And under every single LEGO(tm) brick piece, ever since I was a very little kid, I saw 'PAT PEND' or a patent number. [As I write this, I grabbed a piece off the Droid Developers Kit, and read a number 3037-022-6.]
The LEGO patents include the exact measurements of their bricks. No competitor can make truly LEGO-compatible bricks. Some may claim such, but try putting the bricks together: the tiny hairline difference in bump-to-bump distance means that they won't go together for more than about three or five bumps in a row.
LEGOs were how I learned what a patent WAS. I'm all for LEGO as a company, but even they have their patents and strictly enforce them.
My general advice for little kids and programming:
LOGO, for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.
ToonTalk, for a graphical construction environment, teaching
pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.
Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical
environment.
Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts,
and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids
start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the
idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.
After reading the gopher:// manifesto, it got me to do something that I had been considering for some time: move my internet presence into gopherspace and out of the Web.
PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented ftp to mars will work nicely.
Using TCP for any small-packet transmissions on a high-latency connection is ludicrous. TCP (as opposed to the simpler UDP) guarantees delivery in packet's original order, or the socket dies. It does this by sending back receipts to each routing step. You can "assume success" for a while, but if you do, why not use UDP without all that receipt time?
"Server, you there?" [up to 40 minutes ping time to Mars]
"Yeah. What do you want?"
"Log me in with these credentials: XXX" [another 40 minutes ping time]
"Roger."
"Here's bytes 0 to 511: XXXX"... and so on.
which processes this signal to drive a low-power laser. The light is then scanned by a small mirror to create images
Who needs a planetarium for midnight Pink Floyd laser shows, when you can just strap this gizmo onto your head and zone out? This is far better than those rave shows where some nose-studded guy with an Amiga pumps out some colored blotches on a wall.
I can hear the cash registers klinking now... or maybe it's just the start of the song Money...
As I understand it, the Internet wasn't "designed" to deal with nuke aftermath. It's a wives' tale with a grain of truth deep inside to make it sound good.
The communications system of DARPA may have maximized the advantages of routing, so that.mil sites would have enough redundancy to still talk if a node or a few went down. Computers were just as unreliable then as they are now. Some stay up for months, others bluescreen or blow tubes weekly.
However, DARPA is the Internet. As the name implies, the Internet is an amalgam of many smaller networks. Thus, the whole Internet may not share the fault tolerance that DARPA enjoyed. It's not even clear that the.mil network even still has such traits.
Big business is building most of the Internet infrastructure now. While it costs lots and lots of money if a cable gets cut, corporations still don't have the long-term vision attitude it would take to put in enough redundancy. Dig two transcontinental trench projects with two cables, when you could just dig one? That's a cost.
There's relatively few undersea cables. If there's maybe fifty crossing the North American continent, there's only ten crossing the Pacific. Satellites offer long slow alternatives, but if a deep cable is cut, it's BAD.
How do you know that we both perceive colors the same way? Perhaps the way I perceive blue in my mind looks just like the red that you perceive in your mind.
I used to consider this a problem, but really, it is moot. If I can say "red" and you know what I mean, and if you can say "blue" and I know what you mean, then it's all hunky dorey. We all perceive some color approximately n nm wavelength as a given name for a hue, and that is all that matters.
Now, if we took my eyeball or optic nerve and transplated it in you, maybe something would register with different synaptic signals. You'd see a solarized (hue shifted or mangled) signal. You might not even be able to interpret my brightness signals. However, your brain would, if given some time, retrain itself to the new inputs.
Moreover I might point out there's no constitutional right that guarantees that music companies should make money. If their target customers don't have money for CDs, maybe they should rethink their business plan.
I wasn't suggesting that teens get debit cards to purchase CDs. Heck, if they want CDs, they can go to the local brick and mortar shop with the cold hard cash daddy gives them.
Teens need online purchasing power to equalize the situation: indies can avoid the sleazy contracts purloined by big distributors if they can still make money from their audience. If the indies only target 40-somethings for making money, they'll starve. The indie needs to get cash from the teens, avoiding the big distributors.
