Identify the browser used for this short list. Half of the ones that claim Mozilla are really just Mozilla-compatible, containing no Mozilla code. You have to have a database just to look up what browser you THINK your visitors are using. And that's not even going into user customizations!
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.23; Mac_PowerPC)
Opera/7.50 (X11; Linux i686; U) [en]
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;.NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240×320)
Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; U)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461;.NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.18 i686)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;.NET CLR 1.1.4322;.NET CLR 1.0.3705)
Opera/6.0 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X; U) [en]
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT 4.0) Opera 5.11 [en]
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.50 [en]
There's a guy named zefrank who puts out a video blog which is pretty amusing. One recurring topic is a behavior he calls "Rocketbooming" (not to be confused with the company of the same name, wink wink), which he explains as using really bad metrics to make you look hyper-popular. Of course, this behavior has been used since the business deal leading to the first advertisement on a 2-page town newsletter, but what with the puffy egotistical company name, I kinda like zefrank's term.
Anyway, by shifting gears and making IE7 an automatic downloadable for anyone who has Windows (because you all know that IE is an integral component of Windows), it seems to me that this is just a great numbers-inflating gambit. "We have 100 million* IE7 users (defined as people who left their computers connected to the Internet and didn't crash long enough to download a critical patch update that included it)." Even devoted users of FireFox who happened to fail to aggressively avoid this update will be considered one of the IE7 faithful.
I used to travel on the Mass Pike (I-90) highway on a regular basis, and would usually try to listen to the NPR stations on each ride. I say "try to listen" because every few minutes, the program would get cut by some nearby car using an FM loop to listen to their iPod or satellite radio units. It seems many of the simple FM loop devices use several of the common low-band channel spots which NPR stations prefer. The private unlicensed FM loopbacks would override the NPR licensed FM for a half mile, which means six-second bursts for opposing traffic, or 45-second periods of aggravation if I'm tracking with the FM-polluting idiot.
Someone suggested counter-warfare: I override THEIR FM with an even stronger burst that explains the problem. I don't feel that fighting fire with fire is going to help here.
Others have already said that your idea that the Japanese are unfamiliar with the letter 'X' as preposterous. They learn English in school and are inundated with western media. Algebra doesn't get taught with just kana for variable names. They get it.
It is interesting to note that where many American quizzes refer to "true/false" questions, it's pretty common for a Japanese quiz to use a circle as "correct" and an X as "incorrect." I doubt that would become a negative product connotation (like the apocryphal Chevy "No-Go" Nova story), but it's another useless bit of trivia to add to this mostly worthless thread anyway.
I agree Sony's other problems add to this, but as for those questioning the "industry-wide" aspect of this news, consider this: it's not price-fixing if it's just one company involved. Seeing all the other price-fixing stories out of the semiconductor industry recently, of COURSE it's an industry-wide investigation.
Wright had worked out the algorithm for life, as described by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, in 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea.'"
Okay, it's just a game. Props to Will and all, it's a neat idea and so far it looks to be a fun exploration of the concept, but let's not get carried away.
Many games provide a limited simulacrum of deity simulation: Populous and Black & White come to mind instantly. Someone might even be influenced in thinking about their personal theological views by playing these games, which I find healthy and useful.
But there's a lot more to "the algorithm of life" than what Spore has to offer. From John Conway to Will Wright, you're not going to find 0.00001% of the algorithm in any one place. Enjoy the game for what it is.
This is an obvious result of their poor production run that had all the internal-shorting problems. They call this the Cost of Poor Quality. If you spend all your time making replacement product for no new revenue, of course you can't make new product that earns new dollars.
This article isn't about the basics of CoPQ, but about the shareholder reaction. Shareholders may punish Sony for CoPQ, but then again, that's why you need rigorous product testing BEFORE the customer gets it. If you're not testing it but you're sending it out to multiple customers (Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony Vaio, etc.), then you're just asking for trouble.
Again, no. The "one pixel camera" is a misnomer because it makes you think of the size of one photosite in a regular camera. It has one very large/good sensor and a TON of support structure. You can't just cram a few million of those things into the same camera box.
It's stereolithography or another deposition method. You're seeing a timelapse of the process, with one thin layer per frame, photographed only when the squeegie part is out of the way.
