There are many jobs that very few people are willing to do because the pay and working conditions are so poor. Telemarketing is one of those jobs. But, as they say, you can't have a world full of doctors without an army of janitors. Someone's got to do the work that no one wants to do. And I sympathize with those people who have to choose between working a terrible telemarketing job and eating.
If a telemarketing company is barred from using automated phone dialers to make calls, then they ought to be taken to task for it. I don't think any one will argue with that. But these companies typically have a couple dozen people on staff who can be trained to punch in phone numbers all day long, so it's not like they couldn't just do the same thing manually. In fact, I wish they would do it that way (it would get rid of that annoying split second of silence before you realize you've been caught).
I'm lucky to have been able to avoid falling so low as to have to work one of those jobs, but there are many people who choose to do so. They aren't the ones who you ought to aim your rage at, but at the companies who hire them.
It has a few things that Google doesn't have and probably never could have. The first is a multimedia search engine which links directly to online rips of copyrighted materials. Any Joe Chan over in China wanting to download something like the latest Britney Spears album can hop on Baidu and grab any which link they find. Google, being an American company would be hard pressed to do something as outrageous as that which would no doubt incur the wrath of the RIAA and MPAA, not to mention the Boy Scouts of America (just kidding, but BSA too).
The second is that Baidu is in Chinese, by Chinese, and for Chinese. Google may be in Chinese, but it is owned by American company and anyone who has done business in Asia knows, Not Invented Here was invented there. So Baidu has the hometurf advantage.
And finally, Google simply doesn't bring up the sorts of search results that people are generally looking for anymore. Lots of random searchvertisements, links to other lame search engines (with no results!), and contentless blogs are the results you get with Google when searching outside of English. With Baidu, it's still pretty new enough that it isn't overwhelmed with spam.
What's the deal with the story writeup with no links, though?
I was thinking about this over the weekend and thought about oscillating waves and the whole curling concept. I'm not a scientist, and what I know about this is mostly from Michio Kaku (FWIW) and the collection of essays on the topic edited by Paul Davies.
So you take that tube which has been rolled up and examine the pattern that the line makes when rolled at various degrees. When the line is orthogonal to the curl, you get a dot, which, if rolled tight enough, only has a width and no length. If you lived in Flatland, you would see a very tiny circle, and here in the 3 dimensional world, it is a tiny ring. Now, as you adjust the angle of the line away from the perfectly orthogonal, you get an oscillating pattern, actually a perfect sine wave when flattened.
So, in my limited understanding of the subject, I begin to see a pattern here. If a dimension is curled up, it may either curl up into a tiny speck, or it may manifest itself as a oscillating wave with the width of the curl as its amplitude and the angle of the curl determining its wavelength.
This is one of those topics that is just fun to think about, even if it doesn't really lead anywhere.
The way I understood this phenomenon, as it was explained in Kaku's book, was that the extra dimensions were curled up on themselves so that they were smaller than could be detected.
The thought experiment was similar to the following. Imagine a sheet of paper with a line crossing from one edge to the opposite edge. You can see that the line exists when viewing the sheet in two dimensions. However, imagine if you rolled the sheet of paper up tightly with the line not directly aligned with the roll. Now you would have instead of a line a single dot or a series of evenly-spaced dots. The line hasn't gone anywhere, it has simply been rolled onto itself so that it seems to have become small and barely detectable.
Now extend that idea to multiple spatial dimensions beyond just two or three. Since we humans can only perceive three spatial dimensions, it is hard to imagine what multiple extra dimensions would be like. However, if we can take the extra dimensions and "roll" them into themselves, we can make a little more sense of the concept.
PayPal has my information already. They need me to verify my information to make sure that my account activity is actually my activity and not someone else trying to hack my account (this is what I believe the case to be).
(Back on topic) I heard Americare is a very good charity to donate to in times of disaster.
I wonder if this is related to the PayPal emails I've been receiving recently regarding suspicious activity on my account. From what I understand, Paypal does not have various safeguards that can help keep fraud to a minimum, unlike banks which are required by law to have these protections applied to all their transactions. Unfortunately, there really isn't an easier method of money transfers on the web than PayPal.
