Why does slashdot keep posting Dvorak's articles? This guy made a career by publishing trolls. When he is not writing blatant flamebaits, he is producing medicore pulp articles like this one.
This is yet another one of those generic articles marveling about how technology is influencing our lives today. Nothing to see here, move along.
Writing an email, is almost exactly the same as writing an informal letter. You know, one that you put into envelope and drop into the mailbox. How many slashdot readers still corespond with friends or familly on paper? And no, postcards, and wish cards don't count!
It seems to be a dying art nowdays, but for hundreds of years people used snail mail to communicate with eachother. And for the most part, we figured out how to deal with the ambiguity of the language. You simply articulate your thoughts. Instead of writing one short ambigous sentence, you can allways write 3, that will clearly state your position, intent and indicate your tone. This is what they should teach you in an english class. Why did you think they make you write all these essays, and position papers in your english classes. Written communication is as important as verbal communication, if not more.
English language is not ambigous! We do not need verbal clues, and tone of voice to convey meaning. Think about it - somehow novel writers, poets, journalists and bloggers have no problems communicating their messages using written word. And yet, the second they start composing an email, all their english skills somehow dissapear and they revert to using emoticons, boldface and italics.
No, the #1 reason why emails are misinterpreted is that people who send and read them have poor written communication and reading comprehension skills to begin with.
I use email every day. It is actually my prefered mode of communication. And even though English is my second language, my messages are very rarely misinterpreeted. In the rare cases someone misunderstands me, I actually go to a great length to re-phease what I said and set the record straight in a follow-up email.
Is this just me, or is this legislation absolutely redundant and unnecessary?
It is not going to change a damn thing either, because 90% of time these games are bought by parents/guardians of with their explicit permission.
If little billy gets carded in the video store, he will come the next day with his older brother, or his Dad and get the game anyway.
Eh, legislation for sake of legislating. This is nothing else but some blatant political maneuvering. Because "protecting children" looks good on the record:P
Yes they are atomic (ie not divisible). But that does not mean that you cannot detect presence of objects smaller than a pixel in a photographs. Hell, sometimes it is even worse - you can have an object that is smaller than 1 pixel appearing directly on the border line between 2 pixels. For example let's assume that you put a black dot, on a white canvas and photograph it from a distannce so that in the image it's size is 1 pixel or less.
Let's assume that the center of your dot is on the borderline of pixel 1 and pixel 2. Thus those two pixels are not "pure" white. They are "poluted" by the black dot, but both still contain white. Since you can't subdivide pixels, you need to aproximate the color value to be displayed. Thus the color of the pixel will most likely be a mix of its component colors. In our case, pixel 1 and pixel 2 will probably end up gray-ish.
Now, if you know the consistency of pure white, consistency of pure black, and the scale of your picture (ie. 1 pixel = n square inches) you can calculate the size based on the size and color of the non-pure pixels.
They probably use muli-spectral data for these type of images (ie. data is collected over multiple wavelengths, not just visible light). If you have more bands than just standard RGB you can be even more accurate in measuring these things.
You would be surprised. I teach an introductory computer class, and every semester I have 2-3 people in the room who are actually shocked when I show them how Word 2003 can doublespace their papers for them. These poor souls have been doing it manually for most of their hig-school and college career.
This allways makes me wonder how did these people manage to get into the university? God only knows... But I guess you don't have to write allot of papers in Word when you are a Dance or Pys-Ed major:P
Last semester I brought my laptop with an older Debian install (now I have Kubuntu on it) to show them how Linux looks like. After the class girl actually approached get her computer look more like mine. She was especially impressed with virtual desktops, cute KDE theme (I think some variation on Plastic), gkrellm and the kooldock app (from kdelook.org). I gave her links to apps like StyleXP, ObjectDock, SeriousSamurize and VirtuaWin. And I also gave her a Knoppix CD and showed her how to boot it up.
She was impressed with all this stuff, but I have no clue what happened to her. I would like to think that I helped her to discover that there are things out there other than windows. Maybe, just maybe, she grew up to be a linux user... Probably not though. Most likely she ditched the Knoppix CD somewhere, and then figured that all these cool looking apps eat memory like there is no tomorrow and ditched them too:P
Seriously, did anyone RTFA at all? What the hell are you people talking about? The article clearly says that only when you use a patent against specific GPL'd software, you loose the right to distribute that particular software.
So, for example if you patent a vi clone, you might loose the right to distribute vi, but you can still distribute emacs - and etc..
