I've been in many countries in Europe and also spent some time in the US and in Japan. My conclusion is that -- unless extremely wealthy -- a community can only support one primary mode of transportation. If most people drive to work then the road infrastructure will be pretty decent and public transportation horrible. If few people own cars it will be vice versa.
In Tokyo very few people drive, therefore they have plenty of cash to spend on subway and train tickets (which add up to a hefty sum by the end of the month). In most US cities people have cars and the market just isn't there for building a tram, or even for buying a fleet of buses (buses, btw, provide very little advantage over cars as they are subject to the same traffic and weather hindrances).
Some European cities get around this limitation by artificially injecting wads of taxpayer cash into the public transport infrastructure, so they can have functioning roads and public transport at the same time. But in the US very few communities would put up with this kind of "waste".
I installed NoScript and after several weeks of pain and suffering I finally just gave up on it. It broke many sites in completely surprising and evil ways (I know it's the fault of the site owner, but I'm not into Don Quixote wars). The most detrimental effect is that web-shopping is well nigh impossible while NoScript is running, because even if you remember to enable scripts for the parent site, the payment site will have to be enabled separately, and by the time you figure out what the payment site is, it's already too late and your purchase has just gone completely haywire. Usually you could go back to the parent site and figure out what happened, but when real money is at stake I don't want to take any chances.
So IMHO NoScript is an interesting concept but it has impacts that will suprise and mess up even a skilled user and will definitely drive the average computer owner to a blind rage. I think recommending it to the general public will just persuade all those grandmas and grandpas out there who actually try to follow this advice that they need to stick to MS&IE, or else their computers will start behaving funny.
I agree, Armadillo Run is totally awesome. My other favorite IGF game is Tribal Trouble (http://tribaltrouble.com/). It's for the Settlers crowd, and for those who think Java is too slow to do games:)
My first and foremost question is whether the framebuffer driver that comes with Yellow Dog/RH5 fast enough to do video playback. If yes, PS3/Linux would make an awesome media center.
Using Linux instead of the native media player would be pretty much mandatory, since the built-in one won't uprez DVDs to 1080 -- if rumors are to be believed. Otherwise, since the Sony abstraction layer doesn't allow direct access to the GPU, Linux on the PS3 is just a big useless gimmick. The box is way too expensive for text-only purposes (except perhaps for researchers who just gotta have a cell CPU).
The "dodgy attachment folder" is the single greatest feature in Eudora. It is one of the fundamental reasons why searching your emails is so fast (there is less junk to go through), and it also allows you to keep your email around for a very long time. I have all my mail for the last 8+ years sitting on my hard disk, and since it is only the mail text without attachments, I can still fit it on a CD, even uncompressed.
I was seriously contemplating switching over to Thunderbird (due to some shortcomings in how Eudora displays complex HTML emails and international characters), and the dealbreaker was that Thunderbird lacked support for storing attachments separately from mail. In fact there are features in Thunderbird that would support this sort of scheme, but nobody ever thought to do it.
I'm hoping desperately that the Qualcomm folks put this feature into Thunderbird. The search I'm not too worried about, since Google Desktop is going to beat anything they come up with anyway...
And to put sex into perspective (umm.. I guess perspective is the only get you get on slashdot relating to sex), look at this. Coincidence? I think not!
Amusingly enough, iPods seem to be specced for a maximum of 10000 feet as well (http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html). I agree that these figures may be somewhat conservative, as I see people skiing and boarding with those things all the time, right around 11000 feet high.
I Googled altitude specs a bit more, and there are some drives specified for 6-7000 feet. Even considering a nice safety margin, I would hesitate to take those up to where you live.
Actually, I would be much more worried about the hard disk. Most HDDs have a design spec limit of 10000 feet of elevation, because the head may not maintain desired clearance above the platter at higher altitudes. So check your hard drive specs before you boot that puppy up...
Since the Fine Article is very lean on details, it's hard to properly criticise the findings. I guess it's not going to stop me anyhow... So I will say that I have personally never experienced any phone-GPS interference.
A few years ago I was working on a fleet management system, which had a device in the semitrailers to record their movements and send the logs by a GSM phone connections to the server. The entire device was a 1x2x5 inch box, with a GSM phone module, a GPS module, and common GPS/GSM external antenna. The shielding between the two modules was rather superficial. I think this (especially the common antenna) is pretty much a worst case scenario.
We've never observed reduced precision during phone communication. Airplanes will probably use more sensitive receivers, but that just means that they will likely be less easily confused than a cheap sirf II chip.
Nowadays I fulfill my navigation needs with a PocketPC phone and a bluetooth (sirf III) GPS. They typically reside within inches of each other when in use. I've never observed any transient GPS errors while making a call or while the phone was switching cell towers/providers or searching for a network.
