Re:Insert obvious SOAP joke here
on
eSuds
·
· Score: 1
Gladly.
But just in case nobody gets it (and since the original post is still scored at 1, I assume that most don't), here's the W3C's SOAP Messaging Framework spec.
Maybe someone can cook up a version of lint that can be used with SOAP!
The quoted Basel Action Network says that a pile of 500 computers contains 717Kg of lead. That just doesn't sound plausible. Does every computer really have 3.15 pounds of lead in it?
This is literally not true, but it's close. CRTs do contain lead to block the low-level radiation that they produce. See the Electronic Industries Alliance's information page on lead use in CRTs, along with a handy PDF. Examples range from 1.7 lbs in a 14" CRT to 2.3 in a 21" one. Add that to whatever amounts may be present in other system peripherals, and 3 lbs probably isn't too far a stretch. Remember, most people in this world consider a "computer" to be not only that box with the retractable coffee-cup holder, but the entire system (including monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.).
Re:[Massively OT] nitpick time...
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 1
Habeas is a Latin term used in legal proceedings that means "evidence" or "to show proof."
Habeas in fact
means "let us have" and no more
and not "evidence"
"Let us?" Nay, "You may." -as is subjunctive second
person singular.
Laevissimus tu!
If you can read this, thank a
Latin instructor.
Students at an Iowa college can forget the quintessential experience of pulling all-nighters at the computer lab poring over endless lines of source code.
For one thing, there's no computer lab. For another, there are no computers.
The Des Moines Area Community College's East Des Moines campus is the newest of the college's six branches. It opened in the fall of 2014 with the mission to collaborate with timber companies to beta test education technologies.
Instead of a computer lab, the school has a library equipped with books, magazines, and journals. The resource center also houses several meeting tables, microfiche readers and a few cassettes and CDs -- but no computers.
The school plans to be an entirely computer-free campus. Last year, about 75 Creative Writing students participated in a pilot program to go computerless. Each student used Mead notebook and handheld pens and pencils to access books, syllabi and class materials, and to take notes and exams.
...
Instructor Jay Nickelson said the switch from digital to paper takes a little getting used to.
"It's just a matter of shifting your mind-set a little bit and becoming less reliant on bits and bytes."
It's my understanding that many communities can fine a person or organization if it's determined that a call to 911 was due to anything other than a real emergency or an honest mistake. So what's going to happen here? Is grandma going to get busted because she opened an email on her WebTV? If this virus becomes widespread and wreaks havoc on the 911 call centers around the nation, perhaps it will signal that the time is ripe to hold software manufacturers liable for the bugs in their products.
AUSTIN, Texas, Jul 11, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Forgent(tm) Networks Inc. (Nasdaq:FORG) today clarified its licensing program regarding Forgent's JPEG data compression technology, owned by its subsidiary Compression Labs Inc., embodied in U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672.
JPEG is a standardized image compression mechanism and is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale still images.
Forgent has the sole and exclusive right to use and license all the claims under the '672 patent that implement JPEG in all "fields of use" except in the satellite broadcast business. Forgent's "fields of use" for licensing opportunities include digital cameras, digital still image devices, personal digital assistants (PDA's), cellular telephones that download images, browsers, digital camcorders with a still image function, scanners and other devices used to compress, store, manipulate, print or transmit digital images.
Forgent and a national law firm, who has made and continues to make a significant investment to develop Forgent's IP licensing program, are the sole beneficiaries of the patent license revenue.
"We wanted to ensure the investment community and the general public are clear about the terms of our valuable JPEG data compression technology, one of the many technologies we have in our patent portfolio," stated Richard Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer at Forgent. "We are in ongoing discussions with other manufacturers of digital still cameras, printers, scanners and other products that use JPEG technology for licensing opportunities."
About Forgent
Forgent Networks provides enterprise video network software and services to improve ease-of-use, reliability and manageability of video networks. Video Network Platform (VNP) is the industry's leading video network management software that improves quality of service and cost-of-ownership for multi-vendor, multi-protocol video networks. Forgent's professional services, which have been contracted by thousands of companies, ensure the successful planning, operation and maintenance of video networks. For more information, call 866/276-FORG (3674), or visit www.forgentnetworks.com.
