Truly, e-mail attachments are an ugly hack. The base64 encoding is a workaround the fact that only ASCII text is allowed. So we encode everything with 64 characters. This means we send 8 bits and only get 6 bits for the encoding, making all attachments 1/3 larger. Just look at your mailbox in Pine when you get a large attachment. Somebody once sent me a statistical model for all phonemes of the English language, which was more than 20 MB. In the "size" column in Pine, it just said "size = BIG!":)
I guess the person who wrote the review meant hard disk space usage. A memory footprint of >400 MB would blow away most machines, especially the one the tester used (with 96 MB of RAM), swapping them to death:)
If this contest is indeed sponsored by O'Reilly, and Whirlwind Interactive, they could have been a bit more generous. At least they could have chosen a more even sum, like $500 or $512;)
Now if some agency thinks you have secretly stored some data on your computer, you do not only have to hand over any secret keys, but also tear off any Scotch tape your used anywhere in your home;-)
I know it's nitpicking, but LCD means Liquid Cristal Display. So the term "LCD display" is, although used often, redundant. No need to write "Liquid Cristal Display display":)
As you said, the process of mapping the genes could be patented (e. g. for using it on other species later), while the map itself can be copyrighted. I am sure Celera and the other companies are aware this distinction. Note that there was neither a mention of patenting or copyrighting information in the article, nor of other ways of protecting intellectual property (e. g. by declaring it as a trade secret). However, some people on/. tend to jump the gun when they only smell the word "patent" (I am not referring to your comment with that).
I programmed assembler on a SPARC, and never missed the reverse byte order. Little Endian is counterintuitive. Binary backwards compatibility has always been an issue of binary only programs. If you have the source, just recompile... IMHO little Endian is an ugly hack and looks really ridiculous nowadays.
If Intel x86 chips, where the bytes are ordered the wrong way round, had not been so sucessful due to their most unholy alliance with software where much more is the wrong way round, we would never have had this problem.
If you can figure out this sentence, then you are probably too smart to think of a reason why one would write a number backwards (in memory).;-)
The MySQL server that hosts the pictures went down immediately after the link got posted - the/. effect was quicker than ever:-) Did anybody mirror the pictures while they were available?
If you have all employees clustered in one huge campus, then you inherently need more effort to coordinate everything. Even then, coordination suffers, which is why certain strange features went into Office just because some employee wanted it. A group developing a small, slick product with all essential functionality can proceed much faster - KOffice has proved this, but also Applixware and (to some extent) StarOffice. MS has just grown too big to adjust itself to the market. Once they lose their power to dominate the market and tell people what they want, they will certainly go through a rigorous downsizing/decentralizing process. Maybe the judge will already do that work for them:-)
The entire text below this story (in the front/. page) appears in italics. How ironic, wrong HTML in a story about wrong HTML;-)
These displays were introduced in 1997
on
3D LCD's for Sale
·
· Score: 2
If you go to the "mission" link, you will see in the time line that the 12" version was introduced in 1997 while the larger 15" and 18" versions were introduced in 1998. So it is surprising that manufacturers have not yet picked up that technology. Maybe it is not that good after all? While it is understandable that DTI does not want to give out technical details, it makes me sceptical not to know even the basic idea of how it works.
Why didn't the author try soft morphology?
on
Full Moon
·
· Score: 2
Soft morphology provides an excellent means of restoring old pictures. While it eliminates noise (i. e. dirty specks), it preserves fine details at the same time. One can imagine the simplest form of this by using a fine brush that redraws the image. The brush is just a bit too coarse to draw the dust specks as well, so these disappear. Care has to be taken not to destroy fine details, too; therefore this operation has to be refined a bit. (Genetic algorithms "train" the brush so it will improve the operation.) Very interesting research is going on in this area - and these pictures would have been a perfect chance to translate this into action.
From a standard CRT screen, the signal can still be reconstructed from several dozen meters away, using some elaborate devices. Therefore this cannot be to prevent leaking information in the cable that goes through the monitor. It is likely, as somebody else said, a prevention of the screen copy ("print screen") function in order to restrict customer rights one step further.
The latest version of rvplayer I could get was version 5, which cannot play the movie... please do not post stories that only consist of a video file that cannot be played:-(
on purpose, because it is really a pain in the ass to change an entry. It takes days until a mail is processed, only to see that the request could not be processed for some reason. In order to actually change something, a month can easily pass - if you cannot plan a server migration a long time in advance, you are in real trouble. This sluggish service also prevents people from switching - so there is maybe some wacky business strategy behind that (which only worked in the first place due to the monopoly they had for years; I would never register a new domain there now).
I am no expert at this, but maybe the continuous, analog nature of holograms causes a problem here? If you have a holographic picture, we usually have smooth surfaces; if you view a program as a picture, it looks (more or less) like randomly set pixels. Having a 3D representation is only going to make things worse. Of course the goal is to increase the precision of the holograms, which will solve this problem; but unlike transistors, holograms do not have the kind of inherent "noise immunity" that silicon memory chips have. There is still a long way until we have data crystals à la Babylon 5.
