Dude, I couldn't give a rusty f*** if somebody has "nicer things" than me. I have the cheapest phone available because, shock horror, I just want to use it to make calls and not to act as a mixture between a fashion accessory and an invitation to get mugged.
I have no problem with people paying top dollar for an over-hyped PDA. I just find the endless fanfare over this incremental advance extremely irritating.
Go ahead, mod me flamebait again. Stinking iPhone users, the lot of you.
Does that mean I can take control of an iPhone remotely and deliver a brisk shock to those smug b*stards proudly brandishing their "new baby" on the train?
Real innovators don't even seek patents. 80% of VC-funded software firms don't claim patents within four years of being funded. The whole patent system is a fraud, a tax on the consumer, and a blight on high-tech industries. This bill just perpetuates the fraud a little longer.
I totally agree with this. There is an Audi advert here in the UK where they claim that their new car is very innovative because during its production, they filed more patents than NASA did whilst developing the space shuttle. They fail to mention that NASA is government funded and focussed on progress and innovation, so they have much less interest in slapping a "this is mine" sticker on any half-idea they have and charging everybody to use it.
This is actually related to this discussion. Number of research papers is not necessarily proportional to the quality of the research because (duh) somebody might publish one really amazing paper which contributes more than 15 crappy papers.
It strikes me that the patent system is just another part of the corporate game playing exercise. People cynically patent anything as another revenue stream making a mockery of the purpose of protecting IP in the first place.
It's amazing to me how many inept non-compatible web-pages there still are out there. I recently went to a page that informed me I was running a really ancient version of IE or Mozilla and I needed to upgrade it right now. Except I was running Opera.
I know, I know, I could get Opera to pretend it's IE. That's still stupid.
> That's what happens when you sit around and bitch, loser.
No, in fact what I do is I just don't go to see these films anymore. Blockbuster profit margins are getting squeezed all the time. I wonder if it's because less people are going. I wonder if this is because they're not very good.
> It's a movie, not a political dialog. Not a scientfic experiment. A movie. It's meant to be watched, and enjoyed, and possibly re-watched.
I don't expect a political dialog. I do expect a film that doesn't suck. I enjoy light and entertaining films, but when they've put no effort at all into the script, it's still painful.
Examples of blockbusters that get it right: The Indiana Jones films, the Die Hard movies, the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. It can be done, but most of the time they don't bother.
Special effects are the part Hollywood loves to explain, because they can show off about how many flops they have. What I'd like to know is how a movie with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars can have a worse script than a lot of the content on YouTube.
I haven't seen Transformers, but I can bet that the script will rank alongside such fetid, barftastic tripe as Star Wars, the later X-Men and Spiderman movies and various other whizz-bang blockbusters. Most of the time I'd rather listen to my brain atrophy than what the characters have to say.
Don't even get me started about the carbon cost of sending the actors around the world to whore out their product, practising their sincerity as they pretend they thought the movie was challenging and inspiring, rather than just a paycheck larger than most of us will make in a lifetime.
I see your point, although I guess your friend must be an unusual case.
I think you can get keyrings that manage your passwords for you, generating new ones when needed and with a single sign-on. From what you say, they might be out of bounds for your friend's job, but it sounds as though they should certify some sort of assistance technology to make their job possible...
Passwords actually strike me as quite a good security method. A good password is difficult to guess by a person or by a machine and is very simple to implement, leaving less margin for error in the technology.
I know, I know, people forget their passwords or choose the word "password" all the time. It still seems a little depressing that we have to use all this extra trickery to compensate for people being morons.
Most of these ideas look more like cool gadgets or specific applications to me.
Computing is everywhere now. I think a "re-invention" of it should probably be something that applies to the huge numbers of people who use computing as part of their everyday lives.
I was much more interested in these comments, which involve trying to fundamentally change the way in which we use our technology.
I see your point, but who's going to invade Britain?
First of all, it's an island, so it's pretty hard to get to en masse. The only countries that are close and can get here easily are places like France or Denmark. The political climate would have to change *a lot* for Denmark to invade the UK.