This release may include projections and other forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties and as such, actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected or desired. Some of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include rapid changes in technology, changes in customer order patterns or order mix, the ability to collect certain foreign receivables, foreign exchange rate fluctuations, the intensity of competition, the cost and availability of certain key components, the company's ability to manage product transitions and inventory levels, product pricing pressures, sudden or unexpected changes in demand for videoconferencing systems, litigation involving intellectual property, other issues, and the ability to consummate certain divestiture transactions. Additional discussion of these and other risk factors affecting the company's business and prospects is contained in the company's period filings with the SEC.
CONTACT: Forgent, Austin Forgent Media Relations:
Hedy Baker, 512/437-2789 hedy_baker@forgent.com
or Forgent Investor Relations: Alexa Coy, 512/437-2678 alexa_coy@forgent.com
And we all know what happened to the Trojans
on
Analyzing Palladium
·
· Score: 2
I almost spewed up my iced mocha latté when I read the opening paragraph of the article:
In ancient Troy stood the Palladium, a statue of the goddess Athena. Legend has it that the safety of the city depended on that icon's preservation.
Even someone with the most rudimentary liberal arts education knows what happened to Troy and the Trojans, right? No? Well, here are the relevant parts of Homer's Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid boiled down into one paragraph:
The Greeks went to war against the Trojans because one of their kings' wife, Helen, skipped town to hop in the sack with a Trojan prince. The war went on for about ten years or so with no clear victory in sight for either side. Finally, however, the Greek soldier Odysseus (a.k.a. Ulysses) hatched a clever plan--the Greeks would build a huge, wheeled wooden horse and offer it to the Trojans as a sign of surrender. Unbeknownst to the Trojans, however, Odysseus and a crack team of Greek soldiers would be holed up in the horse's body. Lo and behold, the Trojans accepted the horse and opened the gates to let it in. That night, Odysseus and his posse got down and started kicking some serious Trojan ass from inside the city. In fact, the shrine of Pallas Athena (the Palladium in question) was where the Trojan king Priam and his remaining family members took refuge. But it didn't matter; the Greeks came in and slaughtered them.
Three thousand-odd years later, the term "Trojan horse" has taken on a special meaning in tech jargon. Perhaps whichever marketing dweeb at Microsoft came up with the name "Palladium" for a security product should have paid more attention in that world literature class.
Moby has the perfect opportunity to test his theory empirically: his next album should be target at less technically-savvy fans, like Britney Spears'. If his record sales go up, then he was correct. If they don't, then maybe his music really does suck. Either way, he gets an answer.
[B]y cleverly arranging early caucuses there, [Iowa is] suddenly important.
It's apparent that the only thing that's "sudden" about Iowa's caucuses is your discovery of them. As Drake University's Caucus info page outlines, caucuses have been around in Iowa for over 150 years. The first-in-the-nation status of the caucuses has been around since about 1972. That may be sudden in geological terms, but it's hardly sudden in political terms.
This may be off-topic, but the difference between a caucus and a primary is important. The latter is indistinguishable from a regular poll-style voting procedure. The former is more like a mini-convention at which members of a party discuss various candidates, gradually separate into groups representing their favorite candidates, and then select national convention delegates based on the relative numbers of people aligned with each candidate. See the Drake pages above for more information.
(And yes, I'm a former Iowan myself; I've made my own unique contribution to the Incredible Shrinking Population of the state in which I was raised.)
GAZA (Reuters) - The seven-year-old son of an Indian diplomat in the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip has been awarded a Microsoft certificate which is so advanced that some U.S. universities require that their students earn it to graduate.
Anudeep Bhaskar obtained a Microsoft Office User Specialist (MOUS) certificate after passing the Microsoft Office 2000 Word exam in May by scoring 891 points, surpassing the required 770.
I don't know about you, but that "a Microsoft certificate which is so advanced that some U.S. universities require that their students earn it to graduate" line sures makes me shudder.
Personally, I think it would be easier (and much cooler!) to gengineer bugs that do eat our waste. Of course there is that whole risk of mutation and the bugs eating all the plastic around us,
Just imagine the laffs when our "gengineered" plastic-eating bugs are let loose on our futuristic, half-flesh half-plastic cyborg race!
The company also complained that the Pentagon is funding research on making free software more secure, which in effect subsidizes Microsoft's open-source competitors, Stenbit said.