As the owner of the world-famous leading branded HELLO.COM site, which is a world leader in friendly touchy-feely family photograph sharing, I must inform you that we find your site, "HELL.COM" is illegally infringing on our established trademark. Your site bears a confusingly-similar mark which could tarnish our reputation and dilute our market standing in the public mindshare.
You are hereby ordered to relinquish your domain registration and terminate all marketing which bears the infringing HELL.COM mark, or any other mark which closely or confusingly encroaches on our intellectual property.
As a token of good faith, we will reimburse you $15/year to cover your registration fee, and give you a coupon redeemable for FIVE JOYBUX at our HELLO.COM social site.
Funny you put a wager on the concept that Golden Palace Casinos would ante up for the domain publicity. Speaking of which, are we going to see less Golden Palace marketing crud now that the USA is reigning in all online gambling activities?
I've said before that when a company or country gets to the 1.0e7 or 1.0e8 scale, the whole idea of "vote with your dollars" or even plain democracy just simply breaks down. Any negative news is chatter, compared to the background 95-99% of complacent sheeple.
The whole us vs. them false dichodomy is destroying this country.
I agree, but not quite for the same reasons or solutions you describe.
I would like anyone who talks to their representatives to remind them that the Constitution does not mention parties at all. Whigs, republicrats, democans, greebertarians nor libereens are mentioned in the actual job description of being a representative. That relegates ALL of their party behavior to HOBBY status.
I'm paying my representative to represent ME. Her party affiliation does not matter. My party affiliation does not matter. When you spend time helping out your fellow whigs, that's on your own dime and your own time. I can't force you to drop all party affiliation when you're elected, but I'll be damned if I will pay for your party power-jockeying shenanigans.
Invite Lessig to speak for the day. Or at least read up on some of the issues he commonly raises.
Spend fifteen minutes describing the cultural myths and legends and parables which existed in many cultures, and how Disney cherry-picked them to build its corporate empire. As soon as Disney made it big, they continually bought legislation to make it impossible for other people to build off this generation's cultural bedrock in the same way. (Not to sound too biased, heh.) Then open up the discussion there as to what ethical issues are involved.
If Google adjusts their code to "rectify" a politically-oriented gaming of the system, then Google would appear to many people as politically biased. "You fixed it for Johnny Blue, but you didn't fix it for Sally Red, so you must be one of them blue-state LIBeral activist fanatic type companies!" "You tweaked Sally Red's ranking but left alone Johnny Blue's sort results, so you must be one of them red-state NEOnazi NEOcon corporate welfare hack jobs!"
Again, the issue is not "what wavelength is red" since that's simple to calibrate before launch time. Once a camera is able to accurately model a given shade as white or red or purple or chartreuse, the camera will continue to model that color pretty consistently until the electronics fail.
The problem is not the hardware but in deciding what to perceive.
Color is a combination of the incoming light, the surface characteristics, and the sensor's biases. We adjust our biases to counteract changes in the incoming light, so that the remainder tells us what the surface characteristics are.
The amount of light and reddish filtration in the Martian atmosphere varies with the Martian day, season, and weather. If the camera just records exactly what it sees, that's simple: every image comes out a bit different and anything that is white will look like some unique shade of rosy pink. Every day, the rocks and the soil would look different.
They shipped an expensive and heavy color calibration target all the way to Mars for a reason. Perceptual color calibration is done on an ongoing basis. The goal is to post-process the raw images in a way similar to what our brains do: to balance the lighting conditions so that white objects appear white, green objects appear green, and that soil under our left wheel does not freakishly change color every day.
The problem is not "what color would enter my eyes?" but instead "what color would my brain register?"
The color calibration target that is on the corner of the rover (designed by a group including Bill Nye the Science Guy, if I recall) helps the scientists recreate the colors that entered the camera lens accurately, or to recreate the colors of the materials when ignoring the differences in Martian lighting conditions. But if you were standing there on Mars looking at all this stuff for a while, you'd probably have a different impression. Your eyes would "get used to" the color shifts and start remapping things to perceive them without the shift.
In cameras, this is called "white balance." The white target should look white, right? Well, anyone who has used their digital cameras to take pictures of a white birthday cake lit by candles, or a white wall in a room lit dimly with low-wattage incandescent bulbs has seen that white objects appear amber to the camera. Sometimes seriously orange. Forest shots look much more green/blue than you remember them. Many digicams have automatic white-balancing software, and they automatically shift the RGB colors until the average over the whole scene is neutral.
