There are several people like Ben Radford, Joe Nickell and others who have long experience doing proper, scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena like ghosts. I recommend you take advantage of their expertise.
Ben Radford recently published a book called Scientific Paranormal Investigation last summer that covers alot of the territory. It is highly recommended, available as a paperback & ebook.
An older book by Joe Nickell & Robert A. Baker is called Missing Pieces. It was published in 1992 but of course much of what it says is still totally valid.
I love how a really stupid typo has been propagated from the original news story across two different Slashdot stories. Pope John XXIII was one of the most popular popes of the 20th century, there are lots and lots of schools and churches and other facilities named for him all over. Pope John XIII lived in the 10th century and is barely remembered nas he only served for 7 years.
I realize not everyone is Catholic, but really. It's roughly equivalent to misspelling John F. Kennedy or Winston Churchill's name.
The commenters have gotten off into a long discussion on software patents covering fractal compression.
But nobody has mentioned that in the linked whitepaper, the company refers to this new JPG compression algorithm as "patent-pending technology". They want others to support this new proposed file format, but nowhere do they mention whether their patent (if granted) will be licensed or under what terms. In fact at the bottom of the document a contact is listed for "Partnership and Licensing information."
I'd really be wary about supporting a new file format, only to discover later I owe someone money for patent licensing.
>>a few people seem to be having this problem, and a great many more don't
Put me in the "don't" category. I had great reception on my Treo 600, and the reception if anything is better on the 650. Sound quality sounds just as good as well. The only time I've ever had any sort of sound glitch, it was attributable to the Bluetooth headset, not the phone.
Yet another customer service molehill built into a mountain, courtesy of the internet. A few loudmouths happen to get the inevitable one or two bad units that slipped by QA, and the whole company suffers. I feel sorry for Palm or any other consumer product company that has to deal with this sort of nonsense.
The assembler program A86, which was first released in 1986, used this exact same technique to encode a "footprint" into any executable it created. The author, Eric Isaacson, ostensibly used this to enforce the licensing agreement on the program. (Basically, it was free for all non-commercial use, but if you intended to distribute an application made with it you had to pay him some money).
In particular, read section 6 in this part of the original documentation.
Hydan merely takes this technique that was invented by Eric in 1986, and turns it into a general-purpose Steganography algorithm. It is not anything new.
At the beginning of the introductory clip, Bart is playing a video game in the living room. From the music you can hear coming out of the TV, he's playing Road Rage itself.
At the end of the introductory clip, as Homer has decorated his car as a taxi and asks the family what they think, Bart says: "Just get to the game already!"
If you run out of time while driving a "Road Rage" level, at the end each character has a unique funny comment. Several of them say things that seem to refer to the game, like "I thought I had more time left" and so on.
When you finish the game, the camera zooms out of the "You Won The Game" screen to reveal that the game was being played by the aliens Kang and Kodos. One says, "This game grows tiresome!" The other responds, "Insert the alternate game disk." They then start playing an alien version of Pong and fly off.
If you set down the controller and do nothing for a certain amount of time, your character will 'yell' at you to continue. For instance, Fry says, "Earth to player, you're not playing!"
Also, when Fry walks into the room that is the final battle of the game (which is often called the "boss level"), he says something to the effect of: "Uh oh, this looks like a boss level."
I was curious about this same thing, so I looked up the model on the RCA web site. Apparently the player has some non-volatile memory, which is preloaded with the ClearPlay definitions for about 100 popular DVDs.
If you want to play a disk that is not on the list, you can download the definitions file (assuming they have created it) for it from ClearPlay, copy it onto a CD-R or CD-RW, and load it into the memory of the player.
You can read the exact procedures, and see what options the player offers you, starting on page 24 of the Instruction Book for RCA DRC232N (Warning: it's a.PDF, 1733 KB).
Compuserve did this 15 years ago
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I used to work with someone who was a former Vice President of CompuServe, back before it became a little known part of AOL. This was back in the days when dialup services like this were the only way to stay connected, and the Internet was just becoming available to the public.