If only AT&T had sued DARPA in 1969 or so for subsidizing (=inventing) an open networking protocol that didn't necessarily require the phone company's infrastructure. Sheesh.
I would like to think that the cryptanalysts at the Dept of Defense would be fully versed in the fallacy of Security through Obscurity, and would make their voices heard.
Actually, there's probably very little cryptanalysis that really goes on within the DoD. It's the National Security Agency that's responsible for the codebreaking and code-making. As far as I can tell from their "About" page, they're technically as independent of the DoD as the CIA and FBI are. Of course, these agencies are supposed to work together, but the recent flap over how much the gub'ment knew about a possible al Quaeda attack show just how little communication can go on between field offices of the same agency, not to mention between separate agencies!
Most folks have never heard of it, but the Perseus Project at Tufts University should be the model for the digital cuneiform library. Perseus started in the early 90s as a digital repository of texts, photos, maps, and other reference material of classical (i.e. Latin and ancient Greek) materials. (It has since expanded into other, more recent subjects, but Latin & Greek remain at its core.) Tufts has made a name for itself on the digital library/archival forefront, and they could probably provide lots of useful advice, tools, and frameworks for the cuneiform library.
One thing that the article didn't mention is just what "digitizing" means for these texts. The simplest way to do this is to store high-res photos of each tablet. Even better would be some sort of 3D imaging, because if you've ever seen cuneiform artefacts, you know that they're often in odd shapes (seal rings, stelae, as well as tablets and tablet "envelopes"), and/or broken or cracked in numerous places. But an even bigger question remains: can/will these tablets be digitized into some machine-readable format? Can cuneiform symbols be represented in Unicode? Unlike Latin and Greek works, the vast majority of cuneiform artefacts remain untranslated, but having a machine-readable format for characters can be a huge step for constructing some sort of machine translator. (I, for one, would love to work on something like this; I already work on machine learning of modern language texts.)
What's even better is that the next iMac revision is going to be aimed squarely grabbing market share among traditional *nix types, and will be called the viMac. Then the question will be, "Which is better, eMac or viMac?" You heard it here first.
Speaking from personal experience, my stepfather (in Virginia) uses VoIP to talk to his brother in England. And it's not just because of cost (since both of them are senior-level managers at a telco and a hardware vendor, respectively), but also because most of the time, they're online and in front of their computers anyway.
The diagnosis: The problem is not a bandwidth issue caused by fat HTML, but an annoying delay in actually drawing the page onscreen after its components have been downloaded.
I'm not sitting at my OS X box right now, but I believe that IE defaults to displaying a page only after all of its components have been downloaded. If you turn this off, you'll see text and placeholders displayed right away while the graphics are downloading, if you can tolerate annoying reformatting and redrawing as you go.
Slashdot Mirror
"Star's space bid officially grounded."
He'll just have to drink a helluva lot of Pepsi.
Gladly.
But just in case nobody gets it (and since the original post is still scored at 1, I assume that most don't), here's the W3C's SOAP Messaging Framework spec.
Maybe someone can cook up a version of lint that can be used with SOAP!
This is literally not true, but it's close. CRTs do contain lead to block the low-level radiation that they produce. See the Electronic Industries Alliance's information page on lead use in CRTs, along with a handy PDF. Examples range from 1.7 lbs in a 14" CRT to 2.3 in a 21" one. Add that to whatever amounts may be present in other system peripherals, and 3 lbs probably isn't too far a stretch. Remember, most people in this world consider a "computer" to be not only that box with the retractable coffee-cup holder, but the entire system (including monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.).
"Let us?" Nay, "You may."
-as is subjunctive second
person singular.
Laevissimus tu!
If you can read this, thank a
Latin instructor.
...they'd blame this on the Pentium floating-point bug.
As will be reported someday in Unwired:
It's my understanding that many communities can fine a person or organization if it's determined that a call to 911 was due to anything other than a real emergency or an honest mistake. So what's going to happen here? Is grandma going to get busted because she opened an email on her WebTV? If this virus becomes widespread and wreaks havoc on the 911 call centers around the nation, perhaps it will signal that the time is ripe to hold software manufacturers liable for the bugs in their products.
