Re:Wondrous -- but you still want to smack that id
on
The Magicians
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· Score: 4, Informative
Unless someone knows something I don't about this post it shouldn't be modded down. This is pretty insightful and the author obviously has read and given thought to the content of the book.
Because it's a copy/paste from Amazon's reviews and this "Smidge" character is not only a well known troll but he has done this before? In the course of his lies, he continues to claim to be multiple different reviewers on Amazon. Frankly, he is stealing other reviewer's credit and should be modded down, not up.
"No, it won't" what? Possibly spell problems for the Samba team? From your link:
Patents. Microsoft has patents that may cover your implementations of the technologies described in the Open Specifications. Neither this notice nor Microsoft's delivery of the documentation grants any licenses under those or any other Microsoft patents. However, a given Open Specification may be covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (available here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp) or the Community Promise (available here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx). If you would prefer a written license, or if the technologies described in the Open Specifications are not covered by the Open Specifications Promise or Community Promise, as applicable, patent licenses are available by contacting iplg@microsoft.com...
Emphasis mine. So I'll correct myself, it may spell trouble for the Samba team. It's not clear. Which is essentially what I said. Do you really think iplg@microsoft.com will grant the Samba team a written license or possibly a patent license?
Why do they use the ambiguous language quoted above if this is an open technology I'm not suppose to fear implementing? I mean, haven't we been threatened over this sort of thing before? It's not clear to me why Microsoft stops other products from interfacing with theirs (product lock in?) but I'm not about to give them the benefit of the doubt.
A slight correction, they like to introduce new things when it suits them. Why the rewrite of SMB into SMB2? Well, it has some technological advantages you would expect but according to Wikipedia:
SMB 2 has two big benefits to Microsoft. The first is clear intellectual property ownership. SMB 1 was originally designed by IBM and was shipped on a wide variety of non-Windows operating systems such as SCO Xenix, OS/2 and DEC VMS (Pathworks). It was partially standardised by X/Open and also had draft standards for IETF which lapsed. (See http://ubiqx.org/cifs/Intro.html for historical detail).
The second benefit is a clean break. Microsoft's SMB1 code has to work with a huge variety of SMB clients and servers. A large number of items in the protocol are optional (such as short and long filenames), there are many infolevels for commands (selecting what structure is returned to a particular request), Unicode was a later addition etc. With SMB2 there is significantly reduced compatibility testing (currently only other Windows Vista clients and servers). Additionally the code is a lot less complex since there is far less variability (e.g. there is no need to worry about having Unicode and non-Unicode code paths as SMB2 requires Unicode support).
So you can see they like to introduce new things when it means they have clear intellectual property ownership rights over it and also a lot less work for them. They also don't have to be backwards compatible with their own products.
posted by eldavojohn (898314) * on 2060.09.04 9:05
So, being an old man, I thought I would go legit and get all of my path transmitters MPAA approved. I already had the Z-Ray player that has a 128 core processor to handle all the Z Discs and decrypt the DRM but I spent the extra $50 on the MPAA approved cord from that to my MPAA approved TV (which already has a 256 core processor to hand the encryption). Once all that was in place, I made the big purchase. It was only $100 to have an MPAA approved zoning specialist come in and stake off and area of my living approved by the MPAA for me and my family to view their copyrighted material in. Once that was complete, I got triplicate signoff on a form that allowed me to pay $500 to install two units on either side of the room that emit some sort of crazy field so that the photons leaving my MPAA TV unit can be seen normally within the MPAA designated zone in my living room. It's really neat to stand outside it and see static and then step inside and see it perfectly. You also have to put on headphones (only one set) to hear the sound because they haven't found a similar technology for it yet. Whatever it is that those things generate sure is strong. If the dog gets too close to one of them, it shits itself and walks in circles for about an hour. Also, you can't have metal things on you otherwise they heat up and burn you.
But a couple thousand later and I can finally sit back and not worry about being prosecuted. You guys are all chumps for not enjoying this sort of MPAA certified technology!
By digitally signing DNS responses with public-key cryptography, we will be improving the security of one critical aspect of the Internetâ"the Domain Name Systemâ"which otherwise could be exploited for the purposes of fraud or even cyberterrorism. It is our hope that with widespread deployment DNSSEC will help improve Internet security for the higher education community.
