Actually, if Google ever, say, partners with Starbucks or Borders to provide wireless access, I hope to *gods* they name the service GSpot. I can't wait to read about it on the 10K...
>>Offshoots of the technology could be put into digital cameras, >>offering the same viewfinder capabilities of a high quality single lens reflex camera. >>Photographers would be able to preview a full-colour image >>and make focus-control and depth-of-field adjustments much more easily.
Woohoo - now I get to be Spider Robinson! So, where's my bowel disruptor...
What I find hard to believe is that nobody seems to be pointing out the blindingly obvious. If Google can give each user 1GB of space, and provide, say, POP access to it... then clearly, they could provide HTTP access to that *same* space... at which point, they just put most independent ISPs out of business.
Once Gmail hits, with very few tweaks, Google could become the largest ISP. That's what this infrastructure allows them to do. Think about it - their core technology is indexing the web. How much easier and more powerful would that be if a significant chunk of the web was being served off THEIR OWN SERVERS?
>>...I cringe at the thought I am being watched by someone with NVGs. >>I have an expectation of some privacy while watching a movie.
Um... no. No, you don't. You have *no* expectation of privacy while watching a movie. Movie theatres are a *public* place. You may not, for instance, whack off while watching a movie - at least, not without getting arrested and being societally shunned. Not even if you're the only person in the Kitty-Kat Theatre (thank you, Pee-Wee Herman).
Your behavior and actions are limited while you are in the theatre, and one of the limits is this: thou shalt not electronically record the movie you're watching. If you don't like being (potentially) watched, well, don't go out in public.
>>The day they [install metal detectors] is the day I completely stop going to movies;
Exactly. That's a valid choice - and probably the choice I'd make too. But just complaining about the fact that people can see you when you're in public is not valid.
Hey, don't dis da Pinto! My first car was a '74 Pinto stationwagon, with lemon-yellow stripes and wood-panel siding. And an 8-track player. Damn, now *that* was the bomb.
>>Trusted Computing will totally change the security situation for financial transactions. For the first >>time, personal computers will be suitable platforms for financial operations. Compared to the >>security provided by TC, today's computers are defenseless against attacks, and it would be foolish >>to perform online banking transactions of any significant amount of money.
Right, so I count three points here: 1) TC is going to solve all the problems with online commerce. 2) Today's computers are relatively defenseless. 3) Doing online banking at present is foolish.
Okay, I'll bite. First, I'd dispute the first conclusion, just because *no* technology solves problems of trust outright. I actually work for a major financial institution, and I help manage and maintain our online banking system. So I know, without doubt, that the majority of security problems in today's world are about 10% technology-related, and about 90% people-related - from people doing foolish things with passwords, to not checking the status of accounts when your relationships turn sour, that's what causes the vast majority of security issues with banking, online or no. So no, TC would *not* revolutionize online financial transactions.
I'd dispute conclusion #2 too. Maybe TC computers would be more secure - but to say that today's are "relatively defenseless" ignores not only the reality of today's online environment (that eCommerce works pretty darn well), but also ignores point #1 (that most problems aren't tech-related anyway).
As for number 3 - you can guess what my opinion of that is. Thbbbbpppbpbttt.
>>delete all the white space, and comment in Hungarian
Ha, you laugh. At my first job, the documentation for our product (a medical management system) was written by the original software developer - who was Hungarian. Screen after screen, there were pages filled with explanations like this:
LOBExpCode. This is the LOBExpCode for the system. Enter your LOBExpCode here. NGFTSMapC. This is the NGFTSMapC for the system. Enter your NGFTSMapC here.
And so on. And no, no data dictionary. Occasionally there would be half-pages of attempted explanation in extremely broken English. Even our own developers couldn't tell what half the stuff did. So that's one form of code obfuscation...
>>The MSNBC article fully credits the WP. What's your problem?
I wasn't talking about the article - I was talking about the *headline*.
Whichever Slashdot editor posted this story lifted (or inadvertently copied - it doesn't matter, it's still their responsibility to check) the headline *directly* from the WP. It wasn't MSNBC's headline; theirs would have contained "WP: Online Search Engines...". Slashdont's didn't.
It also wasn't MSNBC's responsibility to provide attribution on behalf of Slashdot; it was Slashdot's responsibility to provide it directly. Instead, the story with WP's headline links to MSNBC. And it wasn't like this was some hidden thing on page B12; this was at the top of page A01. You don't see a problem with this?
Jesus guys, this was the *front page* story on the Post. It was their freaking headline! You guys lifted it, and then ran a link to MSNBC instead - *without attribution* to the Post. What the *hell* are you thinking??