INVESTOR RELATIONS
News
Forgent (ticker: FORG, exchange: NASDAQ) News Release - 11-Jul-2002
Forgent Networks Clarifies Licensing Arrangement
AUSTIN, Texas, Jul 11, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Forgent(tm) Networks Inc. (Nasdaq:FORG) today clarified its licensing program regarding Forgent's JPEG data compression technology, owned by its subsidiary Compression Labs Inc., embodied in U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672.
JPEG is a standardized image compression mechanism and is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale still images.
Forgent has the sole and exclusive right to use and license all the claims under the '672 patent that implement JPEG in all "fields of use" except in the satellite broadcast business. Forgent's "fields of use" for licensing opportunities include digital cameras, digital still image devices, personal digital assistants (PDA's), cellular telephones that download images, browsers, digital camcorders with a still image function, scanners and other devices used to compress, store, manipulate, print or transmit digital images.
Forgent and a national law firm, who has made and continues to make a significant investment to develop Forgent's IP licensing program, are the sole beneficiaries of the patent license revenue.
"We wanted to ensure the investment community and the general public are clear about the terms of our valuable JPEG data compression technology, one of the many technologies we have in our patent portfolio," stated Richard Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer at Forgent. "We are in ongoing discussions with other manufacturers of digital still cameras, printers, scanners and other products that use JPEG technology for licensing opportunities."
About Forgent
Forgent Networks provides enterprise video network software and services to improve ease-of-use, reliability and manageability of video networks. Video Network Platform (VNP) is the industry's leading video network management software that improves quality of service and cost-of-ownership for multi-vendor, multi-protocol video networks. Forgent's professional services, which have been contracted by thousands of companies, ensure the successful planning, operation and maintenance of video networks. For more information, call 866/276-FORG (3674), or visit www.forgentnetworks.com.
This release may include projections and other forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties and as such, actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected or desired. Some of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include rapid changes in technology, changes in customer order patterns or order mix, the ability to collect certain foreign receivables, foreign exchange rate fluctuations, the intensity of competition, the cost and availability of certain key components, the company's ability to manage product transitions and inventory levels, product pricing pressures, sudden or unexpected changes in demand for videoconferencing systems, litigation involving intellectual property, other issues, and the ability to consummate certain divestiture transactions. Additional discussion of these and other risk factors affecting the company's business and prospects is contained in the company's period filings with the SEC.
CONTACT: Forgent, Austin
Forgent Media Relations:
Hedy Baker, 512/437-2789
hedy_baker@forgent.com
or Forgent Investor Relations:
Alexa Coy, 512/437-2678
alexa_coy@forgent.com
Title bar? Try a banner ad--89 or 90 pixels is the standard height of one. Just look at the top of your page.
You heard it here first.
Now, if only this came in beige...
I almost spewed up my iced mocha latté when I read the opening paragraph of the article:
Even someone with the most rudimentary liberal arts education knows what happened to Troy and the Trojans, right? No? Well, here are the relevant parts of Homer's Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid boiled down into one paragraph:
The Greeks went to war against the Trojans because one of their kings' wife, Helen, skipped town to hop in the sack with a Trojan prince. The war went on for about ten years or so with no clear victory in sight for either side. Finally, however, the Greek soldier Odysseus (a.k.a. Ulysses) hatched a clever plan--the Greeks would build a huge, wheeled wooden horse and offer it to the Trojans as a sign of surrender. Unbeknownst to the Trojans, however, Odysseus and a crack team of Greek soldiers would be holed up in the horse's body. Lo and behold, the Trojans accepted the horse and opened the gates to let it in. That night, Odysseus and his posse got down and started kicking some serious Trojan ass from inside the city. In fact, the shrine of Pallas Athena (the Palladium in question) was where the Trojan king Priam and his remaining family members took refuge. But it didn't matter; the Greeks came in and slaughtered them.
Three thousand-odd years later, the term "Trojan horse" has taken on a special meaning in tech jargon. Perhaps whichever marketing dweeb at Microsoft came up with the name "Palladium" for a security product should have paid more attention in that world literature class.
(As a side note, with this story in mind, using the brand name "Trojan" for security tool of a different sort is also ironic.)
...to hear Pat Buchanan* tell it, the U.S.** is aliens' official favorite destination.
* Insert your favorite anti-immigration, usually right-wing, political candidate here.