And here is the crux of the matter. A) The artists often do not own the songs the write and sing, the record companies do. Many artists get little or nothing from "their" music. B) Considering the record industries "creative accounting" practices (i.e., screwing the artists), many people seem to find it difficult to accept the record companies claim of the higher moral ground.
You don't make a case against the theft of music via file-trading. It is theft, as the Napster user is getting the benefit of the music while the licensed distributor gets nothing in return.
I agree that the licensed distributors are sleazebags, fat cats who wine and dine little artists, seducing them into signing horribly restrictive contracts.
To shift the industry away from the fat cat executives,
Get the little indies to STAY independent. Those contracts are signed with their blood.
Organize secure downloads at reasonable prices. A buck a song, or even lower through a subscription service that can handle the microtransactions with a minimum of fuss.
Get debit cards in the hands of teenagers. They're the market for music money, yet so few teens have any purchasing power online due to the credit card hurdle.
First one to land on AN asteroid would probably be able to lay claim to IT. Even if some government decided to lay claim to the asteroid BELT, it'd be pretty much unenforceable.
There are millions of asteroids, and thousands of them are large enough to anchor equipment. There may be other variables of viability, such as usable trajectories of returned mass to Earth, or inter-asteroid collisions, but there's plenty for all developing nations to have their own, several times over.
Microsoft is one of the first (if not THE first) to do serious usability laboratory testing for microcomputer software. This is separate from unit testing, regression testing, stress testing and focus testing.
The labs are set up much as focus group rooms, or if you haven't seen those, tv cops' interrogation chambers. A simple but attractive office or homey room with a computer and a few knick-nacks, overseen by a VERY wired booth and a large one-way mirror wall.
The user is someone off the street, heavily pre-interviewed to fit various target demographics of experience or workstyles.
The instructions handed may go all the way from an unopened box in the chair (install and explore this), to a preconfigured setup and a few written instructions as if from a boss.
The people in the control booth record everything said by the user, and done with the computer. The controller can converse with the user through an intercom, and even move the mouse pointer or type remotely, but generally lets the user drive the show.
The user is asked to think out loud as much as possible, to say their goals as they conceive of them, and to say their reactions to what they see. "Okay, I didn't mean to do that. I think Undo would be here, and, yep, okay, undone. Oh, but that erased this other thing too, which I wasn't expecting."
Now, bring this to Open Source or Free Software. The lab doesn't need to be so fancy, but the REAL needs of REAL users must be REALLY observed and dissected and made into REAL usability gains.
If usability angst testimonies are filtered between the neophyte to the guru, how can the guru comprehend what the neophyte needs? Guesswork makes for crap software.
Conversely, in 1990 or so, Microsoft's LAN Manager group dismissed the feedback from Microsoft's own employees, as "not the typical user." A shame, because at the time, there were very few 30,000+ node LANs in the world. They could have clearly benefitted from the feedback of such users.
Augh! More BASIC-poisoned young programmers!
on
Playstation 2 Basic?
·
· Score: 2
My general advice for little kids and programming:
LOGO, for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.
ToonTalk, for a graphical construction environment, teaching
pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.
Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical
environment.
Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts,
and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids
start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the
idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.
Microsoft operates as a series of individual business units. While that gives them the maximum flexibility to try new things, it also means they often have to learn the same lesson more than once.
Take subscriptions for instance. MS Visual C/C++ wanted to go that model, as many programmers here may recall. "Buy 4.0 and subscribe to MSDN, you'll get 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, every three months like clockwork." Well, the versions came out... 4.0, 4.1, slip, 4.2, slip, slip, slip, uh, 6.0!
By going to a subscription model, they give the user false impression that the product will continue to advance on a rigid schedule. There's no way to win:
if it doesn't come out on time, the customer will feel seriously jypped at the renewal dues;
if it DOES come out on time, the customer has to churn all those desktops' installations to keep step with the advances, or relegate the expensive updates to dusty shelfware.
If they use some sort of lockout like cheap nag shareware, a la "It's February, you can't use the Save feature until you renew your Office subscription dues..." some people will definitely find alternatives. They'll have to keep increasing the dues as the flock of docile sheep dwindles.
Identifying your Wall Warts
Posted by Hemos on Sat 18 Nov 02:07PM from the that's-dymo-nite! dept.