What's more, what's in it for them? In the past, you'd invade a country to steal their resources but Britain doesn't have any resources - it's a service economy. What are you going to do - enslave the bankers? How would that even work??
Maybe I'm just pissing in the wind here, but it strikes me that invasion and occupation is a rather dead concept in modern Europe.
I think we are in basic agreement. Although of course the picture is really a good deal more complicated.
First of all, I've done something of a disservice to the government, who provide a good deal of aid funding to Palestine and elsewhere.
Secondly, the £10bn we've just "saved" would put a very large number of Brits who work for arms company out of work. In an ideal world, they can just go and work at a school or hospital, but these don't usually require missile assembly or guidance system engineering as a job prerequisite.
Thirdly, a government that gave away a portion of military spending to a country full of terrorists would not be re-elected, because the electorate are not bright enough to realise that this might be a sensible strategy. This is related to my commie pinko remark.
Finally, aid to these countries may not necessarily help anyway. In Iran, anything done by the British is seen as interference (There was a story on the BBC about this - they attacked the embassy with eggs during the Queen's birthday celebration, apparently) and people thought that this was a British conspiracy as well.
Yes, but is this the modern threat? These days, the biggest threat is not from invasion and occupation, but from global guerilla warfare, also known as terrorism. The weapons we spend all our money on - submarines, fighter jets and all that high tech robotic crap - is almost useless against all that. There might be an argument for removing a huge proportion of the money we spend on all that phallic hardware and sticking it into other activities, like intelligence and hearts-and-minds work to stop the terrorists from hating us so much.
It's a bit like the Royal Navy in WW2. They thought battleships still ruled the waves, because that's what Nelson used. Then they sent a few to the Pacific theatre, which were promptly sunk by Japanese air power, leading to the fall of Singapore. Now nobody has battleships anymore.
Also, the cost of one bunker buster is probably enough to buy a school in Palestine. That school might prevent a good few people from becoming suicide bombers. That sounds quite cost effective to me.
I know, I know part 1: it doesn't really work like that in the real world, but we're not really trying these other options are we?
I know, I know part 2: I'm a commie pinko leftist bastard who needs to be beaten senseless by a large red-neck.
I'm starting to wonder whether being a "powerful" country is such a good thing. The US (and to a lesser extent, the UK) is in all kinds of trouble trying to maintain and exercise it's power all over the world. If you compare this to countries that just mind their own business, like those in Scandinavia, I wonder what the point is. Denmark, Norway and Sweden routinely come out top in quality of life and happiness surveys.
A particular example of this: the proposal to renew the Trident missile system in the UK. It will cost a vast amount of money. A lot of it will be housed in Scotland, and nobody in Scotland wants it. It raises foreign policy hypocrisy questions, because we have nukes and we say other people shouldn't have nukes. So why are we doing it? I think it's because post-imperial Britain wants to believe it can still sit at the big table.
The only thing I can add to this is that an error message that only takes up 8 lines is a cissy error coming from BGL. I had errors that were multiple screenfuls. It seems somehow wrong when a tiny type error that can be fixed with maybe 3 or 4 well placed characters can be so verbose. I guess that's C++ for you.
I would be inclined to agree with this. I used the Boost Graph Library for some research code a few years ago. It's been designed to be extremely generic, which although a good thing sometimes makes it pretty difficult to just start coding something without all the bells and whistles. For operations on graphs, such as walking through, you can use their specialised functions for doing things but it takes days and days to work out how to use them and I ended up just using regular loops because they were much easier to understand.
Getting it to compile was a bit of a nightmare too. It has its own native compilation management tool that you have to download as well. What the hell is wrong with using make like everybody else? It also uses a very complex template hierarchy that produces terrifying error messages.
I'm sure that once you become an expert, BGL is really powerful and efficient, but I found the learning curve too steep. I just want to get in and build a working prototype quickly so I can see what I'm doing, not spend hours wading through manuals and examples to build the simplest program.
I'll be with the parent post and get modded a troll by boost developers.
