I think the submitter believes that the EEG somehow magically pierces into the brain and that it would be a simple trick to just put some voltage on there and "make stuff happen."
No.
EEGs measure a gross aproximation of all signals it can pick up. You got something like 25 discs on your head trying to pick up any signal and then come out with a composite. Or you can look at each individual output and decide if there's some abnormalities. Heck, your cell phone is shooting 6 watts at your head and nothing happens.
Essentially, you're asking how to transmit to shortwave or something using your walkman.
That said, Dr. Michael Persinger does this kind of thing with a complex helmet which works with magentic fields, not EEG equiment, to affect the brain. The results vary, but he has pretty much debunked the religious and paranormal experience.
The more draconian the laws get in regards to the content industry the more its going to hurt them. How do new TV shows hit critical mass? Usually tape trading and word of mouth. Remember Seinfeld's first couple of seasons? No you don't. No one does because no one watched. The show achieved critical mass later on. This tends to be true of a lot of television and media. You get some kind of loud cult following and if enough people jump aboard the bandwagon suddenly Joe Sixpack is singing its praises too.
How will they promote their new shows? Who will be sharing tapes with friends? Pushing play on the VCR and saying "Check this shit out?" No one. That means it will be harder to market new television, lots more canceled shows, lots more midseason replacemnts, and lots more reruns. The Simpsons is already on three times a day. Heck, Cheers is still on.
At this point I do hope they shoot themselves in the foot. Put up all the damn digital protection you want and my incentive to watch will go down. Not because I'm going to knee-jerk about digital rights, but because if my Tivo can't hold it for me, chances are I'm not rushing home at 7CST to watch your show on YOUR schedule.
Toss in I can't share this show with anyone and you've lost more customers.
People will just shift to the DVD rental market and movie theaters. The TV will collect dust while people discover better things to do with their time.
Could happen or the very least these policies could hurt the industry in ways it is not taking seriously.
The ActiveX stuff they've already downloaded would still execute, its getting new ones that will be an issue. I mean, whatever MS does there will be issues and they have to do something. Might as well do it piecemeal.
It blows my mind people are being told to wipe down their computers and reinstall everything just because of spyware. Blows my mind people might be losing stuff like baby pictures or other irreplacable data. Perhaps all this IE nonsense is teaching people how to backup properly.
>those of us with more than 2 braincells with nothing worth watching.
Its this kind of elitism that makes people wonder why theres so much shitty sci-fi out there like Firefly, Lexx, badly produced and translated anime, etc. From the perspective of non-fanboys your love of some of these shows makes you look like the very same idiot you decry.
Sci-fi is popular and everywhere. Being a fan of the genre doesnt make you some kind of uber-man.
And then consider the people who dont even watch TV, they must think you're an idiot for not cracking open some good books.
In other words, glass housing is relative and you're setting yourself up for a fall defending some show, especially when TV entertainment is so very subjective.
Not to mention your condescending attitude doesnt really make any point other than "I'm a fan, I'm better than you non-fans!!!" Which is pretty sad.
First off, lets understand the simple fact that all art is subjective but this show did fall into many bad cliches. I thought it was an excellent pilot and up until they started "expanding and explaining" the universe it was set in it was good but..
It was a vehicle for more cheesy western tales with a sci-fi twist. That's cheesy star trek as you can get, and lets not fault star trek too hard as it was original at its time.
Then the cheesy religious figure, the pathetic attempts at building drama with 'faith vs reason.' Again, Kirk v Spock was a lot more interesting in this regard and new 40 years ago.
The girl who was experimented on really didnt go anywhere and seemed horribly out of place.
It was a bad show held up by a lack of other decent programming and Whedon fan-boyism. I can't imagine too many investors staying aboard after the last few episodes. Sometimes cancelled shows deserve to be cancelled. Unlike, say, Futurama they had a stable time slot, promotion out the wazoo, lots of internet support, etc and they couldnt pull it off because a critical mass of people tuned in and said this sucks. I'm one of those people. You may not be. But lets not dress up its cancellation as some big mistake and lets be honest with the fact it was a cliche ridden show that blatantly stole from both star trek and cowboy bebop, except it stole badly.
If you're a devoted fan none of this is going to change your mind, nor should it, but you have to realize that if youre trying to win in a media which measures success by popularity you have to contend with the masses. Sometimes the masses are right,sometimes not. In this case I think they were.
A space cowboy, a space priest, etc all in a very unrealistic setting flying about in spacecraft which much cost a small fortune just doesnt do it for me. This show was cancelled for a reason, it just wasn't good. In fact many people think its terrible.