Someone enterprising enough could probably come up with a good online payment system that isn't fraught with fraud. I could possibly not have to re-enable my account every other day when PayPal's automated fraud detection system finds something amiss with my account. I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Hopefully those poor people in New Orleans can get the money and supplies they need to rebuild. It's a sick tragedy what's going on down there. I've been through hurricanes before, but I've never seen anything as bad as this in a non-Third World country.
I'm not going to comment much on the actual article. Some bozo is getting sued by a company run by bozos. Your daily dose of hardcore Americana.
But it's absolutely awesome that the Wall Street Journal (of all places!) is submitting articles to Slashdot. Long the sole remaining North American bastion of expert journalism, the WSJ eclipses all other fishwrap in journalistic integrity and quality. Even the venerable New York Times is just a shadow of the nationally distributed Wall Street Journal. If they are taking a direct interest in submitting articles here, I am both impressed and giddy with excitement.
As is commonly joked, I for one welcome our new Wall Street Journal overlords.
The problem isn't whether or not Apple's operating system beats Windows at features A, B, and C. The problem is that Macintosh has never been accepted on corporate desktops, and that's where Microsoft's next version of Windows will be unstoppable. Outside of certain very specific industries, MacOS has never had a presence in the office setting.
The home computer market is the same story. MacOS has its fans and that gives it something like 10% of the home market, but Windows (in any incarnation) has always been more popular. It's never been simply about "OS xyz has feature abc while the competition doesn't". It's always been about getting the operating systems preinstalled on hardware. Now MacOS will be delivered on x86, and that ought to be interesting. But if customers can only buy MacOS from one vendor, that means that they won't have very much choice in hardware selection.
In the grand scheme of things, though, Apple is the largest single hardware vendor, and that's where they excel. Their software is excellent, but it's always been the hardware that keeps them financially viable.
There was a time when Linux was just a handful of sources on an FTP server somewhere. Full of bugs, but its programmers were full of excitement about getting it up and running.
Now, almost a decade later and the technology is progressing at a rapid pace and people everywhere are loading it up on their systems. I guess there really wasn't any other way for the system to evolve except into a bureaucracy. It's sad in a way.
What is sad is that it's no longer about the code. It's all about who owns what and who can use this or that name. It's a huge business. It's not a hobbyist's operating system anymore.
I guess that's all for the better, I suppose. More business attention means more bug fixes and faster extended functionality. But it kind of loses something intangible when people start thinking like top brass and less like the rank and file.
As the character's sanity level decreases, game play is effected such as by controlling game effects, audio effects, creating hallucinations and the like.
This type of action was part of all the levels in Parappa the Rapper and Um Jammer Lammy. If you played badly, the screen would become wavy or some other effect indicating that there was a clear loss of control.
I am just going to have to go along with the groupthink and agree that this is a gross misapplication of patent law.
Microsoft is helping draw this line. Linux, on the other hand, is not.
Microsoft quite clearly makes operating systems targetted at very specific niches. Their mainline Windows OS is targetted at desktop PC users (including laptops). Their server line of Windows OS is targetted at servers, and from the Macromedia EULA, it seems that these should not support Flash. They have their two embedded lines with WinCE and WinNTe which are also not supported under this EULA. From the main branch of the Windows OS line, there is also the WinXP MC-edition and WinXP Tablet edition, both of which are explicitly prohibited by the EULA. Macromedia says their software can be run on any device running the desktop version of the OS, and Microsoft says, "Ta-da-, here is exactly what we define as a desktop version OS, and here is what is not defined as such."
Linux, on the other hand, blurs the line to a great extent. On the one hand, it's widely used as a server OS, so Macromedia says it's probably OK to go ahead and allow use there. It's also used as a desktop OS, so of course they want to allow that. But then, as you mentioned, you start to get into things like specialized device ports which function just as well as their desktop OS counterparts, but are running on non-traditional (i.e. non-PC) hardware. Macromedia doesn't want that. They want to make sure they can get a per-device royalty on any software released to those devices. My guess is that they've probably got some good contacts with Montavista who are helping OEMs get "Flash for Linux Devices" running on their hardware.
