Another problem is that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players only output high definition video through an HDMI port which most HDTVs don't have. Those early adopters of HDTV bought TVs before HDMI. Their best output is from component video. Later adopters like myself have TVs with only one HDMI port and that is already used by the cable box. HDMI switch boxes are very expensive (~$300). The studios have said that they don't want to output component HDTV signals because they aren't encrypted and could be stolen (the so-called "analog hole"). So that leaves those buying new HDTVs as the market for high definition DVDs - a chicken and the egg problem if there ever was one.
And if MS ran eBay, would there be special features only available to IE users? That would encourage eBay users to use Windoze instead of Apple or Linux.
For those of you railing against software patents, in this case that is NOT the problem. The fact is that up until recently one had to have a working prototype to get a patent. The Constitution allows patent protection to foster innovation by allowing a company to recoup R&D investment during the early years of a product. Recently courts have allowed patent infringement cases to proceed when there was no product to protect and no product ever intended. By patenting an idea and fiercely protecting it without ever making a product you essentially take that idea and any innovation around that idea off the market. If the courts required a working prototype to get a patent and an actual product to defend a patent, this wouldn't happen.
You, the voter, don't get to keep the receipt. What happens is that you get to see is whether the machine voted for you as you wanted, and then that receipt is kept by election officials to act as backup in case the electronic count fails in some way. Then the receipts are used to recount the election. Because you can't read the machine directly with your eyes, if there is any question as to the tally produced by the machine, the paper receipts can be used to recount. Yes, there has always been fraud, and paper can be compromised, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing better when adopting new methods and better procedures for securing the ballots. The idea that the tally is correct because the machine says so is a myth: "It must be right because the computer says so!" Diebold has consistently denied that their computers could fail and that a backup method for recounts was needed.
I bought a HDTV in the last 6 months. It is a Panasonic 65LCX61 which is a recent model. It only has ONE HDMI input. I'm using that for my cable input. I'm not thrilled with the prospect of unplugging the cable and plugging in the HD DVD player (or BLU RAY). I looked for an HDMI switch box. As far as I can tell only one company makes them (Gefen http://www.gefen.com/) and they cost $300 or more!
I have to agree with some of the ideas annunciated before me here about ways to fix the patent system. But I would go one step further. I suggest that a patent infringement case should not be able to be brought if the holder of a patent does not have a product implementing the patent in the market. The main reason for patents is to allow inventors to recoup their investment so that they can make a profit on a product implementing the invention. It was never intended to protect ideas. Ideas were supposed to be in the public domain. Only implementations were supposed to be patentable. This is a clear case where judges have exercised judicial activism and Congress has abdicated its responsibility by not checking that activism that Republicans talk so much about. Perhaps if their Blackberries are turned off, they'll start taking their responsibilities seriously and fix the patent system.
Where I work we have no policy concerning flash drives. Many use their own personal drives because they have one attached to their keychain and it is easier than going to the boss and getting the company to buy one. Perhaps what is needed is a policy that mandates company-owned drives that are only used at work for company business and disallow the use of personal drives. We already disallow personally-owned computers at work so why do we allow personally-owned flash drives?
The difference between humans and machines is NOT semantics. If that were it, building human-like machines would be easy. And in fact for small trivial universes, this has been done.
The big difference is context. Many words in the human languages only acquire meaning by their context. That includes not only their place in the syntax, but their place in the semantics.
We currently don't understand how we humans remember contexts and how we apply symbols to the various contexts with which we are acquainted, including the one that contains the symbol, to discern meaning. Additionally, we don't understand how we limit a context when trying to decide that meaning. Working with contexts is a tricky business that even humans often fail to master. Look at how many interpretations and translations of the Bible there are and how we fight over which one is correct.
This is why computers are so good at deciphering context-free languages (such as computer languages) and so poor at deciphering context-sensitive languages (such as human languages) other than in trivial situations or narrow contexts.
The security of biometrics has been discussed before here. Biometrics are not as safe or as authentic as they sound. There are two easy ways to fool biometric systems:
1. Create a reasonable facsimile of the biometrics that the target reader will accept. There is James Bond movie where he used a glass eye with the correct retina pattern in it.