I mean, did you just think nobody would notice? Some of you guys live *right here* in DC.
The best quote in the whole article, which I'm surprised hasn't been remarked on here:
Over at Marvel studios, there is a similar respect for the web user. "I used to hate the internet," studio chief Ari Avad recently confessed to USA Today. "I thought it was just a place where people stole our ideas. But I see how influential the fans can be in building a consensus. I now consider them as film-making partners."
I mean, did you catch that? A movie studio head who *doesn't* think the Internet is just a place for having his IP stolen. Good gosh, what's next, actually *using* the Internet to make money? Maybe there's hope yet...
>>Go read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's >>what a bad nuclear accident will look like.
As others have pointed out, a nuclear power disaster would be *nothing* like Hiroshima. But even if it were... you know, i went to Hiroshima a couple of years ago. It's a thriving, growing metropolis. So is Nagasaki, for that matter.
Large scale reconstruction of Hiroshima had started by 1950. That's 5 years after the blast - which yeah, is bad, but it's certainly not 50,000 years. And, good grief, that's an actual nuclear bomb. Even the worst case nuclear accident is several *orders* of magnitude less severe. Yeah, radiation is dangerous, but the irrational fear far outstrips the reality.
Argh, I swear I was FR (first-response) when I started typing...:-)
Sorry about that. Anyway, I still appreciated your message, because I was somewhat unpleasantly surprised to discover that with Form Fill off, it is indeed still recording information. After reading the bug, I understand why it's currently that way... but I sure hope that gets changed by 1.0.
>>Why do I have to set browser.tabs.autoHide to false just to have it keep the tab bar visible all >>the time like it should be doing by default (don't they understand it's *annoying* to have your whole >>window shift down whenever you open a new tab?)
On Firebird v0.7, open your Options menu. Select "Advanced", and under "Browsing", uncheck the first option, "Hide the tab bar when only one website is open". Voila.
>>I don't know of anything that comes close to J2EE.
Um... CICS?
Granted, not cross-platform, not nearly as functional, and on and on. Not saying CICS has the kind of functionality and flexibility of J2EE, or anything like that. But for some reason Java pundits always seem to think, hey, transaction managment environment - nobody's EVER done that before. It's actually been around for a long time...
I went through graduate school in Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering program, and took lectures at the SEI, where Watts Humphrey was and still is. But I didn't realize that they were doing presentations to Microsoft. Back in the day (6-7 years back), Microsoft seemed quite uninterested.
To see this tied in to the Trustworthy Computing initiative, though, is pretty jarring. Seems like the "trustworthy" then applies more to the developers than to the software. Not exactly where I'd expect their primary focus to belong!
Parent should have been modded +5: *Damned* insightful. My friend is working on a tiny little program right now that has been changed completely several separate times within the same week. Formal analysis is *hard*, and takes a long time, even with tools. And once it's complete, a small change to the requirements can break the analysis utterly. With real-world, commercial development, requirements drift isn't just a possibility, it's a near-100% certainly. With the exception of large, safety-related problem domains where the scope of projects is big enough to incorporate time for the formal analysis to take place, using such methods is next-to-impossible. I wish it weren't, but it is.
The idea of getting different stories from Baby Bells (or other incumbents) vs. resellers is nothing new. Two years ago when I moved into my townhouse, the prior occupants had had DSL through EarthLink/Covad. Verizon was the local provider, and owned the switches and lines. Covad had the actual DSLAM in my local central office, and EarthLink of course sells service pretty much everywhere in the US, including in my neighborhood. When I tried to order my own DSL service through EarthLink, I was turned down - apprently Verizon told them, "equipment incompatibility". They said maybe my local switch didn't support DSL. I told them that the prior occupants had actually had DSL at my address, but it didn't make any difference; they swore that my line wouldn't support DSL. Later I was told I was too far from the central office, even though I was actually 5000 feet. This went on for some time.
After several more attempts, as well as going through Covad and calling Verizon directly (which did nothing - they just told me to call Covad), I finally discovered (through a friend that had a back-door into their systems - yes, seriously) that the *real* reason I had been denied service was because when I established local service, Verizon had switched the circuit from my house to the central office from a copper line to a fiber one. No amount of inquiry from EarthLink or Covad, or even my own calls, had been able to get them to tell me this.
I had Verizon switch my line back to a copper circuit, but even after this, Verizon *still* turned me down for service! That's right - they still told me (and EarthLink) that my line was incompatible. EarthLink finally told me they would not offer me service, even if I could get Verizon to declare my line eligible for DSL. The reason? It cost them $500 dollars per request to Verizon to establish service - I am not making this up, it was a sales VP who told me this. He told me essentially to go away, and try some other GSP. Of course, there *were* no other GSP's - other than Verizon themselves.