Btw, great job on choosing MSNBC as a source for GPL related story. I wouldn't really read to much into what they say, without confirming the details using some less biased source.
So they want to work on a free, Open Source, technology to develop an Open Standard which will be used to... Lock stuff up so that it is not open, and not free.
Not only is this an ideological conflict but also a logical one.
Yeah, but MS wants to take over the search market. They just can't stand the thought that there might be "another big company" out there.
Look at what happened ot Netscape. MS was an OS maker, Netscape was a browser company. Shouldn't be an issue, right? Well, we all know what happened there. MS doesn't like competition. It is monoculture.
MS already succeded brainwashing clueless users to associate computer with Windows, and Internet with IE. But if you ask these users how do they search the web they will tell you they google for stuff. Therefore MS monoculture approach is broken here. Users realize that not all good things come from MS. You use Google for search and MS for other stuff...
And then people start experimenting - they figure that if google is so much better than MSN then maybe product X is better than equivalent MS offering.
So, to keep the iron grip on "teh internets", MS must brainwash the masses to think that search = MSN. And for that to happen Google must die. Fortunately this is easier said than done, and I don't see Google going away anytime soon.:)
Quick question - how is this "Your Rights Online" article? It has nothing to do with my rights. Or with online for that matter...
I'm not working for MS and I'm not planning to. And it's not like Google is gonna hire me anytime soon. And I think most people here are in similar situation. So this should really be filed under "Other people's rights offline" or something.:P
They are already doing that. They have their "Get the Facts" campaign, they sponsored SCO and funded various studies to show that Windows hal lower TCO.
All I'm saying here is: you cannot just sue linux, buecase there is no one linux entity to sue. The best they can do is to fight some kind of guerilla war. Google on the other hand is a big corporation. You can roll out the big legal guns, and fight an open battle of corporate expionage, legal warfare, and double crossing.
This would not be a problem, if Microsoft was not planning to take over the search market. Right now, I think Google is their #1 enemy. Linux is probably #2 but you can't easily fight a corporate war with an open source project. Google on the other hand is a big target. This was an opening salvo. I'm guessing things can only escalate from here.
How is this news? I would expect VOIP to get better. If it was getting worse - that would be newsworthy I guess...
What next? Study shows that CPU's are getting faster? Study shows that Linux is getting easier to install and maintain? I would say this is the natural progress. Things improve over time - that's just how it works.
This is so true. We will be seeing more and more of this.
At some point, it will become impossible for a small or middle sized company to break into any market. It will be impossible to innovate in any marked, as all the corporate gigants will be locking out eachother with their patents.
And hopefully at some point someone will figure out what was going wrong and fix the patent system. But not before alot of finger pointing, yelling screaming and generally anti-consumer actions. Because of our patent law, and our messed up views on IP US will loose it's spot among the technology leaders.
Let me get this straight? Amazon sues people because they "used tools to provide secure credit card transactions"??? You mean like SSL? They SUED SOMEONE FOR USING FRIKEN SSL?
Ok, we don't know that. I'm sure there has to be something more than using SSL there, but still. If a company can patent something as trivial as "secure credit card transactions" and successfully win a patent infringement case, it will mean that all online stores will be liable. It's a scary thought...
Aww... Our little baybe fox is growing up! Look, it just had a first big script kiddie attack trying to take over one of its' sites.. Ah, how this time passes. Only yesterday it was a tiny alpha project no one cared about...
I think this only goes to show that Firefox is really becoming more popular nowdays.
Oh... You mean the pop-culture, retard, backwards meaning of hacker... As in hackers the movie? Whew... I thought I will have to outsource myself somewhere else:P Heh, silly normal people and their miss-appropriation of technical jargon...
Well, it's not a new idea. It's been around for quite a while now - discussed, debated, deffended and attacked. The fact is that it is simply a bad idea...
I just feel like we are moving back in time in a sense that we are now at preaty much the same point, as we were when VCR's just became popular enough to give movie studio execs heart attacks. People were going nuts about video, and look at us now - no one cares anymore.
Now people discovered that you can actually burn movies on DVD's or even share them over internet *gasp*. This is exactly the same thing as before - new technology forcing entertainment biz to change it's business model.
The only difference now is of course that we have something that was not here before - disposable throw away technology that accomplishes nothing. The only reason why VCR's were not DRM'ed before is that it was impractical and people would not like it.