Your eyes would get a really reddish scene on Mars. Just like that automatic white-balance setting on your camera, your brain would get used to the reddish glow, until the white spot on the color target looked mostly white or subtly blushed instead of a ruddy red color.
Singing is also a good way to end or control stuttering. Jim Neighbors (aka "PFC Gomer Pyle") and Mel Tillis were both prominent examples of this during their careers. Jim worked his way out of stuttering altogether, while Mel continued to stutter whenever he wasn't singing.
It's interesting that they chose to call this release "Zod." The traditional Red Hat maintainer of XFree86/Xorg, Mike Harris, for a long time went by the alternate nickname of "zod" on IRC support channels and the like. He left Red Hat a little while ago, and now this release bears this name. I have no idea if there was any intentional connection.
ObTrivia: In case you missed the other fifty explanations, General Zod is the leader of the Krypton villains in Superman II.
You don't need to remember such trivia as how the Ford Model T's floorboards were recycled wooden crates from the parts suppliers, to then talk about how the hybrid engine may replace simple engines in the coming decade.
Two months before I heard of this, I thought it would be cute to make an iBonsai program. Screensaver-simple, as one of these judges said. A bonsai tree with a variable time scale, from 1x to 20x. Lets you snip twigs or pinch buds to control the overall growth direction, replace the pot when it get large enough, watch it grow under different seasons, and that's about it. There are dozens of tree varieties that work well in bonsai, but it's a bit fussier than practical for those of us who don't have a green thumb or the proper humid environment.
Killer app, NO WAY. $5 shareware cute product, for some people, yes. Less manic than a Tamagotchi, but the same basic idea.
Firstly, I'm quite clear on the difference. The key words you chose to ignore are 'paper', 'hold' and 'ink'. The tangible expression of the idea *can* be locked up by copyright. Secondly, patents also have the same obligation on the owner to identify infringements: to give a similar dirt-age analogy, if you had to find out who pushed a round rock first before pushing a round rock yourself, we still would not have the wheel.
Given the low-pass signature identification algorithms we have discussed lately, I would really like to see a duplicate-video cull on these sites. There seems to be fifty copies of each of the more popular clips, cloned and re-posted to video.google and youtube in some kind of karma-whoring frenzy.
I bet there are more than 30,000 dupes if you just count the 3,000 top-rated video clips.
Slashdot Mirror
Identify the browser used for this short list. Half of the ones that claim Mozilla are really just Mozilla-compatible, containing no Mozilla code. You have to have a database just to look up what browser you THINK your visitors are using. And that's not even going into user customizations!
There's a guy named zefrank who puts out a video blog which is pretty amusing. One recurring topic is a behavior he calls "Rocketbooming" (not to be confused with the company of the same name, wink wink), which he explains as using really bad metrics to make you look hyper-popular. Of course, this behavior has been used since the business deal leading to the first advertisement on a 2-page town newsletter, but what with the puffy egotistical company name, I kinda like zefrank's term.
Anyway, by shifting gears and making IE7 an automatic downloadable for anyone who has Windows (because you all know that IE is an integral component of Windows), it seems to me that this is just a great numbers-inflating gambit. "We have 100 million* IE7 users (defined as people who left their computers connected to the Internet and didn't crash long enough to download a critical patch update that included it)." Even devoted users of FireFox who happened to fail to aggressively avoid this update will be considered one of the IE7 faithful.
I used to travel on the Mass Pike (I-90) highway on a regular basis, and would usually try to listen to the NPR stations on each ride. I say "try to listen" because every few minutes, the program would get cut by some nearby car using an FM loop to listen to their iPod or satellite radio units. It seems many of the simple FM loop devices use several of the common low-band channel spots which NPR stations prefer. The private unlicensed FM loopbacks would override the NPR licensed FM for a half mile, which means six-second bursts for opposing traffic, or 45-second periods of aggravation if I'm tracking with the FM-polluting idiot.
Someone suggested counter-warfare: I override THEIR FM with an even stronger burst that explains the problem. I don't feel that fighting fire with fire is going to help here.
Others have already said that your idea that the Japanese are unfamiliar with the letter 'X' as preposterous. They learn English in school and are inundated with western media. Algebra doesn't get taught with just kana for variable names. They get it.
