The GP says the odds of you winning the lottery, not the odds of someone winning the lottery. If the person he is quoting is correct, and I won't even pretend to know whether he is, each year there must be a small number of planetary systems in the Universe 'lucky' enough to get a visit from a passing neutron star. I'm not saying the odds of winning the lottery are big, but I personally would be surprised if the odds of death by neutron star in our lifetime is anywhere near the odds of winning the 6/49. But I like the analogy a lot.
There's nothing wrong per se with your piece and you shouldn't necessarily read too much personally into stuff like "Worst. Article. Ever." You're just a victim of an editor blowing the lede again. The reaction would probably have been less negative if he had ended by writing, "Some very different ideas on how to make your computing experience, if not your computer, better. What are your top five ideas?" But he didn't. He quoted the poster verbatim and left it at that, and left you to the pikes, halberts and pitchforks of the Slashdot community.
So now you're pig on a spit. Um... welcome to Slashdot. We hope you'll enjoy your stay.
But what about the dozens of binaries you run on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and all the other OSs recently shown as patched on Secunia. If you're reading this in anything other than a text-only browser and you haven't recompiled from source, you are vulnerable, regardless of the application sitting in/bin/. That's precisely the point of the article.
I'd mod you up +1 for insight, but -1 for presumptiveness.
When I lived in New Delhi, brown outs were a frequent problem and surges were a real hazard. A colleague of mine returned home once to the smell of ozone and burning plastic and found that a surge had left a scorch mark where his fax machine used to be. Any kind of electronic device required a special kind of expensive current regulator to protect against spikes, and even with one you were no better off if the power ever up and died. A desktop system in this sort of environment would be a mistake. Using laptops is a huge advantage, since it lives on its own power supply and really doesn't care much (or so it seemed to me) about brown outs and surges. So... Go MIT!
BUT, what you appear to be saying too is that developing countries can choose only three of the four items you list. That's bunk. Education is central to long-term development and while e-learning is mostly bullshit, computer science and engineering education needs computers.
Also, you'd be best to check your assumptions about the "Third World" at the door. There is a world of difference in the infrastructure and education needs between Burundi and Papua New Guinea on the one hand and Mexico and Kenya on the other. There are many 'Third Worlds' and few of them are of the sort you are probably imagining.
Let's imagine for a moment that I thought that knitting was the coolest thing. Were I to say, "Start offering stuff like darning and crochet...", you'd laugh in my face. Big, loud, throaty laughs, too, I'd reckon.
IP TV has the opportunity of satisfying micro-communities like anime and SciFi buffs (and, heck, knitting wonks), but to say that the 'big studios' will learn some sort of lesson from it is to completely misrepresent what they do and why they have so much money today. They don't care about narrowcasting because it doesn't get them where they want to be. If IP TV had heaps of viewers, they would care, but it doesn't, so they don't. It's another stupid idea, driven solely by technology, that has arrived stillborn.
I have flown through LAX from Asia to Canada twice and both times I marveled at the idiocy of having to line up like cattle to go through immigration and then walk with your luggage from the one terminal to the other to catch a *connecting flight*. What on Earth would stop a person from entering the US on a ticket to Vancouver or Toronto and not bother continuing the rest of their journey? I can't imagine I am the first to think of this idea. To boot, the airport is a toilet, with virtually no comforts or amenities you'd find at almost ANY other international airport. Coming from Singapore it was a horrid shock. I have sworn never to fly through the US again and in five years I have kept to that promise.
Investigator1: We noticed that the 25 credit card fraud victims each shopped at The Gap five months ago. We talked to the store manager and interviewed the employees. One pimply faced teenager broke down in his interview and admitted he gave the credit card numbers to a member of a well-known, local crime syndicate. We arrested five people in our fair city. We recommend people carefully read their credit card statements each month and report any unauthorized purchases.
Investigator2: We noticed that the 5000 credit card fraud victims had hard drives choking on pornography and had several key loggers. The key loggers were programmed to access an IRC channel that hasn't been active in five months. As the fraudulent purchases all took place in Eastern Europe, it is unlikely we will ever catch the perps. We recommend you do your shopping locally and avoid using the Internet for any financially sensitive activities.