Another VP had as his yearly goal a target for revenue growth. Subscribers were very sensitive to the rates for the service, because it was very expensive, so he knew he couldn't just raise the hourly rate. So he sat down with some spreadsheets and crunched numbers, and noticed that they had two groups of subscribers. The ones who used the service constantly and ran up huge monthly bills, and those who used it occasionally and often had a zero balance at the end of a given month.
He instituted a new policy where a new minimum charge was added to the subscriber agreement, something like $2 or $4, but was only charged if you didn't already spend at least that much in hourly charges. As a result, this new fee would have no effect on the big-time users of the service, who naturally would be the most vocal users.
But there were thousands of users who fit in this low-usage camp, so once instituted, this new fee resulted in a couple million extra dollars a month rolling in. And with no extra work on the company's part, it was like free money! A month after insituting this fee, they had gotten like maybe a dozen complaints.
Needless to say the VP who made this decision got his million dollar year-end bonus, and everyone was happy. Except the few subscribers who paid attention to their bills.
I think this is where most of these junk fees come from. Executives who have little else to do than to play with a spreadsheet all day, play with numbers on end until they come up with some little slice of their user base that they can charge an extra fee to that is unlikely to complain, but will still affect the bottom line.
But as my story points out, this is not a new thing. Its been going on for decades or more. A couple of years ago I noticed AT&T and the other long distance services instituting a minimum monthly charge as part of their standard rate plans, and I thought back to that VP at CompuServe.
I'd mod you up but I don't have any points right now. As I read it I was wondering how many times he was going to work the name of his company into the proposal.
This seems like just a ploy to get some publicity for TruSecure. I don't think any rational person would expect this to fly.
I hope you copied the source code off those 8" floppies onto some other media. 15+ year old floppy disks are not that reliable. You might be in for a nasty surprise.
I can echo this. Sitting on the floor of my office right this second is a Replay 4160 that I just received today back from Replay support when the hard drive in my unit crashed last week. So I can verify that customer support & RMA functions of Replay are up and running just fine.
Worry not about the bankruptcy, it appears ReplayTV is very much a going concern.
I had to do this for my mom, and I just used a very simple whitelist technique. It works well for her because there is only a fixed subset of people that she corresponds with (the family) and they are all in her address book.
Both Outlook Express and the full Outlook have a "Rules" system that let you automatically move emails around based on various criteria.
Simply set her up some rules that match on the various types of email she wants to get. In my mom's case we have a family mailing list, which I set a rule to match the subject line for. She also gets automated emails from a cooking site, and from her ISP, so I set up rules for that.
The key is each rule should simply match a type of mail she wants to keep, and have the "Stop processing rules" option checked. As soon as one of the criteria is matched, the rules stop and the mail stays in her inbox. The rule need not have any actual "action" on it, its purpose is to match and stop.
The last two rules are critical. The next to last rule should be a "Match on FROM address", and you should select EVERYONE in her address book. (And of course, set the "stop processing more rules" bit). You may have to update this rule as she adds to her address book.
The very last rule is the key. This one is only going to be processed if NONE of the others match. You simply have this rule match everything, and dump everything into a folder named "Junk Mail".
That's it. No extra software required. When I go visit her, she usually has a ton of stuff in Junk Mail, just give it a quick look to make sure there is nothing your rules are missing, and dump it for her.
P.S. If that's not geeky enough for you, I also recommend Cloudmark.
I forsee a nice market for user-carried RFID zappers. Over on the halfbakery (a site for discussing ideas and inventions) I posted some thoughts on the features someone would want in such a device.
Anyone want to start a company around it? (Only half serious).
The LA Times had an interesting article just Monday about the failure (so far) for DVRs to really take off in the consumer marketplace. Quote: "it must be said that the revolution is way behind schedule. Far from being an indispensable household appliance, the DVR remains a device of cliquish partiality."
Back before such tools were common, I wrote a make file dependency scanner for use at a previous job. It had some simple name (like BuildMake) but inside the program there was a table that listed which modules were referenced by others.
That table was called guzinta because it listed which module "goes into" this one.
The operating-system provided debugger for CP/M was called DDT. Ostensibly this stood for Dynamic Debugging Tool, but most assumed it was a reference to the now-banned pesticide.
I didn't say it was acceptible, but it is reality. Banks are like any other company, they have fixed budgets for things like support, and in these economic times those budgets are typically stretched thin or are being cut.