Yes, good sci-fi is hard to come by and its difficult to make it into either TV or Film, but this show really puts the 'Wheadon is a goldenboy' meme to rest.
All reports of feral children I've read list them as walking on their two legs so I'd assume its innate at this point. Some of them will get on all fours more often than we will, but that actually sounds practical if it wasn't for the social stigma of walking around like a dog now and again.
Dean more or less declared war on the media and worked hard to sidestep it and reach people directly . A lot of the media elites didn't like this nor the criticism he hard for them and targetted him from day one. They tried to dig up dirt, found nothing, but once they got that bad mic recording of Dean 'rallying the troops' they played the hell out of it. Thus, more or less, the end of Dean.
Hence, candidate -- and media critic -- Howard Dean reacted with humor Tuesday in Milwaukee as journalists presented him with a long-sleeve white T-shirt. It carried the motto "Establishment Media" in front, and a slogan swiped from Dean in the back: "We Have the Power, Dean Press Corps 2004."
On December 1, 2003, Howard Dean was ahead by twenty points in the polls when he appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews and said, "We're going to break up the giant media enterprises." This pronouncement went far beyond the governor's previous public musings about possibly re-regulating the communications industry, and amounted to a declaration of war on the corporations that administer the flow of information in the United States.
It was an extraordinarily noble and dangerous thing to do: when he advocated a truly free press, Dr. Dean was provoking the corrupt media conglomerates that control what most Americans see and hear and read, and thereby control what most Americans think.
Is there going to be one? Screw all this conjecture and benchmarking, I'd rather try it out on my machine and see how well it works and if I like it before dropping fifty bucks on a videogame.
Too pragmatic?
There's something suspicious about companies that don't bother with demos.
Ive had a sidekick since they were made available. I'm sporting the color model now and have made 6 returns because of poor manufacturing quality. Three for the B&w and three for the color.
Its a nice but it has some serious downsides:
1. Total vendor lock in. The SSH client is free, but the upgrade is 10 bucks. Games are 10 bucks.
This isn't a palm where you can just upload apps onto it (unless youre a developer).
2. Spotty reception is putting it nicely.
3. Its as thick and big as a bar of soap and sadly this new model doesnt look much smaller.
4. The web proxy isn't scaling. It was usable over a year ago but now surfing anytime during the day means lots of timeouts. The device is too popular for the servers.
Next time I have some cash I'm going to pick up the treo or perhaps just a normal cell phone.
Because people with no practical business experience know what every company should be doing.
Because someone uses Linux they think they own it.
Because of OSS elitism.
Because of the fear of success. (How Linspire's success hurts Mandrake or Redhat is beyond me)
Because some people think Lindows should be fighting their political battles for them, when their government reps should be. If your country is hopelessly corrupt its not Lindows fault.
Because elitists hate GUIs and other tools which can make Linux popular.
Because of the Robertson hate-fest which is popular around here.
Remember these are public libraries so that means:
1. More of your tax dollars wasted.
2. More downtime of critical library systems. (there aint no card catalog anymore).
3. The potential for inter-library viruses.
4. The potential for keyloggers, etc.
At your house, feel free to use a browser you coded using VB, but at my library I expect the crap to work. If that means getting rid of MS, then so be it.
Whats wrong with pet grooming? Seriously, have you ever owned a dog? They can get pretty filthy quickly and unless you like bathing 30-80lbs animals who don't want to take a bath, well that's you're only route.
Toss in work, kids, etc and that 30+ bucks to groom your dog doesn't seem like a big deal.
Simply put, the economics of the situation tend to work out.
I would be pretty skeptical about investing in Linux retail. What are they making money off of? Pure hardware sales? The margins on hardware aren't too hot. I'm sure labor is pretty good, but the buyers probably already know how to do most things and paying seventy bucks an hour for someone to remount your CD-ROM or whatever is pretty excessive.
Not to mention he's not only competing with the local electronics stores full of wintel machines, but web-based businesses with much less overhead. (is he selling on the web also?)
Good luck and all, but there's more money to be made in dog grooming, if you want to be technical about it. At the end of the day the "idiot" business is the one which can't pay the bills.
This does tug at my nostalgia strings as I remember the local computer stores I dragged my parents to in the late 80s. None of which are still in business. Even then I found that it was cheaper to order stuff through the macwarehouse or the computershopper magazine than the brick and morter stores. I must have been around 10 years old, most adults already know how to scour for deals and its a lot easier with the web.
