I own a business across the street from an unused building. For years it has been a site for heroin dealing, vandalism, muliple assults and batteries, and at least one mugging. I got a netcam, put the camera feed live on a web site, and informed anybody who cared to listen ( this included neighbors, cops, drug sellers and buyers, etc ). It took several months for people's behavior to change ( which was odd...I expected it to change almost overnight ) But now all we have is an occasional vagrant.
Disclaimer: I'm drunk off my ass right now.
Do you have any evidence at all that your camera stopped crime. I mean, sure, it stopped crime right in front of your store, but what about a block over?
Same thing with the city owned cameras. They might have an impact on crime in the immediate area of the cameras, but that'll just push crime to the sides. Does a heroin dealer care if he sells heroin right here, or a block away? Probably not.
I'm all for law enforcement, but there has to be a better way. A way that doesn't have so much potential for abuse.
Well, that's an awful lot of coincidences isn't it? That's why I spread out my suspicious activities over months, if not years.
String of coincidences or not, it's enough for them to make your life a living hell for at least a few days. And on the off chance this would actually pinpoint somebody with nefarious plans, they'd have it setup to look like a big coincidence anyway. Or they'd shop at places not monitored by cameras. Or they'd ask somebody else to pick it up for them. Or they'd buy some of it off the internet. Or...
Even with lesser crimes like robbery or mugging, the best case scenario is that the robbers/muggers/rapists/purse snatchers move a couple of blocks over, away from the cameras. Maybe every once in a while one of them will have a change of heart while walking to the new location, but I wouldn't count on it.
So, to sum up, this will: waste tax payer money, inconvenience innocent people, and have zero impact on actual criminals.
The other part, being able to send images on 911 calls, actually sounds like a really good idea. Probably explains why they piggybacked the idiotic survelience part.
I have a 5 MP camera phone as I write this. Things are starting to get better in the phone area, so much that I guess 5 - 10 years later, we might see the promised ubiquitous all in one device. It isn't perfect today, but for non-professional use, a camera phone is more than what the majority requires.
You're missing the point. They haven't even got the phone part down yet, but instead of making the actual phone features better, they're wasting time on the camera. Of course they're doing it to take your mind away from how bad the phone is in all other respects, and it seems to be working out nicely for them.
When they have a phone that has a couple days of talk time per battery, a month of standby, never drops calls, and lets me save text messages/incoming calls/missed calls indefinitely, they can go ahead and add all the extra shit they want. Until then, it'd be nice if they could get their priorities straight.
I don't know what camera phones you've been using, but take a look at this photo I took with a camera phone. I think the quality is rather better than you might suggest (3 mega pixel).
You should see the pictures I take with my camera. (12 mega pixel!!1!)
If I want to take pictures, I'll bring my fuckin' camera. 99.999% of the time, when I don't want to take pictures, I'd prefer to have a phone that works well. It wouldn't piss me off so much if phones were actually really good besides the camera, but last I checked most phones still drop calls, lose reception, have poor voice quality, only allow a limited number of phone book entries, only save a limited number of sent/received calls, etc. It's nice to know that instead of fixing their shit, they're working on a better camera. Idiots.
Cameras within phones aren't yet perfect; the optical zoom hasn't yet been perfected and there's still the small issue of having to hold it quite still, but the camera phone is still good at the job it's intended for. If I'm going on vacation, then sure I'll take my proper digital camera with me. If I'm at a party or even out and about and see a photo opportunity, the phone is an ideal tool to take a quick snap.
No. It's not. You can get a very decent 5 or 6 megapixel camera for $85-$150 and the quality is several orders of magnitude better than a camera phone. If you really find yourself constantly saying "OMG! I need to take a picture!", maybe you should spend the $100.
Okay, bare with me, I'm thinking about this. My bicycle has a MTBF which isn't related to its lifetime - it breaks and I repair it, until at some point it breaks really badly and I replace it. But if my hard drive dies, it's dead, end of story - in other words I only care about the first failure. The 'infant mortality' stage makes sense, but let's assume that is covered by the guarantee (I know, my data's gone, but I'm bound to have backups;-) Once we've reached the 'low failure rate' stage, isn't the mean time-to-first-failure related to the MTBF?
Think of it this way: If you buy 100 drives, you can expect 50 of the drives to die before the MTBF, and the other 50 to last some amount of time after the MTBF. Pondering the implications for a single drive is meaningless.
I don't understand how he's getting off. At the very least, he should be charged with facilitating kiddie porn distribution. If I get caught with a bunch of drugs in my apartment, I can't just say "I don't lock the door so some guy hides his drugs here."