2. Capture the digital stream of ones and zeroes that corresponds to a particular biometric and find where to plug that into the authentication process to have the identity accepted.
Additionally, unlike passwords, if your biometrics are compromised you can't change them (unless you resort to nasty surgery).
Finally, if you are injured or have surgery for medical reasons and your biometrics are changed, how will you prove who you are?
This makes no sense! Firstly I already have a receiver that is less than 2 years old. My TV is less than 6 months old. I expect them to work with current technology and not be made obsolete so quickly. My receiver does not have HDMI. I want the HD (or Blu-Ray) DVD player to output HD signals over component video cables since my TV only has one HDMI input already connected to my cable box. I've looked at an HDMI switch box and that costs $300 plus I would need 2 more HDMI cables that each run between $70 and $100 each!
I have a friend that has a 5 year old HD TV that has no HDMI input. He is SOL if HD signals are not available on component cables. He expected his TV to last and be compatible for at least a decade. TV owners have longer compatibility expectations than computer owners.
If the HD signal is not output via component outputs as well as HDMI, this is going to be a non-starter for many of us who have 0 or 1 HDMI input on our HD TVs. I have 1 and it it connected to my cable box.
Not True! Just a few pixels difference can make a huge difference in how things appear on the page: whether they fall off the right side of the screen or hang outside the bounds of boxes, etc. Firefox runs on more than one OS and Safari does not. So differences not only in browsers but in OS graphics systems and font renderings can be huge. Fonts are not always the same number of pixels in size and colors are not always the same exact shade. Additionally each browser on each OS has different bugs (or non-standard features) that can change the way things appear. Firefox is not the be-all and end-all even if it might be the most standard.
Those of you who think that websites that work with IE only are due to incompetence or stupidity don't understand software development in the real world. It is expensive to test a web site against multiple browsers. It is usually a business decision to test a web site against a limited set of browsers.
Not all browsers render the same code in the same manner. So if you try to use standard coding and that works with all the tested browsers, then the attitude is "Don't blame us if our site doesn't work with your browser - we didn't test with it and we coded to standards. Talk to your browser's developer."
You cannot be certain, even if you are coding to standards, what browsers will render the code correctly (read: as you expected). You have to test all expected browsers, and as I already said, that may cost more than you are willing to spend.
I've said this before on slashdot: the biggest problem with biometrics is that once compromised they cannot be easily changed. You can always change your password if someone discovers it, but you can't easily change your retinal pattern. So if someone has a fake eyeball with your pattern you can't keep them from using it by using another pattern. The naive have assumed that biometrics are much harder to steal than passwords and would be too closely tied to the person to whom they belong to be compromised. For every type of authentication, there is a surprisingly easy and clever way to compromise it.
Where does it list the hardware it supports? I'm not talking about CPU or HD or CD. I'm talking about network card, video card, DVD, printer, etc. In my opinion the biggest problem with UNIX/LINUX/MINIX type OS's is the problem of hardware support. Since most hardware shops don't have the resources to create and test drivers for multiple OS's, they concentrate on Windows and let someone else come up with drivers for other OS's. That leaves the UNIX/LINUX/MINIX type OS's constantly behind the curve since they have to have someone create drivers after the hardware is released and by the time the driver is tested and stable, the hardware is obsolete.
The article gives us no facts that we can use to verify the claim. Without a definition of information and a definition of indexing one cannot take this for accurate. There are many definitions of information and except that used in "Information Theory", which is a message received and decoded to its original form, I don't know of any definition that has sientific or mathematical rigour. In fact, in my opinion, Information Theory is a misnomer and is more properly called Communication Theory since it is about getting a message properly communicated, NOT about whether its contents are useful. Additionally, information as understood by most comes in many forms and types and each may require different ways of indexing. Finally, aren't the indexes information that needs to be indexed? How do you keep from recursing?
Google develops a high speed WiMax network OS where everything is done over the network. All apps and all storage is on the network. The box that connects to this OS is a $100 machine whose internal OS is simple and is in flash rom and has lots of memory to run the apps, but no storage. The desktop and the Web are the same as far as the user is concerned. This returns us to the mainframe/terminal paradigm.