Obviously this kind of litigation is a good step and to be encouraged, but it's interesting to imagine what would happen if nobody took action against spammers through the courts.
Clearly spam works, so the amount of spam being sent would only continue to grow. Would this lead to increased vigilante action? More privacy and restrictions imposed by administrators? Decrease in the use of Email as the signal-to-noise ratio continues to degenerate? All of the above?
All we need is to concentrate the power we already have. Apparently, less than 1% of the world's desert would be enough for all the world's power.
I'm not sure whether I believe this, but I certainly think we should be filling those otherwise useless deserts that cover a large portion of the globe with energy harvesting technology. Maybe the Arab countries, fairly replete with this kind of energy rich terrain, could convert from oil economy to exporting something better for the planet?
I hope so. Every time I have to upgrade my machine I have to spend an hour on the web working out the 700 different kinds of processor I can buy and what type of socket I need to support them.
I had an AMD Duron 800MHz that I tried to replace with an Athlon 1300MHz which should have been supported, but created a nifty column of smoke when I plugged it in. Anything that reduces that likelihood is good in my book.
What about those psycho people who spend all their lives getting Linux installed on their XBox/router/phone/wrist-watch? It's bit dull if it already runs Linux.
Maybe they'll try and install Windows on it instead.
It's all very well having empathy with CSRs who have to deal with idiot users, but that's not actually this guy's fault. If they want to, a company can treat me like an idiot because a number of their other customers are idiots. However, that's not going to make me like that company and will probably make me take my business elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing that this is an excuse to rag on Fox and bitch about the war and Dubya some more.
At least the story had "ftp" in it, making it slightly more "for nerds".
Peter
PS. I was against the war, I'm against Bush and I think Fox sucks, but even so (and as the parent post points out), this is a bit tenuous.
Dude, I couldn't give a rusty f*** if somebody has "nicer things" than me. I have the cheapest phone available because, shock horror, I just want to use it to make calls and not to act as a mixture between a fashion accessory and an invitation to get mugged.
I have no problem with people paying top dollar for an over-hyped PDA. I just find the endless fanfare over this incremental advance extremely irritating.
Go ahead, mod me flamebait again. Stinking iPhone users, the lot of you.
Peter
Does that mean I can take control of an iPhone remotely and deliver a brisk shock to those smug b*stards proudly brandishing their "new baby" on the train?
Peter
I've realised that my message is blatant karma-whoring. Apologies.
Next time, I'll just say "patents are bad, mm-kay?"
Peter
Real innovators don't even seek patents. 80% of VC-funded software firms don't claim patents within four years of being funded. The whole patent system is a fraud, a tax on the consumer, and a blight on high-tech industries. This bill just perpetuates the fraud a little longer.
I totally agree with this. There is an Audi advert here in the UK where they claim that their new car is very innovative because during its production, they filed more patents than NASA did whilst developing the space shuttle. They fail to mention that NASA is government funded and focussed on progress and innovation, so they have much less interest in slapping a "this is mine" sticker on any half-idea they have and charging everybody to use it.
This is actually related to this discussion. Number of research papers is not necessarily proportional to the quality of the research because (duh) somebody might publish one really amazing paper which contributes more than 15 crappy papers.
It strikes me that the patent system is just another part of the corporate game playing exercise. People cynically patent anything as another revenue stream making a mockery of the purpose of protecting IP in the first place.
Peter
It's amazing to me how many inept non-compatible web-pages there still are out there. I recently went to a page that informed me I was running a really ancient version of IE or Mozilla and I needed to upgrade it right now. Except I was running Opera.
I know, I know, I could get Opera to pretend it's IE. That's still stupid.
Peter
> That's what happens when you sit around and bitch, loser.
No, in fact what I do is I just don't go to see these films anymore. Blockbuster profit margins are getting squeezed all the time. I wonder if it's because less people are going. I wonder if this is because they're not very good.
> It's a movie, not a political dialog. Not a scientfic experiment. A movie. It's meant to be watched, and enjoyed, and possibly re-watched.