Soon, there will be SHA-++. And inevitably, Microsoft will make SHA-# ("sha-SHARP") that will take as much computing power to generate as it will to break. Ah, progress.
Seriously, if they are so opposed to deep linking, why don't they change their site so the entire page is run off their index page and manage all navigation with form POST arguments rather than GETs. Putting up a rule that people are going to bypass anyways is idiotic and then punishing them is only going to garner you bad press. The solution is technological. You'd think an Interweb company like this would get it, but... never mind.
I would imagine in the trenches, your nodes must suffer more from mud, rain, lack of sleep and jammed rifles cartridges. If I were you, I'd put your systems in a climate-controlled environment. You'd see a lot fewer failures.
With your hubris of hundreds, try your cynicism with someone else.
The author of the article makes a big deal about heat and hard drives. I have built and rebuilt lots of desktop systems and I've seen lots of things burn out, but I have never, ever seen a hard disk fail on a computer that wasn't on a RAID-0 system and wasn't doing constant, heavy-duty through-put (all of them off-line video editors, where you almost always expect a drive to fail 'any day now'). I did buy one drive that quickly showed itself to be a dud and replaced it with an identical model with no further failures.
What's the deal? Does anyone else here go through conniption fits every time you install a new HD?
No, I also doubt the legal system checks prior art outside the country to issuing a patent, but that doesn't mean that you can't bring up foreign prior art as a defense. Seems to me to be pretty easy to pierce Mastushita's argument by demonstrating prior art from the US (or wherever) since it would demonstrate that Matsushita didn't invent the technology in the first place (again, this is assuming that the rollover tooltip and this technology are the same).
Whatever you think of them, patents are there ostensibly to protect the people who invested money and time, however minor, in things they actually invented, not to reward squatters who invented nothing but were the first in line at the patents office that day.
Can someone be a little more clear on what this behaviour actually *is*? I saw this story on NHK news the other night here in Osaka and it looked a whole lot like a standard roll-over tooltip. I'll tell you it sent a chill up my spine thinking that a Japanese court could/would enforce a patent on a rollover tooltip. That would suck, since it would mean either a) the defense of 'prior art' doesn't apply in Japan if it is foreign prior art and b) Japanese companies are free to enforce patents for things they simply copied from non-Japanese companies. I find both to be unlikely.
The parent post suggests that the two help methods are distinct in some way, but since I don't use either of the products myself, so I have no way to know what it is that this fuss is about.
EA has a market cap of, get this, nearly 20 billion dollars. I don't have the historical data, but like most dot-com companies and the healthy majority of most estabilished, publically traded companies, this cash was probably originally acquired through an IPO (or a series of IPOs). Some companies still generate debt the old fashioned way, by asking a small circle of prospective shareholders to front them some money in return for a cut of the profits and a say in how the company is run and these are the companies who should bend over backwards for the investors who ponied up the dough. I mean, it's pretty hard to say 'no' to a guy who wrote you a check for 200Gs, no?
But with a volume of 14 MILLION shares traded today (Jan. 27), I'd be willing to bet most of the shareholders aren't original IPO holders. Most of the shares have been probably been held by dozens or hundreds of people, whose chief interest is not the long-term health of the company, but short term gain. They are gamblers, opportunists who benefit from companies gutting themselves at the first sign of trouble or, in this case, at the latest sign of massive profit.
I honestly don't care whether EA directors believe these layoffs are beneficial for their company in the long run. Perhaps they are. Perhaps it will give them elbow room to do something amazing or risky or important. But don't tell me they 'owe' anything to a bunch of day traders or that those day traders do anything more than circulate debt. Each time those shares changes hands they become less important and more like plain, old fashion debt, like a loan at a bank.
If you honestly think that the stock market drives the economy, good for you. I hope it keeps you warm at night each time a company lays off workers/consumers just so they can keep their P/E ratio in line with market expectations.
I used to manage the Discovery Channel Canada's web site at a time when we were transforming the site from an online science news magazine to a video-on-demand supplier of Discovery Channel Canada material. One of the things a few of us were interested in doing was offering up transcripts of aired programs. Doing it was simple, even then, since most TV tuner cards were capable of grabbing the captioning info from a vertical interval and dumping it to a text file. The main problem, I thought, was that the material was always ALL CAPS and chock-a-block with seplling mistaks (in my own opinion, I thought that after the show had aired, the captions were actually useless for anything more than internal archival purposes). The real problem, though, was that often (really often), we didn't actually own the copyright.