LeetSkeeter wrote, "This helpful article that shows us one solution to the
age-old question: how to deobfuscate those wall-wart[?] power adapters." I use those new gel
pens in flourescent colors, too.
Better Case Air Circulation
Posted by michael on Sat 18 Nov 01:07PM from the vacuum-kewled dept.
ThinkGeek is working with a leading vendor of high-powered turbine systems to get co-branding.
Can you imagine the little BSD mascot on one of these?
Overclockers, read on.
Ask Slashdot: Too Many Fluff Postings?
Posted by timothy on Sat 18 Nov 01:07PM from the running-gnu-lint-on-it dept.
DustBunny writes, "What's the right balance between
meaningless stories and trivia? Everyone says that Slashdot's
been going downhill, but I don't think so. I think it's
just that more people notice how low it's always been.
Come on, when's the next Tenchi Muyo DVD that we're supposed to
boycott?"
[update by timothy]: We got a cease
and desist from ZD News... apparently they have the
inside on puff journalism.
Apparently, it's not just a matter of their saying "gee, a.foo would be cool," but it's a matter of giving the new.foo over to the person/organization who submitted the proposal.
They dropped.xxx and.kids because the applicants weren't competent to run a registry service.
So, it didn't come down to logical divisions, but to registrars. Just like.mil is managed by one organization (DoD), so would.xxx or.kids.
Personally, I am glad ".kids" didn't make it. It's an idiomatic word. (Is it related to that infamous.cx image?). I also prefer the three-letter ones, just in consistency.
I also didn't like the.web thing. Isn't the www. convention enough? Or would Foobar Inc., need to move their web presence to some new toplevel domain?
Anyone can run Perl code through a perl-built obfuscator. Heck, one of the winning entries was an obfuscated perl-built obfuscator. How... imaginative.
I have lost my hardcopy of the Obfuscated C contest entries, but it seemed like they had a lot more spirit, and thought about the artistic side, on more than one level.
For example, one winner of Obfuscated C wrote a simple maze generator. However, the source code to the maze generator was itself a maze, with whitespace passages going up and across and down through the code. To top it off, those whitespace passages that cut through the code spelled out the word "MAZE", if you stood back far enough to see it. The main variables used were m, a, z and e, as well.
The closest to 'artistic' Perl source that I have seen is the "RSA Dolphin," where the RSA algorithm is formatted to have the silhouette of a dolphin. That's still only one level of art.
If the "captain" of the "vessel" is ashore, you can bet your butt that they can prosecute.
Surface computers sending or receiving data to such a satellite would be the vulnerable point of inquiry. Unless your transmissions are laser-narrow, they'll be detected. If they suspect you already, they will confiscate what they need to pin the rest of the case.
As an analogy, consider a remote controlled boat packed with contraband. There's several potentially culpable parties: those caught where the contraband left port, those caught where the contraband arrived, and those who were ashore but responsible for the arrangement of said boat.
I wholeheartedly agree with your premise and conclusions.
However, from your blurb, I think you misunderstood the specific type of error the software was making. Contrast:
jamie: New Mexico was given to Gore on election night by 6,800 votes because of buggy computer software. That software "failed to read" straight-party votes (oops!), and worse, it "also chose at least one candidate from another party."
FOX News: The machines initially failed to read ballots on which voters chose to vote a straight party ticket, but also chose at least one candidate from another party, election officials said.
The cards that were erroneously counted were when someone overrode one or more races on a blanket straight-party ballot. An example: I VOTE STRAIGHT DEMOCRATIC, BUT I WANT JOHN Q. REPUBLICAN TO WIN FOR THE SENATE RACE.
When that happened, the software probably read "straight vote" and marked JANE Q. DEMOCRAT for SENATE. Then it marked JOHN Q. REPUBLICAN. Then it saw there were two marks for SENATE, so discarded the vote for that race. It'd be an easy error to make.
I liked the group's listing of specific cases (near the end of the study), showing decisions that were apparently incompatible with the official resolution policy.
Rubbing ICANN's nose in badly-followed official doctrine, citing their own chapter and verse, may be effective, or it may just make things worse, though.