Some more information on why we need this can be found on Wikipedia's page for DNS cache poisoning. It's great this is going out to the "higher education community" but when is it going to catch on world wide? Is it like IPv6 where we need to wait for a catastrophic failure? One day when www.google.com resolves to the IP of www.malwareinyourface.com for some noticeable fraction of the populace?
What's mostly wrong with the corridors in Stanley Donen's Saturn 3 (1980) is that the floor-surfaces resemble the base floor of a movie studio, something which had plagued the corridors in the medium-budget Star Wars three years earlier (more on Star Wars corridors in a moment).
The movie that has an opening fight sequence in a corridor and later corridor after corridor on the death star followed by another fight sequence in a prison block corridor only leading up to the-equivalent-of-Jesus getting lightsabered in half in a corridor adjacent to a docking bay.... and you say "more on Star Wars corridors in a moment."
And the second movie? Hoth ice corridors. IV, V & VI are so dependent on corridor shots.
Did you mean to say "The Corridors of Star Wars article will be out later today with a 58 page thesis on the strength of corridor running and combat between rebels and imperials in the Star Wars cinema"?
Sucks to be me though, I've got a dominate eye so I can't see the 3D stuff. Just looks like an out of tune tv. Guess i've got that to look forward to when they go mainstream:P
Um, almost all of the population has a "dominant eye" with a very small fraction having no ocular dominance at all. I haven't had the chance to demo any of these technologies but if you're asserting that ocular dominance renders them useless then I think Sony's market is drastically small. I'm not an optometrist but are you saying you experience ocular dominance far more than the average person? To a debilitating extent?
Or it's to prevent scammers and phishers from making Google-like homepages. Think for a minute how awesome that would be if you got a rube to show up at your www.google.eldavo.com and it looked just like the Google homepage. They do a search for Bank of America and it takes them to www.bankofamerica.eldavo.com which looks just like bank of america. You could potentially do a lot of damage if you had the patience to go around scraping major sites and just making static HTML pages that sent username and password back to a database. And if you could get like three or four sites to correlate your identity theft...
With domain name poisoning or the actions of some viruses on the hosts file in Windows, is it so hard to imagine an entrepreneurial scammer getting naive people to download and install a virus that simple takes them to www.google.eldavo.com instead of google's real homepage? Perhaps with this design patent (as everyone and their dog has pointed out already), their intent is to make prosecuting these scammers a possibility for them instead of having to wait for the feds to come up with some identity theft charges. After all, were I stealing your info, I'd just be selling it. Not directly doing the identity theft, mind you.
You can spin this both ways. Is it possible for Google to start attacking everyone with simple centered search boxes and links across the top? Maybe. I doubt they'd get far but if you can point me to a case of that, I'll conceded vileness.
'Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip.'
Colonists heading to the new world were heading from a place of high resource (to live) contention to a place of low resource contention. A smart move if you wish to succeed--the resources were there for the taking. The astronauts, however, are not just heading to a place of higher resource contention they are heading to a place of no resources. None for living anyway. You might find platinum ore on Mars but you aren't going to find fur trapping, fishing and logging. This isn't little house on the prairie, this is the cold deadness of space.
You're sending them there on a one trip for one reason and one reason only: saving money. You're not sending them to a new world with more people there and more people coming and food everywhere ripe for the picking. They will eke out a miserable existence and remember earth fondly and try to be live off of what they are doing for humanity.
Nokia, on the other hand, has just announced two more music phones that will feature Comes With Music, an unlimited music-download service that involves a one time fee, which is part of the price of the CMW phone, and lets you download music for free (and you get to keep it) for a year.
Am I the only person that went to the CWM page and slid the "Please Select Your Location" bar up and down for about 5 minutes? The United States of America does not appear to be on the list. Is this music going to be restricted by what region you live in? Because when I click UK they say they asked the best in the music industry to sign a deal with them and they all said yes... are they talking UK only? How did they handle royalties and copyright fees? Is that why there's no US?
Why on/earth/ would Sony care about Linux on PS3's?