Commonly, an outside company produces a show for a broadcaster. Once the show has aired, they are free to sell it to other broadcasters in other regions. So they are particularly feverish about protecting their material from the Internet. I mean, why would a broadcaster in Germany want to buy a television program translated into German if its English transcripts were available on the Internet? Well, I thought that was a garbage argument, but the lawyers didn't. In fact, the supply contracts with outside show producers were so fanatically exact, that using the captions for anyone other than the hard of hearing was simple out of the question.
So if the broadcaster can't use that material, what makes Google think they can?
Besides, do you think for one moment that Fox will let anyone use stills and complete transcripts of The Simpsons? Not in a million years, man.
Exactly. So the proper way to install Windows from an old CD without a prior or alternate connection to the Internet and no hardware firewall/router is to 1) Install Windows, 2) Connect to Internet, 3) Download patches and service packs, 4) Burn CD with patches, 5) Get off Internet, 6) FDISK, Reinstall, patch. Regardless of whether this is a reasonable solution, at the moment it is the only solution for most single-PC homes that use Windows (and that would be almost ALL single-PC homes.)
Of course, sometimes this doesn't work. I have a friend in Toronto who was essentially unable to install Windows for two days because of the Blaster worm. He installed three times and was unable to finish downloading the Windows Updates before his PC rebooted.
This is really a problem of having installation software on disks that can get out-of-date. It is not a Windows-only problem, but it happens to be an overwhelmingly, predominantly Windows problem. It is also a result of most ISPs doing absolutely nothing about reigning in infected machines. Microsoft: bad. ISPs: Double-plus bad.
When I got into journalism school in 1991, I think digital audio editing was just being experimented with by many radio newsrooms. The way to edit stories then was to use a stiff, one-sided razor blade, an aluminum cutting block and translucent blue tape (or to mix a story down from two reel-to-reels to a third recorder). I like to think I was good at making edits, but my fingers weren't as dry as most other reporters and often you could hear the audio become softer and muddy at my edit points.
After I returned from freelancing in India, there was one CBC radio piece I wanted to use for my demo tape. I never bothered to ask for a copy from the newsroom, but I had all of the old source tapes. So I stitched a copy together using a shareware, two-channel, 16-bit audio editor (CoolEdit, I think). I was absolutely astonished at how easy it was to edit the piece. The quality was easily as good as you would expect to get on a cassette tape. The very idea that anyone would use audio tape in news gathering in this day and age makes me want to laugh.
In the editing suites at my old journalism school, there were also editing blocks that were 3/4 inches wide in the TV editing studios. Hard to believe people used to use razors on TV tapes too!
The English to which you refer, Middle English, had no fixed spelling conventions. If you read anything written prior to the 1600s, you will find several common spellings of 'colour', with or without the 'u' and with one 'l' or two. Shakespeare himself spelled it both 'color' and 'colour'. There simply is no correct spelling; there is only the style of English to which you subscribe. If you are American, you usually drop the 'u'. If you are British, you usually include it. If you are Canadian you go crazy: "This Labour Day, the Canadian Labor Congress hopes to raise labour issues...." Yeah, my head hurts, too.
All of the things you list have been persistent complaints for a long time against Flash. But an intelligent design in the hands of a good programmer overcomes all of them. Unfortunately, you need to have a good command of Actionscript, server-side programming, browser-based Javascript and frames-based HTML. O'Reily's Flash Hacks book covers most of these in a pretty comprehensive way. So the problem, as ever, isn't Flash, it's the design and underlying code that sucks.
As I understand it, the universe has only one megnetic field and the Earth (and other masses) merely distorts that field. Same goes for gravity. Is this not true? I realize this doesn't change the sense of the article at all, but it always bothers me to hear people talk of the "Earth's" magnetic field like it is somehow unconnected to anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
The GP says the odds of you winning the lottery, not the odds of someone winning the lottery. If the person he is quoting is correct, and I won't even pretend to know whether he is, each year there must be a small number of planetary systems in the Universe 'lucky' enough to get a visit from a passing neutron star. I'm not saying the odds of winning the lottery are big, but I personally would be surprised if the odds of death by neutron star in our lifetime is anywhere near the odds of winning the 6/49. But I like the analogy a lot.
