I'm very eager to know: how many times do you need to change batteries in your PocketPC on a regular day? Three times, five times or more?
Aren't these things far too power-hungry (running Windows Mobule, therefore requiring processors so powerful they'll simply blast away an entire Beowulf cluster of '80s 20MHz PC/386's in a benchmark) for simple note-taking?
I really long for the good old Psion Series 5mx that you could type away on continuously until your fingers bled before you would need to swap 2 ordinary AA cells...
Because of the ever increasing reliance on eyecandy generators (read: graphics cards), lots of memory and fast CPUs and hard drives.
Back in the day I wrote real-time data acquisition software that ran under MS-DOS and was stable as a rock and could take floodwaves of data in stride. Nowadays customers want more eyecandy resulting in Windows apps that can't even handle modest data input without dedicated hardware with copious amounts of RAM for buffering.
Want eyecandy? Take a blotter and suck on it. It's MUCH cheaper than any current video card and sure to change your outlook on life forever.
Um, no. The majority (81 out of 114) of root servers are not in the US. I may have miscounted a few (me being stoned and it being late), but that doesn't invalidate my point, not by a long shot.
at the end of the day, and this is the argument that I've yet to hear refuted... what's the harm of having the data to be mined stripped of personally identifying information, indexed, and linked to a database that stores the identifying information, which is accessible only by court order?
Troll troll troll your post Gently down the screen Merrily merrily merrily merrily Life is but a stream
It's all about transparency. Which is even harder to maintain if parts of the process are no longer tangible, in plain sight and all. Just how do you think you are going to verify that privacy is protected when you don't have access to the data, the software used to process it (both source code and actually running binaries) and the hardware it runs on? At least in the dead-tree era there would always be some paper trail to follow back to its source in case of malpractice.
I mean, it's not that hard to allow data mining AND protect privacy at the same time. [...]
Actually, this is Very Hard Indeed, precisely because of the lack of transparency, i.e. not knowing what gets done with that data in reality, not in theory. As long as you don't know for certain that the original data containing personally identifiable information is thoroughly and utterly destroyed, you can't be sure about your privacy no matter what you believe.
For another example of the dangers of a lack of transparency, read up on the recently uncovered voting irregularities at Black Box Voting. Shiver, shudder, then come again.
Book publishers have the means to exclude electronic searching as well, and have used this for as long as I know. (does that show my age?) It's in the disclaimer, which almost all books I know have somewhere on the first few pages. Relevnt part of it reads (approximately):
"No part of this publication may be reproduced, either in part or in full, either photographically, electronically, or by any other means, without express permission of the publisher."
There you have it, the dead-tree equivalent of 'robots.txt'.
The point with SMS is that the phone buttons are designed NOT to be pressed easily
They're designed that way because the designers are stupid IMHO. There must be more than eleventyhundred bazillion ways to prevent a keyboard from sending unwanted keypresses while still being ergonomic but most phones don't use them. I honestly don't know why. (BTW the cheapest and murest way is to cover the keyboard with a plastic flip cover when not in use)
Surely <wink> the phone manufacturers must have struck a deal with physical therapists to rake in some extra revenue...?
What many of us (in many different postings) are hinting at is that all this will inevitably lead to a debate on where the actual boundary between 'fair use' and copyright infringement actually lies. Since this distinction is not well defined at all (many people will have many different opinions) it will either rage ad infinitum or some arbitrary legislation will be passed, leaving it to flocks of lawyers to pick away at boundary cases.
Just to drop yet another example: I don't believe I'm the only one who can come up with a 'sliding window' search algorithm to extract all text from books using Amazon's 'Search Inside the Book' service. Should I now start my timer and clock the time it takes for some author to sue Amazon for making excerpts from books available online just because their search can be 'tweaked'? I hope not...
1. Take any book and scan/OCR it 2. Produce 4 derived works, each with every ((N % 4) + 1, N integer)'th word from the original in it. 3. ??? 4. Profit!!
Sigh. Soon 'they' will come running after someone whistling 'Always look on the bright side of life' or the theme song of 'The Bridge on the River Kwai', or kids hopping around on the pavement 'only ever so slightly like Michael Jackson did', aggressively panhandling them for performance license fees. It's a sick, sad world.
A locked screendoor will not stop a burglar - but it will stop your nosy neighbour just walking into your kitchen or your children to walk outside.
Gosh no..heaven forbid!! Your neighbour could actually come in and say 'Hi!' to your kids! Your kids could actually go outside and see for themselves what Nature really looks like instead of watching Cartoon Channel. The horror!
People, if some of you really get off on living in a 'war zone' 24/7 where you can trust nobody, please do, but I'm outta here.
These have been around in Japan for ages, I believe many are (being) translated into Eng(l|r)ish. Just search for 'dating sim' on Google. Add 'hentai' to your search according to preference.
Maybe the GPP is generalizing too much on all spreadsheet software out there, but I can think of several scenarios which many spreadsheets may have difficulty solving.