I'm assuming he doesnt have that much overhead and the carwash subsidizes the actual store. It looks like he bought a carwash and thought it would be fun to build a Linux store on the property. So that space was already going to waste and the Linux store is really just a hobby business built on top of his real business.
Another positive aspect is that people can just walk in and play with Linux to see what its like. I'm sure many people are curious, but not curious enough to partition their drive or get a second machine. Kinda how the Apple store is full of people who will never own Apples.
The upside is that its free, but takes 18 hours of tweaking to actually clean your specific model the first time. If you have an import or a rare car, it might not clean it at all.
There's a slim chance your car wont start after the wash, leaving all your gauges at 16, 16, 16, 16, 16...
Your "Save the Whales" bumper sticker might be replaced with a "Save the Pengiuns" sticker or a photo of a fat guy in front of a computer will be appended to your original bumper sticker.
Pasty employees will snort at your aftermarket body effects and graphics, unless they are glowing then they will tell you how 'l33T they are.
Conversely, the very same pasty employees will give you the weakest high-five you have ever experienced if you have made any modifications to your onboard computer or stereo system.
After the wash your car will not be able to share a lane with any car registered in Washington state.
Your mileage will increase but for some inexplicable reason you'll have to learn how to drive stick as your automatic will cease to exist.
That's what it is. Every MS hole gets on the front page and rightly so, but something like half the PHP installations world-wide are at risk and slashdot buries it?
I use linux too, like most people here, and would have really appreciated seeing this earlier.
Obviously, I can DOS your computer by overtaking your resources by running some app a bazillion times.
I can also use launching apps to say I'm from MS, Yahoo, etc and tell the user to login and change their password (among other things). What user will say "I see you can run apps remotely on my computer but I know this is just the shell URI problem!"
>Or am I just reading this wrong?
Yeah, you're thinking like a techie and not a user. Problem #1 in the industry and here as well.
MS seems to be telling the world "buy XP or else" when they should be patching all vulnerable systems ASAP.
Granted, 2K still gets security patches but its not going to get that new firewall or IE changes. There are a lot of win2k installs out there which will be around for quite sometime until Joe User's computer dies and he buys a new XP machine. Of course, the fate of the 2K machine is still unknown, it could be given to one of his kids, parents, etc.
The zombie problem cannot be solved by SP2 alone. Win2K needs to be addressed just as fully.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the submitter believes that the EEG somehow magically pierces into the brain and that it would be a simple trick to just put some voltage on there and "make stuff happen."
No.
EEGs measure a gross aproximation of all signals it can pick up. You got something like 25 discs on your head trying to pick up any signal and then come out with a composite. Or you can look at each individual output and decide if there's some abnormalities. Heck, your cell phone is shooting 6 watts at your head and nothing happens.
Essentially, you're asking how to transmit to shortwave or something using your walkman.
That said, Dr. Michael Persinger does this kind of thing with a complex helmet which works with magentic fields, not EEG equiment, to affect the brain. The results vary, but he has pretty much debunked the religious and paranormal experience.
The real title will be the Return of the Sith.
IE doesnt support blink, you're thinking netscape and Mozilla.Man, the MS bashing has hit a new low when people are attributing Moz/Netscape stuff to MS.
http://webdesign.about.com/library/tags/bltags-
The more draconian the laws get in regards to the content industry the more its going to hurt them. How do new TV shows hit critical mass? Usually tape trading and word of mouth. Remember Seinfeld's first couple of seasons? No you don't. No one does because no one watched. The show achieved critical mass later on. This tends to be true of a lot of television and media. You get some kind of loud cult following and if enough people jump aboard the bandwagon suddenly Joe Sixpack is singing its praises too.
How will they promote their new shows? Who will be sharing tapes with friends? Pushing play on the VCR and saying "Check this shit out?" No one. That means it will be harder to market new television, lots more canceled shows, lots more midseason replacemnts, and lots more reruns. The Simpsons is already on three times a day. Heck, Cheers is still on.
At this point I do hope they shoot themselves in the foot. Put up all the damn digital protection you want and my incentive to watch will go down. Not because I'm going to knee-jerk about digital rights, but because if my Tivo can't hold it for me, chances are I'm not rushing home at 7CST to watch your show on YOUR schedule.
Toss in I can't share this show with anyone and you've lost more customers.
People will just shift to the DVD rental market and movie theaters. The TV will collect dust while people discover better things to do with their time.
Could happen or the very least these policies could hurt the industry in ways it is not taking seriously.
The ActiveX stuff they've already downloaded would still execute, its getting new ones that will be an issue. I mean, whatever MS does there will be issues and they have to do something. Might as well do it piecemeal.