And honestly, for the great majority of users, why on earth would you bother putting Linux on a PS3 (aside from 'because I can' and scientific stuff...
Well, via a slashdot article I submitted, there's a site that shows you how to make your own supercomputer with a cluster of PS3s that was about $4,000 at the time and probably less now. I think they were using Fedora 8 because of the Cell SDK support at the time. While you might call this "scientific stuff," some people might view it as a really cheap alternative for universities and hobbyists. Just a thought to consider.
... it has removed the final reason for the open source world to care about Sony.
I thought ImageWorks (of Sony Pictures) had recently opensourced OSL, Scala Migrations, Field3D, PyString and Maya Reticle or at least made them community endeavors. I can't seem to find the source code for browsing on OSL and some of the other projects are pretty tiny but if that's true it's a good sign on ImageWorks' part.
Writing off the PS3? Probably. They probably realized Linux support buys them little over the Wii and XBox360 despite what I and everyone else thinks. But the rest of Sony might have hope.
And I've been drinking Coca-Cola ever since I hit that hunderd an' eleven year old lady in Grand Theft Auto VI: The Ballad of Brawndo's Stories and her blood spilt across the sidewalk to make the Coca-Cola logo. Now ever time I crack open a can of Coca-Cola, it feels like someone's spine in my hands snapping like celery. And when I take that first drink of blood... er... Coca-Cola, it's like I'm drinking that old lady's life essence again.
Before realizing that we had to solve this storage problem ourselves, we considered Amazon S3, Dell or Sun Servers, NetApp Filers, EMC SAN, etc. As we investigated these traditional off-the-shelf solutions, we became increasingly disillusioned by the expense. When you strip away the marketing terms and fancy logos from any storage solution, data ends up on a hard drive.
That's odd, where I work we pay a premium for what happens when the power goes out, what happens with a drive goes bad, what happens when maintenance needs to be performed, what happens when the infrastructure needs upgrades, etc. This article left out a lot of buzzwords but they also left out the people who manage these massive beasts. I mean, how many hundreds (or thousands) of drives are we talking here?
You might as well add a few hundred thousand a year for the people who need to maintain this hardware and also someone to get up in the middle of the night when their pager goes off because something just went wrong and you want 24/7 storage time.
We don't pay premiums because we're stupid. We pay premiums so we can relax and concentrate on what we need to concentrate on.
Having never done this before, the government is bound to have problems. All of them do when they try new things. I can bear with them for some incorrectly rendered pie charts or -- gasp! -- an informative comment about the numbers being pretty poor. Sorry to sound so apologetic but I'll give the idea of transparency and A and the implementation a C-. So what? The numbers are there.
Because what did we have before? Data via third parties that had to use a FOIA and sit and wait for it? Numbers that were years old? Or we had to visit 50 state sites that were all laid out differently and aggregate the data? And we're ripping on usaspending.gov for design flaws? Okay, from a web developer's standpoint these are pretty egregious errors but so what?
At least it reads "These totals are pretty poor numbers." and not "We really had to cook the books to get this to look right." Hell, now you know where to start looking if you want to do what you should be doing: criticizing the government based on their spending and IT (mis)management!
How would you react if the next president did away with usaspending.gov? Happy that the travesty of a parody site is gone?
The patent process and IP lawyers help create innovation.
Actually, the article did point out capitalism
So on what do intelligent people base the idea that technological progress is moving faster than ever before? It's simple: a chart of productivity from the dawn of humanity to the present day. It shows a line that inclines very gradually until around 1750, when it suddenly shoots almost straight up.
But that's hardly surprising. Since around 1750 the world has witnessed the spread of an economic system, by the name of capitalism, that is predicated on economic growth. And how the economy has grown since then! But surely the creation of new markets and the increasingly fine division of labor cannot be equated with technological progress, as every consumer knows.