Excerpted:
Crew.com
WIPO D2000-0054
4(a)iii - Ruling goes beyond ICANN policy, attempting to make secondary markets in generic domain names illegal if the generic term happens to be trademarked. Faced with the absence of any real bad faith, the panelists concocted a "preclusion" doctrine that holds that prior registration of a name constitutes bad faith under 4(b)ii of the policy because it prevents the trademark holder from having the name. Since domain name registrations are by definition exclusive, this could be used to justify bad faith for any name a trademark holder wants.
Bodacious-tatas.com
WIPO D2000-0479
4(a)i - The trademark involved was "Tata & Sons." The panelist stretched the definition of "confusingly similar" well beyond the breaking point.
Esquire.com
NAF FA0093763
4(b)i, 4(a)ii - Bad faith finding based on holding that respondent registered name intending to sell it to complainant, despite absence of any evidence of an offer and despite fact that the domain was sold in 1997 to a different party with a bona fide business plan to use the name for email addresses.
Guinness-beer-really-sucks.com
WIPO D2000-0996
4(a)i - Bad faith and no rights were proved, but the panelist's finding that the domain name was "confusingly similar" to the trademark "Guinness" is insupportable.
Barcelona.com
WIPO D2000-0505
4(a)ii, 4(a)iii - Respondent used name for bona fide offering of services but panelist asserted that "some rights are better or more legitimate than others." Panelist also adopted bizarre "preclusion" concept advanced in crew.com to manufacture a bad faith finding.
Tonsil.com
WIPO D2000-0376
4(b)i - A generic term trademarked by a German company that already had the country-code version of the name. Panelist's decision seems to have been driven mainly by his irritation with the respondent's behavior. Took 4(b)i to new heights of absurdity by holding that failure to respond to an offer to buy the name for $100 proved that a higher price was demanded.
Traditions.com
NAF FA0094388 (In post-udrp litigation)
4(a)iii - Another ruling that completely ignored the bad faith requirement of the policy in order to take away a generic domain name from a domain reseller and give it to a trademark holder
That's the idea. Read the article, especially re: secure line-of-sight and satellite-relay control systems.
It's just like the existing 'smart bombs' are able to be guided by secure channels, watching the video returning from the craft and aiming it with a joystick.
One pilot in a secure bunker can launch ten birds from different airports. She can punch in their waypoints to meet near the objective, and fine-tune one or two into their attacks at a time. Let those birds revert to autopilot while another two go in for attacks. Repeat. When done, land them one at a time by the same joystick. Let the airport jockeys put the planes away, while the pilot sips her tea.
I don't think the story was trying to imply that humans wouldn't be involved in the control of the plane. Just that humans wouldn't be INSIDE the plane to control it.
When working at the chemistry department of the University of Arizona, I ended up co-sysadminning a supercomputer called the Ardent Titan. Ardent seems to have disappeared.
The Titan's focus was graphics and vector-processing. A scalar processor loads one register with one value resulting from one operation. A vector processor loads n registers with n values resulting from one operation; think "ADD AX TO EACH REGISTER IN VX[]". Four CPUs in our model, but it supported far more.
One of the sample programs was a flag hanging on a flagpole. It was a 512x512 node swatch of cloth, and it was being animated at 30fps, if I recall. You could drag your mouse to adjust a wind source. As you moved the source, the flag would flap realistically.
I had my one-processor SGI (MIPS 4000 at 100MHz) handle the same basic simulation with 64x64 nodes, a few years later. Of course, the complexity of the simulation increases geometrically with the size of the swatch of free fabric, but it's not THAT terrible.
In essence, the simulator is just an MxN array of nodes, with springs between each node horizontally, vertically and diagonally. The two diagonals can be given opposing compression limits, to emulate the thread bias of cloth. Apply forces to all nodes, and minimize the energy on each node. Take another pass to apply forces of self-collision, where one part of the fabric tries to intersect another part.
Slashdot Mirror
My RCA Digital Cablemodem works fine with:
Single machine (win9x, winNT, win2k, linux), or
Linux as NAT router to hub, or
Win2k with WinRoute as NAT router to hub, or
Dedicated linux-based VPN-tunneling NAT router to switch.