Today however, most people are already brainwashed by the made-up stories about pirates and their foul evil copyright raping ways. Sigh.. People actually believe that DRM is good. Joe Public is anally raped by MPAA on a daily basis and he doesn't care. Heh, he loves every minute of it, because he cannot figure out that things could be different.
Movies are information - nothing more. And the truth is that the nature of information is that it can either be kept secret, or copied. It cannot be exclusively owned, it cannot be lent or leased. You can make all technological barriers to information flow you want, but it will flow anyway. The only way to stop the flow is to close the tap, and keep it contained.
... Actually, I don't know what I was trying to say here. Sorry for the rant, but DRM pisses me off.
Heh... This might just be some advertising bit that told you how easy it is to burn movies with their software or something... And it is possible that they promptly removed it after the Gorkster case made it illegal to make copyright infringment friendly advertisements...
This just gave me an idea... If you sell blank CD's and put "Burn any movie in minutes and share with your friends" wouldn't that land you in jail, and make your CD brand illegal in the face of the Gorkster decision?
So they are working on delivering movies encumbered with DRM, and lock people to their platform. And this is progress? I feel like we are moving back in time here...
We as consumers need to really put our food down on this DRM crap...
Well... I guess the fact that they quizzed him does not supprise me. I mean, any company of that size and public exposure will want to ensure high standards by screening even the most promissing and highly reffered applicants. The fact that they contacted him, does not mean they should not run him through this screening.
What is sucky about this is the fact that they scheduled him for an interview after he withdrew the application. That seems kindoff fishy, and I would not want a prospective employer retain and reuse my info this way after I told them to suck it.
BlueShoes has this interesting app called web file manager. Essentially it creates an explorer like session within your browser. It relies heavily on javascript and stuff...
Why not FTP? This is probably the simplest solution, and one that is most flexible. Unless of course you are concerned about privacy and stuff.
I think for clueless windows users FTP might be the most intuitive thing there is. They simply type a ftp address in explorer and have access to their FTP folders in the same way as they would be accessing the local files.
Furthermore, you can create a shortcut on their desktop, and set Explorer to remember the login - making it a completely transparent interface to the users (as long as they are connected to the internet that is). I was amazed how my dumbest users picked up the notion of storing stuff "on the company server" when I did that for them...
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!
Why does slashdot keep posting Dvorak's articles? This guy made a career by publishing trolls. When he is not writing blatant flamebaits, he is producing medicore pulp articles like this one.
This is yet another one of those generic articles marveling about how technology is influencing our lives today. Nothing to see here, move along.
I call bullshit on this!
Writing an email, is almost exactly the same as writing an informal letter. You know, one that you put into envelope and drop into the mailbox. How many slashdot readers still corespond with friends or familly on paper? And no, postcards, and wish cards don't count!
It seems to be a dying art nowdays, but for hundreds of years people used snail mail to communicate with eachother. And for the most part, we figured out how to deal with the ambiguity of the language. You simply articulate your thoughts. Instead of writing one short ambigous sentence, you can allways write 3, that will clearly state your position, intent and indicate your tone. This is what they should teach you in an english class. Why did you think they make you write all these essays, and position papers in your english classes. Written communication is as important as verbal communication, if not more.
English language is not ambigous! We do not need verbal clues, and tone of voice to convey meaning. Think about it - somehow novel writers, poets, journalists and bloggers have no problems communicating their messages using written word. And yet, the second they start composing an email, all their english skills somehow dissapear and they revert to using emoticons, boldface and italics.
No, the #1 reason why emails are misinterpreted is that people who send and read them have poor written communication and reading comprehension skills to begin with.
I use email every day. It is actually my prefered mode of communication. And even though English is my second language, my messages are very rarely misinterpreeted. In the rare cases someone misunderstands me, I actually go to a great length to re-phease what I said and set the record straight in a follow-up email.
Is this just me, or is this legislation absolutely redundant and unnecessary?
:P
It is not going to change a damn thing either, because 90% of time these games are bought by parents/guardians of with their explicit permission.
If little billy gets carded in the video store, he will come the next day with his older brother, or his Dad and get the game anyway.
Eh, legislation for sake of legislating. This is nothing else but some blatant political maneuvering. Because "protecting children" looks good on the record
Yes they are atomic (ie not divisible). But that does not mean that you cannot detect presence of objects smaller than a pixel in a photographs. Hell, sometimes it is even worse - you can have an object that is smaller than 1 pixel appearing directly on the border line between 2 pixels. For example let's assume that you put a black dot, on a white canvas and photograph it from a distannce so that in the image it's size is 1 pixel or less.