So finally I gave in and called Verizon Online. They too told me that my line was incompatible. When I asked why, I was told that I had a fiber circuit. I told the sales rep that I had had Verizon techs switch my circuit to copper, and they said they believed me, but that their computer systems didn't know that, so they still couldn't take my order. "However," the sales rep told me, "you *could* take your complaint to our Appeals Line".
Uhh... Appeals Line? What the heck is that?
Turns out that Verizon Online had encountered these situations before, and had set up an Appeals Line so that customers could have actual techs (rather than sales reps) manually re-evaluate their accounts for DSL service. So... why didn't EarthLink and Covad just do they same thing? "Oh, we don't make that available to our competitors; it's only for our customers."
In the end, the Appeals department looked at my account, and - shucky-darn, whaddya know! - decided that my line really *was* eligible for DSL after all. And that was that. After 4 months (!!) of trying, I had a DSL account established within a DAY of calling Verizon Online instead of their competitors.
That's what the FCC calls, "fair competition".
Of course, that was two years ago. Maybe things have changed... but somehow, I doubt it.
Actually, because data is stored as 2's complement, the so-called "1" is actually a *negative* 1, causing it to actually levitate. This helps reduce friction on the disk, ultimately leading to fewer disk failures. Ahh, the wonders of modern science.
>>In general, the provisions of the constitution apply to all people >>(persons) under the jurisdiction of the United States, whether they >>be citizens or not.
Except of course for "enemy combatants". Which seems to be pretty much whoever the hell the Bush administration decides is one. Don't that just make you feel all warm and squooshy?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if Google ever, say, partners with Starbucks or Borders to provide wireless access, I hope to *gods* they name the service GSpot. I can't wait to read about it on the 10K...
>>Offshoots of the technology could be put into digital cameras,
>>offering the same viewfinder capabilities of a high quality single lens reflex camera.
>>Photographers would be able to preview a full-colour image
>>and make focus-control and depth-of-field adjustments much more easily.
Woohoo - now I get to be Spider Robinson! So, where's my bowel disruptor...
What I find hard to believe is that nobody seems to be pointing out the blindingly obvious. If Google can give each user 1GB of space, and provide, say, POP access to it... then clearly, they could provide HTTP access to that *same* space... at which point, they just put most independent ISPs out of business.
Once Gmail hits, with very few tweaks, Google could become the largest ISP. That's what this infrastructure allows them to do. Think about it - their core technology is indexing the web. How much easier and more powerful would that be if a significant chunk of the web was being served off THEIR OWN SERVERS?
>>...I cringe at the thought I am being watched by someone with NVGs.
>>I have an expectation of some privacy while watching a movie.
Um... no. No, you don't. You have *no* expectation of privacy while watching a movie. Movie theatres are a *public* place. You may not, for instance, whack off while watching a movie - at least, not without getting arrested and being societally shunned. Not even if you're the only person in the Kitty-Kat Theatre (thank you, Pee-Wee Herman).
Your behavior and actions are limited while you are in the theatre, and one of the limits is this: thou shalt not electronically record the movie you're watching. If you don't like being (potentially) watched, well, don't go out in public.
>>The day they [install metal detectors] is the day I completely stop going to movies;
Exactly. That's a valid choice - and probably the choice I'd make too. But just complaining about the fact that people can see you when you're in public is not valid.
>>An automated car doesn't really displace jobs...
"Johnny Cab says: Have a nice day!"
Hey, don't dis da Pinto! My first car was a '74 Pinto stationwagon, with lemon-yellow stripes and wood-panel siding. And an 8-track player. Damn, now *that* was the bomb.
Here was my favorite part of the article.
>>Trusted Computing will totally change the security situation for financial transactions. For the first
>>time, personal computers will be suitable platforms for financial operations. Compared to the
>>security provided by TC, today's computers are defenseless against attacks, and it would be foolish
>>to perform online banking transactions of any significant amount of money.
Right, so I count three points here:
1) TC is going to solve all the problems with online commerce.
2) Today's computers are relatively defenseless.
3) Doing online banking at present is foolish.
Okay, I'll bite. First, I'd dispute the first conclusion, just because *no* technology solves problems of trust outright. I actually work for a major financial institution, and I help manage and maintain our online banking system. So I know, without doubt, that the majority of security problems in today's world are about 10% technology-related, and about 90% people-related - from people doing foolish things with passwords, to not checking the status of accounts when your relationships turn sour, that's what causes the vast majority of security issues with banking, online or no. So no, TC would *not* revolutionize online financial transactions.