I find is odd that Intel keeps backtracking to its 20 year old Pentium Pro design. Both of their recent high-budget designs, the P4 and the Itanium proved to be a flop to some extent, while the P6/Pentium Pro/PII/PIII/Centrino/Banias architecture has scaled amazingly well since its humble 200 MHz beginnings.
Was there a generation change at the design offices? What else could have caused the most prominent chip design firm to lose its ability to do solid engineering? Granted even the golden boys created a dead end (i960) architecture, it wasn't quite as expensive a mistake as Itanium...
I remember that in the nineties new chip generations would be popping up left and right, each of them offering some really unique and cool innovation in terms of memory management, execution streamlining or heat management. But Transmeta was the last memorable innovation, and since then everyone seems to be exclusively focused on cache megabytes and transistor sizes. I would love to see real experimentation and innovation reintroduced in the CPU arena...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing too. Sony claims that they are unaware of any case where their rootkit caused damages to customers. See details here.
If you have been damaged in any way, shape or form, it's time to call their bluff!
Limited time access (via DRM?) is reasonable as I can see people buying the box sets if they like the shows enough. Here's to the WB to proving it once and for all.
I think the major deterrent will be this (FT fine A): "The company will offer a changing selection of several hundred episodes each month, rather than providing continuous access to all the episodes in a series, Mr. Frankel said, so as not to cannibalize potential DVD sales of old TV shows."
So just when you are in the middle of a season, the show will go out of rotation and you have to go and get the DVD anyway (or wait -- 4800 episodes, a few hundred per rotation -> at least 6 months).
In Europe many banks send a one-time code to your mobile phone (as a short message) for each transaction. This way the "thing you have" is the phone, which you carry around anyway. In cell-averse US of A, they could alternatively make an old-style phone call and have a machine dictate the code.
Some other European banks require custom software on your machine, or a hard token. Sane people generally avoid these banks.
Some other banks just give you a stack of cards with a list of one-time-pads on each. Once you consume your cards, you can order some more in the post, or just walk into any branch and have them printed.
I would passionately dissuade anyone from choosing a RAID solution. I used to have two HDDs in my office PC (completely different make, model) and they both crapped out at the same exact moment. It might have been a power fluctuation, or one burning out the other, I don't know...
However I do know that most PC power supplies are despicable as of late, with a suicide rate far exceeding that of HDDs (except for certain IBM models:)). And if your power supply goes, you have a pretty good chance that your data will go with it.
Closely following the power supply, the next biggest threat to your data is software: a coding error, misbehaving driver or physical memory glitch can wipe out your disk content in a second. RAID doesn't help here either.
My personal solution is CD-Rs. I write everything important on CD-Rs, and once in a while I throw away older copies. At less than 50 cents per disk it is pretty cheap and reliable.
Being an ignorant foreigner, I have to confess to favoring Best Buy on several occasions in the past. I was always satisfied with the service and the prices (mind you, I exclusively bought items that I couldn't get as fast or as cheap online).
My rude awakening came this summer, when all of a sudden they decided that they wouldn't accept non-US credit cards anymore.
At the checkout the computer happily accepted my card (and said "approved" on the screen), but then the girl (who appeared barely old enough to work) looked at my card and called a manager. The manager asked me to show and ID (I happily complied), then took my ID and the card and went away with them (wtf??).
He came back after about 15 minutes, and said that he cannot accept the card, because he couldn't call my bank (the card carried the number and I'm 100% positive he could have called them if he wanted -- granted he knew how to get an international line). He also waved a photo copy of my ID and card (which of course would be something entirely illegal to do in any country without a Patriot Act).
I offered him several more non-US cards from different international banks. He declined to accept any of them.
After mumbling a curse for wasting 20 minutes of my time, I walked over to the neighboring Circuit City and bought the same items without any problems.
Being unhappy with the service as I was, I decided in a moment of fury to write to Best Buy. I went into great lenghts to emphasize that my card was valid and the computer system acknowledged this fact, the problem was with the human software.
They answered rather promply and said that I should talk to my bank, because only they can advise me why my charge was declined (which it wasn't). Obviously they don't even take the time to read a 5 sentence letter to figure out what someone is complaining about, they just send one of their stock answers. When I tried to explain what happened in even greater lengths in follow-up mail, they simply ignored it.
I did them a favor and decided to spare them the inconvenience of serving me in the future. I also advised every friend I have not to purchase in BB and particularly in that Arizona store.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been in many countries in Europe and also spent some time in the US and in Japan. My conclusion is that -- unless extremely wealthy -- a community can only support one primary mode of transportation. If most people drive to work then the road infrastructure will be pretty decent and public transportation horrible. If few people own cars it will be vice versa.