The advantage of this is that there are no viruses, spyware, worms on the user's machine. Security is pushed upstream to the the administrator of the OS. No crashes or reloads of the user's machine. Additionally, new versions of an app can be instantly available, and old versions can still be available where required for older format data. Finally, you can access all your data and apps from anywhere and use that data is presentations anywhere.
Some issues:
1. Security
2. Deployment of access to low population areas such as Montana or Chad.
3. Providing private branches for businesses who don't want their proprietary info on the public network.
4. Dealing with high security situations where the OS and data cannot be on the network: for example, nuclear power control, manufacturing control especially pharmaceutical and chemical
4. Converting ISVs to service and use oriented income rather than selling copies of a program. Users would pay to gain access to a program (maybe a one-time or per-use fee). No more worrying about where that cryptic serial number was stored when system reload is done. The system knows if you have paid to use a program.
Where I patrol we get a lot of kids who are not yet very responsible and trying to communicate with them if they are hurt or misbehaving and have a headset blasting in their ears is difficult. So we took the position of disallowing them on the slope. At bigger ski areas the number of patrollers per acre is smaller and you might not see one all day. Our area is small and the public sees us all the time so we can enforce these policies more easily.
Be careful about listening to your IPod while actually skiing! Many ski areas don't allow headsets while skiing as that limits your ability to hear other skiers on the trail. I kinow because I am a ski patroller and we don't allow headsets while skiing at my area - Spring Mountain, PA.
What about Hillary's Hair? This what a web site in the middle 90's that kept track of Hillary Clinton's hairdos and allowed you to vote for your favorite. Don't go to hillaryshair.com now since it is a porno web site. Or maybe you want to!
It is a sad fact that different browsers (and even different versions of the same browser) often render the same code in different ways. It is not always because Microsoft doesn't follow standards. Some web site authors query the browser for who it is so they can point the user to the correct version of their web site optimized for that browser. Since it is unknown how IE7 will render any given site, those sites may not have code specifically for IE7 and the code that queries for the browser type and version may not recognize IE7 as a legitimate browser.
Real paper only requires ambient light to be read. No special electronic device. Additionally it doesn't suffer from changes in encoding format and if made of non-acidic materials, lasts hundreds of years. If you can read braille, you may not even need light!
Go to WalMart and buy some hardware for your PC. Unless it uses a standard already built into the OS, more often than not it doesn't have a driver for Linux bundled with it. If the hardware is newer than the Linux distro you have, the driver won't be in the OS either. That means downloading a driver from some obscure website with some God-awful install mechanism. Ordinary users want drivers bundled with the hardware or the OS that install with a minimum of effort.
This problem is especially prevalent with printers whose product lifetime is 9 months or less. Printer manufacturers don't have to follow any standards because the driver will handle it. It is rare to see Linux drivers bundled with the printer even though OS X drivers often are!
Many hardware manufacturers, especially small ones, have made a business decision that they can't afford to support driver development for multiple OS's, especially for those whose market share is small. OS X has the advantage that Apple will help many companies with driver development since Apple controls the hardware.
So you install a Linux distro and find after a year or two that all the available drivers that work with your kernel version are for hardware that is obsolete and possibly only available on ebay. Your graphics card fails and you cannot even find another card to replace it.
There are still thousands of PCS that were installed in the 90's in industrial applications (such as factory/process automation) that cannot boot from CD or don't have a CD drive. These need a floppy for emergency reinstall and rescue.Upgrading these PCs is expensive and time consuming.
These systems also use use floppies to transfer files because many cannot be on corporate networks due to security and other reasons. Transfering data to office systems for further analysis still needs floppy drives!
Those who think biometrics are better than password systems, ought to think twice. While passwords can be changed when compromised, biometrics cannot.
There is a scene in a James Bond movie where JB uses a glass eyeball that has someone's retina pattern in it to gain access to a secure building. Also, all biometrics must be converted to some digital pattern. How long will it be before some malicious person gets these digital patterns and figures out how to plug them into the software that authenticates the biometrics thereby bypassing the reader?
Once compromised, you can't change your fingerprint or retina!