Managers are going to look for any way to stretch that budget, and if that means ignoring 5% of the user base, frankly some of them would be willing to take that risk. (Plus they can always play the 'fingerpointing' game with Intuit if push comes to shove).
What percentage of the available base of tech support personnel have Macintosh experience? Is it similar to the 5 to 8% you quote for desktop penetration? If so, that bank is going to have a really hard time hiring some techs who can answer Macintosh questions intelligently. As a result they're going to have to pay them more to retain them. You can imagine where this leads in a manager's mind.
It may well suck, but decisions that come down to money often do.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several people like Ben Radford, Joe Nickell and others who have long experience doing proper, scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena like ghosts. I recommend you take advantage of their expertise. Ben Radford recently published a book called Scientific Paranormal Investigation last summer that covers alot of the territory. It is highly recommended, available as a paperback & ebook. An older book by Joe Nickell & Robert A. Baker is called Missing Pieces. It was published in 1992 but of course much of what it says is still totally valid.
Lame, dude. It takes 5 seconds to get it right: simply type "Pope John XIII High School" into Google, and it immediately suggests:
(Which, by the way, quickly shows you there are MANY John XXIII high schools in the US, but NO John XIII high schools).
With editing standards like this, no wonder professional journalists look down on blogs.
I realize not everyone is Catholic, but really. It's roughly equivalent to misspelling John F. Kennedy or Winston Churchill's name.
But nobody has mentioned that in the linked whitepaper, the company refers to this new JPG compression algorithm as "patent-pending technology". They want others to support this new proposed file format, but nowhere do they mention whether their patent (if granted) will be licensed or under what terms. In fact at the bottom of the document a contact is listed for "Partnership and Licensing information."
I'd really be wary about supporting a new file format, only to discover later I owe someone money for patent licensing.
Put me in the "don't" category. I had great reception on my Treo 600, and the reception if anything is better on the 650. Sound quality sounds just as good as well. The only time I've ever had any sort of sound glitch, it was attributable to the Bluetooth headset, not the phone.
Yet another customer service molehill built into a mountain, courtesy of the internet. A few loudmouths happen to get the inevitable one or two bad units that slipped by QA, and the whole company suffers. I feel sorry for Palm or any other consumer product company that has to deal with this sort of nonsense.
I love my Treo 650.
That text about SP2 was NOT in the CNET article when it was first posted. They revised it as the result of comments on their own message board.
In particular, read section 6 in this part of the original documentation.
Hydan merely takes this technique that was invented by Eric in 1986, and turns it into a general-purpose Steganography algorithm. It is not anything new.
At the end of the introductory clip, as Homer has decorated his car as a taxi and asks the family what they think, Bart says: "Just get to the game already!"
If you run out of time while driving a "Road Rage" level, at the end each character has a unique funny comment. Several of them say things that seem to refer to the game, like "I thought I had more time left" and so on.
When you finish the game, the camera zooms out of the "You Won The Game" screen to reveal that the game was being played by the aliens Kang and Kodos. One says, "This game grows tiresome!" The other responds, "Insert the alternate game disk." They then start playing an alien version of Pong and fly off.
Also, when Fry walks into the room that is the final battle of the game (which is often called the "boss level"), he says something to the effect of: "Uh oh, this looks like a boss level."
There are other examples in that game.
I was curious about this same thing, so I looked up the model on the RCA web site. Apparently the player has some non-volatile memory, which is preloaded with the ClearPlay definitions for about 100 popular DVDs.
If you want to play a disk that is not on the list, you can download the definitions file (assuming they have created it) for it from ClearPlay, copy it onto a CD-R or CD-RW, and load it into the memory of the player.
You can read the exact procedures, and see what options the player offers you, starting on page 24 of the Instruction Book for RCA DRC232N (Warning: it's a .PDF, 1733 KB).
Another VP had as his yearly goal a target for revenue growth. Subscribers were very sensitive to the rates for the service, because it was very expensive, so he knew he couldn't just raise the hourly rate. So he sat down with some spreadsheets and crunched numbers, and noticed that they had two groups of subscribers. The ones who used the service constantly and ran up huge monthly bills, and those who used it occasionally and often had a zero balance at the end of a given month.
