x what they're currently showing. BluRay discs with 20-25Gb capacities will be here within a year or so. Media for those discs will probably start around $10-30 (guess? anyone know?) and quickly fall to under $5 within two years. The end result of course, is that any format of less then 1Gb is going to quickly start looking like the old 360K floppy; too small to bother with. (Hell, 4Gb DVD-R already looks tiny.)
Of course, this brings up the matter (again) of having media too small to find, and there's not much room for a label. "See this? It's going to replace CDs soon. I'll have to buy the White Album again."
Yep yep yep... SD and Sony Memory Sticks are probably on the "too small" side. Even 8cm CDs are tricky, because there's not much "label" area to write information on (I can fit around 30-50 handwritten characters on an 8cm CD, if I have a fresh fine-tip marker). OTOH, an 8cm square where I can write on the lower half is much easier to label.
Credit-card size is interesting, of course it would probably end up being a bit thicker then that due to some sort of protective shell. There might even be enough room for 2 or 3 sq in of media while still leaving enough room for a clumsy fellow like me to hold it.
Another advantage is that users are probably already used to putting credit-card sized things into slots end-wise (e.g. when you put your card into an ATM). Low training threshold?
I think the appropriate analogy here would be the early days of railroad. It used to be that each train company had their own standard for the width of the rails. The train engines and cars from one company could not fit on the rails from a competing railway.
In other words, the railroad companies agreed on a common standard with regards to the width of the rails, tunnel clearances, etc. Without designing in "incompatibilities" (e.g. switches that only worked with a particular engine model).
Integration is easy when products follow a published standard. It's as close to plug-n-play as it's possible to get without having to get sucked into a monopoly's monoculture.
I don't know about US networks, but in the GSM network, emergency calls (112) have to get through even if you are on a different network, or haven't paid your subscription.
AFAIK, US is the same - in fact there are charities that will collect old, in-active, cell phones for use as portable 911 (our emergency number) phones.
or you can listen to all the crybabies screaming about nerfs and see-saw the game back and forth on a weekly basis.
Which is what SOE has been doing with EQ for the past 2 years. End-result is that cry-babies just cry harder when they don't get their way, and the griefers run rampant because everything is open to re-negotiation. (It's now a lot like dealing with a bunch of spoiled 5-year olds who are accustomed to always getting their way.)
The other problem that the SOE developers have is when they do implement a fix for a balance issue, they attempt to solve the entire problem at once. Which means that they usually go too far in the other direction and either have to dial it back over the next 3 patches or else it's such a drastic change that it affects a multitude of other classes. A dev team with a bit of common sense would realize that maybe changes should be gradual. So if class A is over-powered, instead of radically nerfing the class in a single-change, it should be planned out to take up to 6 months to implement everything. Do one change, see how it affects balance, tweak it a bit, then implement the 2nd change.
Of course, that requires someone with a "Vision" to act as a gatekeeper and a moderator. Both to keep the players from demanding changes that would damage the game, and to keep developers from changing things just because they can be changed.
Casual gamers who only play a few hours per week want a stable game where their hard work into a class isn't suddenly made away with when their class gets re-balanced. People love to complain about their class strengths/weakenesses, but if they *really* didn't want to deal with those plus/minuses, they'd have re-rolled another class. Changing the game to satisfy a whiner just means that everyone else will start whining.
And if they put in insanely hard content for the power-gamers, the casual crowd won't play it, and won't buy the expansions for it.
Here's where the bean counters get involved. A player-oriented decision would be to make a high-level expansion, realize that you will only sell it to half the playerbase, and make it a no-holds-barred high-level expansion. Instead, they try to add low-level features to market to the LCD so that the majority of the playerbase will buy it. So design time gets taken away from satisfying the high-end players (the original goal), and you end up with a lackluster expansion. Or else they make changes seemingly willy-nilly that end up causing huge balance issues that take months to work out.
I'm hopeful that we'll see portable DVD-R players as well, especially in a mini-DVD format (1Gb on an 8cm disc is handy).
As a wild guess, I'd say we might see one in 2005 - but it probably won't sell enough to take off, if it's not killed off on purpose. (Media companies want you listening to the new DVD-audio discs, not DVD-R discs full of MP3s)
There are now some camcorders that record onto mini DVD-Rs, so the technology for the heads/motors is now there. (Probably somewhat designed to be battery friendly as well.)
The Asus A7N8X motherboard also has that POST reporter voice.
Cute the first dozen times, then gets annoying quickly.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it...
More like, "well, even though people complained the first time, we'll bet that fewer people complain the second time, and by the third time there will be so few that we can freely ignore them anyway".
Ah... yes, the Toshiba's have those too. And they used to make an odd-sized 1440x1050 15" (which is what I use). I was hoping you had the inside-track on a desktop LCD monitor.
Of course, I still wish IBM would mass-produce their 200dpi LCD monitors. (My laptop is 128dpi, yours is probably 140dpi at a guess.) A 2048x1536 display would be quite nifty in a 15" package or imagine a 3200x2400 17" monitor.
Hell, if they get to 300dpi, a dead pixel would probably not even be visible.
You therefore send your credit card number, unencrypted, over the Internet. Along the way it would have probably been logged at a proxy cache and would have certainly been logged at Google. You sure are a trusting fellow.
You could also search a few digits at a time, e.g. "+1234 +5678 +901" which won't be as conspicuous.