I don't expect a political dialog. I do expect a film that doesn't suck. I enjoy light and entertaining films, but when they've put no effort at all into the script, it's still painful.
Examples of blockbusters that get it right: The Indiana Jones films, the Die Hard movies, the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. It can be done, but most of the time they don't bother.
Peter
Now that you mention it, they did taste a bit acidic.
Peter
Special effects are the part Hollywood loves to explain, because they can show off about how many flops they have. What I'd like to know is how a movie with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars can have a worse script than a lot of the content on YouTube.
I haven't seen Transformers, but I can bet that the script will rank alongside such fetid, barftastic tripe as Star Wars, the later X-Men and Spiderman movies and various other whizz-bang blockbusters. Most of the time I'd rather listen to my brain atrophy than what the characters have to say.
Don't even get me started about the carbon cost of sending the actors around the world to whore out their product, practising their sincerity as they pretend they thought the movie was challenging and inspiring, rather than just a paycheck larger than most of us will make in a lifetime.
The world sucks. Somebody shoot me.
Peter
I see your point, although I guess your friend must be an unusual case.
I think you can get keyrings that manage your passwords for you, generating new ones when needed and with a single sign-on. From what you say, they might be out of bounds for your friend's job, but it sounds as though they should certify some sort of assistance technology to make their job possible...
Peter
Passwords actually strike me as quite a good security method. A good password is difficult to guess by a person or by a machine and is very simple to implement, leaving less margin for error in the technology.
I know, I know, people forget their passwords or choose the word "password" all the time. It still seems a little depressing that we have to use all this extra trickery to compensate for people being morons.
Peter
Most of these ideas look more like cool gadgets or specific applications to me.
Computing is everywhere now. I think a "re-invention" of it should probably be something that applies to the huge numbers of people who use computing as part of their everyday lives.
I was much more interested in these comments, which involve trying to fundamentally change the way in which we use our technology.
Peter
Congratulations on falling victim to a lot of insane right-wing neo-con dogma. Would you care to back that up with any facts?
Peter
I see your point, but who's going to invade Britain?
First of all, it's an island, so it's pretty hard to get to en masse. The only countries that are close and can get here easily are places like France or Denmark. The political climate would have to change *a lot* for Denmark to invade the UK.
What's more, what's in it for them? In the past, you'd invade a country to steal their resources but Britain doesn't have any resources - it's a service economy. What are you going to do - enslave the bankers? How would that even work??
Maybe I'm just pissing in the wind here, but it strikes me that invasion and occupation is a rather dead concept in modern Europe.
Peter
I think we are in basic agreement. Although of course the picture is really a good deal more complicated.
First of all, I've done something of a disservice to the government, who provide a good deal of aid funding to Palestine and elsewhere.
Secondly, the £10bn we've just "saved" would put a very large number of Brits who work for arms company out of work. In an ideal world, they can just go and work at a school or hospital, but these don't usually require missile assembly or guidance system engineering as a job prerequisite.
Thirdly, a government that gave away a portion of military spending to a country full of terrorists would not be re-elected, because the electorate are not bright enough to realise that this might be a sensible strategy. This is related to my commie pinko remark.
Finally, aid to these countries may not necessarily help anyway. In Iran, anything done by the British is seen as interference (There was a story on the BBC about this - they attacked the embassy with eggs during the Queen's birthday celebration, apparently) and people thought that this was a British conspiracy as well.
Peter
Yes, but is this the modern threat? These days, the biggest threat is not from invasion and occupation, but from global guerilla warfare, also known as terrorism. The weapons we spend all our money on - submarines, fighter jets and all that high tech robotic crap - is almost useless against all that. There might be an argument for removing a huge proportion of the money we spend on all that phallic hardware and sticking it into other activities, like intelligence and hearts-and-minds work to stop the terrorists from hating us so much.
It's a bit like the Royal Navy in WW2. They thought battleships still ruled the waves, because that's what Nelson used. Then they sent a few to the Pacific theatre, which were promptly sunk by Japanese air power, leading to the fall of Singapore. Now nobody has battleships anymore.