** Insert your favorite country here.
Moby has the perfect opportunity to test his theory empirically: his next album should be target at less technically-savvy fans, like Britney Spears'. If his record sales go up, then he was correct. If they don't, then maybe his music really does suck. Either way, he gets an answer.
NPR's just making sure that someone can't deep-link so far that an unsuspecting reader misses the ads that fund the site.
Joke. Funny. Laugh. Aww, forget it.
It's apparent that the only thing that's "sudden" about Iowa's caucuses is your discovery of them. As Drake University's Caucus info page outlines, caucuses have been around in Iowa for over 150 years. The first-in-the-nation status of the caucuses has been around since about 1972. That may be sudden in geological terms, but it's hardly sudden in political terms.
This may be off-topic, but the difference between a caucus and a primary is important. The latter is indistinguishable from a regular poll-style voting procedure. The former is more like a mini-convention at which members of a party discuss various candidates, gradually separate into groups representing their favorite candidates, and then select national convention delegates based on the relative numbers of people aligned with each candidate. See the Drake pages above for more information.
(And yes, I'm a former Iowan myself; I've made my own unique contribution to the Incredible Shrinking Population of the state in which I was raised.)
Quoth Reuters:
I don't know about you, but that "a Microsoft certificate which is so advanced that some U.S. universities require that their students earn it to graduate" line sures makes me shudder.
Just imagine the laffs when our "gengineered" plastic-eating bugs are let loose on our futuristic, half-flesh half-plastic cyborg race!
If you haven't explored your campus's steam tunnels, then you shouldn't consider your college experience complete.
From alt.college.tunnels: useful campus tunnel info. (Watch out for the pop-up ads.)
If only AT&T had sued DARPA in 1969 or so for subsidizing (=inventing) an open networking protocol that didn't necessarily require the phone company's infrastructure. Sheesh.
Actually, there's probably very little cryptanalysis that really goes on within the DoD. It's the National Security Agency that's responsible for the codebreaking and code-making. As far as I can tell from their "About" page, they're technically as independent of the DoD as the CIA and FBI are. Of course, these agencies are supposed to work together, but the recent flap over how much the gub'ment knew about a possible al Quaeda attack show just how little communication can go on between field offices of the same agency, not to mention between separate agencies!
Most folks have never heard of it, but the Perseus Project at Tufts University should be the model for the digital cuneiform library. Perseus started in the early 90s as a digital repository of texts, photos, maps, and other reference material of classical (i.e. Latin and ancient Greek) materials. (It has since expanded into other, more recent subjects, but Latin & Greek remain at its core.) Tufts has made a name for itself on the digital library/archival forefront, and they could probably provide lots of useful advice, tools, and frameworks for the cuneiform library.
One thing that the article didn't mention is just what "digitizing" means for these texts. The simplest way to do this is to store high-res photos of each tablet. Even better would be some sort of 3D imaging, because if you've ever seen cuneiform artefacts, you know that they're often in odd shapes (seal rings, stelae, as well as tablets and tablet "envelopes"), and/or broken or cracked in numerous places. But an even bigger question remains: can/will these tablets be digitized into some machine-readable format? Can cuneiform symbols be represented in Unicode? Unlike Latin and Greek works, the vast majority of cuneiform artefacts remain untranslated, but having a machine-readable format for characters can be a huge step for constructing some sort of machine translator. (I, for one, would love to work on something like this; I already work on machine learning of modern language texts.)
What's even better is that the next iMac revision is going to be aimed squarely grabbing market share among traditional *nix types, and will be called the viMac. Then the question will be, "Which is better, eMac or viMac?" You heard it here first.
Speaking from personal experience, my stepfather (in Virginia) uses VoIP to talk to his brother in England. And it's not just because of cost (since both of them are senior-level managers at a telco and a hardware vendor, respectively), but also because most of the time, they're online and in front of their computers anyway.
I'm not sitting at my OS X box right now, but I believe that IE defaults to displaying a page only after all of its components have been downloaded. If you turn this off, you'll see text and placeholders displayed right away while the graphics are downloading, if you can tolerate annoying reformatting and redrawing as you go.
But I guess that it depends on the browser. links unleashes a can of whoop-ass regardless of the *nix flavor that it's running on.