I'm sure other schemes will do just fine for you.
And under every single LEGO(tm) brick piece, ever since I was a very little kid, I saw 'PAT PEND' or a patent number. [As I write this, I grabbed a piece off the Droid Developers Kit, and read a number 3037-022-6.]
The LEGO patents include the exact measurements of their bricks. No competitor can make truly LEGO-compatible bricks. Some may claim such, but try putting the bricks together: the tiny hairline difference in bump-to-bump distance means that they won't go together for more than about three or five bumps in a row.
LEGOs were how I learned what a patent WAS. I'm all for LEGO as a company, but even they have their patents and strictly enforce them.
My general advice for little kids and programming:
LOGO, for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.
ToonTalk, for a graphical construction environment, teaching pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.
Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical environment.
Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts, and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.
After reading the gopher:// manifesto, it got me to do something that I had been considering for some time: move my internet presence into gopherspace and out of the Web.
So, is this considered going underground?
PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented ftp to mars will work nicely.
Using TCP for any small-packet transmissions on a high-latency connection is ludicrous. TCP (as opposed to the simpler UDP) guarantees delivery in packet's original order, or the socket dies. It does this by sending back receipts to each routing step. You can "assume success" for a while, but if you do, why not use UDP without all that receipt time?
"Server, you there?" [up to 40 minutes ping time to Mars]
"Yeah. What do you want?"
"Log me in with these credentials: XXX" [another 40 minutes ping time]
"Roger."
"Here's bytes 0 to 511: XXXX"... and so on.
which processes this signal to drive a low-power laser. The light is then scanned by a small mirror to create images
Who needs a planetarium for midnight Pink Floyd laser shows, when you can just strap this gizmo onto your head and zone out? This is far better than those rave shows where some nose-studded guy with an Amiga pumps out some colored blotches on a wall.
I can hear the cash registers klinking now... or maybe it's just the start of the song Money...
As I understand it, the Internet wasn't "designed" to deal with nuke aftermath. It's a wives' tale with a grain of truth deep inside to make it sound good.
The communications system of DARPA may have maximized the advantages of routing, so that .mil sites would have enough redundancy to still talk if a node or a few went down. Computers were just as unreliable then as they are now. Some stay up for months, others bluescreen or blow tubes weekly.
However, DARPA is the Internet . As the name implies, the Internet is an amalgam of many smaller networks. Thus, the whole Internet may not share the fault tolerance that DARPA enjoyed. It's not even clear that the .mil network even still has such traits.
Big business is building most of the Internet infrastructure now. While it costs lots and lots of money if a cable gets cut, corporations still don't have the long-term vision attitude it would take to put in enough redundancy. Dig two transcontinental trench projects with two cables, when you could just dig one? That's a cost.
There's relatively few undersea cables. If there's maybe fifty crossing the North American continent, there's only ten crossing the Pacific. Satellites offer long slow alternatives, but if a deep cable is cut, it's BAD.
How do you know that we both perceive colors the same way? Perhaps the way I perceive blue in my mind looks just like the red that you perceive in your mind.
I used to consider this a problem, but really, it is moot. If I can say "red" and you know what I mean, and if you can say "blue" and I know what you mean, then it's all hunky dorey. We all perceive some color approximately n nm wavelength as a given name for a hue, and that is all that matters.
Now, if we took my eyeball or optic nerve and transplated it in you, maybe something would register with different synaptic signals. You'd see a solarized (hue shifted or mangled) signal. You might not even be able to interpret my brightness signals. However, your brain would, if given some time, retrain itself to the new inputs.
The movie "Fantastic Voyage" is just a screen adaptation of the novel by Isaac Asimov.
Moreover I might point out there's no constitutional right that guarantees that music companies should make money. If their target customers don't have money for CDs, maybe they should rethink their business plan.
I wasn't suggesting that teens get debit cards to purchase CDs. Heck, if they want CDs, they can go to the local brick and mortar shop with the cold hard cash daddy gives them.
Teens need online purchasing power to equalize the situation: indies can avoid the sleazy contracts purloined by big distributors if they can still make money from their audience. If the indies only target 40-somethings for making money, they'll starve. The indie needs to get cash from the teens, avoiding the big distributors.