Given the example, what if B2 contains a formula which itself (recursively, conditionally) depends on A1? Only if the spreadsheet app contains or has access to a reasonably sophisticated CAS (Computer Algebra System) like Maple or Mathematica can you expect it perform well in this regard.
If you are looking for a support company for embedded NetBSD, check out Wasabi Systems. If I'm not mistaken, several port maintainers either work for Wasabi or are in frequent contact with them.
Half-truths are sometimes worse than the whole truth.
True: Shared source code is free, apparently without restrictions. Also true: You need to buy a runtime license for each and every device that you ship.[1]
[1]: From the webpage you link to: "A valid Windows CE 5.0 runtime license must be purchased for each Windows CE 5.0 derivative work prior to distribution.".
From link to "How to Buy Windows Embedded Operating Systems" on the same page: "Step 4 Acquire runtime licenses for commercial shipment. When you have completed testing and development and you are ready to bring your embedded system to market, you must acquire runtime licenses and certificates of authenticity from your distributor for each unit that you ship."...
This exploit is actually an example of a very old idea. A proof of concept can be found in this followup article from March 2004 (the link to the original article is already dead and buried), which also mentiones the need to visually identify executable files.
First Rule in Malware Prevention: Never Trust a Pretty Picture.
Geez, I'd expect better from the MacOS developers. Enticing users to rely entirely on an icon to suggest the content and intention of a file is plain ridiculous.
One thing both Microsoft and Apple should have done a long time ago is overlay a marker (like a small gear) onto icons of executable files and make it very hard to disable it (like the arrow on Windows shortcuts). This, combined with a tiny little bit of education would have prevented most if not all of the great email worm and trojan pandemics of recent years.
Transparency and publicity are exactly the things that can prevent Wikipedia from becoming the focus of some insane "war on words" between editors in future. Because there are no 'memory holes' as in George Orwell's '1984' yet, the truth comes out sooner or later.
I would strongly support a global Wikipedia caching system to counter any possible future attempts at implementing 'memory holes', along with a linguistic analysis system which crawls all articles and flags suspicious editing sprees.
Slashdot Mirror
30 here, age 36. Test taken while stoned, with trippy bleepy sweepy trance playing in the background, just for fun.
I'm very eager to know: how many times do you need to change batteries in your PocketPC on a regular day? Three times, five times or more?
Aren't these things far too power-hungry (running Windows Mobule, therefore requiring processors so powerful they'll simply blast away an entire Beowulf cluster of '80s 20MHz PC/386's in a benchmark) for simple note-taking?
I really long for the good old Psion Series 5mx that you could type away on continuously until your fingers bled before you would need to swap 2 ordinary AA cells...
Because of the ever increasing reliance on eyecandy generators (read: graphics cards), lots of memory and fast CPUs and hard drives.
Back in the day I wrote real-time data acquisition software that ran under MS-DOS and was stable as a rock and could take floodwaves of data in stride. Nowadays customers want more eyecandy resulting in Windows apps that can't even handle modest data input without dedicated hardware with copious amounts of RAM for buffering.
Want eyecandy? Take a blotter and suck on it. It's MUCH cheaper than any current video card and sure to change your outlook on life forever.
Not all support is about fixing crappy stuff. Support is also about helping users make use of provided features.
Not a knock-out. Next round...
Um, no. The majority (81 out of 114) of root servers are not in the US. I may have miscounted a few (me being stoned and it being late), but that doesn't invalidate my point, not by a long shot.
...was: Gosh, those poor doctors must have contracted some nasty disease from their bovine patients.
(note how blackberries are never used in their case)
They are, because they have their case on right when they start growing. Be glad, for picking them would be a very messy business if they didn't.
at the end of the day, and this is the argument that I've yet to hear refuted... what's the harm of having the data to be mined stripped of personally identifying information, indexed, and linked to a database that stores the identifying information, which is accessible only by court order?
Troll troll troll your post
Gently down the screen
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a stream
It's all about transparency. Which is even harder to maintain if parts of the process are no longer tangible, in plain sight and all.
Just how do you think you are going to verify that privacy is protected when you don't have access to the data, the software used to process it (both source code and actually running binaries) and the hardware it runs on? At least in the dead-tree era there would always be some paper trail to follow back to its source in case of malpractice.
I mean, it's not that hard to allow data mining AND protect privacy at the same time. [...]
Actually, this is Very Hard Indeed, precisely because of the lack of transparency, i.e. not knowing what gets done with that data in reality, not in theory. As long as you don't know for certain that the original data containing personally identifiable information is thoroughly and utterly destroyed, you can't be sure about your privacy no matter what you believe.
For another example of the dangers of a lack of transparency, read up on the recently uncovered voting irregularities at Black Box Voting. Shiver, shudder, then come again.
Book publishers have the means to exclude electronic searching as well, and have used this for as long as I know. (does that show my age?)
It's in the disclaimer, which almost all books I know have somewhere on the first few pages. Relevnt part of it reads (approximately):
"No part of this publication may be reproduced, either in part or in full, either photographically, electronically, or by any other means, without express permission of the publisher."
There you have it, the dead-tree equivalent of 'robots.txt'.