I'd dispute conclusion #2 too. Maybe TC computers would be more secure - but to say that today's are "relatively defenseless" ignores not only the reality of today's online environment (that eCommerce works pretty darn well), but also ignores point #1 (that most problems aren't tech-related anyway).
As for number 3 - you can guess what my opinion of that is. Thbbbbpppbpbttt.
Whatta crock.
>>NASA will have a press briefing today at 2 p.m. EST to announce "significant findings".
(from the press conference:)
"The bad news is, no, we haven't found water."
"But the good news is, we just saved up to 15% on our car insurance by switching to GEICO."
"Hey, come back..."
>>delete all the white space, and comment in Hungarian
Ha, you laugh. At my first job, the documentation for our product (a medical management system) was written by the original software developer - who was Hungarian. Screen after screen, there were pages filled with explanations like this:
LOBExpCode. This is the LOBExpCode for the system. Enter your LOBExpCode here.
NGFTSMapC. This is the NGFTSMapC for the system. Enter your NGFTSMapC here.
And so on. And no, no data dictionary. Occasionally there would be half-pages of attempted explanation in extremely broken English. Even our own developers couldn't tell what half the stuff did. So that's one form of code obfuscation...
>>The MSNBC article fully credits the WP. What's your problem?
I wasn't talking about the article - I was talking about the *headline*.
Whichever Slashdot editor posted this story lifted (or inadvertently copied - it doesn't matter, it's still their responsibility to check) the headline *directly* from the WP. It wasn't MSNBC's headline; theirs would have contained "WP: Online Search Engines...". Slashdont's didn't.
It also wasn't MSNBC's responsibility to provide attribution on behalf of Slashdot; it was Slashdot's responsibility to provide it directly. Instead, the story with WP's headline links to MSNBC. And it wasn't like this was some hidden thing on page B12; this was at the top of page A01. You don't see a problem with this?
Despite the fact that someone linked it above, it bears repeating:
From the front page of the Washington Post today:
Online Search Engines Lift Cover of Privacy
Jesus guys, this was the *front page* story on the Post. It was their freaking headline! You guys lifted it, and then ran a link to MSNBC instead - *without attribution* to the Post. What the *hell* are you thinking??
I mean, did you just think nobody would notice? Some of you guys live *right here* in DC.
What the hell?
>>most people want cell phones that do one thing - make calls.
;-)
>>Yet phones come with games, instant messaging, cameras, etc.
Sounds like Emacs.
Can't believe *that* got left off...
The best quote in the whole article, which I'm surprised hasn't been remarked on here:
Over at Marvel studios, there is a similar respect for the web user. "I used to hate the internet," studio chief Ari Avad recently confessed to USA Today. "I thought it was just a place where people stole our ideas. But I see how influential the fans can be in building a consensus. I now consider them as film-making partners."
I mean, did you catch that? A movie studio head who *doesn't* think the Internet is just a place for having his IP stolen. Good gosh, what's next, actually *using* the Internet to make money? Maybe there's hope yet...
>>Go read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's
>>what a bad nuclear accident will look like.
As others have pointed out, a nuclear power disaster would be *nothing* like Hiroshima. But even if it were... you know, i went to Hiroshima a couple of years ago. It's a thriving, growing metropolis. So is Nagasaki, for that matter.
Large scale reconstruction of Hiroshima had started by 1950. That's 5 years after the blast - which yeah, is bad, but it's certainly not 50,000 years. And, good grief, that's an actual nuclear bomb. Even the worst case nuclear accident is several *orders* of magnitude less severe. Yeah, radiation is dangerous, but the irrational fear far outstrips the reality.
Argh, I swear I was FR (first-response) when I started typing... :-)
Sorry about that. Anyway, I still appreciated your message, because I was somewhat unpleasantly surprised to discover that with Form Fill off, it is indeed still recording information. After reading the bug, I understand why it's currently that way... but I sure hope that gets changed by 1.0.
>>Why do I have to set browser.tabs.autoHide to false just to have it keep the tab bar visible all
>>the time like it should be doing by default (don't they understand it's *annoying* to have your whole
>>window shift down whenever you open a new tab?)
On Firebird v0.7, open your Options menu. Select "Advanced", and under "Browsing", uncheck the first option, "Hide the tab bar when only one website is open". Voila.
Bob
>>I don't know of anything that comes close to J2EE.
Um... CICS?