At least in the United States, patents have been granted as far back as 1646 with the first patent act being put in place in 1790. The concept of patents has been around as long (maybe even longer) than this explosion of technological progress the article talks about. And you can argue both ways quite easily that it promotes inventing. The first being that with patents I have such a huge reward waiting for me that I am driven to invent and license patents because it is so lucrative and there's a system in place to protect my interests. The second being that I can take other people's inventions and modify them or mash them together without having to pay royalties or worry about litigation. In the United States we currently have the former while in China you might find a mix of the two to foster growth at different levels. I'm not arguing for or against either idea but I don't think that really has a proven effect for or against inventing. I will say that the first patent act in the U.S. was passed in 1790, 40 years after the "productivity" explosion in 1750 that the article mentions. Just something to consider.
What if the author had found data on inventions that failed? Would the author see a huge amount in the lifetime of his grandmother (if those records exist) and very few during his own lifetime (per capita in both time periods)?
Sometimes it feels like for every one hobby project I take on there are nine more that die at some point in development. Perhaps today we bet on sure things -- like incremental developments on things already existing -- instead of investing our time in risky ventures? Possibly because development and production of an idea is a costly venture with many people needed along the way. It gets harder to be a one stop shop as we're trained to be specialized and therefore our failures become more costly. Our economic system has evolved to reward only those that succeed and really really punish those that don't.
Probably not an adequate explanation but may explain part of it.
There was no control group in this experiment. They did a before and after with a group of people.
Well, if this is true... and I can't find the paper yet so I don't know. Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time. I hope they understand that with no control group they are setting themselves up for scientific disaster.
I mean, how are they going to eliminate alternative explanations? This is standard scientific procedure--I'd be shocked to hear this being published without adhering to something I learned about in fourth grade.
Elektronorgtechnica Bias -- Any Video Game Really
on
Tetris Improves Your Brain
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
This, says the doctors who undertook the study, shows that focusing on a "challenging visuospatial task" like a videogame can actually alter the structure of the brain, not just increase brain activity.
So you're saying this is akin to jamming the square block in the square hole and the triangle block in the triangle hole? Or, really, any sort of two dimensional puzzles like the mazes on the back of tray mats at a restaurant? Or maybe even -- *gasp* -- any game portrayed on a 2D surface like a TV or computer screen?
The study, funded by Tetris' makers...
I understand now.
The study's subjects, a group of adolescent girls, underwent MRI scans before and after a three-month Tetris practice period.
Don't get me wrong, I grew up on Tetris 2 and The New Tetris. They both still have massive replay value and really spurred me to look into polyomino based puzzles which had increased fame in the mid 1960s until everyone realized that they had little real world application (but they still show up in papers). Still, it lead me to a book by Martin Gardner who wrote Scientific American columns on Mathematical Games. If you remember those, I recommend this book. So something good came out of studying tile theory and Tetris for me but there's no evidence yet it did anything more for me than say playing Gauntlet on the NES would have.
Strictly logically speaking, celebrating "gay culture and heritage" would be like me celebrating "diabetic culture and heritage". It's bullshit.
With all due respect, I probably wouldn't make comparisons between diabetes status because there is little discrimination against diabetes sufferers. You can claim they had no choice to have diabetes but your analogy really ends there. There's no Mark Shepherd of the diabetes community. While awareness is important, you don't have a phobia of diabetes running rampant in some communities.
I don't know why you deny it but there is a culture to homosexuality. It's no secret to acknowledge historically that homosexuals have been viewed or shunned as a counterculture and it's that counterculture that we should not be afraid of and -- actually -- recognize.
It's like racism in a way. If a black guy calls me whitey, pasty, whatever.. what happens? I don't give a shit, because my skin is indeed roughly the color of light dough (at least compared to the black guy). Now reverse the situation, see what happens if I refer to a black guy as black. It doesn't matter how politically correct I try to be, it doesn't matter that in a room full of white people his skin color is his most easily identifiable visible feature. He might be a cool guy, but most likely I will get a fist to the face, repeatedly. Likewise, if a gay guy calls me straight, even if he means it as a demeaning thing to say, he completely gets off the hook because noone cares. Refer to a raging homosexual as.. well.. gay, and you at the very least get a good screaming too.