Also, the cost of one bunker buster is probably enough to buy a school in Palestine. That school might prevent a good few people from becoming suicide bombers. That sounds quite cost effective to me.
I know, I know part 1: it doesn't really work like that in the real world, but we're not really trying these other options are we?
I know, I know part 2: I'm a commie pinko leftist bastard who needs to be beaten senseless by a large red-neck.
Peter
I'm starting to wonder whether being a "powerful" country is such a good thing. The US (and to a lesser extent, the UK) is in all kinds of trouble trying to maintain and exercise it's power all over the world. If you compare this to countries that just mind their own business, like those in Scandinavia, I wonder what the point is. Denmark, Norway and Sweden routinely come out top in quality of life and happiness surveys.
A particular example of this: the proposal to renew the Trident missile system in the UK. It will cost a vast amount of money. A lot of it will be housed in Scotland, and nobody in Scotland wants it. It raises foreign policy hypocrisy questions, because we have nukes and we say other people shouldn't have nukes. So why are we doing it? I think it's because post-imperial Britain wants to believe it can still sit at the big table.
I say let's stop trying to do that.
Peter
Amen, brother.
The only thing I can add to this is that an error message that only takes up 8 lines is a cissy error coming from BGL. I had errors that were multiple screenfuls. It seems somehow wrong when a tiny type error that can be fixed with maybe 3 or 4 well placed characters can be so verbose. I guess that's C++ for you.
Peter
I did, because I was trying to use the Python Boost integration. It was very painful.
You could be right that it's more powerful, but it's still annoying to need a compile tool for just *one* project that I want to use.
Peter
I would be inclined to agree with this. I used the Boost Graph Library for some research code a few years ago. It's been designed to be extremely generic, which although a good thing sometimes makes it pretty difficult to just start coding something without all the bells and whistles. For operations on graphs, such as walking through, you can use their specialised functions for doing things but it takes days and days to work out how to use them and I ended up just using regular loops because they were much easier to understand.
Getting it to compile was a bit of a nightmare too. It has its own native compilation management tool that you have to download as well. What the hell is wrong with using make like everybody else? It also uses a very complex template hierarchy that produces terrifying error messages.
I'm sure that once you become an expert, BGL is really powerful and efficient, but I found the learning curve too steep. I just want to get in and build a working prototype quickly so I can see what I'm doing, not spend hours wading through manuals and examples to build the simplest program.
I'll be with the parent post and get modded a troll by boost developers.
Peter
Obviously this kind of litigation is a good step and to be encouraged, but it's interesting to imagine what would happen if nobody took action against spammers through the courts.
Clearly spam works, so the amount of spam being sent would only continue to grow. Would this lead to increased vigilante action? More privacy and restrictions imposed by administrators? Decrease in the use of Email as the signal-to-noise ratio continues to degenerate? All of the above?
Peter
If you believe these guys:
http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/index.shtml
All we need is to concentrate the power we already have. Apparently, less than 1% of the world's desert would be enough for all the world's power.
I'm not sure whether I believe this, but I certainly think we should be filling those otherwise useless deserts that cover a large portion of the globe with energy harvesting technology. Maybe the Arab countries, fairly replete with this kind of energy rich terrain, could convert from oil economy to exporting something better for the planet?
Peter
I hope so. Every time I have to upgrade my machine I have to spend an hour on the web working out the 700 different kinds of processor I can buy and what type of socket I need to support them.
I had an AMD Duron 800MHz that I tried to replace with an Athlon 1300MHz which should have been supported, but created a nifty column of smoke when I plugged it in. Anything that reduces that likelihood is good in my book.
Peter
What about those psycho people who spend all their lives getting Linux installed on their XBox/router/phone/wrist-watch? It's bit dull if it already runs Linux.
Maybe they'll try and install Windows on it instead.
Peter
It's all very well having empathy with CSRs who have to deal with idiot users, but that's not actually this guy's fault. If they want to, a company can treat me like an idiot because a number of their other customers are idiots. However, that's not going to make me like that company and will probably make me take my business elsewhere.
Peter