The point with SMS is that the phone buttons are designed NOT to be pressed easily
They're designed that way because the designers are stupid IMHO. There must be more than eleventyhundred bazillion ways to prevent a keyboard from sending unwanted keypresses while still being ergonomic but most phones don't use them. I honestly don't know why.
(BTW the cheapest and murest way is to cover the keyboard with a plastic flip cover when not in use)
Surely <wink> the phone manufacturers must have struck a deal with physical therapists to rake in some extra revenue...?
What many of us (in many different postings) are hinting at is that all this will inevitably lead to a debate on where the actual boundary between 'fair use' and copyright infringement actually lies.
Since this distinction is not well defined at all (many people will have many different opinions) it will either rage ad infinitum or some arbitrary legislation will be passed, leaving it to flocks of lawyers to pick away at boundary cases.
Just to drop yet another example: I don't believe I'm the only one who can come up with a 'sliding window' search algorithm to extract all text from books using Amazon's 'Search Inside the Book' service. Should I now start my timer and clock the time it takes for some author to sue Amazon for making excerpts from books available online just because their search can be 'tweaked'? I hope not...
Dang. Shouldn't post while debugging cyclic buffers on a DSP.
Should be words N*4+B total_words, N integer, B=Book=1..4
1. Take any book and scan/OCR it
2. Produce 4 derived works, each with every ((N % 4) + 1, N integer)'th word from the original in it.
3. ???
4. Profit!!
Sigh. Soon 'they' will come running after someone whistling 'Always look on the bright side of life' or the theme song of 'The Bridge on the River Kwai', or kids hopping around on the pavement 'only ever so slightly like Michael Jackson did', aggressively panhandling them for performance license fees.
It's a sick, sad world.
A locked screendoor will not stop a burglar - but it will stop your nosy neighbour just walking into your kitchen or your children to walk outside.
Gosh no..heaven forbid!! Your neighbour could actually come in and say 'Hi!' to your kids! Your kids could actually go outside and see for themselves what Nature really looks like instead of watching Cartoon Channel. The horror!
People, if some of you really get off on living in a 'war zone' 24/7 where you can trust nobody, please do, but I'm outta here.
These have been around in Japan for ages, I believe many are (being) translated into Eng(l|r)ish. Just search for 'dating sim' on Google. Add 'hentai' to your search according to preference.
I vote for Wikimathica, to go with the lingo
Maybe the GPP is generalizing too much on all spreadsheet software out there, but I can think of several scenarios which many spreadsheets may have difficulty solving.
Given the example, what if B2 contains a formula which itself (recursively, conditionally) depends on A1?
Only if the spreadsheet app contains or has access to a reasonably sophisticated CAS (Computer Algebra System) like Maple or Mathematica can you expect it perform well in this regard.
If you are looking for a support company for embedded NetBSD, check out Wasabi Systems. If I'm not mistaken, several port maintainers either work for Wasabi or are in frequent contact with them.
Short answers are not the whole story.
...
Half-truths are sometimes worse than the whole truth.
True: Shared source code is free, apparently without restrictions.
Also true: You need to buy a runtime license for each and every device that you ship.[1]
[1]: From the webpage you link to:
"A valid Windows CE 5.0 runtime license must be purchased for each Windows CE 5.0 derivative work prior to distribution.".
From link to "How to Buy Windows Embedded Operating Systems" on the same page:
"Step 4
Acquire runtime licenses for commercial shipment.
When you have completed testing and development and you are ready to bring your embedded system to market, you must acquire runtime licenses and certificates of authenticity from your distributor for each unit that you ship."
This exploit is actually an example of a very old idea. A proof of concept can be found in this followup article from March 2004 (the link to the original article is already dead and buried), which also mentiones the need to visually identify executable files.
First Rule in Malware Prevention: Never Trust a Pretty Picture.
Geez, I'd expect better from the MacOS developers. Enticing users to rely entirely on an icon to suggest the content and intention of a file is plain ridiculous.
One thing both Microsoft and Apple should have done a long time ago is overlay a marker (like a small gear) onto icons of executable files and make it very hard to disable it (like the arrow on Windows shortcuts). This, combined with a tiny little bit of education would have prevented most if not all of the great email worm and trojan pandemics of recent years.
In other news, a new cross-site scripting vulnerability has been discovered in the recently opened pigeon blogsphere.
The working designation is P19@BirdFlu.
Seriously, I hope that no-one comes up with the wretched idea of weaponizing GPS/phone equipped pigeons at a time like this.
In case you need help, call 1-800-H5N1
All your blog are belong to blog! ...
Move Blog!
For great blogspace.
Transparency and publicity are exactly the things that can prevent Wikipedia from becoming the focus of some insane "war on words" between editors in future. Because there are no 'memory holes' as in George Orwell's '1984' yet, the truth comes out sooner or later.
I would strongly support a global Wikipedia caching system to counter any possible future attempts at implementing 'memory holes', along with a linguistic analysis system which crawls all articles and flags suspicious editing sprees.
Hmmm, seems to be a page which has had a lot of edits. Which 'version' of Truth do you trust?