In Tokyo very few people drive, therefore they have plenty of cash to spend on subway and train tickets (which add up to a hefty sum by the end of the month). In most US cities people have cars and the market just isn't there for building a tram, or even for buying a fleet of buses (buses, btw, provide very little advantage over cars as they are subject to the same traffic and weather hindrances).
Some European cities get around this limitation by artificially injecting wads of taxpayer cash into the public transport infrastructure, so they can have functioning roads and public transport at the same time. But in the US very few communities would put up with this kind of "waste".
I installed NoScript and after several weeks of pain and suffering I finally just gave up on it. It broke many sites in completely surprising and evil ways (I know it's the fault of the site owner, but I'm not into Don Quixote wars). The most detrimental effect is that web-shopping is well nigh impossible while NoScript is running, because even if you remember to enable scripts for the parent site, the payment site will have to be enabled separately, and by the time you figure out what the payment site is, it's already too late and your purchase has just gone completely haywire. Usually you could go back to the parent site and figure out what happened, but when real money is at stake I don't want to take any chances.
So IMHO NoScript is an interesting concept but it has impacts that will suprise and mess up even a skilled user and will definitely drive the average computer owner to a blind rage. I think recommending it to the general public will just persuade all those grandmas and grandpas out there who actually try to follow this advice that they need to stick to MS&IE, or else their computers will start behaving funny.
Stolen directly from the mysql website:
Mandatory comment about how copyright violation is not the same as theft, and about the loathsomeness of RIAA propaganda and fair use.
I never thought that there was a strong correlation between college grades and intelligence/job performance, but clearly I was wrong...
I agree, Armadillo Run is totally awesome. My other favorite IGF game is Tribal Trouble (http://tribaltrouble.com/). It's for the Settlers crowd, and for those who think Java is too slow to do games :)
My first and foremost question is whether the framebuffer driver that comes with Yellow Dog/RH5 fast enough to do video playback. If yes, PS3/Linux would make an awesome media center.
Using Linux instead of the native media player would be pretty much mandatory, since the built-in one won't uprez DVDs to 1080 -- if rumors are to be believed. Otherwise, since the Sony abstraction layer doesn't allow direct access to the GPU, Linux on the PS3 is just a big useless gimmick. The box is way too expensive for text-only purposes (except perhaps for researchers who just gotta have a cell CPU).
The "dodgy attachment folder" is the single greatest feature in Eudora. It is one of the fundamental reasons why searching your emails is so fast (there is less junk to go through), and it also allows you to keep your email around for a very long time. I have all my mail for the last 8+ years sitting on my hard disk, and since it is only the mail text without attachments, I can still fit it on a CD, even uncompressed.
I was seriously contemplating switching over to Thunderbird (due to some shortcomings in how Eudora displays complex HTML emails and international characters), and the dealbreaker was that Thunderbird lacked support for storing attachments separately from mail. In fact there are features in Thunderbird that would support this sort of scheme, but nobody ever thought to do it.
I'm hoping desperately that the Qualcomm folks put this feature into Thunderbird. The search I'm not too worried about, since Google Desktop is going to beat anything they come up with anyway...
And to put sex into perspective (umm.. I guess perspective is the only get you get on slashdot relating to sex), look at this. Coincidence? I think not!
Amusingly enough, iPods seem to be specced for a maximum of 10000 feet as well (http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html). I agree that these figures may be somewhat conservative, as I see people skiing and boarding with those things all the time, right around 11000 feet high.
I Googled altitude specs a bit more, and there are some drives specified for 6-7000 feet. Even considering a nice safety margin, I would hesitate to take those up to where you live.
Actually, I would be much more worried about the hard disk. Most HDDs have a design spec limit of 10000 feet of elevation, because the head may not maintain desired clearance above the platter at higher altitudes. So check your hard drive specs before you boot that puppy up...
These guys must have read the parable about the Out of Memory Killer!
Since the Fine Article is very lean on details, it's hard to properly criticise the findings. I guess it's not going to stop me anyhow... So I will say that I have personally never experienced any phone-GPS interference.
A few years ago I was working on a fleet management system, which had a device in the semitrailers to record their movements and send the logs by a GSM phone connections to the server. The entire device was a 1x2x5 inch box, with a GSM phone module, a GPS module, and common GPS/GSM external antenna. The shielding between the two modules was rather superficial. I think this (especially the common antenna) is pretty much a worst case scenario.
We've never observed reduced precision during phone communication. Airplanes will probably use more sensitive receivers, but that just means that they will likely be less easily confused than a cheap sirf II chip.