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Another problem is that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players only output high definition video through an HDMI port which most HDTVs don't have. Those early adopters of HDTV bought TVs before HDMI. Their best output is from component video. Later adopters like myself have TVs with only one HDMI port and that is already used by the cable box. HDMI switch boxes are very expensive (~$300). The studios have said that they don't want to output component HDTV signals because they aren't encrypted and could be stolen (the so-called "analog hole"). So that leaves those buying new HDTVs as the market for high definition DVDs - a chicken and the egg problem if there ever was one.
And if MS ran eBay, would there be special features only available to IE users? That would encourage eBay users to use Windoze instead of Apple or Linux.
For those of you railing against software patents, in this case that is NOT the problem. The fact is that up until recently one had to have a working prototype to get a patent. The Constitution allows patent protection to foster innovation by allowing a company to recoup R&D investment during the early years of a product. Recently courts have allowed patent infringement cases to proceed when there was no product to protect and no product ever intended. By patenting an idea and fiercely protecting it without ever making a product you essentially take that idea and any innovation around that idea off the market. If the courts required a working prototype to get a patent and an actual product to defend a patent, this wouldn't happen.
You, the voter, don't get to keep the receipt. What happens is that you get to see is whether the machine voted for you as you wanted, and then that receipt is kept by election officials to act as backup in case the electronic count fails in some way. Then the receipts are used to recount the election. Because you can't read the machine directly with your eyes, if there is any question as to the tally produced by the machine, the paper receipts can be used to recount. Yes, there has always been fraud, and paper can be compromised, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing better when adopting new methods and better procedures for securing the ballots. The idea that the tally is correct because the machine says so is a myth: "It must be right because the computer says so!" Diebold has consistently denied that their computers could fail and that a backup method for recounts was needed.
I bought a HDTV in the last 6 months. It is a Panasonic 65LCX61 which is a recent model. It only has ONE HDMI input. I'm using that for my cable input. I'm not thrilled with the prospect of unplugging the cable and plugging in the HD DVD player (or BLU RAY). I looked for an HDMI switch box. As far as I can tell only one company makes them (Gefen http://www.gefen.com/) and they cost $300 or more!
I have to agree with some of the ideas annunciated before me here about ways to fix the patent system. But I would go one step further. I suggest that a patent infringement case should not be able to be brought if the holder of a patent does not have a product implementing the patent in the market. The main reason for patents is to allow inventors to recoup their investment so that they can make a profit on a product implementing the invention. It was never intended to protect ideas. Ideas were supposed to be in the public domain. Only implementations were supposed to be patentable. This is a clear case where judges have exercised judicial activism and Congress has abdicated its responsibility by not checking that activism that Republicans talk so much about. Perhaps if their Blackberries are turned off, they'll start taking their responsibilities seriously and fix the patent system.
Where I work we have no policy concerning flash drives. Many use their own personal drives because they have one attached to their keychain and it is easier than going to the boss and getting the company to buy one. Perhaps what is needed is a policy that mandates company-owned drives that are only used at work for company business and disallow the use of personal drives. We already disallow personally-owned computers at work so why do we allow personally-owned flash drives?
The difference between humans and machines is NOT semantics. If that were it, building human-like machines would be easy. And in fact for small trivial universes, this has been done.
The big difference is context. Many words in the human languages only acquire meaning by their context. That includes not only their place in the syntax, but their place in the semantics.
We currently don't understand how we humans remember contexts and how we apply symbols to the various contexts with which we are acquainted, including the one that contains the symbol, to discern meaning. Additionally, we don't understand how we limit a context when trying to decide that meaning. Working with contexts is a tricky business that even humans often fail to master. Look at how many interpretations and translations of the Bible there are and how we fight over which one is correct.
This is why computers are so good at deciphering context-free languages (such as computer languages) and so poor at deciphering context-sensitive languages (such as human languages) other than in trivial situations or narrow contexts.
The security of biometrics has been discussed before here. Biometrics are not as safe or as authentic as they sound. There are two easy ways to fool biometric systems:
1. Create a reasonable facsimile of the biometrics that the target reader will accept. There is James Bond movie where he used a glass eye with the correct retina pattern in it.
