I agree that this would be desirable but I guess profit margins would be so low that no manufacturer is interested in such a thing. It has been said many times that the (almost) perfect laptop can be built today. One in each size. Just nobody is interested in actually building it because to whom would they market their next model?
That 0,9" added screen-size makes a surprisingly huge difference in terms of ergonomy and almost no difference in terms of portability. Speaking from expirience here, as I own a Vaio TX5N (11.1") and a few MacBooks and Dells of various sizes.
When you start talking about screen-sizes below 12" then every tenth of an inch suddenly starts to really matter. You probably wouldn't notice the difference between working at a 13,5" versus a 14" screen. But you will notice the difference between a 12" and a 11.5" screen and very quickly, too.
In my expirience anything below 12" is only for roughly 1 hour of work. After that it turns into a chore (eyestrain etc.). People with extraordinary eyesight may not have a problem working on screens smaller than 12" for extended periods of time but I'd claim that for people with average eyesight (to which I count myself - no glasses) 12" is the smallest comfortable size.
Agree'd. Also notice how there is surprisingly little google hating in the comments this time. Is it going out of fashion already? Admittedly it must be really hard for the google-haters to find something to whine about in this particular story... I guess we'll just see some "too good to be true"-rants and that's it.
Back on topic: This would be a truly awesome move by google. Let's see if they can really pull it off, they'll have the whole telco industry against them. Talk about a game-changer!
In a few years we'll be watching TV in a window on our desktop just like we watch youtube today. Comcast will either adapt or vanish. Same old story, really...
Well, we're obviously discussing a technical solution that would require everybody to change or upgrade their mail infrastructure - with all the caveats. If we could roll out such a system then there are no inherent technical barriers to key exchange. For example mail clients could automatically detect when you send mail to an address for the first time and perform a key-exchange before sending the actual mail. The key-exchange could be along the lines of: The remote MTA creates a captcha for you to solve and after you have solved it, it would add your public key to the recipients whitelist and accept your mail. For the sender all of this could be wrapped up in a simple dialog box ("Enter these letters"). Ofcourse each recipient could configure whether it wants to allow that kind of auto-whitelisting at all.
This can be implemented today, all the technologies exist. The obvious problem is mass adoption...
On a side-note: Despite the mass-adoption problem I do think this would make for an excellent open source project. It should be possible to encapsulate the functionality into plugins and modules for the various popular MTAs and MUAs. The main problem would be to find people who are familar and comfortable with the different APIs of all the qmails, Postfixes, Exims, KMails, Outlooks and Thunderbirds of the world. This lends itself to the open source model; create a standard, a protocol and some API guidelines, then attract a herd of developers to build the various implementations incrementally.
If the email from the stranger is properly signed, then you look at it. If it is not spam, then you mark the sender as someone you trust. If it is spam, then you mark the sender as a spammer, and further messages from that identity are rejected. Spammers cannot afford to make a new key pair for every spam and ensure that the public key gets to the PKI that you use to validate messages.
Actually generating keys can be very cheap when you don't need them to be secure. Spammers would probably not even use a RNG for their keys. Nonetheless I still like the idea because *if* it was widely adopted (a pipe dream) it would quickly become common practice to only really look at mail that is signed with a key that is on your whitelist. There'd be easy ways to let people manually put themselves on your whitelist (e.g. with a captcha-form) for cold contacts, that stuff could even be built into mail-clients. And it would raise the bar for mass-mailings significantly since spammers *can* crack captchas - but they'd have to do so for each individual recipient.
Usually you only make the initial contact through a form and subsequent communication is done by E-Mail. Furthermore I could very well imagine contact forms that additionally offer an option to upload my public key to their whitelist, after entering a captcha. That way I could even make the initial contact my normal E-Mail with very little extra-effort.
Heck, if something like this is standarized they'd be firefox plugins popping up left and right that automate the process of presenting your E-Mail public key to any website that you sign up with.