Now the community looks and sees it is just a matter of hacking into the ROM and excising the Flash binary, a few magic incantations, and voila! they've got themselves something that can be put onto any Linux device for that particular processor. When that happens, Macromedia will be able to bring up the EULA and say, "Hey, we told you that you couldn't do this. And we don't seem to find you as a valid licensee. So please say hello to our little friend, The Courts."
My guess is that this is just the beginning of a wider restriction in licensing of closed-source software on open-source operating systems. Slowly it won't just be "device-targetted versions" of the OS that aren't allowed, but any version of the OS that is not provided from an approved list of vendors (Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake) who have made it clear that their operating systems are not just tarballs of code (Debian) but rather are specifically designed for target platforms.
That said, I am left scratching my head that they would consider either the WinXP for TabletPCs and WinXP Media Center edition unusable platforms. These are both very short diversions from the mainline Windows OS trunk. Much more "enhanced" versions of the OS than actual separate versions.
The software makers will typically license the source code to OEMs who will then sublicense them to integrators who perform the porting/integration (hence the name). I said in the earlier post that integrators license from the software makers, but actually it is the OEMs who have the contract with the software maker.
In order to run it on your watch or your toaster, you would either need to upgrade your watch or toaster to an x86 and have either Windows95-XP (not including WinCE or NTe) or Linux installed on it.
Otherwise you'd need to figure out a way to make the Shockwave binary run on the foreign hardware/OS. This is what they are trying to prevent. They don't want you to decompile the system. They want to license the source code to embedded systems integrators who will perform the porting for Original Equipment Manufacturers who will then provide you, the end user, with an embedded version of Flash (or whatever).
Even if you could port it to other hardware, you couldn't sell that port or perform the port for anyone because of the copyright restriction.
I doubt it matters a whit to you. If you were seriously considering doing something like that, you'd already know the reasoning behind the licensing.
I'm looking at this data and it seems that iTunes does seem to pick out favorite songs more often than not-so-favorite songs. Which, I suppose, is the whole idea behind the Party Shuffle concept.
So after analyzing all that data, how does Brian Hansen come to the conclusion that "it's simply the mind's tendency to find a pattern that makes you think iTunes has a preference". Uh, no. It's the software learning that you have a certain type of genre or style that you strongly favor and will selectively pick songs that are related, thus giving you a better-selected playlist.
And it seems that the program has a bug in that it will play a song twice in a row. That's a real bug (if you don't like that type of thing).
In the Star Trek world, was Chekov related in any way to playwright Anton Chekov? I know they liked to toss around all sorts of literary allusions (including the famous "Shakespeare must be read in its original Klingon" line.
More power to these guys! Star Trek continues, despite its critics, to (as Vulcans like to say) "live long and prosper".
Unless you mean to say that the lower new feature count will make it easier to clone those features into the Linux GUIs. Or maybe you mean that people who upgrade to new PCs will then have their older PCs available to load Linux on. I'm not sure how the next release of Windows will help Linux in the least.
People buy Microsoft because that's what they expect when they buy a computer. Some people think they want more, so they buy a Mac. Other people are happy with Linux, and they don't even have to spend a dime to get the OS software.
When Microsoft releases their next version, I don't think it will have the massive uptake that Windows 95 did, or even Windows 2000 did. Even Windows XP had a slower takeup than the real quantum leaps in Windows history (Win95, Win2K). People are just satisfied with what they've got.
How are you going to convince satisfied people to run Linux? It doesn't really offer them anything that they don't already have or need. If it were that important to them, they would be running it already.
Isn't the problem that other websites are displaying the content in violation of the original website's copyright? Google's automatic crawling is indexing these "stolen" images and redisplaying them in its search results. So when someone clicks on one of those links, they go to the violating website instead of the original website.
I'm not sure that Google ought to be held liable for this. They only provide an indexing service which is just happening to find copyright violations. There is a case to be made that by redisplaying thumbnail versions of the images, that they are also in violation of copyright, but it's nowhere near as clear cut as with the actually infringing websites.