It is interesting to note that where many American quizzes refer to "true/false" questions, it's pretty common for a Japanese quiz to use a circle as "correct" and an X as "incorrect." I doubt that would become a negative product connotation (like the apocryphal Chevy "No-Go" Nova story), but it's another useless bit of trivia to add to this mostly worthless thread anyway.
I agree Sony's other problems add to this, but as for those questioning the "industry-wide" aspect of this news, consider this: it's not price-fixing if it's just one company involved. Seeing all the other price-fixing stories out of the semiconductor industry recently, of COURSE it's an industry-wide investigation.
Okay, it's just a game. Props to Will and all, it's a neat idea and so far it looks to be a fun exploration of the concept, but let's not get carried away.
Many games provide a limited simulacrum of deity simulation: Populous and Black & White come to mind instantly. Someone might even be influenced in thinking about their personal theological views by playing these games, which I find healthy and useful.
But there's a lot more to "the algorithm of life" than what Spore has to offer. From John Conway to Will Wright, you're not going to find 0.00001% of the algorithm in any one place. Enjoy the game for what it is.
This is an obvious result of their poor production run that had all the internal-shorting problems. They call this the Cost of Poor Quality. If you spend all your time making replacement product for no new revenue, of course you can't make new product that earns new dollars.
This article isn't about the basics of CoPQ, but about the shareholder reaction. Shareholders may punish Sony for CoPQ, but then again, that's why you need rigorous product testing BEFORE the customer gets it. If you're not testing it but you're sending it out to multiple customers (Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony Vaio, etc.), then you're just asking for trouble.
Again, no. The "one pixel camera" is a misnomer because it makes you think of the size of one photosite in a regular camera. It has one very large/good sensor and a TON of support structure. You can't just cram a few million of those things into the same camera box.
It's stereolithography or another deposition method. You're seeing a timelapse of the process, with one thin layer per frame, photographed only when the squeegie part is out of the way.
As the owner of the world-famous leading branded HELLO.COM site, which is a world leader in friendly touchy-feely family photograph sharing, I must inform you that we find your site, "HELL.COM" is illegally infringing on our established trademark. Your site bears a confusingly-similar mark which could tarnish our reputation and dilute our market standing in the public mindshare.
You are hereby ordered to relinquish your domain registration and terminate all marketing which bears the infringing HELL.COM mark, or any other mark which closely or confusingly encroaches on our intellectual property.
As a token of good faith, we will reimburse you $15/year to cover your registration fee, and give you a coupon redeemable for FIVE JOYBUX at our HELLO.COM social site.
Funny you put a wager on the concept that Golden Palace Casinos would ante up for the domain publicity. Speaking of which, are we going to see less Golden Palace marketing crud now that the USA is reigning in all online gambling activities?
Thanks for that. My usual 'microrant' on this topic: http://www.halley.cc/ed/microrants/#piracy - it looks like your Thomas Dekker reference predates my reference.
I've said before that when a company or country gets to the 1.0e7 or 1.0e8 scale, the whole idea of "vote with your dollars" or even plain democracy just simply breaks down. Any negative news is chatter, compared to the background 95-99% of complacent sheeple.
I would like anyone who talks to their representatives to remind them that the Constitution does not mention parties at all. Whigs, republicrats, democans, greebertarians nor libereens are mentioned in the actual job description of being a representative. That relegates ALL of their party behavior to HOBBY status.
I'm paying my representative to represent ME. Her party affiliation does not matter. My party affiliation does not matter. When you spend time helping out your fellow whigs, that's on your own dime and your own time. I can't force you to drop all party affiliation when you're elected, but I'll be damned if I will pay for your party power-jockeying shenanigans.
Invite Lessig to speak for the day. Or at least read up on some of the issues he commonly raises.
Spend fifteen minutes describing the cultural myths and legends and parables which existed in many cultures, and how Disney cherry-picked them to build its corporate empire. As soon as Disney made it big, they continually bought legislation to make it impossible for other people to build off this generation's cultural bedrock in the same way. (Not to sound too biased, heh.) Then open up the discussion there as to what ethical issues are involved.
If Google adjusts their code to "rectify" a politically-oriented gaming of the system, then Google would appear to many people as politically biased. "You fixed it for Johnny Blue, but you didn't fix it for Sally Red, so you must be one of them blue-state LIBeral activist fanatic type companies!" "You tweaked Sally Red's ranking but left alone Johnny Blue's sort results, so you must be one of them red-state NEOnazi NEOcon corporate welfare hack jobs!"