2. Capture the digital stream of ones and zeroes that corresponds to a particular biometric and find where to plug that into the authentication process to have the identity accepted.
Additionally, unlike passwords, if your biometrics are compromised you can't change them (unless you resort to nasty surgery).
Finally, if you are injured or have surgery for medical reasons and your biometrics are changed, how will you prove who you are?
This makes no sense! Firstly I already have a receiver that is less than 2 years old. My TV is less than 6 months old. I expect them to work with current technology and not be made obsolete so quickly. My receiver does not have HDMI. I want the HD (or Blu-Ray) DVD player to output HD signals over component video cables since my TV only has one HDMI input already connected to my cable box. I've looked at an HDMI switch box and that costs $300 plus I would need 2 more HDMI cables that each run between $70 and $100 each!
I have a friend that has a 5 year old HD TV that has no HDMI input. He is SOL if HD signals are not available on component cables. He expected his TV to last and be compatible for at least a decade. TV owners have longer compatibility expectations than computer owners.
If the HD signal is not output via component outputs as well as HDMI, this is going to be a non-starter for many of us who have 0 or 1 HDMI input on our HD TVs. I have 1 and it it connected to my cable box.
Not True! Just a few pixels difference can make a huge difference in how things appear on the page: whether they fall off the right side of the screen or hang outside the bounds of boxes, etc. Firefox runs on more than one OS and Safari does not. So differences not only in browsers but in OS graphics systems and font renderings can be huge. Fonts are not always the same number of pixels in size and colors are not always the same exact shade. Additionally each browser on each OS has different bugs (or non-standard features) that can change the way things appear. Firefox is not the be-all and end-all even if it might be the most standard.
Those of you who think that websites that work with IE only are due to incompetence or stupidity don't understand software development in the real world. It is expensive to test a web site against multiple browsers. It is usually a business decision to test a web site against a limited set of browsers.
Not all browsers render the same code in the same manner. So if you try to use standard coding and that works with all the tested browsers, then the attitude is "Don't blame us if our site doesn't work with your browser - we didn't test with it and we coded to standards. Talk to your browser's developer."
You cannot be certain, even if you are coding to standards, what browsers will render the code correctly (read: as you expected). You have to test all expected browsers, and as I already said, that may cost more than you are willing to spend.
I've said this before on slashdot: the biggest problem with biometrics is that once compromised they cannot be easily changed. You can always change your password if someone discovers it, but you can't easily change your retinal pattern. So if someone has a fake eyeball with your pattern you can't keep them from using it by using another pattern. The naive have assumed that biometrics are much harder to steal than passwords and would be too closely tied to the person to whom they belong to be compromised. For every type of authentication, there is a surprisingly easy and clever way to compromise it.
Where does it list the hardware it supports? I'm not talking about CPU or HD or CD. I'm talking about network card, video card, DVD, printer, etc. In my opinion the biggest problem with UNIX/LINUX/MINIX type OS's is the problem of hardware support. Since most hardware shops don't have the resources to create and test drivers for multiple OS's, they concentrate on Windows and let someone else come up with drivers for other OS's. That leaves the UNIX/LINUX/MINIX type OS's constantly behind the curve since they have to have someone create drivers after the hardware is released and by the time the driver is tested and stable, the hardware is obsolete.
The article gives us no facts that we can use to verify the claim. Without a definition of information and a definition of indexing one cannot take this for accurate. There are many definitions of information and except that used in "Information Theory", which is a message received and decoded to its original form, I don't know of any definition that has sientific or mathematical rigour. In fact, in my opinion, Information Theory is a misnomer and is more properly called Communication Theory since it is about getting a message properly communicated, NOT about whether its contents are useful. Additionally, information as understood by most comes in many forms and types and each may require different ways of indexing. Finally, aren't the indexes information that needs to be indexed? How do you keep from recursing?
Google develops a high speed WiMax network OS where everything is done over the network. All apps and all storage is on the network. The box that connects to this OS is a $100 machine whose internal OS is simple and is in flash rom and has lots of memory to run the apps, but no storage. The desktop and the Web are the same as far as the user is concerned. This returns us to the mainframe/terminal paradigm.