Why do you need to receive mail from absolute strangers? I most certainly don't. And if I had to then I'd probably offer some kind of webform in order to not drown in spam...
If you're talking about notifications from webshops and the ilk, I'd imagine there could be a simple way to whitelist certain addresses. E.g. during registration at a website there could be a button "allow e-mail from this site" that automatically imports the public key of that site. Not rocket science and certainly much better than what we have now.
There's a very simple solution for that particular use-case: Use a contact-form (with a captcha) and auto-whitelist all e-mails received via that form. Most support cold-contacts happen via a webform anyways so that's not much of a change from what we have today. Subsequent mails would then be picked up by the whilelist. Yes, spammers *could* hack the form and get themselves whitelisted, but the incentive is probably very low - who wants to spam a support channel that's most certainly not interested in your blue pills?
I thought we're talking about an implementation of trust-hierarchy in computer systems (as in the TFA). Ofcourse, when you parse the sentence with common sense there's no point in even wasting brain cycles on it. Computers have no common sense, though...
How so? There is only one factoid contained in the given input: The sentence declares itself false. Since we have no other information to validate against we must trust it by default, hence we assume the statement is True.
This is a bootstrapping problem. We must trust the very first factoid entering a system or we'll never get started. Alternatively we could decide to disallow self-referential input.
Really, these puzzles are completely irrelevant in a peer reputation system.
Well, I don't know which average non-geeks you asked but most non-geeks I know have never heard about napster. Napster was a short fad back in 2000 and probably there are still some people out there who remember it - but it's nowhere near as known as iTunes or, say, mp3.com
50 million dollars can buy *a lot* of marketing. One has to seriously wonder why they didn't simply start a new brand instead of paying so much for a partially tainted (not everybody remembers the good days of napster) and effectively dead one...
I'm the exclusive rights-holder of the globally established trademarks "drm-infested-music.com" and (related) "dim-executives.com". We both know that your brand-portfolio will never be complete without them, therefore I will (reluctantly) agree to sell it to you for the unbeatable (discounted, all-inclusive, wholesale, excl. tax) price of only 100 million US-dollars.
In order to make the deal more attractive to your shareholders I hereby agree that we pretend I'd have 50 million US dollars in the bank along with the trademarks, thus we can close the deal if you send me a cheque covering only 50 million US-dollars! This 50% monster-discount is only valid till the end of this month, act now!
Dude, you've been seriously brainwashed. You sound like the prototype of a "Corporate Drone".
I honestly pity anyone who seriously uses sentences like "If you can't orient toward the customer's need, we can't orient toward the need for you.".
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Amen!
I have seen more than one company that was effectively dysfunct in the way you describe. In one particularly disturbing example the CTO is a former taxi-driver(!), I kid you not. He apparently participated in some tech gigs before joining the company but nothing that would turn him into a competent manager by any metric. The boss praises him for his "communication skills" which pretty much translates to the constant ass-blowing (CTO towards CEO) that you mentioned. Other than that everybody knows that he's clueless, it's even obvious when you only look at the figures since he never meets a deadline (well, maybe once a year) and budgets frequently expand like supernovas. Needless to say the company has completely lost all its momentum because this guy accumulated a team of ass-blowers around him that, just like him, can't get shit done but knows how to disguise it in creamy communications...
The scary part is that in our economy this setup *can* work, depending on your business-model. The aforementioned company is making millions in revenue with a ridiculously crappy product, simply because the competition is equally bad or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
I somehow doubt that many people are buying these addon cards for Video. I mean, does anyone really watch movies on that tiny screen?
Dude...
I agree that this would be desirable but I guess profit margins would be so low that no manufacturer is interested in such a thing.
It has been said many times that the (almost) perfect laptop can be built today. One in each size. Just nobody is interested in actually building it because to whom would they market their next model?
I'd rather think 12" is the sweet spot.
That 0,9" added screen-size makes a surprisingly huge difference in terms of ergonomy and almost no difference in terms of portability.