Cash flow:
teen to debit card to online broker to indie
Content flow:
indie to online broker to teen
And here is the crux of the matter. A) The artists often do not own the songs the write and sing, the record companies do. Many artists get little or nothing from "their" music. B) Considering the record industries "creative accounting" practices (i.e., screwing the artists), many people seem to find it difficult to accept the record companies claim of the higher moral ground.
You don't make a case against the theft of music via file-trading. It is theft, as the Napster user is getting the benefit of the music while the licensed distributor gets nothing in return.
I agree that the licensed distributors are sleazebags, fat cats who wine and dine little artists, seducing them into signing horribly restrictive contracts.
To shift the industry away from the fat cat executives,
Get the little indies to STAY independent. Those contracts are signed with their blood.
Organize secure downloads at reasonable prices. A buck a song, or even lower through a subscription service that can handle the microtransactions with a minimum of fuss.
Get debit cards in the hands of teenagers. They're the market for music money, yet so few teens have any purchasing power online due to the credit card hurdle.
First one to land on AN asteroid would probably be able to lay claim to IT. Even if some government decided to lay claim to the asteroid BELT, it'd be pretty much unenforceable.
There are millions of asteroids, and thousands of them are large enough to anchor equipment. There may be other variables of viability, such as usable trajectories of returned mass to Earth, or inter-asteroid collisions, but there's plenty for all developing nations to have their own, several times over.
Microsoft is one of the first (if not THE first) to do serious usability laboratory testing for microcomputer software. This is separate from unit testing, regression testing, stress testing and focus testing.
The labs are set up much as focus group rooms, or if you haven't seen those, tv cops' interrogation chambers. A simple but attractive office or homey room with a computer and a few knick-nacks, overseen by a VERY wired booth and a large one-way mirror wall.
The user is someone off the street, heavily pre-interviewed to fit various target demographics of experience or workstyles.
The instructions handed may go all the way from an unopened box in the chair (install and explore this), to a preconfigured setup and a few written instructions as if from a boss.
The people in the control booth record everything said by the user, and done with the computer. The controller can converse with the user through an intercom, and even move the mouse pointer or type remotely, but generally lets the user drive the show.
The user is asked to think out loud as much as possible, to say their goals as they conceive of them, and to say their reactions to what they see. "Okay, I didn't mean to do that. I think Undo would be here, and, yep, okay, undone. Oh, but that erased this other thing too, which I wasn't expecting."
Now, bring this to Open Source or Free Software. The lab doesn't need to be so fancy, but the REAL needs of REAL users must be REALLY observed and dissected and made into REAL usability gains.
If usability angst testimonies are filtered between the neophyte to the guru, how can the guru comprehend what the neophyte needs? Guesswork makes for crap software.
Conversely, in 1990 or so, Microsoft's LAN Manager group dismissed the feedback from Microsoft's own employees, as "not the typical user." A shame, because at the time, there were very few 30,000+ node LANs in the world. They could have clearly benefitted from the feedback of such users.
How about c|net's story off of the ap: Qwest ordered to pay AT&T $350M for repeatedly cutting a fiber-optic phone line.
My general advice for little kids and programming:
LOGO, for visual stimuli, for variables and procedures.
ToonTalk, for a graphical construction environment, teaching pattern-matching and declarative rule-based programming.
Prolog and Java, once the kid is ready to forego the graphical environment.
Why Prolog? ToonTalk is based on Prolog's inference concepts, and I advocate straight Prolog after that. I think too many kids start out with BASIC, Pascal and C, and are forever bent on the idea that procedural languages are all there is to programming.
Microsoft operates as a series of individual business units. While that gives them the maximum flexibility to try new things, it also means they often have to learn the same lesson more than once.
Take subscriptions for instance. MS Visual C/C++ wanted to go that model, as many programmers here may recall. "Buy 4.0 and subscribe to MSDN, you'll get 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, every three months like clockwork." Well, the versions came out... 4.0, 4.1, slip, 4.2, slip, slip, slip, uh, 6.0!