There's nothing wrong per se with your piece and you shouldn't necessarily read too much personally into stuff like "Worst. Article. Ever." You're just a victim of an editor blowing the lede again. The reaction would probably have been less negative if he had ended by writing, "Some very different ideas on how to make your computing experience, if not your computer, better. What are your top five ideas?" But he didn't. He quoted the poster verbatim and left it at that, and left you to the pikes, halberts and pitchforks of the Slashdot community.
So now you're pig on a spit. Um... welcome to Slashdot. We hope you'll enjoy your stay.
But what about the dozens of binaries you run on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and all the other OSs recently shown as patched on Secunia. If you're reading this in anything other than a text-only browser and you haven't recompiled from source, you are vulnerable, regardless of the application sitting in /bin/. That's precisely the point of the article.
When I lived in New Delhi, brown outs were a frequent problem and surges were a real hazard. A colleague of mine returned home once to the smell of ozone and burning plastic and found that a surge had left a scorch mark where his fax machine used to be. Any kind of electronic device required a special kind of expensive current regulator to protect against spikes, and even with one you were no better off if the power ever up and died. A desktop system in this sort of environment would be a mistake. Using laptops is a huge advantage, since it lives on its own power supply and really doesn't care much (or so it seemed to me) about brown outs and surges. So... Go MIT!
BUT, what you appear to be saying too is that developing countries can choose only three of the four items you list. That's bunk. Education is central to long-term development and while e-learning is mostly bullshit, computer science and engineering education needs computers.
Also, you'd be best to check your assumptions about the "Third World" at the door. There is a world of difference in the infrastructure and education needs between Burundi and Papua New Guinea on the one hand and Mexico and Kenya on the other. There are many 'Third Worlds' and few of them are of the sort you are probably imagining.
Let's imagine for a moment that I thought that knitting was the coolest thing. Were I to say, "Start offering stuff like darning and crochet...", you'd laugh in my face. Big, loud, throaty laughs, too, I'd reckon.
IP TV has the opportunity of satisfying micro-communities like anime and SciFi buffs (and, heck, knitting wonks), but to say that the 'big studios' will learn some sort of lesson from it is to completely misrepresent what they do and why they have so much money today. They don't care about narrowcasting because it doesn't get them where they want to be. If IP TV had heaps of viewers, they would care, but it doesn't, so they don't. It's another stupid idea, driven solely by technology, that has arrived stillborn.
I have flown through LAX from Asia to Canada twice and both times I marveled at the idiocy of having to line up like cattle to go through immigration and then walk with your luggage from the one terminal to the other to catch a *connecting flight*. What on Earth would stop a person from entering the US on a ticket to Vancouver or Toronto and not bother continuing the rest of their journey? I can't imagine I am the first to think of this idea. To boot, the airport is a toilet, with virtually no comforts or amenities you'd find at almost ANY other international airport. Coming from Singapore it was a horrid shock. I have sworn never to fly through the US again and in five years I have kept to that promise.
Because SSL protects no one against key loggers.
Investigator1: We noticed that the 25 credit card fraud victims each shopped at The Gap five months ago. We talked to the store manager and interviewed the employees. One pimply faced teenager broke down in his interview and admitted he gave the credit card numbers to a member of a well-known, local crime syndicate. We arrested five people in our fair city. We recommend people carefully read their credit card statements each month and report any unauthorized purchases.
Investigator2: We noticed that the 5000 credit card fraud victims had hard drives choking on pornography and had several key loggers. The key loggers were programmed to access an IRC channel that hasn't been active in five months. As the fraudulent purchases all took place in Eastern Europe, it is unlikely we will ever catch the perps. We recommend you do your shopping locally and avoid using the Internet for any financially sensitive activities.
How's that?
Soon, there will be SHA-++. And inevitably, Microsoft will make SHA-# ("sha-SHARP") that will take as much computing power to generate as it will to break. Ah, progress.
