Very clever: no lenses are required since the specimens are in more or less direct contact with the imaging surface. I wonder why the sensors have to be in a linear array though -- couldn't they be expanded to a rectangular array in order to get a conventional image instead of having the specimens sliding across a linear array and generating scan lines?
My personal favorite silly DRM law is the one which sets out massive penalties for circumventing a DRM mechanism - making anyone who holds the shift key while loading a CD into Windoze box a felon.
Anybody who loads a DRM-installing CD while logged in as a non-Administrator would be guilty too -- that stuff can't be installed without admin privileges, so the effect is the same as holding down shift while loading the CD.
Profiling is only justified on an opt-in basis. Users need to know exactly what they are exchanging for access to searches or web content, and this can only be accomplished by an explicit agreement between the service or content provider and the user. Otherwise there is no informed consent, and we are lost in legal murkiness.
No correspondence should ever be considered absolutley private.
Aside from technical screw-ups, accidental or illegal behavior, or possibly national security concerns, the default expectation absolutely should be privacy in one's correspondence. If privacy is not going to be honored, then an opt-in mechanism that explicitly details the information to be collected is the only ethical approach.
The same tools that allow data aggregation by companies like Google and ISPs give us better access to information and (arguably) a better quality of life.
Data aggregated from public web sites for searching purposes is not the same as aggregating data from individuals operating under the default expectation of privacy.
Creation of profiles allow vendors to serve us better. They allow better targeting of ads so we're not bombarded with ads for things we have no interest in...
No, surreptitious profiling allows Google and other advertising companies to serve their corporate clients better, not individuals. I am better served by not having to view ads at all, as I am capable of directing my own searches. I'd much prefer to pay for each search I request using some sort of micro-payment scheme; other individuals should be given the opt-in to free advertising-supported searches if they personally feel comfortable with that.
The parties who are upset about the lack of broadband adoption are the advertisers and their customers. Unobtrusive text ads aren't sufficient for their purposes and even static banner ads are slow to download on dial-up, so it reduces their effectiveness. They want full-blown video and rich media that starts playing right away, and they need consumers to be able to register their messages before they can decide to turn their eyes away.
Advertising is what drives the computing economy today.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? T.S Eliot, "The Rock", 1934
Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not truth,
Truth is not beauty,
Beauty is not love,
Love is not music,
and Music is THE BEST. Frank Zappa, 1979
Usenet's store and forward system over a network of NNTP servers would have been perfect for such massive simultaneous downloads. It's really too bad it's not viable anymore.
With the NSA involved, I wouldn't even trust the source code. It has to be compiled, and who knows what backdoors they've put into the compiler executable itself. You can't even trust the source code for the compiler if the binary you're compiling the compiler with is bugged. Has anyone built a working version of OpenSolaris with a gcc they've bootstrapped themselves?
I know I'm being naive here, but from what I'm reading about the issue, it seems almost to be a fundamental oversight in the design of DNS. What is supposed to happen when a widely used server and the domain it serves goes out of business? Was the possibility of an entire TLD foundering under the load of unanswered queries never anticipated in the design of the system?
Or perhaps the Connection Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_machine from the '80s? It's interesting that this "panic" first appeared 20 years ago when it appeared that transistor densities might be hitting a limit. But then superscalar architectures were implemented and fab technology improved, and we were able to ignore the problem for the next 20 years.
If wealth is our measure of reward for your value to the community, then surely the man who made it possible to preserve our shared knowledge should be rewarded duly. I don't see anything special about Jimmy Wales. If he hadn't created Wikipedia, somebody else would have. Same goes for Bill Gates in my opinion.
I particulary like the thunderbird anti-phishing tie in. I thought the whole point of FireFox was to unbundle from the email client. I've always preferred the SeaMonkey distribution because the browser and email play together -- maybe you'd like to try it.
You don't need to feed Google to find out when the next bus is coming. Haven't you every heard of nextbus.com? I would much prefer services like this being provided by smaller decentralized entities than one master entity providing a tempting target for government subpoenas.
This really reminds me of the Usenet battles of the 90's -- a relatively small group of admins spending huge amounts of time creating, maintaining, and defending a Kafkaesque series of processes to approve official Big-8 news groups. In the end, the process became so cumbersome and politicized that groups that really should have been created simply died due to the overwhelming red tape and bullying that went on throughout the entire process. The current generation of Usenet administrators now tries to encourage the creation of as many relevant newsgroups as possible using vastly simplified rules.
You only have receptor density for reading dead center in your eye. You can't put Terminator-style displays of to the side of your FOV, because you can only see motion and coarse detail off dead center. I think it would have to be a dynamic display correlated with the movement of your eye (somehow). The display would update rapidly in response to eye movements to trace out the desired image, with only the center few pixels displaying any detail. Combined with persistence of vision and a few pixels off the center to display coarse image approximations and movement, this might reasonably emulate what the eye would perceive in its normal scan of an image.