The advantage of this is that there are no viruses, spyware, worms on the user's machine. Security is pushed upstream to the the administrator of the OS. No crashes or reloads of the user's machine. Additionally, new versions of an app can be instantly available, and old versions can still be available where required for older format data. Finally, you can access all your data and apps from anywhere and use that data is presentations anywhere.
Some issues:
1. Security
2. Deployment of access to low population areas such as Montana or Chad.
3. Providing private branches for businesses who don't want their proprietary info on the public network.
4. Dealing with high security situations where the OS and data cannot be on the network: for example, nuclear power control, manufacturing control especially pharmaceutical and chemical
4. Converting ISVs to service and use oriented income rather than selling copies of a program. Users would pay to gain access to a program (maybe a one-time or per-use fee). No more worrying about where that cryptic serial number was stored when system reload is done. The system knows if you have paid to use a program.
Where I patrol we get a lot of kids who are not yet very responsible and trying to communicate with them if they are hurt or misbehaving and have a headset blasting in their ears is difficult. So we took the position of disallowing them on the slope. At bigger ski areas the number of patrollers per acre is smaller and you might not see one all day. Our area is small and the public sees us all the time so we can enforce these policies more easily.
Be careful about listening to your IPod while actually skiing! Many ski areas don't allow headsets while skiing as that limits your ability to hear other skiers on the trail. I kinow because I am a ski patroller and we don't allow headsets while skiing at my area - Spring Mountain, PA.
What about Hillary's Hair? This what a web site in the middle 90's that kept track of Hillary Clinton's hairdos and allowed you to vote for your favorite. Don't go to hillaryshair.com now since it is a porno web site. Or maybe you want to!
It is a sad fact that different browsers (and even different versions of the same browser) often render the same code in different ways. It is not always because Microsoft doesn't follow standards. Some web site authors query the browser for who it is so they can point the user to the correct version of their web site optimized for that browser. Since it is unknown how IE7 will render any given site, those sites may not have code specifically for IE7 and the code that queries for the browser type and version may not recognize IE7 as a legitimate browser.
Real paper only requires ambient light to be read. No special electronic device. Additionally it doesn't suffer from changes in encoding format and if made of non-acidic materials, lasts hundreds of years. If you can read braille, you may not even need light!
Go to WalMart and buy some hardware for your PC. Unless it uses a standard already built into the OS, more often than not it doesn't have a driver for Linux bundled with it. If the hardware is newer than the Linux distro you have, the driver won't be in the OS either. That means downloading a driver from some obscure website with some God-awful install mechanism. Ordinary users want drivers bundled with the hardware or the OS that install with a minimum of effort.
This problem is especially prevalent with printers whose product lifetime is 9 months or less. Printer manufacturers don't have to follow any standards because the driver will handle it. It is rare to see Linux drivers bundled with the printer even though OS X drivers often are!
Many hardware manufacturers, especially small ones, have made a business decision that they can't afford to support driver development for multiple OS's, especially for those whose market share is small. OS X has the advantage that Apple will help many companies with driver development since Apple controls the hardware.
So you install a Linux distro and find after a year or two that all the available drivers that work with your kernel version are for hardware that is obsolete and possibly only available on ebay. Your graphics card fails and you cannot even find another card to replace it.
There are still thousands of PCS that were installed in the 90's in industrial applications (such as factory/process automation) that cannot boot from CD or don't have a CD drive. These need a floppy for emergency reinstall and rescue.Upgrading these PCs is expensive and time consuming.
These systems also use use floppies to transfer files because many cannot be on corporate networks due to security and other reasons. Transfering data to office systems for further analysis still needs floppy drives!
Those who think biometrics are better than password systems, ought to think twice. While passwords can be changed when compromised, biometrics cannot.
There is a scene in a James Bond movie where JB uses a glass eyeball that has someone's retina pattern in it to gain access to a secure building. Also, all biometrics must be converted to some digital pattern. How long will it be before some malicious person gets these digital patterns and figures out how to plug them into the software that authenticates the biometrics thereby bypassing the reader?
Once compromised, you can't change your fingerprint or retina!