Speaking from expirience here, as I own a Vaio TX5N (11.1") and a few MacBooks and Dells of various sizes.
When you start talking about screen-sizes below 12" then every tenth of an inch suddenly starts to really matter.
You probably wouldn't notice the difference between working at a 13,5" versus a 14" screen. But you will notice the difference between a 12" and a 11.5" screen and very quickly, too.
In my expirience anything below 12" is only for roughly 1 hour of work. After that it turns into a chore (eyestrain etc.). People with extraordinary eyesight may not have a problem working on screens smaller than 12" for extended periods of time but I'd claim that for people with average eyesight (to which I count myself - no glasses) 12" is the smallest comfortable size.
My thoughts exactly.
I wish slashdot would finally hire some editors with a clue. It can't be so hard, can it?
Seriously, the way slashdot is headed I won't be surprised when it dies the death-by-fork, soon...
Agree'd. Also notice how there is surprisingly little google hating in the comments this time. Is it going out of fashion already?
Admittedly it must be really hard for the google-haters to find something to whine about in this particular story... I guess we'll just see some "too good to be true"-rants and that's it.
Back on topic: This would be a truly awesome move by google. Let's see if they can really pull it off, they'll have the whole telco industry against them. Talk about a game-changer!
Yawn, a 10 second google search reveals that a smaller webserver has been created 9 years ago.
Nothing to see here, please move along...
In a few years we'll be watching TV in a window on our desktop just like we watch youtube today. Comcast will either adapt or vanish. Same old story, really...
In the near future you'll be able to watch your channel 5 over IP anyways and probably with better reception (i.e. no huge antenna needed) than today.
Dude, it gets even worse! Just try getting in touch with anybody in the Martian office at any time of the day! NOBODY there. It DOESN'T exist!
Well, we're obviously discussing a technical solution that would require everybody to change or upgrade their mail infrastructure - with all the caveats.
If we could roll out such a system then there are no inherent technical barriers to key exchange. For example mail clients could automatically detect when you send mail to an address for the first time and perform a key-exchange before sending the actual mail. The key-exchange could be along the lines of: The remote MTA creates a captcha for you to solve and after you have solved it, it would add your public key to the recipients whitelist and accept your mail. For the sender all of this could be wrapped up in a simple dialog box ("Enter these letters"). Ofcourse each recipient could configure whether it wants to allow that kind of auto-whitelisting at all.
This can be implemented today, all the technologies exist. The obvious problem is mass adoption...
On a side-note: Despite the mass-adoption problem I do think this would make for an excellent open source project. It should be possible to encapsulate the functionality into plugins and modules for the various popular MTAs and MUAs. The main problem would be to find people who are familar and comfortable with the different APIs of all the qmails, Postfixes, Exims, KMails, Outlooks and Thunderbirds of the world. This lends itself to the open source model; create a standard, a protocol and some API guidelines, then attract a herd of developers to build the various implementations incrementally.
Actually generating keys can be very cheap when you don't need them to be secure. Spammers would probably not even use a RNG for their keys. Nonetheless I still like the idea because *if* it was widely adopted (a pipe dream) it would quickly become common practice to only really look at mail that is signed with a key that is on your whitelist. There'd be easy ways to let people manually put themselves on your whitelist (e.g. with a captcha-form) for cold contacts, that stuff could even be built into mail-clients. And it would raise the bar for mass-mailings significantly since spammers *can* crack captchas - but they'd have to do so for each individual recipient.
Usually you only make the initial contact through a form and subsequent communication is done by E-Mail. Furthermore I could very well imagine contact forms that additionally offer an option to upload my public key to their whitelist, after entering a captcha. That way I could even make the initial contact my normal E-Mail with very little extra-effort.
Heck, if something like this is standarized they'd be firefox plugins popping up left and right that automate the process of presenting your E-Mail public key to any website that you sign up with.
Why do you need to receive mail from absolute strangers? I most certainly don't.