I'm seeing more like 4 to 4.5 hours with my kids OLPC. Even when I turn down the background light, it doesn't seem to extend the battery life that much.
Power management isn't working in the OLPC builds shipped to G1G1 recepients in December, but it's supposed to be addressed in a January update.
I'm surprised the OLPC take as long to boot as it does, though: 1 min 30 sec before the GUI comes up, and 2 min 20 sec before it finds and connects with the wireless AP. I thought it would be a bit faster booting from flash -- maybe it's the X11 overhead.
It's my understanding that these writers are on staff, earning regular salaries. How are they in principal different from professional software developers working for Silicon Valley companies? If their pay is miserably low, sure, striking for better pay is reasonable, but why should they get paid residuals every time the product of their work brings in income for their employers?
Who is stupid enough to go to Youtube for authoritative information about anything? Because it's just like on-demand TV except it's on your computer. It's unfortunate but hardly unexpected these days that more people get their news from TV then printed newspapers.
It would think that a one-legged balancing robot would be inherently easier to design, build and debug -- it's simpler, has fewer joints, and fewer failure modes.
I think the point of the new robot is that it's a two-legged, humanoid balancing robot -- a much more complicated design.
I don't really mind seeing ads to read Salon content, but the site is no longer allowing client machines that block ad.doubleclick.net to view anything. Tolerating ads is one thing, but I'll be damned if I'll allow doubleclick to track me all over the freakin' web just to see Salon's stuff.
It's too bad that open lossless formats haven't seen the kind of uptake with consumers as MP3. On the other hand, it's probably impossible to encumber MP3 with DRM without breaking compatibility, so overall it's a positive I think. As much as I would prefer lossless encoding, I can't tell the difference between music encoded with `lame --preset extreme' and lossless. I sure hope these distributors decide to go beyond the standard 128kb CBR for their downloadable products.
I also don't see how it's going to work well with the disk images associated with virtualization technology like Parallels, or with large monolithic email folders and databases.
The problem is that Time Machine backups at the file level of granularity. Block-based backup technology like Ghost is a much better solution -- it can run in the background, perform full and incremental backups whenever you want, and the backup sets can be mounted as drives for browsing. And your backup disk won't fill up with multiple copies of your email or VM disk images because you forgot to exclude them from your backup.
It was my impression that at least a small portion of the momentum for sales of the MacBook Pro was from coders wanting a stable, elegant, Unix-based development environment that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux applications. That certainly was the motivation for my group at work to purchase MacBook Pros to replace older hardware and hand out to new engineers.
Until there's a point release of Leopard that fixes X11, LDAP, and the other regressions I really can't recommend new MacBook Pro purchases with 10.5.0 pre-installed to any of my colleagues. I'll tell them to wait.
What you are suffering from is a commong Windows users disorder known as Fullscreenitis
It's a preference. Why are some preferences wrong? Why shouldn't Mac OS implement this preference for people who have it?
It would certainly convert my wife to a Mac user to be able to run her apps full screen. She prefers to interact with only one app at a time and finds the clutter around the desktop to be a distraction.
Who boots a laptop? I just close the lid on my Mac, and it goes to sleep. I open it up and there's my stuff [...]
Don't you ever worry about someone stealing your laptop and just needing to open the lid to get access to your life? Or do you always tether the laptop to a security cable? My apartment got burglarized nearly a year ago and my laptop was stolen, but once I got over the initial shock, I was seriously glad that my important data was encrypted and that I had shutdown the machine with a boot password. Of course that wouldn't stop a competent identity thief, but at least it probably would have stopped someone who was more interested in the resale value of the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Very clever: no lenses are required since the specimens are in more or less direct contact with the imaging surface. I wonder why the sensors have to be in a linear array though -- couldn't they be expanded to a rectangular array in order to get a conventional image instead of having the specimens sliding across a linear array and generating scan lines?
My personal favorite silly DRM law is the one which sets out massive penalties for circumventing a DRM mechanism - making anyone who holds the shift key while loading a CD into Windoze box a felon.
Anybody who loads a DRM-installing CD while logged in as a non-Administrator would be guilty too -- that stuff can't be installed without admin privileges, so the effect is the same as holding down shift while loading the CD.
No correspondence should ever be considered absolutley private.
Aside from technical screw-ups, accidental or illegal behavior, or possibly national security concerns, the default expectation absolutely should be privacy in one's correspondence. If privacy is not going to be honored, then an opt-in mechanism that explicitly details the information to be collected is the only ethical approach.
The same tools that allow data aggregation by companies like Google and ISPs give us better access to information and (arguably) a better quality of life.
Data aggregated from public web sites for searching purposes is not the same as aggregating data from individuals operating under the default expectation of privacy.
Creation of profiles allow vendors to serve us better. They allow better targeting of ads so we're not bombarded with ads for things we have no interest in ...