Seriously, if they are so opposed to deep linking, why don't they change their site so the entire page is run off their index page and manage all navigation with form POST arguments rather than GETs. Putting up a rule that people are going to bypass anyways is idiotic and then punishing them is only going to garner you bad press. The solution is technological. You'd think an Interweb company like this would get it, but... never mind.
I would imagine in the trenches, your nodes must suffer more from mud, rain, lack of sleep and jammed rifles cartridges. If I were you, I'd put your systems in a climate-controlled environment. You'd see a lot fewer failures.
With your hubris of hundreds, try your cynicism with someone else.
The author of the article makes a big deal about heat and hard drives. I have built and rebuilt lots of desktop systems and I've seen lots of things burn out, but I have never, ever seen a hard disk fail on a computer that wasn't on a RAID-0 system and wasn't doing constant, heavy-duty through-put (all of them off-line video editors, where you almost always expect a drive to fail 'any day now'). I did buy one drive that quickly showed itself to be a dud and replaced it with an identical model with no further failures.
What's the deal? Does anyone else here go through conniption fits every time you install a new HD?
No, I also doubt the legal system checks prior art outside the country to issuing a patent, but that doesn't mean that you can't bring up foreign prior art as a defense. Seems to me to be pretty easy to pierce Mastushita's argument by demonstrating prior art from the US (or wherever) since it would demonstrate that Matsushita didn't invent the technology in the first place (again, this is assuming that the rollover tooltip and this technology are the same).
Whatever you think of them, patents are there ostensibly to protect the people who invested money and time, however minor, in things they actually invented, not to reward squatters who invented nothing but were the first in line at the patents office that day.
Can someone be a little more clear on what this behaviour actually *is*? I saw this story on NHK news the other night here in Osaka and it looked a whole lot like a standard roll-over tooltip. I'll tell you it sent a chill up my spine thinking that a Japanese court could/would enforce a patent on a rollover tooltip. That would suck, since it would mean either a) the defense of 'prior art' doesn't apply in Japan if it is foreign prior art and b) Japanese companies are free to enforce patents for things they simply copied from non-Japanese companies. I find both to be unlikely.
The parent post suggests that the two help methods are distinct in some way, but since I don't use either of the products myself, so I have no way to know what it is that this fuss is about.
Whoa. That's a load of horse crap.
EA has a market cap of, get this, nearly 20 billion dollars. I don't have the historical data, but like most dot-com companies and the healthy majority of most estabilished, publically traded companies, this cash was probably originally acquired through an IPO (or a series of IPOs). Some companies still generate debt the old fashioned way, by asking a small circle of prospective shareholders to front them some money in return for a cut of the profits and a say in how the company is run and these are the companies who should bend over backwards for the investors who ponied up the dough. I mean, it's pretty hard to say 'no' to a guy who wrote you a check for 200Gs, no?
But with a volume of 14 MILLION shares traded today (Jan. 27), I'd be willing to bet most of the shareholders aren't original IPO holders. Most of the shares have been probably been held by dozens or hundreds of people, whose chief interest is not the long-term health of the company, but short term gain. They are gamblers, opportunists who benefit from companies gutting themselves at the first sign of trouble or, in this case, at the latest sign of massive profit.
I honestly don't care whether EA directors believe these layoffs are beneficial for their company in the long run. Perhaps they are. Perhaps it will give them elbow room to do something amazing or risky or important. But don't tell me they 'owe' anything to a bunch of day traders or that those day traders do anything more than circulate debt. Each time those shares changes hands they become less important and more like plain, old fashion debt, like a loan at a bank.
If you honestly think that the stock market drives the economy, good for you. I hope it keeps you warm at night each time a company lays off workers/consumers just so they can keep their P/E ratio in line with market expectations.
Well, dood,
All I can say is, "Lawyers! Start Your ENGINES!!!" and we'll see which of us is right.
And there is where Google will get shivved.