It blows my mind people are being told to wipe down their computers and reinstall everything just because of spyware. Blows my mind people might be losing stuff like baby pictures or other irreplacable data. Perhaps all this IE nonsense is teaching people how to backup properly.
Man, why not just a simple "emergency" patch to lock down ActiveX? A year ago.
MS needs to unbundle the activeX settings changes from all the other stuff they're trying in SP2.
>those of us with more than 2 braincells with nothing worth watching.
Its this kind of elitism that makes people wonder why theres so much shitty sci-fi out there like Firefly, Lexx, badly produced and translated anime, etc. From the perspective of non-fanboys your love of some of these shows makes you look like the very same idiot you decry.
Sci-fi is popular and everywhere. Being a fan of the genre doesnt make you some kind of uber-man.
And then consider the people who dont even watch TV, they must think you're an idiot for not cracking open some good books.
In other words, glass housing is relative and you're setting yourself up for a fall defending some show, especially when TV entertainment is so very subjective.
Not to mention your condescending attitude doesnt really make any point other than "I'm a fan, I'm better than you non-fans!!!" Which is pretty sad.
First off, lets understand the simple fact that all art is subjective but this show did fall into many bad cliches. I thought it was an excellent pilot and up until they started "expanding and explaining" the universe it was set in it was good but..
It was a vehicle for more cheesy western tales with a sci-fi twist. That's cheesy star trek as you can get, and lets not fault star trek too hard as it was original at its time.
Then the cheesy religious figure, the pathetic attempts at building drama with 'faith vs reason.' Again, Kirk v Spock was a lot more interesting in this regard and new 40 years ago.
The girl who was experimented on really didnt go anywhere and seemed horribly out of place.
It was a bad show held up by a lack of other decent programming and Whedon fan-boyism. I can't imagine too many investors staying aboard after the last few episodes. Sometimes cancelled shows deserve to be cancelled. Unlike, say, Futurama they had a stable time slot, promotion out the wazoo, lots of internet support, etc and they couldnt pull it off because a critical mass of people tuned in and said this sucks. I'm one of those people. You may not be. But lets not dress up its cancellation as some big mistake and lets be honest with the fact it was a cliche ridden show that blatantly stole from both star trek and cowboy bebop, except it stole badly.
If you're a devoted fan none of this is going to change your mind, nor should it, but you have to realize that if youre trying to win in a media which measures success by popularity you have to contend with the masses. Sometimes the masses are right,sometimes not. In this case I think they were.
A space cowboy, a space priest, etc all in a very unrealistic setting flying about in spacecraft which much cost a small fortune just doesnt do it for me. This show was cancelled for a reason, it just wasn't good. In fact many people think its terrible.
Yes, good sci-fi is hard to come by and its difficult to make it into either TV or Film, but this show really puts the 'Wheadon is a goldenboy' meme to rest.
All reports of feral children I've read list them as walking on their two legs so I'd assume its innate at this point. Some of them will get on all fours more often than we will, but that actually sounds practical if it wasn't for the social stigma of walking around like a dog now and again.
Lots links/info more at this blog entry
Heavy handed but interesting piece here:
Is there going to be one? Screw all this conjecture and benchmarking, I'd rather try it out on my machine and see how well it works and if I like it before dropping fifty bucks on a videogame.
Too pragmatic?
There's something suspicious about companies that don't bother with demos.
>he RF was dismal and talking on it was awkward
Ive had a sidekick since they were made available. I'm sporting the color model now and have made 6 returns because of poor manufacturing quality. Three for the B&w and three for the color.
Its a nice but it has some serious downsides:
1. Total vendor lock in. The SSH client is free,
but the upgrade is 10 bucks. Games are 10 bucks.
This isn't a palm where you can just upload apps onto it (unless youre a developer).
2. Spotty reception is putting it nicely.
3. Its as thick and big as a bar of soap and sadly this new model doesnt look much smaller.
4. The web proxy isn't scaling. It was usable over a year ago but now surfing anytime during the day means lots of timeouts. The device is too popular for the servers.
Next time I have some cash I'm going to pick up the treo or perhaps just a normal cell phone.
Because people with no practical business experience know what every company should be doing.
Because someone uses Linux they think they own it.
Because of OSS elitism.
Because of the fear of success. (How Linspire's success hurts Mandrake or Redhat is beyond me)
Because some people think Lindows should be fighting their political battles for them, when their government reps should be. If your country is hopelessly corrupt its not Lindows fault.
Because elitists hate GUIs and other tools which can make Linux popular.
Because of the Robertson hate-fest which is popular around here.
In other words, no good reason.