No, surreptitious profiling allows Google and other advertising companies to serve their corporate clients better, not individuals. I am better served by not having to view ads at all, as I am capable of directing my own searches. I'd much prefer to pay for each search I request using some sort of micro-payment scheme; other individuals should be given the opt-in to free advertising-supported searches if they personally feel comfortable with that.
The parties who are upset about the lack of broadband adoption are the advertisers and their customers. Unobtrusive text ads aren't sufficient for their purposes and even static banner ads are slow to download on dial-up, so it reduces their effectiveness. They want full-blown video and rich media that starts playing right away, and they need consumers to be able to register their messages before they can decide to turn their eyes away. Advertising is what drives the computing economy today.
Interesting exploration of the issues here: http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/57/Default.aspx
Usenet's store and forward system over a network of NNTP servers would have been perfect for such massive simultaneous downloads. It's really too bad it's not viable anymore.
With the NSA involved, I wouldn't even trust the source code. It has to be compiled, and who knows what backdoors they've put into the compiler executable itself. You can't even trust the source code for the compiler if the binary you're compiling the compiler with is bugged. Has anyone built a working version of OpenSolaris with a gcc they've bootstrapped themselves?
I know I'm being naive here, but from what I'm reading about the issue, it seems almost to be a fundamental oversight in the design of DNS. What is supposed to happen when a widely used server and the domain it serves goes out of business? Was the possibility of an entire TLD foundering under the load of unanswered queries never anticipated in the design of the system?
Or perhaps the Connection Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_machine from the '80s? It's interesting that this "panic" first appeared 20 years ago when it appeared that transistor densities might be hitting a limit. But then superscalar architectures were implemented and fab technology improved, and we were able to ignore the problem for the next 20 years.
You don't need to feed Google to find out when the next bus is coming. Haven't you every heard of nextbus.com? I would much prefer services like this being provided by smaller decentralized entities than one master entity providing a tempting target for government subpoenas.
This really reminds me of the Usenet battles of the 90's -- a relatively small group of admins spending huge amounts of time creating, maintaining, and defending a Kafkaesque series of processes to approve official Big-8 news groups. In the end, the process became so cumbersome and politicized that groups that really should have been created simply died due to the overwhelming red tape and bullying that went on throughout the entire process. The current generation of Usenet administrators now tries to encourage the creation of as many relevant newsgroups as possible using vastly simplified rules.
Power management isn't working in the OLPC builds shipped to G1G1 recepients in December, but it's supposed to be addressed in a January update.
I'm surprised the OLPC take as long to boot as it does, though: 1 min 30 sec before the GUI comes up, and 2 min 20 sec before it finds and connects with the wireless AP. I thought it would be a bit faster booting from flash -- maybe it's the X11 overhead.
It's my understanding that these writers are on staff, earning regular salaries. How are they in principal different from professional software developers working for Silicon Valley companies? If their pay is miserably low, sure, striking for better pay is reasonable, but why should they get paid residuals every time the product of their work brings in income for their employers?
It would think that a one-legged balancing robot would be inherently easier to design, build and debug -- it's simpler, has fewer joints, and fewer failure modes. I think the point of the new robot is that it's a two-legged, humanoid balancing robot -- a much more complicated design.
I don't really mind seeing ads to read Salon content, but the site is no longer allowing client machines that block ad.doubleclick.net to view anything. Tolerating ads is one thing, but I'll be damned if I'll allow doubleclick to track me all over the freakin' web just to see Salon's stuff.
It's too bad that open lossless formats haven't seen the kind of uptake with consumers as MP3. On the other hand, it's probably impossible to encumber MP3 with DRM without breaking compatibility, so overall it's a positive I think. As much as I would prefer lossless encoding, I can't tell the difference between music encoded with `lame --preset extreme' and lossless. I sure hope these distributors decide to go beyond the standard 128kb CBR for their downloadable products.
Apparently it doesn't work well with FileVault:
http://blog.nominet.org.uk/tech/2007/10/31/leopard-and-filevault-wont-work-well-with-time-machine/I also don't see how it's going to work well with the disk images associated with virtualization technology like Parallels, or with large monolithic email folders and databases.
The problem is that Time Machine backups at the file level of granularity. Block-based backup technology like Ghost is a much better solution -- it can run in the background, perform full and incremental backups whenever you want, and the backup sets can be mounted as drives for browsing. And your backup disk won't fill up with multiple copies of your email or VM disk images because you forgot to exclude them from your backup.
Until there's a point release of Leopard that fixes X11, LDAP, and the other regressions I really can't recommend new MacBook Pro purchases with 10.5.0 pre-installed to any of my colleagues. I'll tell them to wait.
It's a preference. Why are some preferences wrong? Why shouldn't Mac OS implement this preference for people who have it?
It would certainly convert my wife to a Mac user to be able to run her apps full screen. She prefers to interact with only one app at a time and finds the clutter around the desktop to be a distraction.