Let's assume that the center of your dot is on the borderline of pixel 1 and pixel 2. Thus those two pixels are not "pure" white. They are "poluted" by the black dot, but both still contain white. Since you can't subdivide pixels, you need to aproximate the color value to be displayed. Thus the color of the pixel will most likely be a mix of its component colors. In our case, pixel 1 and pixel 2 will probably end up gray-ish.
Now, if you know the consistency of pure white, consistency of pure black, and the scale of your picture (ie. 1 pixel = n square inches) you can calculate the size based on the size and color of the non-pure pixels.
They probably use muli-spectral data for these type of images (ie. data is collected over multiple wavelengths, not just visible light). If you have more bands than just standard RGB you can be even more accurate in measuring these things.
You would be surprised. I teach an introductory computer class, and every semester I have 2-3 people in the room who are actually shocked when I show them how Word 2003 can doublespace their papers for them. These poor souls have been doing it manually for most of their hig-school and college career.
This allways makes me wonder how did these people manage to get into the university? God only knows... But I guess you don't have to write allot of papers in Word when you are a Dance or Pys-Ed major :P
Last semester I brought my laptop with an older Debian install (now I have Kubuntu on it) to show them how Linux looks like. After the class girl actually approached get her computer look more like mine. She was especially impressed with virtual desktops, cute KDE theme (I think some variation on Plastic), gkrellm and the kooldock app (from kdelook.org). I gave her links to apps like StyleXP, ObjectDock, SeriousSamurize and VirtuaWin. And I also gave her a Knoppix CD and showed her how to boot it up.
She was impressed with all this stuff, but I have no clue what happened to her. I would like to think that I helped her to discover that there are things out there other than windows. Maybe, just maybe, she grew up to be a linux user... Probably not though. Most likely she ditched the Knoppix CD somewhere, and then figured that all these cool looking apps eat memory like there is no tomorrow and ditched them too :P
Seriously, did anyone RTFA at all? What the hell are you people talking about? The article clearly says that only when you use a patent against specific GPL'd software, you loose the right to distribute that particular software.
So, for example if you patent a vi clone, you might loose the right to distribute vi, but you can still distribute emacs - and etc..
Btw, great job on choosing MSNBC as a source for GPL related story. I wouldn't really read to much into what they say, without confirming the details using some less biased source.
So they want to work on a free, Open Source, technology to develop an Open Standard which will be used to... Lock stuff up so that it is not open, and not free.
Not only is this an ideological conflict but also a logical one.
Yeah, but MS wants to take over the search market. They just can't stand the thought that there might be "another big company" out there.
Look at what happened ot Netscape. MS was an OS maker, Netscape was a browser company. Shouldn't be an issue, right? Well, we all know what happened there. MS doesn't like competition. It is monoculture.
MS already succeded brainwashing clueless users to associate computer with Windows, and Internet with IE. But if you ask these users how do they search the web they will tell you they google for stuff. Therefore MS monoculture approach is broken here. Users realize that not all good things come from MS. You use Google for search and MS for other stuff...
And then people start experimenting - they figure that if google is so much better than MSN then maybe product X is better than equivalent MS offering.
So, to keep the iron grip on "teh internets", MS must brainwash the masses to think that search = MSN. And for that to happen Google must die. Fortunately this is easier said than done, and I don't see Google going away anytime soon. :)
Quick question - how is this "Your Rights Online" article? It has nothing to do with my rights. Or with online for that matter...
I'm not working for MS and I'm not planning to. And it's not like Google is gonna hire me anytime soon. And I think most people here are in similar situation. So this should really be filed under "Other people's rights offline" or something. :P
Hehe... That fits too! :P
They are already doing that. They have their "Get the Facts" campaign, they sponsored SCO and funded various studies to show that Windows hal lower TCO.
All I'm saying here is: you cannot just sue linux, buecase there is no one linux entity to sue. The best they can do is to fight some kind of guerilla war. Google on the other hand is a big corporation. You can roll out the big legal guns, and fight an open battle of corporate expionage, legal warfare, and double crossing.
Oh my! Clash of the Titans!
This would not be a problem, if Microsoft was not planning to take over the search market. Right now, I think Google is their #1 enemy. Linux is probably #2 but you can't easily fight a corporate war with an open source project. Google on the other hand is a big target. This was an opening salvo. I'm guessing things can only escalate from here.
How is this news? I would expect VOIP to get better. If it was getting worse - that would be newsworthy I guess...