I'd recommend reading TFA... geological phenomenon like this are measure on timescales of millions or even billions of years.
Or 700 to 1200 years, as is described in the article. Why would I comment if I hadn't read the article?
Who cares how long it takes for this type of thing to occur? I'm sure I won't be around for the heat death of the universe, but it's an interesting thing to know that there will be a Big Crunch at some point off in the future. Same thing here. If the core is gradually slowing down or speeding up or even staying the same, there must be some implications for this. But as I mentioned before, none were explained in the article.
If the core slows down due to friction with the mantle, will there be an effect on the magnetic field surrounding the Earth? Without the magnetic field, my understanding is that the Van Allen radiation belt will also not exist, and that in turn would expose the Earth to the full-on radiation of the Sun.
I'm no scientist, of course. But I wonder what the implications of the spinning core means. Also, how long would it take to stop spinning, or to develop a wobble?
There have been a slew of large earthquakes around the world lately. Could it be related?
The problem is that people are using robots to work in an autonomous manner to find ways around typical human limitations (we can only send several hundred emails a day, robots are not so limited). So people want to stop these "cheater" by making the user prove that they are a human rather than a robot.
Is this really a good thing, though? Even on a site like Slashdot, in a story about defeating bots, the very first comment in this story is posted by a bot. How ironic is that? What is accomplished by banning users who can't read these "captchas" (what a horrendous fake word)? Nothing, apparently, as the story says. It only serves to annoy legitimate users and does nothing to hamper illegitimate robots.
The solution is not this sort of halfway measure. The solution is to make it simply not worth the effort to be a nuisance on a discussion forum. I suppose that requires a glut of intelligent posters, but with the entire citizenry of the Internet available, that can't be so hard.
They may have given the books away to other libraries in the system, but I have a feeling that when they say "software suites", they are including the digitized versions of the books they are eliminating.
Information is not a static thing, and the progress from static books to dynamic online resources is a reaction to that. However, there is still value in understanding what people believed back before the "curent truth" was understood. Spontaneous Generation, a defunct theory of abiogenesis, was once the prevailing theory of germs. Now we know better and have better theories to explain the phenomenon. But does that mean that the thought processes of those early medical pioneers were wrong or only incomplete?
An older book which contains the original theory as it was understood to be correct at the time will present the evidence with a positive bent. Any modern book will only present it with a desultory tone.
Our understanding of the world grows all the time, and books are excellent in recording these things for posterity. The internet, on the other hand, is designed around change. It does not make sense to keep an out-dated theory around, as it just takes up disk space and bandwidth. So there is a chance that we may lose little bits of historical knowledge here and there, and all that adds up.
Of course, it happens with books as well. However with books, the texts are printed once and forever and will contain its information until it is physically destroyed. Bits on a web server can be wiped out with just a command.
Which is why I don't think that they are getting rid of the book information, just the physical copies. It makes sense to keep the digitized copies available for research purposes, even if they may contain old and outdated information.
Leaving this to computers will lead to traffic jam
on
The Future of the Car
·
· Score: -1
These systems all work on the concept of acting before the driver would act. It prevents such things as tail-gating, out-of-control swerving, etc. But this will have the added problem of contributing to massive congestion.
Take one car on an empty highway. At the speed limit, it can travel at an unimpeded 60mph. Now add another car behind him. That car will put a buffer between it and the car in front. In order to do this, it can't travel any faster than the car in front, in fact it must travel slower to open up that space (maybe 1mph slower). Add another 10 cars doing the same thing and suddenly the last car is going 11mph slower than the car in front. With a crowded highway, you'll end up with traffic at a standstill.
Maybe it's worth it to save lives on the road, though. But if these systems truly make the roads safer by avoiding and mitigating hazardous actions, then it would also be useful to raise the speed limits to compensate.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many jobs that very few people are willing to do because the pay and working conditions are so poor. Telemarketing is one of those jobs. But, as they say, you can't have a world full of doctors without an army of janitors. Someone's got to do the work that no one wants to do. And I sympathize with those people who have to choose between working a terrible telemarketing job and eating.