Does a Windows machine somehow release you from any responsibility? I might have to install a copy somewhere, just in case.
Why isn't it smart? Presuming you can add some value it's always smart to profit from free labor.
Yeah, I meant that a strictly rebranded, for pay FreeBSD wouldn't be smart because everyone would just download the original. Unless, of course, I added value. I should've mentioned that.
Re:"source would have to be made available" ?
on
iPhone Not Running OS X
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· Score: 2, Informative
I think you are a bit confused yourself. Apple only hold the rights to the small parts of OS X that they developed themselves. The majority of OS X (including the kernel) is based on BSD, GNU and other Open Source code that never originated within Apple. If they are to reuse any of that for the Apple iPhone, they would have to release the source code.
No, if I'm not mistaken, OSX is based largely on FreeBSD. The BSD license doesn't require the source code to be released. In fact, I could grab the FreeBSD source code, rebrand it as anything I want, and sell it without releasing a single line of code. Not smart, but allowed by the license, and 100% legal. The only caveat is that somewhere I would have to state that I'm using BSD copyrighted code.
Your argument that open-source users are against paying for stuff was really lame before. Quoting an irrelevant paragraph that's in almost every EULA and other software license didn't help.
From the Windows Vista Home Edition EULA:
NO OTHER WARRANTIES. The limited warranty is the only direct warranty from
Microsoft. Microsoft gives no other express warranties, guarantees or conditions.
Where allowed by your local laws, Microsoft excludes implied warranties of
merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. If your local laws
give you any implied warranties, guarantees or conditions, despite this exclusion, your remedies are
described in the Remedy for Breach of Warranty clause above, to the extent permitted by your local
laws.
Webmail providers don't provide software, they provide storage space and bandwidth.
Besides, I don't think most open source users are in it to save money. It's a nice perk, but being able to do whatever you want with the software you use is a much nicer perk.
In the case of webmail, open source doesn't apply. HTML and Javascript aren't compiled, so if you send me a webpage, you're necessarily sending me its source code. As long as I don't redistribute it, I'm free to do what I want with it as fair use.
Now, there is a somewhat person reason for this for me too. I am starting up a new gaming company that will depend on ad revenue on the site to survive. If people block it, we will die off. We won't ever put ads in the way, but some people just can't stand to let us make money for a free service to happen.
Here's a crazy idea: instead of annoying the shit out of people with advertisements, how about you charge them for the product or service you're providing? When you depend on ads for revenue, you're basically saying "This product is neat, but it's not very useful, so we have to depend on morons who click on advertisements."
As for me, if I have any intention of visiting a site more than once, I block the ads. And I mean all of them. The images, flash, iframes, and Javascript are easy, but I'll dig around in the source just to find the right CSS classes, IDs, or DOM structure to add to the blocklist of my user stylesheet. If it's too much work to block the ads, I just don't visit the site.
That might seem like a bit much, but I don't like, and don't use, advertisements. They insult my intelligence, waste my bandwidth, waste my screen space, and waste my time. On top of that, since they're paid for by the makers of the product, they're less than worthless for making purchasing decisions.
I also hope they seak new financhial backing and dump the one(s) that threatened to walk. However I still can't really say that they are BAD people, they were in a hard situation (Stand up, take the bullet, and die. Or run away to live and fight another day).
They chose wrong. I'm not a big gamer, so I had never even heard of this contest before. But right now, the only thing I know about the event is that it's controlled by corporate sponsors. In other words, it's pointless. Who wins? Who loses? Who gets thrown out? Whoever the sponsors want. No credibility at all.
On the otherhand, if they had told the sponsor to go to hell, they'd lose sponsorship, but their losing sponsors would also make it onto the front page of Slashdot. Except then, I'd know that it's actually a fair judge of game quality. A game doesn't win just because a corporate sponsor says it should. It wouldn't be the last contest. They'd have less money to spend on next year's contest, but they'd still be around.
Now they have the money, they just don't have any credibility. Which makes having an event next year seem like a waste of time.
best show ever. 10 minutes of science, and 30 minutes adam hurting himself. i love them.
All these people defending Mythbusters, and not one has mentioned the best feature of the show. Kariisreallyhot. A bit ditzy, but still really hot.
Regardless, it seems like the show got dumbed down. Especially the later seasons. Maybe I just noticed it more before I stopped watching. It seems like it switched from being about interesting stuff, to being about making the biggest explosion and having a higher potential for injury.
One might've said the same thing about the half-baked cooperative multitasking in early versions of MacOS and Windows, or "multiprogramming" work-arounds on old mainframe OSs like OS/360. But those "perversions" ultimately paved the way for modern preemptive multitasking systems on every desktop and server.