The ruling is not enforceable outside the USA, so this will not stop DeCSS. However, it is a *very* disturbing precedent, and shows how clueless judges are when it comes to technology (and/or how easy to influence by large, powerful corporations).
"Consolidate the complementary networks of VA (including Linux.com, Sourceforge.net, and Themes.org) and Andover.Net (including Slashdot.org and Freshmeat.net) to create the Internet's leading destination for Open Source developers, with nearly two-thirds of the total traffic of major Open Source sites and putting the combined network in the top 100 web destinations worldwide."
This means that one source is controlling 2/3 of all Open Source web pages! No one else hearing alarm bells ringing? It is really important to have no monopoly in the media, especially in this case where Open Source is going to have a strongly increasing influence on society.
I cannot give you a guide for a good business plan here, but the key point is you write the business plan for yourself not only for the banks. It will serve you as a road map for the first two or three years, until you reach the break even point. Every month, you should compare your current position to where you think you should be (the business plan should include the expenses for each month for the first year, for each quarter for the second).
As for product ideas, the key is the Unique Selling Proposition. Why should people buy your product? What makes it special (better) than any other product out there? Also keep in mind that your product does not only have to please the customer, but also everyone else involved - vendors, people who will have to maintain the product (sysadmins) etc. If a sysadmin for some reason does not like the product (possibly because it is a good idea that he did not come up with - the "Not Invented Here" syndrome) for some reason, he may be powerful enough to block it, even though people would like to use it.
Of course a business plan includes more than that - most large banks have guidelines for writing a business plan - do use them!
The problem is not the difficulty to break the signature scheme (i. e. to break the hash function used), but to establish procedures that regulate what happens if
a key is stolen (and used against you)
a key needs to be retracted before the normal expiry date (e. g. if you think it might have been stolen
someone you trusted who authenticated other parties turns out to be not trustworthy - your entire "web of trust" might collapse due to this (e. g. if some official certification authority turns out to be corrupt)
The first two problems are partly of technical nature, since security holes in computers will always exist, but the more difficult aspects are social implications and laws that regulate how these signatures apply to real life.
For many small programs, the people who write them just don't have the time to create an elaborate user interface around it... usually, the programmers themselves use the command line version, so the scratch-an-itch motivation is no longer here. And if the author of the program has time to extend it, he would probably rather improve the functionality. Nothing evil about that.
It would be good if all those Win32 programmers who don't like writing deep (complicated) code but love designing UIs (shallow, boring code) contributed more to Open Source programs!
Maybe they should have used the defaults from the previous version. Another problem is that it does not find the skins in/usr/local/share/xmms/Skins. This also worked fine before. Xmms would be neat if one could choose several directories for shuffle play... does anyone know whether this is possible? Otherwise I'll stick to mpg123...
Slashdot Mirror
Truly, e-mail attachments are an ugly hack. The base64 encoding is a workaround the fact that only ASCII text is allowed. So we encode everything with 64 characters. This means we send 8 bits and only get 6 bits for the encoding, making all attachments 1/3 larger. :)
Just look at your mailbox in Pine when you get a large attachment. Somebody once sent me a statistical model for all phonemes of the English language, which was more than 20 MB. In the "size" column in Pine, it just said "size = BIG!"
"The preferred language of the young programmers they were hiring was Linux."
;)
Hmm. I thought it was C
I guess the person who wrote the review meant hard disk space usage. A memory footprint of >400 MB would blow away most machines, especially the one the tester used (with 96 MB of RAM), swapping them to death :)
If this contest is indeed sponsored by O'Reilly, and Whirlwind Interactive, they could have been a bit more generous. At least they could have chosen a more even sum, like $500 or $512 ;)
Now if some agency thinks you have secretly stored some data on your computer, you do not only have to hand over any secret keys, but also tear off any Scotch tape your used anywhere in your home ;-)
I know it's nitpicking, but LCD means Liquid Cristal Display. So the term "LCD display" is, although used often, redundant. No need to write "Liquid Cristal Display display" :)
As you said, the process of mapping the genes could be patented (e. g. for using it on other species later), while the map itself can be copyrighted. /. tend to jump the gun when they only smell the word "patent" (I am not referring to your comment with that).
I am sure Celera and the other companies are aware this distinction. Note that there was neither a mention of patenting or copyrighting information in the article, nor of other ways of protecting intellectual property (e. g. by declaring it as a trade secret). However, some people on
I programmed assembler on a SPARC, and never missed the reverse byte order. Little Endian is counterintuitive. Binary backwards compatibility has always been an issue of binary only programs. If you have the source, just recompile... IMHO little Endian is an ugly hack and looks really ridiculous nowadays.
If Intel x86 chips, where the bytes are ordered the wrong way round, had not been so sucessful due to their most unholy alliance with software where much more is the wrong way round, we would never have had this problem.
;-)
If you can figure out this sentence, then you are probably too smart to think of a reason why one would write a number backwards (in memory).
The MySQL server that hosts the pictures went down immediately after the link got posted - the /. effect was quicker than ever :-)
Did anybody mirror the pictures while they were available?