If a telemarketing company is barred from using automated phone dialers to make calls, then they ought to be taken to task for it. I don't think any one will argue with that. But these companies typically have a couple dozen people on staff who can be trained to punch in phone numbers all day long, so it's not like they couldn't just do the same thing manually. In fact, I wish they would do it that way (it would get rid of that annoying split second of silence before you realize you've been caught).
I'm lucky to have been able to avoid falling so low as to have to work one of those jobs, but there are many people who choose to do so. They aren't the ones who you ought to aim your rage at, but at the companies who hire them.
It has a few things that Google doesn't have and probably never could have. The first is a multimedia search engine which links directly to online rips of copyrighted materials. Any Joe Chan over in China wanting to download something like the latest Britney Spears album can hop on Baidu and grab any which link they find. Google, being an American company would be hard pressed to do something as outrageous as that which would no doubt incur the wrath of the RIAA and MPAA, not to mention the Boy Scouts of America (just kidding, but BSA too).
The second is that Baidu is in Chinese, by Chinese, and for Chinese. Google may be in Chinese, but it is owned by American company and anyone who has done business in Asia knows, Not Invented Here was invented there. So Baidu has the hometurf advantage.
And finally, Google simply doesn't bring up the sorts of search results that people are generally looking for anymore. Lots of random searchvertisements, links to other lame search engines (with no results!), and contentless blogs are the results you get with Google when searching outside of English. With Baidu, it's still pretty new enough that it isn't overwhelmed with spam.
What's the deal with the story writeup with no links, though?
I was thinking about this over the weekend and thought about oscillating waves and the whole curling concept. I'm not a scientist, and what I know about this is mostly from Michio Kaku (FWIW) and the collection of essays on the topic edited by Paul Davies.
So you take that tube which has been rolled up and examine the pattern that the line makes when rolled at various degrees. When the line is orthogonal to the curl, you get a dot, which, if rolled tight enough, only has a width and no length. If you lived in Flatland, you would see a very tiny circle, and here in the 3 dimensional world, it is a tiny ring. Now, as you adjust the angle of the line away from the perfectly orthogonal, you get an oscillating pattern, actually a perfect sine wave when flattened.
So, in my limited understanding of the subject, I begin to see a pattern here. If a dimension is curled up, it may either curl up into a tiny speck, or it may manifest itself as a oscillating wave with the width of the curl as its amplitude and the angle of the curl determining its wavelength.
This is one of those topics that is just fun to think about, even if it doesn't really lead anywhere.
The way I understood this phenomenon, as it was explained in Kaku's book, was that the extra dimensions were curled up on themselves so that they were smaller than could be detected.
The thought experiment was similar to the following. Imagine a sheet of paper with a line crossing from one edge to the opposite edge. You can see that the line exists when viewing the sheet in two dimensions. However, imagine if you rolled the sheet of paper up tightly with the line not directly aligned with the roll. Now you would have instead of a line a single dot or a series of evenly-spaced dots. The line hasn't gone anywhere, it has simply been rolled onto itself so that it seems to have become small and barely detectable.
Now extend that idea to multiple spatial dimensions beyond just two or three. Since we humans can only perceive three spatial dimensions, it is hard to imagine what multiple extra dimensions would be like. However, if we can take the extra dimensions and "roll" them into themselves, we can make a little more sense of the concept.
????!!!!
I've never heard of that term before (phished), so I looked it up on Google. I'm one unhappy camper...
Looks like I have a little bit of business to take care of. Why doesn't my virus scanner catch these things?
PayPal has my information already. They need me to verify my information to make sure that my account activity is actually my activity and not someone else trying to hack my account (this is what I believe the case to be).
(Back on topic) I heard Americare is a very good charity to donate to in times of disaster.
I wonder if this is related to the PayPal emails I've been receiving recently regarding suspicious activity on my account. From what I understand, Paypal does not have various safeguards that can help keep fraud to a minimum, unlike banks which are required by law to have these protections applied to all their transactions. Unfortunately, there really isn't an easier method of money transfers on the web than PayPal.