I used to manage the Discovery Channel Canada's web site at a time when we were transforming the site from an online science news magazine to a video-on-demand supplier of Discovery Channel Canada material. One of the things a few of us were interested in doing was offering up transcripts of aired programs. Doing it was simple, even then, since most TV tuner cards were capable of grabbing the captioning info from a vertical interval and dumping it to a text file. The main problem, I thought, was that the material was always ALL CAPS and chock-a-block with seplling mistaks (in my own opinion, I thought that after the show had aired, the captions were actually useless for anything more than internal archival purposes). The real problem, though, was that often (really often), we didn't actually own the copyright.
Commonly, an outside company produces a show for a broadcaster. Once the show has aired, they are free to sell it to other broadcasters in other regions. So they are particularly feverish about protecting their material from the Internet. I mean, why would a broadcaster in Germany want to buy a television program translated into German if its English transcripts were available on the Internet? Well, I thought that was a garbage argument, but the lawyers didn't. In fact, the supply contracts with outside show producers were so fanatically exact, that using the captions for anyone other than the hard of hearing was simple out of the question.
So if the broadcaster can't use that material, what makes Google think they can?
Besides, do you think for one moment that Fox will let anyone use stills and complete transcripts of The Simpsons? Not in a million years, man.
I see busy days ahead for http://chillingeffects.org/.
Exactly. So the proper way to install Windows from an old CD without a prior or alternate connection to the Internet and no hardware firewall/router is to 1) Install Windows, 2) Connect to Internet, 3) Download patches and service packs, 4) Burn CD with patches, 5) Get off Internet, 6) FDISK, Reinstall, patch. Regardless of whether this is a reasonable solution, at the moment it is the only solution for most single-PC homes that use Windows (and that would be almost ALL single-PC homes.)
Of course, sometimes this doesn't work. I have a friend in Toronto who was essentially unable to install Windows for two days because of the Blaster worm. He installed three times and was unable to finish downloading the Windows Updates before his PC rebooted.
This is really a problem of having installation software on disks that can get out-of-date. It is not a Windows-only problem, but it happens to be an overwhelmingly, predominantly Windows problem. It is also a result of most ISPs doing absolutely nothing about reigning in infected machines. Microsoft: bad. ISPs: Double-plus bad.
When I got into journalism school in 1991, I think digital audio editing was just being experimented with by many radio newsrooms. The way to edit stories then was to use a stiff, one-sided razor blade, an aluminum cutting block and translucent blue tape (or to mix a story down from two reel-to-reels to a third recorder). I like to think I was good at making edits, but my fingers weren't as dry as most other reporters and often you could hear the audio become softer and muddy at my edit points. After I returned from freelancing in India, there was one CBC radio piece I wanted to use for my demo tape. I never bothered to ask for a copy from the newsroom, but I had all of the old source tapes. So I stitched a copy together using a shareware, two-channel, 16-bit audio editor (CoolEdit, I think). I was absolutely astonished at how easy it was to edit the piece. The quality was easily as good as you would expect to get on a cassette tape. The very idea that anyone would use audio tape in news gathering in this day and age makes me want to laugh. In the editing suites at my old journalism school, there were also editing blocks that were 3/4 inches wide in the TV editing studios. Hard to believe people used to use razors on TV tapes too!
The English to which you refer, Middle English, had no fixed spelling conventions. If you read anything written prior to the 1600s, you will find several common spellings of 'colour', with or without the 'u' and with one 'l' or two. Shakespeare himself spelled it both 'color' and 'colour'. There simply is no correct spelling; there is only the style of English to which you subscribe. If you are American, you usually drop the 'u'. If you are British, you usually include it. If you are Canadian you go crazy: "This Labour Day, the Canadian Labor Congress hopes to raise labour issues...." Yeah, my head hurts, too.
All of the things you list have been persistent complaints for a long time against Flash. But an intelligent design in the hands of a good programmer overcomes all of them. Unfortunately, you need to have a good command of Actionscript, server-side programming, browser-based Javascript and frames-based HTML. O'Reily's Flash Hacks book covers most of these in a pretty comprehensive way. So the problem, as ever, isn't Flash, it's the design and underlying code that sucks.
As I understand it, the universe has only one megnetic field and the Earth (and other masses) merely distorts that field. Same goes for gravity. Is this not true? I realize this doesn't change the sense of the article at all, but it always bothers me to hear people talk of the "Earth's" magnetic field like it is somehow unconnected to anything else.