And if I had to then I'd probably offer some kind of webform in order to not drown in spam...
If you're talking about notifications from webshops and the ilk, I'd imagine there could be a simple way to whitelist certain addresses. E.g. during registration at a website there could be a button "allow e-mail from this site" that automatically imports the public key of that site. Not rocket science and certainly much better than what we have now.
There's a very simple solution for that particular use-case: Use a contact-form (with a captcha) and auto-whitelist all e-mails received via that form. Most support cold-contacts happen via a webform anyways so that's not much of a change from what we have today. Subsequent mails would then be picked up by the whilelist. Yes, spammers *could* hack the form and get themselves whitelisted, but the incentive is probably very low - who wants to spam a support channel that's most certainly not interested in your blue pills?
Or you could just adjust your monitor settings. You know, these little knobs that are all set to 105/100 right now.
I thought we're talking about an implementation of trust-hierarchy in computer systems (as in the TFA).
Ofcourse, when you parse the sentence with common sense there's no point in even wasting brain cycles on it.
Computers have no common sense, though...
There is no statement, hence there is no truth value to be assigned.
The sentence effectively translates to:
Knowledge[ NIL ]--
If the sentence would be:
"This sentence is false and the earth is flat."
Then that would translate to:
Knowledge[ EARTH_IS_FLAT ]--
Always assuming that we decide to trust the self-assessment of the sentence (i.e. it's the first input ever).
How so?
There is only one factoid contained in the given input: The sentence declares itself false.
Since we have no other information to validate against we must trust it by default, hence we assume the statement is True.
This is a bootstrapping problem. We must trust the very first factoid entering a system or we'll never get started.
Alternatively we could decide to disallow self-referential input.
Really, these puzzles are completely irrelevant in a peer reputation system.
True. Next?
Well, I don't know which average non-geeks you asked but most non-geeks I know have never heard about napster.
Napster was a short fad back in 2000 and probably there are still some people out there who remember it - but it's nowhere near as known as iTunes or, say, mp3.com
50 million dollars can buy *a lot* of marketing. One has to seriously wonder why they didn't simply start a new brand instead of paying so much for a partially tainted (not everybody remembers the good days of napster) and effectively dead one...
Sounds like a great deal!
Hey BestBuy, listen up:
I'm the exclusive rights-holder of the globally established trademarks "drm-infested-music.com" and (related) "dim-executives.com".
We both know that your brand-portfolio will never be complete without them, therefore I will (reluctantly) agree to sell it to you for the unbeatable (discounted, all-inclusive, wholesale, excl. tax) price of only 100 million US-dollars.
In order to make the deal more attractive to your shareholders I hereby agree that we pretend I'd have 50 million US dollars in the bank along with the trademarks, thus we can close the deal if you send me a cheque covering only 50 million US-dollars! This 50% monster-discount is only valid till the end of this month, act now!
Fibrechannel in every room. Yummy!
Dude, you've been seriously brainwashed.
You sound like the prototype of a "Corporate Drone".
I honestly pity anyone who seriously uses sentences like "If you can't orient toward the customer's need, we can't orient toward the need for you.".
Amen!
I have seen more than one company that was effectively dysfunct in the way you describe.
In one particularly disturbing example the CTO is a former taxi-driver(!), I kid you not. He apparently participated in some tech gigs before joining the company but nothing that would turn him into a competent manager by any metric. The boss praises him for his "communication skills" which pretty much translates to the constant ass-blowing (CTO towards CEO) that you mentioned. Other than that everybody knows that he's clueless, it's even obvious when you only look at the figures since he never meets a deadline (well, maybe once a year) and budgets frequently expand like supernovas. Needless to say the company has completely lost all its momentum because this guy accumulated a team of ass-blowers around him that, just like him, can't get shit done but knows how to disguise it in creamy communications...
The scary part is that in our economy this setup *can* work, depending on your business-model. The aforementioned company is making millions in revenue with a ridiculously crappy product, simply because the competition is equally bad or worse.