Someone enterprising enough could probably come up with a good online payment system that isn't fraught with fraud. I could possibly not have to re-enable my account every other day when PayPal's automated fraud detection system finds something amiss with my account. I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Hopefully those poor people in New Orleans can get the money and supplies they need to rebuild. It's a sick tragedy what's going on down there. I've been through hurricanes before, but I've never seen anything as bad as this in a non-Third World country.
I'm not going to comment much on the actual article. Some bozo is getting sued by a company run by bozos. Your daily dose of hardcore Americana.
But it's absolutely awesome that the Wall Street Journal (of all places!) is submitting articles to Slashdot. Long the sole remaining North American bastion of expert journalism, the WSJ eclipses all other fishwrap in journalistic integrity and quality. Even the venerable New York Times is just a shadow of the nationally distributed Wall Street Journal. If they are taking a direct interest in submitting articles here, I am both impressed and giddy with excitement.
As is commonly joked, I for one welcome our new Wall Street Journal overlords.
The problem isn't whether or not Apple's operating system beats Windows at features A, B, and C. The problem is that Macintosh has never been accepted on corporate desktops, and that's where Microsoft's next version of Windows will be unstoppable. Outside of certain very specific industries, MacOS has never had a presence in the office setting.
The home computer market is the same story. MacOS has its fans and that gives it something like 10% of the home market, but Windows (in any incarnation) has always been more popular. It's never been simply about "OS xyz has feature abc while the competition doesn't". It's always been about getting the operating systems preinstalled on hardware. Now MacOS will be delivered on x86, and that ought to be interesting. But if customers can only buy MacOS from one vendor, that means that they won't have very much choice in hardware selection.
In the grand scheme of things, though, Apple is the largest single hardware vendor, and that's where they excel. Their software is excellent, but it's always been the hardware that keeps them financially viable.
There was a time when Linux was just a handful of sources on an FTP server somewhere. Full of bugs, but its programmers were full of excitement about getting it up and running.
Now, almost a decade later and the technology is progressing at a rapid pace and people everywhere are loading it up on their systems. I guess there really wasn't any other way for the system to evolve except into a bureaucracy. It's sad in a way.
What is sad is that it's no longer about the code. It's all about who owns what and who can use this or that name. It's a huge business. It's not a hobbyist's operating system anymore.
I guess that's all for the better, I suppose. More business attention means more bug fixes and faster extended functionality. But it kind of loses something intangible when people start thinking like top brass and less like the rank and file.
As the character's sanity level decreases, game play is effected such as by controlling game effects, audio effects, creating hallucinations and the like.
This type of action was part of all the levels in Parappa the Rapper and Um Jammer Lammy. If you played badly, the screen would become wavy or some other effect indicating that there was a clear loss of control.
I am just going to have to go along with the groupthink and agree that this is a gross misapplication of patent law.
Microsoft is helping draw this line. Linux, on the other hand, is not.
Microsoft quite clearly makes operating systems targetted at very specific niches. Their mainline Windows OS is targetted at desktop PC users (including laptops). Their server line of Windows OS is targetted at servers, and from the Macromedia EULA, it seems that these should not support Flash. They have their two embedded lines with WinCE and WinNTe which are also not supported under this EULA. From the main branch of the Windows OS line, there is also the WinXP MC-edition and WinXP Tablet edition, both of which are explicitly prohibited by the EULA. Macromedia says their software can be run on any device running the desktop version of the OS, and Microsoft says, "Ta-da-, here is exactly what we define as a desktop version OS, and here is what is not defined as such."
Linux, on the other hand, blurs the line to a great extent. On the one hand, it's widely used as a server OS, so Macromedia says it's probably OK to go ahead and allow use there. It's also used as a desktop OS, so of course they want to allow that. But then, as you mentioned, you start to get into things like specialized device ports which function just as well as their desktop OS counterparts, but are running on non-traditional (i.e. non-PC) hardware. Macromedia doesn't want that. They want to make sure they can get a per-device royalty on any software released to those devices. My guess is that they've probably got some good contacts with Montavista who are helping OEMs get "Flash for Linux Devices" running on their hardware.