By going to a subscription model, they give the user false impression that the product will continue to advance on a rigid schedule. There's no way to win:
if it doesn't come out on time, the customer will feel seriously jypped at the renewal dues;
if it DOES come out on time, the customer has to churn all those desktops' installations to keep step with the advances, or relegate the expensive updates to dusty shelfware.
If they use some sort of lockout like cheap nag shareware, a la "It's February, you can't use the Save feature until you renew your Office subscription dues..." some people will definitely find alternatives. They'll have to keep increasing the dues as the flock of docile sheep dwindles.
One word: Why?
Some future stories on Slashdot:
Identifying your Wall Warts
Posted by Hemos on Sat 18 Nov 02:07PM
from the that's-dymo-nite! dept.
LeetSkeeter wrote, "This helpful article that shows us one solution to the age-old question: how to deobfuscate those wall-wart[?] power adapters." I use those new gel pens in flourescent colors, too.
Better Case Air Circulation
Posted by michael on Sat 18 Nov 01:07PM
from the vacuum-kewled dept.
ThinkGeek is working with a leading vendor of high-powered turbine systems to get co-branding. Can you imagine the little BSD mascot on one of these? Overclockers, read on.
Ask Slashdot: Too Many Fluff Postings?
Posted by timothy on Sat 18 Nov 01:07PM
from the running-gnu-lint-on-it dept.
DustBunny writes, "What's the right balance between meaningless stories and trivia? Everyone says that Slashdot's been going downhill, but I don't think so. I think it's just that more people notice how low it's always been. Come on, when's the next Tenchi Muyo DVD that we're supposed to boycott?" [update by timothy]: We got a cease and desist from ZD News... apparently they have the inside on puff journalism.
Apparently, it's not just a matter of their saying "gee, a .foo would be cool," but it's a matter of giving the new .foo over to the person/organization who submitted the proposal.
They dropped .xxx and .kids because the applicants weren't competent to run a registry service.
So, it didn't come down to logical divisions, but to registrars. Just like .mil is managed by one organization (DoD), so would .xxx or .kids.
Personally, I am glad ".kids" didn't make it. It's an idiomatic word. (Is it related to that infamous .cx image?). I also prefer the three-letter ones, just in consistency.
I also didn't like the .web thing. Isn't the www. convention enough? Or would Foobar Inc., need to move their web presence to some new toplevel domain?
This is not a flamebait.
Anyone can run Perl code through a perl-built obfuscator. Heck, one of the winning entries was an obfuscated perl-built obfuscator. How... imaginative.
I have lost my hardcopy of the Obfuscated C contest entries, but it seemed like they had a lot more spirit, and thought about the artistic side, on more than one level.
For example, one winner of Obfuscated C wrote a simple maze generator. However, the source code to the maze generator was itself a maze, with whitespace passages going up and across and down through the code. To top it off, those whitespace passages that cut through the code spelled out the word "MAZE", if you stood back far enough to see it. The main variables used were m, a, z and e, as well.
The closest to 'artistic' Perl source that I have seen is the "RSA Dolphin," where the RSA algorithm is formatted to have the silhouette of a dolphin. That's still only one level of art.
If the "captain" of the "vessel" is ashore, you can bet your butt that they can prosecute.
Surface computers sending or receiving data to such a satellite would be the vulnerable point of inquiry. Unless your transmissions are laser-narrow, they'll be detected. If they suspect you already, they will confiscate what they need to pin the rest of the case.
As an analogy, consider a remote controlled boat packed with contraband. There's several potentially culpable parties: those caught where the contraband left port, those caught where the contraband arrived, and those who were ashore but responsible for the arrangement of said boat.
I wholeheartedly agree with your premise and conclusions.
However, from your blurb, I think you misunderstood the specific type of error the software was making. Contrast:
FOX News: The machines initially failed to read ballots on which voters chose to vote a straight party ticket, but also chose at least one candidate from another party, election officials said.
The cards that were erroneously counted were when someone overrode one or more races on a blanket straight-party ballot. An example: I VOTE STRAIGHT DEMOCRATIC, BUT I WANT JOHN Q. REPUBLICAN TO WIN FOR THE SENATE RACE.