What next? Study shows that CPU's are getting faster? Study shows that Linux is getting easier to install and maintain? I would say this is the natural progress. Things improve over time - that's just how it works.
This is so true. We will be seeing more and more of this.
At some point, it will become impossible for a small or middle sized company to break into any market. It will be impossible to innovate in any marked, as all the corporate gigants will be locking out eachother with their patents.
And hopefully at some point someone will figure out what was going wrong and fix the patent system. But not before alot of finger pointing, yelling screaming and generally anti-consumer actions. Because of our patent law, and our messed up views on IP US will loose it's spot among the technology leaders.
Let me get this straight? Amazon sues people because they "used tools to provide secure credit card transactions"??? You mean like SSL? They SUED SOMEONE FOR USING FRIKEN SSL?
Ok, we don't know that. I'm sure there has to be something more than using SSL there, but still. If a company can patent something as trivial as "secure credit card transactions" and successfully win a patent infringement case, it will mean that all online stores will be liable. It's a scary thought...
Aww... Our little baybe fox is growing up! Look, it just had a first big script kiddie attack trying to take over one of its' sites.. Ah, how this time passes. Only yesterday it was a tiny alpha project no one cared about... I think this only goes to show that Firefox is really becoming more popular nowdays.
Does that mean that being a briliant, enthusiastic programmer will be a crime now? I mean... Crap...
Oh... You mean the pop-culture, retard, backwards meaning of hacker... As in hackers the movie? Whew... I thought I will have to outsource myself somewhere else :P Heh, silly normal people and their miss-appropriation of technical jargon...
Well, it's not a new idea. It's been around for quite a while now - discussed, debated, deffended and attacked. The fact is that it is simply a bad idea...
I just feel like we are moving back in time in a sense that we are now at preaty much the same point, as we were when VCR's just became popular enough to give movie studio execs heart attacks. People were going nuts about video, and look at us now - no one cares anymore.
Now people discovered that you can actually burn movies on DVD's or even share them over internet *gasp*. This is exactly the same thing as before - new technology forcing entertainment biz to change it's business model.
The only difference now is of course that we have something that was not here before - disposable throw away technology that accomplishes nothing. The only reason why VCR's were not DRM'ed before is that it was impractical and people would not like it.
Today however, most people are already brainwashed by the made-up stories about pirates and their foul evil copyright raping ways. Sigh.. People actually believe that DRM is good. Joe Public is anally raped by MPAA on a daily basis and he doesn't care. Heh, he loves every minute of it, because he cannot figure out that things could be different.
Movies are information - nothing more. And the truth is that the nature of information is that it can either be kept secret, or copied. It cannot be exclusively owned, it cannot be lent or leased. You can make all technological barriers to information flow you want, but it will flow anyway. The only way to stop the flow is to close the tap, and keep it contained.
... Actually, I don't know what I was trying to say here. Sorry for the rant, but DRM pisses me off.
Heh... This might just be some advertising bit that told you how easy it is to burn movies with their software or something... And it is possible that they promptly removed it after the Gorkster case made it illegal to make copyright infringment friendly advertisements...
This just gave me an idea... If you sell blank CD's and put "Burn any movie in minutes and share with your friends" wouldn't that land you in jail, and make your CD brand illegal in the face of the Gorkster decision?
So they are working on delivering movies encumbered with DRM, and lock people to their platform. And this is progress? I feel like we are moving back in time here...
We as consumers need to really put our food down on this DRM crap...
Well... I guess the fact that they quizzed him does not supprise me. I mean, any company of that size and public exposure will want to ensure high standards by screening even the most promissing and highly reffered applicants. The fact that they contacted him, does not mean they should not run him through this screening.
What is sucky about this is the fact that they scheduled him for an interview after he withdrew the application. That seems kindoff fishy, and I would not want a prospective employer retain and reuse my info this way after I told them to suck it.
first post :P
BlueShoes has this interesting app called web file manager. Essentially it creates an explorer like session within your browser. It relies heavily on javascript and stuff...
Why not FTP? This is probably the simplest solution, and one that is most flexible. Unless of course you are concerned about privacy and stuff.
I think for clueless windows users FTP might be the most intuitive thing there is. They simply type a ftp address in explorer and have access to their FTP folders in the same way as they would be accessing the local files.
Furthermore, you can create a shortcut on their desktop, and set Explorer to remember the login - making it a completely transparent interface to the users (as long as they are connected to the internet that is). I was amazed how my dumbest users picked up the notion of storing stuff "on the company server" when I did that for them...