Now the community looks and sees it is just a matter of hacking into the ROM and excising the Flash binary, a few magic incantations, and voila! they've got themselves something that can be put onto any Linux device for that particular processor. When that happens, Macromedia will be able to bring up the EULA and say, "Hey, we told you that you couldn't do this. And we don't seem to find you as a valid licensee. So please say hello to our little friend, The Courts."
My guess is that this is just the beginning of a wider restriction in licensing of closed-source software on open-source operating systems. Slowly it won't just be "device-targetted versions" of the OS that aren't allowed, but any version of the OS that is not provided from an approved list of vendors (Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake) who have made it clear that their operating systems are not just tarballs of code (Debian) but rather are specifically designed for target platforms.
That said, I am left scratching my head that they would consider either the WinXP for TabletPCs and WinXP Media Center edition unusable platforms. These are both very short diversions from the mainline Windows OS trunk. Much more "enhanced" versions of the OS than actual separate versions.
Slight mistake I made.
The software makers will typically license the source code to OEMs who will then sublicense them to integrators who perform the porting/integration (hence the name). I said in the earlier post that integrators license from the software makers, but actually it is the OEMs who have the contract with the software maker.
In order to run it on your watch or your toaster, you would either need to upgrade your watch or toaster to an x86 and have either Windows95-XP (not including WinCE or NTe) or Linux installed on it.
Otherwise you'd need to figure out a way to make the Shockwave binary run on the foreign hardware/OS. This is what they are trying to prevent. They don't want you to decompile the system. They want to license the source code to embedded systems integrators who will perform the porting for Original Equipment Manufacturers who will then provide you, the end user, with an embedded version of Flash (or whatever).
Even if you could port it to other hardware, you couldn't sell that port or perform the port for anyone because of the copyright restriction.
I doubt it matters a whit to you. If you were seriously considering doing something like that, you'd already know the reasoning behind the licensing.
*blink*blink* That was a lot of analysis to figure out just that.
I'm looking at this data and it seems that iTunes does seem to pick out favorite songs more often than not-so-favorite songs. Which, I suppose, is the whole idea behind the Party Shuffle concept.
So after analyzing all that data, how does Brian Hansen come to the conclusion that "it's simply the mind's tendency to find a pattern that makes you think iTunes has a preference". Uh, no. It's the software learning that you have a certain type of genre or style that you strongly favor and will selectively pick songs that are related, thus giving you a better-selected playlist.
And it seems that the program has a bug in that it will play a song twice in a row. That's a real bug (if you don't like that type of thing).
In the Star Trek world, was Chekov related in any way to playwright Anton Chekov? I know they liked to toss around all sorts of literary allusions (including the famous "Shakespeare must be read in its original Klingon" line.
More power to these guys! Star Trek continues, despite its critics, to (as Vulcans like to say) "live long and prosper".
Unless you mean to say that the lower new feature count will make it easier to clone those features into the Linux GUIs. Or maybe you mean that people who upgrade to new PCs will then have their older PCs available to load Linux on. I'm not sure how the next release of Windows will help Linux in the least.
People buy Microsoft because that's what they expect when they buy a computer. Some people think they want more, so they buy a Mac. Other people are happy with Linux, and they don't even have to spend a dime to get the OS software.
When Microsoft releases their next version, I don't think it will have the massive uptake that Windows 95 did, or even Windows 2000 did. Even Windows XP had a slower takeup than the real quantum leaps in Windows history (Win95, Win2K). People are just satisfied with what they've got.
How are you going to convince satisfied people to run Linux? It doesn't really offer them anything that they don't already have or need. If it were that important to them, they would be running it already.
So why would Windows Vista help Linux?
Isn't the problem that other websites are displaying the content in violation of the original website's copyright? Google's automatic crawling is indexing these "stolen" images and redisplaying them in its search results. So when someone clicks on one of those links, they go to the violating website instead of the original website.