He instituted a new policy where a new minimum charge was added to the subscriber agreement, something like $2 or $4, but was only charged if you didn't already spend at least that much in hourly charges. As a result, this new fee would have no effect on the big-time users of the service, who naturally would be the most vocal users.
But there were thousands of users who fit in this low-usage camp, so once instituted, this new fee resulted in a couple million extra dollars a month rolling in. And with no extra work on the company's part, it was like free money! A month after insituting this fee, they had gotten like maybe a dozen complaints.
Needless to say the VP who made this decision got his million dollar year-end bonus, and everyone was happy. Except the few subscribers who paid attention to their bills.
I think this is where most of these junk fees come from. Executives who have little else to do than to play with a spreadsheet all day, play with numbers on end until they come up with some little slice of their user base that they can charge an extra fee to that is unlikely to complain, but will still affect the bottom line.
But as my story points out, this is not a new thing. Its been going on for decades or more. A couple of years ago I noticed AT&T and the other long distance services instituting a minimum monthly charge as part of their standard rate plans, and I thought back to that VP at CompuServe.
This seems like just a ploy to get some publicity for TruSecure. I don't think any rational person would expect this to fly.
No, not for the casinos and stuff. For one or both of these two shows:
Penn & Teller live at the Rio.
The Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton
I hope you copied the source code off those 8" floppies onto some other media. 15+ year old floppy disks are not that reliable. You might be in for a nasty surprise.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein has a cooperative mission mode
I can echo this. Sitting on the floor of my office right this second is a Replay 4160 that I just received today back from Replay support when the hard drive in my unit crashed last week. So I can verify that customer support & RMA functions of Replay are up and running just fine.
Worry not about the bankruptcy, it appears ReplayTV is very much a going concern.
Both Outlook Express and the full Outlook have a "Rules" system that let you automatically move emails around based on various criteria.
Simply set her up some rules that match on the various types of email she wants to get. In my mom's case we have a family mailing list, which I set a rule to match the subject line for. She also gets automated emails from a cooking site, and from her ISP, so I set up rules for that.
The key is each rule should simply match a type of mail she wants to keep, and have the "Stop processing rules" option checked. As soon as one of the criteria is matched, the rules stop and the mail stays in her inbox. The rule need not have any actual "action" on it, its purpose is to match and stop.
The last two rules are critical. The next to last rule should be a "Match on FROM address", and you should select EVERYONE in her address book. (And of course, set the "stop processing more rules" bit). You may have to update this rule as she adds to her address book.
The very last rule is the key. This one is only going to be processed if NONE of the others match. You simply have this rule match everything, and dump everything into a folder named "Junk Mail".
That's it. No extra software required. When I go visit her, she usually has a ton of stuff in Junk Mail, just give it a quick look to make sure there is nothing your rules are missing, and dump it for her.
P.S. If that's not geeky enough for you, I also recommend Cloudmark.
Anyone want to start a company around it? (Only half serious).
Did anyone from Slashdot attend this hearing yesterday? What was the result?
LA times story is mirrored at the San Jose Mercury-News as well.
Read it here (free registration required, yadda, yadda):
Mass Rollout of DVR Technology Stuck on 'Pause'
That table was called guzinta because it listed which module "goes into" this one.
The operating-system provided debugger for CP/M was called DDT. Ostensibly this stood for Dynamic Debugging Tool, but most assumed it was a reference to the now-banned pesticide.
Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC.
I didn't say it was acceptible, but it is reality. Banks are like any other company, they have fixed budgets for things like support, and in these economic times those budgets are typically stretched thin or are being cut.
Managers are going to look for any way to stretch that budget, and if that means ignoring 5% of the user base, frankly some of them would be willing to take that risk. (Plus they can always play the 'fingerpointing' game with Intuit if push comes to shove).
What percentage of the available base of tech support personnel have Macintosh experience? Is it similar to the 5 to 8% you quote for desktop penetration? If so, that bank is going to have a really hard time hiring some techs who can answer Macintosh questions intelligently. As a result they're going to have to pay them more to retain them. You can imagine where this leads in a manager's mind.
It may well suck, but decisions that come down to money often do.