Again, the issue is not "what wavelength is red" since that's simple to calibrate before launch time. Once a camera is able to accurately model a given shade as white or red or purple or chartreuse, the camera will continue to model that color pretty consistently until the electronics fail.
The problem is not the hardware but in deciding what to perceive.
Color is a combination of the incoming light, the surface characteristics, and the sensor's biases. We adjust our biases to counteract changes in the incoming light, so that the remainder tells us what the surface characteristics are.
The amount of light and reddish filtration in the Martian atmosphere varies with the Martian day, season, and weather. If the camera just records exactly what it sees, that's simple: every image comes out a bit different and anything that is white will look like some unique shade of rosy pink. Every day, the rocks and the soil would look different.
They shipped an expensive and heavy color calibration target all the way to Mars for a reason. Perceptual color calibration is done on an ongoing basis. The goal is to post-process the raw images in a way similar to what our brains do: to balance the lighting conditions so that white objects appear white, green objects appear green, and that soil under our left wheel does not freakishly change color every day.
The problem is not "what color would enter my eyes?" but instead "what color would my brain register?"
The color calibration target that is on the corner of the rover (designed by a group including Bill Nye the Science Guy, if I recall) helps the scientists recreate the colors that entered the camera lens accurately, or to recreate the colors of the materials when ignoring the differences in Martian lighting conditions. But if you were standing there on Mars looking at all this stuff for a while, you'd probably have a different impression. Your eyes would "get used to" the color shifts and start remapping things to perceive them without the shift.
In cameras, this is called "white balance." The white target should look white, right? Well, anyone who has used their digital cameras to take pictures of a white birthday cake lit by candles, or a white wall in a room lit dimly with low-wattage incandescent bulbs has seen that white objects appear amber to the camera. Sometimes seriously orange. Forest shots look much more green/blue than you remember them. Many digicams have automatic white-balancing software, and they automatically shift the RGB colors until the average over the whole scene is neutral.
Your eyes would get a really reddish scene on Mars. Just like that automatic white-balance setting on your camera, your brain would get used to the reddish glow, until the white spot on the color target looked mostly white or subtly blushed instead of a ruddy red color.
For extremely large values of 'instant'.
Singing is also a good way to end or control stuttering. Jim Neighbors (aka "PFC Gomer Pyle") and Mel Tillis were both prominent examples of this during their careers. Jim worked his way out of stuttering altogether, while Mel continued to stutter whenever he wasn't singing.
It's interesting that they chose to call this release "Zod." The traditional Red Hat maintainer of XFree86/Xorg, Mike Harris, for a long time went by the alternate nickname of "zod" on IRC support channels and the like. He left Red Hat a little while ago, and now this release bears this name. I have no idea if there was any intentional connection.
ObTrivia: In case you missed the other fifty explanations, General Zod is the leader of the Krypton villains in Superman II.
You don't need to remember such trivia as how the Ford Model T's floorboards were recycled wooden crates from the parts suppliers, to then talk about how the hybrid engine may replace simple engines in the coming decade.
It's kinda sad, actually.
Two months before I heard of this, I thought it would be cute to make an iBonsai program. Screensaver-simple, as one of these judges said. A bonsai tree with a variable time scale, from 1x to 20x. Lets you snip twigs or pinch buds to control the overall growth direction, replace the pot when it get large enough, watch it grow under different seasons, and that's about it. There are dozens of tree varieties that work well in bonsai, but it's a bit fussier than practical for those of us who don't have a green thumb or the proper humid environment.
Killer app, NO WAY. $5 shareware cute product, for some people, yes. Less manic than a Tamagotchi, but the same basic idea.
Firstly, I'm quite clear on the difference. The key words you chose to ignore are 'paper', 'hold' and 'ink'. The tangible expression of the idea *can* be locked up by copyright. Secondly, patents also have the same obligation on the owner to identify infringements: to give a similar dirt-age analogy, if you had to find out who pushed a round rock first before pushing a round rock yourself, we still would not have the wheel.
Given the low-pass signature identification algorithms we have discussed lately, I would really like to see a duplicate-video cull on these sites. There seems to be fifty copies of each of the more popular clips, cloned and re-posted to video.google and youtube in some kind of karma-whoring frenzy.
I bet there are more than 30,000 dupes if you just count the 3,000 top-rated video clips.