Remember these are public libraries so that means:
1. More of your tax dollars wasted.
2. More downtime of critical library systems. (there aint no card catalog anymore).
3. The potential for inter-library viruses.
4. The potential for keyloggers, etc.
At your house, feel free to use a browser you coded using VB, but at my library I expect the crap to work. If that means getting rid of MS, then so be it.
here.
Whats wrong with pet grooming? Seriously, have you ever owned a dog? They can get pretty filthy quickly and unless you like bathing 30-80lbs animals who don't want to take a bath, well that's you're only route.
Toss in work, kids, etc and that 30+ bucks to groom your dog doesn't seem like a big deal.
Simply put, the economics of the situation tend to work out.
I would be pretty skeptical about investing in Linux retail. What are they making money off of? Pure hardware sales? The margins on hardware aren't too hot. I'm sure labor is pretty good, but the buyers probably already know how to do most things and paying seventy bucks an hour for someone to remount your CD-ROM or whatever is pretty excessive.
Not to mention he's not only competing with the local electronics stores full of wintel machines, but web-based businesses with much less overhead. (is he selling on the web also?)
Good luck and all, but there's more money to be made in dog grooming, if you want to be technical about it. At the end of the day the "idiot" business is the one which can't pay the bills.
This does tug at my nostalgia strings as I remember the local computer stores I dragged my parents to in the late 80s. None of which are still in business. Even then I found that it was cheaper to order stuff through the macwarehouse or the computershopper magazine than the brick and morter stores. I must have been around 10 years old, most adults already know how to scour for deals and its a lot easier with the web.
I'm assuming he doesnt have that much overhead and the carwash subsidizes the actual store. It looks like he bought a carwash and thought it would be fun to build a Linux store on the property. So that space was already going to waste and the Linux store is really just a hobby business built on top of his real business.
Another positive aspect is that people can just walk in and play with Linux to see what its like. I'm sure many people are curious, but not curious enough to partition their drive or get a second machine. Kinda how the Apple store is full of people who will never own Apples.
The upside is that its free, but takes 18 hours of tweaking to actually clean your specific model the first time. If you have an import or a rare car, it might not clean it at all.
There's a slim chance your car wont start after the wash, leaving all your gauges at 16, 16, 16, 16, 16...
Your "Save the Whales" bumper sticker might be replaced with a "Save the Pengiuns" sticker or a photo of a fat guy in front of a computer will be appended to your original bumper sticker.
Pasty employees will snort at your aftermarket body effects and graphics, unless they are glowing then they will tell you how 'l33T they are.
Conversely, the very same pasty employees will give you the weakest high-five you have ever experienced if you have made any modifications to your onboard computer or stereo system.
After the wash your car will not be able to share a lane with any car registered in Washington state.
Your mileage will increase but for some inexplicable reason you'll have to learn how to drive stick as your automatic will cease to exist.
Its not on the main page if you are using default settings, but this is:
Ballmer - Xbox 'Can Take Sony' In Next Generation
And the Atak worm.
sigh
That's what it is. Every MS hole gets on the front page and rightly so, but something like half the PHP installations world-wide are at risk and slashdot buries it?
I use linux too, like most people here, and would have really appreciated seeing this earlier.
MR:I will email you all these crappy garage rock mp3s I own thanks to mp3.com all day, everyday until you buy my OS.
Dell: Holy crap, he's serious.
MR: Here they come!
Dell: My ears! Oh, the agony. Here take the check!
Obviously, I can DOS your computer by overtaking your resources by running some app a bazillion times.
I can also use launching apps to say I'm from MS, Yahoo, etc and tell the user to login and change their password (among other things). What user will say "I see you can run apps remotely on my computer but I know this is just the shell URI problem!"
>Or am I just reading this wrong?
Yeah, you're thinking like a techie and not a user. Problem #1 in the industry and here as well.
What about all the win2000 installs?
MS seems to be telling the world "buy XP or else" when they should be patching all vulnerable systems ASAP.
Granted, 2K still gets security patches but its not going to get that new firewall or IE changes. There are a lot of win2k installs out there which will be around for quite sometime until Joe User's computer dies and he buys a new XP machine. Of course, the fate of the 2K machine is still unknown, it could be given to one of his kids, parents, etc.
The zombie problem cannot be solved by SP2 alone. Win2K needs to be addressed just as fully.
Will SP2 be installed if the user has his or her PC set to automatically update?
Should I assume that friends and family will all call me on the same day asking "what the hell is this firewall thing asking me all these questions?"
And they wept during the install as they realized they failed to raise a son with manners.