Nowadays I fulfill my navigation needs with a PocketPC phone and a bluetooth (sirf III) GPS. They typically reside within inches of each other when in use. I've never observed any transient GPS errors while making a call or while the phone was switching cell towers/providers or searching for a network.
I find is odd that Intel keeps backtracking to its 20 year old Pentium Pro design. Both of their recent high-budget designs, the P4 and the Itanium proved to be a flop to some extent, while the P6/Pentium Pro/PII/PIII/Centrino/Banias architecture has scaled amazingly well since its humble 200 MHz beginnings.
Was there a generation change at the design offices? What else could have caused the most prominent chip design firm to lose its ability to do solid engineering? Granted even the golden boys created a dead end (i960) architecture, it wasn't quite as expensive a mistake as Itanium...
I remember that in the nineties new chip generations would be popping up left and right, each of them offering some really unique and cool innovation in terms of memory management, execution streamlining or heat management. But Transmeta was the last memorable innovation, and since then everyone seems to be exclusively focused on cache megabytes and transistor sizes. I would love to see real experimentation and innovation reintroduced in the CPU arena...
It also helps that they spin the disc about 40 times slower...
...a t-shirt with the caption: "My lawyer sued all my customers and all he got me was this chapter 11."
If you have been damaged in any way, shape or form, it's time to call their bluff!
I think the major deterrent will be this (FT fine A):
"The company will offer a changing selection of several hundred episodes each month, rather than providing continuous access to all the episodes in a series, Mr. Frankel said, so as not to cannibalize potential DVD sales of old TV shows."
So just when you are in the middle of a season, the show will go out of rotation and you have to go and get the DVD anyway (or wait -- 4800 episodes, a few hundred per rotation -> at least 6 months).
I'm gonna patent Hollywood Endings in hopes of never allowing them to be used, ever again. [satanic laugh from Sundance crowd]
Yeah, I know there might be some prior art issues, but I'm reasonably confident that the patent office will never notice.
In Europe many banks send a one-time code to your mobile phone (as a short message) for each transaction. This way the "thing you have" is the phone, which you carry around anyway. In cell-averse US of A, they could alternatively make an old-style phone call and have a machine dictate the code. Some other European banks require custom software on your machine, or a hard token. Sane people generally avoid these banks. Some other banks just give you a stack of cards with a list of one-time-pads on each. Once you consume your cards, you can order some more in the post, or just walk into any branch and have them printed.
However I do know that most PC power supplies are despicable as of late, with a suicide rate far exceeding that of HDDs (except for certain IBM models :)). And if your power supply goes, you have a pretty good chance that your data will go with it.
Closely following the power supply, the next biggest threat to your data is software: a coding error, misbehaving driver or physical memory glitch can wipe out your disk content in a second. RAID doesn't help here either.
My personal solution is CD-Rs. I write everything important on CD-Rs, and once in a while I throw away older copies. At less than 50 cents per disk it is pretty cheap and reliable.
Being an ignorant foreigner, I have to confess to favoring Best Buy on several occasions in the past. I was always satisfied with the service and the prices (mind you, I exclusively bought items that I couldn't get as fast or as cheap online).
My rude awakening came this summer, when all of a sudden they decided that they wouldn't accept non-US credit cards anymore.
At the checkout the computer happily accepted my card (and said "approved" on the screen), but then the girl (who appeared barely old enough to work) looked at my card and called a manager. The manager asked me to show and ID (I happily complied), then took my ID and the card and went away with them (wtf??).
He came back after about 15 minutes, and said that he cannot accept the card, because he couldn't call my bank (the card carried the number and I'm 100% positive he could have called them if he wanted -- granted he knew how to get an international line). He also waved a photo copy of my ID and card (which of course would be something entirely illegal to do in any country without a Patriot Act).
I offered him several more non-US cards from different international banks. He declined to accept any of them.
After mumbling a curse for wasting 20 minutes of my time, I walked over to the neighboring Circuit City and bought the same items without any problems.
Being unhappy with the service as I was, I decided in a moment of fury to write to Best Buy. I went into great lenghts to emphasize that my card was valid and the computer system acknowledged this fact, the problem was with the human software.
They answered rather promply and said that I should talk to my bank, because only they can advise me why my charge was declined (which it wasn't). Obviously they don't even take the time to read a 5 sentence letter to figure out what someone is complaining about, they just send one of their stock answers. When I tried to explain what happened in even greater lengths in follow-up mail, they simply ignored it.
I did them a favor and decided to spare them the inconvenience of serving me in the future. I also advised every friend I have not to purchase in BB and particularly in that Arizona store.