When that happened, the software probably read "straight vote" and marked JANE Q. DEMOCRAT for SENATE. Then it marked JOHN Q. REPUBLICAN. Then it saw there were two marks for SENATE, so discarded the vote for that race. It'd be an easy error to make.
I liked the group's listing of specific cases (near the end of the study), showing decisions that were apparently incompatible with the official resolution policy.
Rubbing ICANN's nose in badly-followed official doctrine, citing their own chapter and verse, may be effective, or it may just make things worse, though.
WIPO D2000-0054
4(a)iii - Ruling goes beyond ICANN policy, attempting to make secondary markets in generic domain names illegal if the generic term happens to be trademarked. Faced with the absence of any real bad faith, the panelists concocted a "preclusion" doctrine that holds that prior registration of a name constitutes bad faith under 4(b)ii of the policy because it prevents the trademark holder from having the name. Since domain name registrations are by definition exclusive, this could be used to justify bad faith for any name a trademark holder wants.
WIPO D2000-0479
4(a)i - The trademark involved was "Tata & Sons." The panelist stretched the definition of "confusingly similar" well beyond the breaking point.
NAF FA0093763
4(b)i, 4(a)ii - Bad faith finding based on holding that respondent registered name intending to sell it to complainant, despite absence of any evidence of an offer and despite fact that the domain was sold in 1997 to a different party with a bona fide business plan to use the name for email addresses.
WIPO D2000-0996
4(a)i - Bad faith and no rights were proved, but the panelist's finding that the domain name was "confusingly similar" to the trademark "Guinness" is insupportable.
WIPO D2000-0505
4(a)ii, 4(a)iii - Respondent used name for bona fide offering of services but panelist asserted that "some rights are better or more legitimate than others." Panelist also adopted bizarre "preclusion" concept advanced in crew.com to manufacture a bad faith finding.
WIPO D2000-0376
4(b)i - A generic term trademarked by a German company that already had the country-code version of the name. Panelist's decision seems to have been driven mainly by his irritation with the respondent's behavior. Took 4(b)i to new heights of absurdity by holding that failure to respond to an offer to buy the name for $100 proved that a higher price was demanded.
NAF FA0094388 (In post-udrp litigation)
4(a)iii - Another ruling that completely ignored the bad faith requirement of the policy in order to take away a generic domain name from a domain reseller and give it to a trademark holder
That's the idea. Read the article, especially re: secure line-of-sight and satellite-relay control systems.
It's just like the existing 'smart bombs' are able to be guided by secure channels, watching the video returning from the craft and aiming it with a joystick.
One pilot in a secure bunker can launch ten birds from different airports. She can punch in their waypoints to meet near the objective, and fine-tune one or two into their attacks at a time. Let those birds revert to autopilot while another two go in for attacks. Repeat. When done, land them one at a time by the same joystick. Let the airport jockeys put the planes away, while the pilot sips her tea.
I don't think the story was trying to imply that humans wouldn't be involved in the control of the plane. Just that humans wouldn't be INSIDE the plane to control it.
When working at the chemistry department of the University of Arizona, I ended up co-sysadminning a supercomputer called the Ardent Titan. Ardent seems to have disappeared.
The Titan's focus was graphics and vector-processing. A scalar processor loads one register with one value resulting from one operation. A vector processor loads n registers with n values resulting from one operation; think "ADD AX TO EACH REGISTER IN VX[]". Four CPUs in our model, but it supported far more.
One of the sample programs was a flag hanging on a flagpole. It was a 512x512 node swatch of cloth, and it was being animated at 30fps, if I recall. You could drag your mouse to adjust a wind source. As you moved the source, the flag would flap realistically.
I had my one-processor SGI (MIPS 4000 at 100MHz) handle the same basic simulation with 64x64 nodes, a few years later. Of course, the complexity of the simulation increases geometrically with the size of the swatch of free fabric, but it's not THAT terrible.
In essence, the simulator is just an MxN array of nodes, with springs between each node horizontally, vertically and diagonally. The two diagonals can be given opposing compression limits, to emulate the thread bias of cloth. Apply forces to all nodes, and minimize the energy on each node. Take another pass to apply forces of self-collision, where one part of the fabric tries to intersect another part.