I'm not sure that Google ought to be held liable for this. They only provide an indexing service which is just happening to find copyright violations. There is a case to be made that by redisplaying thumbnail versions of the images, that they are also in violation of copyright, but it's nowhere near as clear cut as with the actually infringing websites.
I'd recommend reading TFA... geological phenomenon like this are measure on timescales of millions or even billions of years.
Or 700 to 1200 years, as is described in the article. Why would I comment if I hadn't read the article?
Who cares how long it takes for this type of thing to occur? I'm sure I won't be around for the heat death of the universe, but it's an interesting thing to know that there will be a Big Crunch at some point off in the future. Same thing here. If the core is gradually slowing down or speeding up or even staying the same, there must be some implications for this. But as I mentioned before, none were explained in the article.
If the core slows down due to friction with the mantle, will there be an effect on the magnetic field surrounding the Earth? Without the magnetic field, my understanding is that the Van Allen radiation belt will also not exist, and that in turn would expose the Earth to the full-on radiation of the Sun.
I'm no scientist, of course. But I wonder what the implications of the spinning core means. Also, how long would it take to stop spinning, or to develop a wobble?
There have been a slew of large earthquakes around the world lately. Could it be related?
The problem is that people are using robots to work in an autonomous manner to find ways around typical human limitations (we can only send several hundred emails a day, robots are not so limited). So people want to stop these "cheater" by making the user prove that they are a human rather than a robot.
Is this really a good thing, though? Even on a site like Slashdot, in a story about defeating bots, the very first comment in this story is posted by a bot. How ironic is that? What is accomplished by banning users who can't read these "captchas" (what a horrendous fake word)? Nothing, apparently, as the story says. It only serves to annoy legitimate users and does nothing to hamper illegitimate robots.
The solution is not this sort of halfway measure. The solution is to make it simply not worth the effort to be a nuisance on a discussion forum. I suppose that requires a glut of intelligent posters, but with the entire citizenry of the Internet available, that can't be so hard.
They may have given the books away to other libraries in the system, but I have a feeling that when they say "software suites", they are including the digitized versions of the books they are eliminating.
Information is not a static thing, and the progress from static books to dynamic online resources is a reaction to that. However, there is still value in understanding what people believed back before the "curent truth" was understood. Spontaneous Generation, a defunct theory of abiogenesis, was once the prevailing theory of germs. Now we know better and have better theories to explain the phenomenon. But does that mean that the thought processes of those early medical pioneers were wrong or only incomplete?
An older book which contains the original theory as it was understood to be correct at the time will present the evidence with a positive bent. Any modern book will only present it with a desultory tone.
Our understanding of the world grows all the time, and books are excellent in recording these things for posterity. The internet, on the other hand, is designed around change. It does not make sense to keep an out-dated theory around, as it just takes up disk space and bandwidth. So there is a chance that we may lose little bits of historical knowledge here and there, and all that adds up.
Of course, it happens with books as well. However with books, the texts are printed once and forever and will contain its information until it is physically destroyed. Bits on a web server can be wiped out with just a command.
Which is why I don't think that they are getting rid of the book information, just the physical copies. It makes sense to keep the digitized copies available for research purposes, even if they may contain old and outdated information.
Work is so tough.
;-)
But I got time to make a podcast!
These systems all work on the concept of acting before the driver would act. It prevents such things as tail-gating, out-of-control swerving, etc. But this will have the added problem of contributing to massive congestion.
Take one car on an empty highway. At the speed limit, it can travel at an unimpeded 60mph. Now add another car behind him. That car will put a buffer between it and the car in front. In order to do this, it can't travel any faster than the car in front, in fact it must travel slower to open up that space (maybe 1mph slower). Add another 10 cars doing the same thing and suddenly the last car is going 11mph slower than the car in front. With a crowded highway, you'll end up with traffic at a standstill.
Maybe it's worth it to save lives on the road, though. But if these systems truly make the roads safer by avoiding and mitigating hazardous actions, then it would also be useful to raise the speed limits to compensate.