Um, your over generalizations are down right embarrassing. I'm not sure who you're hanging out with or why you think this way but I have several gay friends and if someone says "fag" or "gay" in a demeaning manner, they start saying "breeder" to refer to something as stupid or dumb. They handle it quite well, no screaming or punching. In fact, it's more "Oscar Wilde wit" than "Stone Cold Steve Austin physical violence". I'm not saying no one's touchy about these topics and if they are it's because they've suffered because of them. My friends have grown up safe from the most violent forms of persecution and that's why I would consider it important to recognize homosexuality and make it known that it's not punishable and it's not wrong in the eyes of the law.
*sigh* Can't we design some virus or some such that forces the right half of the brain to be the dominant one already?
Thanks for your judgment, I hope you enjoy forcing your values and ideas on people. Good luck "making" everyone correct.
Whether you care about him, whether you apologize, frankly, it doesn't matter.
Right, but Turing was homosexual and you're not... or at least all accounts and his trial for "gross indecency" indicated it. I think that historically we need to not only recognize people who were homosexual but celebrate them. An apology from the British government and/or knighthood would not only be an apology to Turing but an apology to those that were tried for the same reason. Turing isn't alone in famous figures tried for "gross indecency" with Oscar Wilde suffering the same charge. I'm sure there's a lot more. But if you had an uncle or aunt that was tried and jailed long ago for homosexuality, you could view this apology as an apology to every British citizen who was persecuted for the way they were born.
Also, I often find myself (an American) debating people who believe that homosexuality is a choice. Alan Turing is a great counterexample. Why would you "choose" to be gay if it meant this kind of punishment and drove you to take your life? And it's not like he was illogical, he's one of the greatest recent logicians.
I think the apology would mean a lot to a lot of people and be another reason to 1) learn more about the man Alan Turing and remember him as more than just a computer scientist and 2) celebrate gay culture and heritage.
So that explains why I couldn't reach www.BjörnsSpankBank.se and I'll have you know that I expect a full refund for the *cough* services that "Björn" failed to render. Thankfully www.BjörnsPörn.se is still up or I'd have to switch to Swiss or *shudder* German sites.
So if the Pantacene is made of Benzene and the Benzene is C6H6, what is that gray flat smooth material that the molecules are sitting on top of in the second picture? Is this simply due to a focus so incredibly tuned that you can't see past the Pentacene molecules? I would expect that to be a field of bumps and crazy random shapes because it has to be made of some molecule or atom, right? How would they finish the slide/table/surface of that so accurately? I'm used to seeing that when you see bacteria or viruses with an electron microscope, what is in effect here that we don't see an alien landscape back-dropping these molecules? I'm not calling into question the authenticity of the image, just curious if anyone knows.
TPB really helps me find my torrents. This kind of file sharing is exactly what BT is great for.
I've used DistroWatch since the first time someone told me to try out Debian in college and it turned out I needed a different distribution because Debian was for me to start out on. Very memorable learning experience.
Even today, the site does a really good job of keeping up to date. An example is Slackware 13.0 that was released today and there in one paragraph with all the links you could want and direct links to mirrors for torrents and the MD5s.
A lot of times when I want to know what a distro is up to, I click that pull down bar -- like say Fedora -- and get a convenient history of recent releases with a paragraph about the release. Hats off to the people who maintain that site.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless someone knows something I don't about this post it shouldn't be modded down. This is pretty insightful and the author obviously has read and given thought to the content of the book.
Because it's a copy/paste from Amazon's reviews and this "Smidge" character is not only a well known troll but he has done this before? In the course of his lies, he continues to claim to be multiple different reviewers on Amazon. Frankly, he is stealing other reviewer's credit and should be modded down, not up.
No, it won't. The specs are right here.
"No, it won't" what? Possibly spell problems for the Samba team? From your link:
Patents. Microsoft has patents that may cover your implementations of the technologies described in the Open Specifications. Neither this notice nor Microsoft's delivery of the documentation grants any licenses under those or any other Microsoft patents. However, a given Open Specification may be covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (available here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp) or the Community Promise (available here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx). If you would prefer a written license, or if the technologies described in the Open Specifications are not covered by the Open Specifications Promise or Community Promise, as applicable, patent licenses are available by contacting iplg@microsoft.com ...
Emphasis mine. So I'll correct myself, it may spell trouble for the Samba team. It's not clear. Which is essentially what I said. Do you really think iplg@microsoft.com will grant the Samba team a written license or possibly a patent license?