Granted, not cross-platform, not nearly as functional, and on and on. Not saying CICS has the kind of functionality and flexibility of J2EE, or anything like that. But for some reason Java pundits always seem to think, hey, transaction managment environment - nobody's EVER done that before. It's actually been around for a long time...
Just saying.
I went through graduate school in Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering program, and took lectures at the SEI, where Watts Humphrey was and still is. But I didn't realize that they were doing presentations to Microsoft. Back in the day (6-7 years back), Microsoft seemed quite uninterested.
To see this tied in to the Trustworthy Computing initiative, though, is pretty jarring. Seems like the "trustworthy" then applies more to the developers than to the software. Not exactly where I'd expect their primary focus to belong!
Toynbee? Uniminds? Haunted Houses?
SlashDot is looking more like Omni Magazine all the time...
Parent should have been modded +5: *Damned* insightful. My friend is working on a tiny little program right now that has been changed completely several separate times within the same week. Formal analysis is *hard*, and takes a long time, even with tools. And once it's complete, a small change to the requirements can break the analysis utterly. With real-world, commercial development, requirements drift isn't just a possibility, it's a near-100% certainly. With the exception of large, safety-related problem domains where the scope of projects is big enough to incorporate time for the formal analysis to take place, using such methods is next-to-impossible. I wish it weren't, but it is.
The idea of getting different stories from Baby Bells (or other incumbents) vs. resellers is nothing new. Two years ago when I moved into my townhouse, the prior occupants had had DSL through EarthLink/Covad. Verizon was the local provider, and owned the switches and lines. Covad had the actual DSLAM in my local central office, and EarthLink of course sells service pretty much everywhere in the US, including in my neighborhood. When I tried to order my own DSL service through EarthLink, I was turned down - apprently Verizon told them, "equipment incompatibility". They said maybe my local switch didn't support DSL. I told them that the prior occupants had actually had DSL at my address, but it didn't make any difference; they swore that my line wouldn't support DSL. Later I was told I was too far from the central office, even though I was actually 5000 feet. This went on for some time.
After several more attempts, as well as going through Covad and calling Verizon directly (which did nothing - they just told me to call Covad), I finally discovered (through a friend that had a back-door into their systems - yes, seriously) that the *real* reason I had been denied service was because when I established local service, Verizon had switched the circuit from my house to the central office from a copper line to a fiber one. No amount of inquiry from EarthLink or Covad, or even my own calls, had been able to get them to tell me this.
I had Verizon switch my line back to a copper circuit, but even after this, Verizon *still* turned me down for service! That's right - they still told me (and EarthLink) that my line was incompatible. EarthLink finally told me they would not offer me service, even if I could get Verizon to declare my line eligible for DSL. The reason? It cost them $500 dollars per request to Verizon to establish service - I am not making this up, it was a sales VP who told me this. He told me essentially to go away, and try some other GSP. Of course, there *were* no other GSP's - other than Verizon themselves.
So finally I gave in and called Verizon Online. They too told me that my line was incompatible. When I asked why, I was told that I had a fiber circuit. I told the sales rep that I had had Verizon techs switch my circuit to copper, and they said they believed me, but that their computer systems didn't know that, so they still couldn't take my order. "However," the sales rep told me, "you *could* take your complaint to our Appeals Line".
Uhh... Appeals Line? What the heck is that?
Turns out that Verizon Online had encountered these situations before, and had set up an Appeals Line so that customers could have actual techs (rather than sales reps) manually re-evaluate their accounts for DSL service. So... why didn't EarthLink and Covad just do they same thing? "Oh, we don't make that available to our competitors; it's only for our customers."
In the end, the Appeals department looked at my account, and - shucky-darn, whaddya know! - decided that my line really *was* eligible for DSL after all. And that was that. After 4 months (!!) of trying, I had a DSL account established within a DAY of calling Verizon Online instead of their competitors.
That's what the FCC calls, "fair competition".
Of course, that was two years ago. Maybe things have changed... but somehow, I doubt it.
Bob
Actually, because data is stored as 2's complement, the so-called "1" is actually a *negative* 1, causing it to actually levitate. This helps reduce friction on the disk, ultimately leading to fewer disk failures. Ahh, the wonders of modern science.
Darn straight - it IS funnier each time. Just reading the grumbling is hilarious... :-)
>>In general, the provisions of the constitution apply to all people
>>(persons) under the jurisdiction of the United States, whether they
>>be citizens or not.
Except of course for "enemy combatants". Which seems to be pretty much whoever the hell the Bush administration decides is one. Don't that just make you feel all warm and squooshy?