In five to seven years, we'll likely be using an application-centered Web that had its roots in hacks and work-arounds like AJAX. Progress isn't always neat or pretty.
It's possible, but there's a difference between modern web applications and the early cooperative multitasking and multiprogramming systems. When those early systems were devised, there weren't any better ways of doing that stuff. They weren't ignoring existing technology just to meet needless requirements. These new web applications are reimplementing a bunch of stuff that's already been done, except making it needlessly use HTTP, HTML and Javascript.
What other form of application runs without a separate step of installation?
That's your reason for accepting applications with few features and incredibly poor performance? That's like saying "I could make ten times more money, but then I'd have to pay more taxes." It doesn't make sense.
And why does Windows make it so hard for a user to build a sandbox for an installed application?
That's irrelevant. "Web applications" running in IE are no safer than any other application on Windows. Not that it matters. If one of your requirements was "Running applications securely", you wouldn't be running Windows.
AJAX can be considered a great technology because it's the only thing that provides a ubiquitous framework for asynchronous information transfer. It's a uber-shitty implimentation because Javascript was never intended to do anything like this. But the concept is cool. The implimentation is not.
I think you meant "asynchronous information transfer, on a webpage". Which gets right to the root of the problem. People are trying to put everything in webpages, even when it doesn't make any sense or isn't the best option.
I absolutely abhor "web applications." They're less responsive, harder to use, and never match the features of standalone applications.
Look at the gigantic difference between Google Earth and Google Maps. Or between any webmail system and Sylpheed or Thunderbird. Or between YouTube's video player and xine or mplayer. The web applications are light years behind the standalone apps, in large part because they're using HTTP, HTML and Javascript in ways they were never intended to be used.
Just the other day I bought an older Dell that "wouldn't boot" for $15, sans hard drive. An hour of hacking around inside, and I was able to get it going. It's a little old, but it'll make a nice LiveCD tester.
Consumers are getting raped by MS and Dell, but they're not going to learn, so might as well take advantage.
AJAX is a great technology. Yes, if you overuse it or use it in the wrong places then it is harmful. Saying AJAX is unstable, unusable, brittle, impractical is simply an untrue generalization. Like anything else, if you do it right it enhances usability and is quite reliable.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. AJAX is NOT a great technology. It's a perversion. It bends HTTP and HTML to do things they were never meant to do. And because of that, it's not really surprising that it has so many huge problems. Not being able to bookmark or use the back button? Those are gigantic problems.
If anything good can be said about AJAX, it's a curiosity. It's certainly amusing that it can be done, but "great technology" it is not.
I've never drank a drop of alcohol in my life, and never will, so I'd gladly see this feature in every car sold. Mandatory is fine with me.
KNOW YOUR DRUNKARD! YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT! You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension... and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can't find a rape victim... He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Drunkard fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command -- including yours... BEWARE. Any officer apprehending a alcohol addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time [on him] will usually save nine on you.
Seriously though, just because you disagree with something doesn't mean it should be illegal.
And again for the upteenth time, I'm not endorsing this as a standard, I'm with everyone else who opposes this. However, the examples in the article do not appear to be the huge "standard breaking" ace card that every witch hunter here seems to be making it out to be.
If that's the case, you don't seem to understand the purpose of an ISO standard.
An ISO standard is supposed to be the definitive guide to a particular thing. They (usually) go into painstaking detail and explicitly describe exactly what each feature does, and specifically state any undefined or implementation specific behavior. See the C standard, C++ standard, Ada standard, POSIX, or any other ISO standard to see a few examples. They're not supposed to have vague descriptions like "Mimic the behavior of this 12 year old, hard to find program, whose behavior we can't describe."
How am I supposed to write code to use Office XML, when the standard can't even come up with an English description of what that code is supposed to do? It mocks the entire idea of having a standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I'm drunk off my ass right now.
Do you have any evidence at all that your camera stopped crime. I mean, sure, it stopped crime right in front of your store, but what about a block over?
Same thing with the city owned cameras. They might have an impact on crime in the immediate area of the cameras, but that'll just push crime to the sides. Does a heroin dealer care if he sells heroin right here, or a block away? Probably not.
I'm all for law enforcement, but there has to be a better way. A way that doesn't have so much potential for abuse.
String of coincidences or not, it's enough for them to make your life a living hell for at least a few days. And on the off chance this would actually pinpoint somebody with nefarious plans, they'd have it setup to look like a big coincidence anyway. Or they'd shop at places not monitored by cameras. Or they'd ask somebody else to pick it up for them. Or they'd buy some of it off the internet. Or...