If you have all employees clustered in one huge campus, then you inherently need more effort to coordinate everything. Even then, coordination suffers, which is why certain strange features went into Office just because some employee wanted it. :-)
A group developing a small, slick product with all essential functionality can proceed much faster - KOffice has proved this, but also Applixware and (to some extent) StarOffice. MS has just grown too big to adjust itself to the market. Once they lose their power to dominate the market and tell people what they want, they will certainly go through a rigorous downsizing/decentralizing process. Maybe the judge will already do that work for them
The entire text below this story (in the front /. page) appears in italics. How ironic, wrong HTML in a story about wrong HTML ;-)
If you go to the "mission" link, you will see in the time line that the 12" version was introduced in 1997 while the larger 15" and 18" versions were introduced in 1998.
So it is surprising that manufacturers have not yet picked up that technology. Maybe it is not that good after all? While it is understandable that DTI does not want to give out technical details, it makes me sceptical not to know even the basic idea of how it works.
Soft morphology provides an excellent means of restoring old pictures. While it eliminates noise (i. e. dirty specks), it preserves fine details at the same time.
One can imagine the simplest form of this by using a fine brush that redraws the image. The brush is just a bit too coarse to draw the dust specks as well, so these disappear. Care has to be taken not to destroy fine details, too; therefore this operation has to be refined a bit. (Genetic algorithms "train" the brush so it will improve the operation.)
Very interesting research is going on in this area - and these pictures would have been a perfect chance to translate this into action.
From a standard CRT screen, the signal can still be reconstructed from several dozen meters away, using some elaborate devices. Therefore this cannot be to prevent leaking information in the cable that goes through the monitor.
It is likely, as somebody else said, a prevention of the screen copy ("print screen") function in order to restrict customer rights one step further.
The latest version of rvplayer I could get was version 5, which cannot play the movie... please do not post stories that only consist of a video file that cannot be played :-(
on purpose, because it is really a pain in the ass to change an entry. It takes days until a mail is processed, only to see that the request could not be processed for some reason. In order to actually change something, a month can easily pass - if you cannot plan a server migration a long time in advance, you are in real trouble.
This sluggish service also prevents people from switching - so there is maybe some wacky business strategy behind that (which only worked in the first place due to the monopoly they had for years; I would never register a new domain there now).
I am no expert at this, but maybe the continuous, analog nature of holograms causes a problem here?
If you have a holographic picture, we usually have smooth surfaces; if you view a program as a picture, it looks (more or less) like randomly set pixels. Having a 3D representation is only going to make things worse.
Of course the goal is to increase the precision of the holograms, which will solve this problem; but unlike transistors, holograms do not have the kind of inherent "noise immunity" that silicon memory chips have. There is still a long way until we have data crystals à la Babylon 5.
Now the army can also play Robin Hood again, the Lieutenant being Robin, the Sergeant Major being Little John, and the cook Friar Tuck :-)
:^)
Or some sergeant who always felt suppressed by his superiors will create his fantasy where they will serve them
The ruling is not enforceable outside the USA, so this will not stop DeCSS. However, it is a *very* disturbing precedent, and shows how clueless judges are when it comes to technology (and/or how easy to influence by large, powerful corporations).
This means that one source is controlling 2/3 of all Open Source web pages! No one else hearing alarm bells ringing? It is really important to have no monopoly in the media, especially in this case where Open Source is going to have a strongly increasing influence on society.
As for product ideas, the key is the Unique Selling Proposition. Why should people buy your product? What makes it special (better) than any other product out there? Also keep in mind that your product does not only have to please the customer, but also everyone else involved - vendors, people who will have to maintain the product (sysadmins) etc. If a sysadmin for some reason does not like the product (possibly because it is a good idea that he did not come up with - the "Not Invented Here" syndrome) for some reason, he may be powerful enough to block it, even though people would like to use it.
Of course a business plan includes more than that - most large banks have guidelines for writing a business plan - do use them!
- a key is stolen (and used against you)
- a key needs to be retracted before the normal expiry date (e. g. if you think it might have been stolen
- someone you trusted who authenticated other parties turns out to be not trustworthy - your entire "web of trust" might collapse due to this (e. g. if some official certification authority turns out to be corrupt)
The first two problems are partly of technical nature, since security holes in computers will always exist, but the more difficult aspects are social implications and laws that regulate how these signatures apply to real life.For many small programs, the people who write them just don't have the time to create an elaborate user interface around it... usually, the programmers themselves use the command line version, so the scratch-an-itch motivation is no longer here. And if the author of the program has time to extend it, he would probably rather improve the functionality. Nothing evil about that.
It would be good if all those Win32 programmers who don't like writing deep (complicated) code but love designing UIs (shallow, boring code) contributed more to Open Source programs!
Maybe they should have used the defaults from the previous version. Another problem is that it does not find the skins in /usr/local/share/xmms/Skins. This also worked fine before.
Xmms would be neat if one could choose several directories for shuffle play... does anyone know whether this is possible? Otherwise I'll stick to mpg123...