Even with lesser crimes like robbery or mugging, the best case scenario is that the robbers/muggers/rapists/purse snatchers move a couple of blocks over, away from the cameras. Maybe every once in a while one of them will have a change of heart while walking to the new location, but I wouldn't count on it.
So, to sum up, this will: waste tax payer money, inconvenience innocent people, and have zero impact on actual criminals.
The other part, being able to send images on 911 calls, actually sounds like a really good idea. Probably explains why they piggybacked the idiotic survelience part.
You're missing the point. They haven't even got the phone part down yet, but instead of making the actual phone features better, they're wasting time on the camera. Of course they're doing it to take your mind away from how bad the phone is in all other respects, and it seems to be working out nicely for them.
When they have a phone that has a couple days of talk time per battery, a month of standby, never drops calls, and lets me save text messages/incoming calls/missed calls indefinitely, they can go ahead and add all the extra shit they want. Until then, it'd be nice if they could get their priorities straight.
You should see the pictures I take with my camera. (12 mega pixel!!1!)
If I want to take pictures, I'll bring my fuckin' camera. 99.999% of the time, when I don't want to take pictures, I'd prefer to have a phone that works well. It wouldn't piss me off so much if phones were actually really good besides the camera, but last I checked most phones still drop calls, lose reception, have poor voice quality, only allow a limited number of phone book entries, only save a limited number of sent/received calls, etc. It's nice to know that instead of fixing their shit, they're working on a better camera. Idiots.
No. It's not. You can get a very decent 5 or 6 megapixel camera for $85-$150 and the quality is several orders of magnitude better than a camera phone. If you really find yourself constantly saying "OMG! I need to take a picture!", maybe you should spend the $100.
Did I miss the joke? How are files edited with emacs and vi not text files?
Same here, except I don't even run Vista.
Think of it this way: If you buy 100 drives, you can expect 50 of the drives to die before the MTBF, and the other 50 to last some amount of time after the MTBF. Pondering the implications for a single drive is meaningless.
Yes.
Does this work with other stuff? Say... MP3s?
I don't understand how he's getting off. At the very least, he should be charged with facilitating kiddie porn distribution. If I get caught with a bunch of drugs in my apartment, I can't just say "I don't lock the door so some guy hides his drugs here."
Does a Windows machine somehow release you from any responsibility? I might have to install a copy somewhere, just in case.
Yeah, I meant that a strictly rebranded, for pay FreeBSD wouldn't be smart because everyone would just download the original. Unless, of course, I added value. I should've mentioned that.
No, if I'm not mistaken, OSX is based largely on FreeBSD. The BSD license doesn't require the source code to be released. In fact, I could grab the FreeBSD source code, rebrand it as anything I want, and sell it without releasing a single line of code. Not smart, but allowed by the license, and 100% legal. The only caveat is that somewhere I would have to state that I'm using BSD copyrighted code.
Your argument that open-source users are against paying for stuff was really lame before. Quoting an irrelevant paragraph that's in almost every EULA and other software license didn't help.
From the Windows Vista Home Edition EULA:
Webmail providers don't provide software, they provide storage space and bandwidth.
Besides, I don't think most open source users are in it to save money. It's a nice perk, but being able to do whatever you want with the software you use is a much nicer perk.
In the case of webmail, open source doesn't apply. HTML and Javascript aren't compiled, so if you send me a webpage, you're necessarily sending me its source code. As long as I don't redistribute it, I'm free to do what I want with it as fair use.
Here's a crazy idea: instead of annoying the shit out of people with advertisements, how about you charge them for the product or service you're providing? When you depend on ads for revenue, you're basically saying "This product is neat, but it's not very useful, so we have to depend on morons who click on advertisements."
As for me, if I have any intention of visiting a site more than once, I block the ads. And I mean all of them. The images, flash, iframes, and Javascript are easy, but I'll dig around in the source just to find the right CSS classes, IDs, or DOM structure to add to the blocklist of my user stylesheet. If it's too much work to block the ads, I just don't visit the site.
That might seem like a bit much, but I don't like, and don't use, advertisements. They insult my intelligence, waste my bandwidth, waste my screen space, and waste my time. On top of that, since they're paid for by the makers of the product, they're less than worthless for making purchasing decisions.
They chose wrong. I'm not a big gamer, so I had never even heard of this contest before. But right now, the only thing I know about the event is that it's controlled by corporate sponsors. In other words, it's pointless. Who wins? Who loses? Who gets thrown out? Whoever the sponsors want. No credibility at all.
On the otherhand, if they had told the sponsor to go to hell, they'd lose sponsorship, but their losing sponsors would also make it onto the front page of Slashdot. Except then, I'd know that it's actually a fair judge of game quality. A game doesn't win just because a corporate sponsor says it should. It wouldn't be the last contest. They'd have less money to spend on next year's contest, but they'd still be around.
Now they have the money, they just don't have any credibility. Which makes having an event next year seem like a waste of time.
All these people defending Mythbusters, and not one has mentioned the best feature of the show. Kari is really hot. A bit ditzy, but still really hot.
Regardless, it seems like the show got dumbed down. Especially the later seasons. Maybe I just noticed it more before I stopped watching. It seems like it switched from being about interesting stuff, to being about making the biggest explosion and having a higher potential for injury.
Actually, the QuickTime versions seem to work better.
wget http://www.pbs.org/media/22ndcentury/22ndcentury_3 84.mov
mplayer 22ndcentury_384.mov
wget http://www.pbs.org/media/kcet/wiredscience/wired-p ilot-full_480.mov -O wired_pilot_full_480.mov
mplayer wired_pilot_full_480.mov
wget http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/si/video/chapter_1_300. mov -O ch1.mov. mov -O ch2.mov. mov -O ch3.mov. mov -O ch4.mov. mov -O ch5.mov. mov -O ch6.mov
wget http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/si/video/chapter_2_300
wget http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/si/video/chapter_3_300
wget http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/si/video/chapter_4_300
wget http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/si/video/chapter_5_300
wget http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/si/video/chapter_6_300
mplayer ch*.mov
They don't seem to have that last one as one big file.
mplayer mms://wm.z1.mii-streaming.net/media/pbs/windows/ge neral/windows/kcet/wiredscience/wired-pilot-full_3 20.wmv
wget http://media.pbs.org/asxgen/general/windows/wgbh/s i/chapter_all_308.asx
mplayer chapter_all_308.asx
It's possible, but there's a difference between modern web applications and the early cooperative multitasking and multiprogramming systems. When those early systems were devised, there weren't any better ways of doing that stuff. They weren't ignoring existing technology just to meet needless requirements. These new web applications are reimplementing a bunch of stuff that's already been done, except making it needlessly use HTTP, HTML and Javascript.
No, the GP was right. Here. And here.
That's your reason for accepting applications with few features and incredibly poor performance? That's like saying "I could make ten times more money, but then I'd have to pay more taxes." It doesn't make sense.
That's irrelevant. "Web applications" running in IE are no safer than any other application on Windows. Not that it matters. If one of your requirements was "Running applications securely", you wouldn't be running Windows.
I think you meant "asynchronous information transfer, on a webpage". Which gets right to the root of the problem. People are trying to put everything in webpages, even when it doesn't make any sense or isn't the best option.
I absolutely abhor "web applications." They're less responsive, harder to use, and never match the features of standalone applications.
Look at the gigantic difference between Google Earth and Google Maps. Or between any webmail system and Sylpheed or Thunderbird. Or between YouTube's video player and xine or mplayer. The web applications are light years behind the standalone apps, in large part because they're using HTTP, HTML and Javascript in ways they were never intended to be used.
and sell your old one cheap.
Just the other day I bought an older Dell that "wouldn't boot" for $15, sans hard drive. An hour of hacking around inside, and I was able to get it going. It's a little old, but it'll make a nice LiveCD tester.
Consumers are getting raped by MS and Dell, but they're not going to learn, so might as well take advantage.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. AJAX is NOT a great technology. It's a perversion. It bends HTTP and HTML to do things they were never meant to do. And because of that, it's not really surprising that it has so many huge problems. Not being able to bookmark or use the back button? Those are gigantic problems.
If anything good can be said about AJAX, it's a curiosity. It's certainly amusing that it can be done, but "great technology" it is not.
KNOW YOUR DRUNKARD! YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT! You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension... and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can't find a rape victim... He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Drunkard fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command -- including yours... BEWARE. Any officer apprehending a alcohol addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time [on him] will usually save nine on you.
Seriously though, just because you disagree with something doesn't mean it should be illegal.
If that's the case, you don't seem to understand the purpose of an ISO standard.
An ISO standard is supposed to be the definitive guide to a particular thing. They (usually) go into painstaking detail and explicitly describe exactly what each feature does, and specifically state any undefined or implementation specific behavior. See the C standard, C++ standard, Ada standard, POSIX, or any other ISO standard to see a few examples. They're not supposed to have vague descriptions like "Mimic the behavior of this 12 year old, hard to find program, whose behavior we can't describe."
How am I supposed to write code to use Office XML, when the standard can't even come up with an English description of what that code is supposed to do? It mocks the entire idea of having a standard.