Why do they use the ambiguous language quoted above if this is an open technology I'm not suppose to fear implementing? I mean, haven't we been threatened over this sort of thing before? It's not clear to me why Microsoft stops other products from interfacing with theirs (product lock in?) but I'm not about to give them the benefit of the doubt.
they don't like introducing "new" things
A slight correction, they like to introduce new things when it suits them. Why the rewrite of SMB into SMB2? Well, it has some technological advantages you would expect but according to Wikipedia:
SMB 2 has two big benefits to Microsoft. The first is clear intellectual property ownership. SMB 1 was originally designed by IBM and was shipped on a wide variety of non-Windows operating systems such as SCO Xenix, OS/2 and DEC VMS (Pathworks). It was partially standardised by X/Open and also had draft standards for IETF which lapsed. (See http://ubiqx.org/cifs/Intro.html for historical detail).
The second benefit is a clean break. Microsoft's SMB1 code has to work with a huge variety of SMB clients and servers. A large number of items in the protocol are optional (such as short and long filenames), there are many infolevels for commands (selecting what structure is returned to a particular request), Unicode was a later addition etc. With SMB2 there is significantly reduced compatibility testing (currently only other Windows Vista clients and servers). Additionally the code is a lot less complex since there is far less variability (e.g. there is no need to worry about having Unicode and non-Unicode code paths as SMB2 requires Unicode support).
So you can see they like to introduce new things when it means they have clear intellectual property ownership rights over it and also a lot less work for them. They also don't have to be backwards compatible with their own products.
While SAMBA 4.0 has experimental support for SMB2 interfacing, I'm guessing the "clear intellectual property" could spell trouble moving forward for Tridgell and the SAMBA team.
Subject: New Setup
posted by eldavojohn (898314) * on 2060.09.04 9:05
So, being an old man, I thought I would go legit and get all of my path transmitters MPAA approved. I already had the Z-Ray player that has a 128 core processor to handle all the Z Discs and decrypt the DRM but I spent the extra $50 on the MPAA approved cord from that to my MPAA approved TV (which already has a 256 core processor to hand the encryption). Once all that was in place, I made the big purchase. It was only $100 to have an MPAA approved zoning specialist come in and stake off and area of my living approved by the MPAA for me and my family to view their copyrighted material in. Once that was complete, I got triplicate signoff on a form that allowed me to pay $500 to install two units on either side of the room that emit some sort of crazy field so that the photons leaving my MPAA TV unit can be seen normally within the MPAA designated zone in my living room. It's really neat to stand outside it and see static and then step inside and see it perfectly. You also have to put on headphones (only one set) to hear the sound because they haven't found a similar technology for it yet. Whatever it is that those things generate sure is strong. If the dog gets too close to one of them, it shits itself and walks in circles for about an hour. Also, you can't have metal things on you otherwise they heat up and burn you.
But a couple thousand later and I can finally sit back and not worry about being prosecuted. You guys are all chumps for not enjoying this sort of MPAA certified technology!
By digitally signing DNS responses with public-key cryptography, we will be improving the security of one critical aspect of the Internetâ"the Domain Name Systemâ"which otherwise could be exploited for the purposes of fraud or even cyberterrorism. It is our hope that with widespread deployment DNSSEC will help improve Internet security for the higher education community.
Some more information on why we need this can be found on Wikipedia's page for DNS cache poisoning. It's great this is going out to the "higher education community" but when is it going to catch on world wide? Is it like IPv6 where we need to wait for a catastrophic failure? One day when www.google.com resolves to the IP of www.malwareinyourface.com for some noticeable fraction of the populace?
What's mostly wrong with the corridors in Stanley Donen's Saturn 3 (1980) is that the floor-surfaces resemble the base floor of a movie studio, something which had plagued the corridors in the medium-budget Star Wars three years earlier (more on Star Wars corridors in a moment).
The movie that has an opening fight sequence in a corridor and later corridor after corridor on the death star followed by another fight sequence in a prison block corridor only leading up to the-equivalent-of-Jesus getting lightsabered in half in a corridor adjacent to a docking bay .... and you say "more on Star Wars corridors in a moment."
And the second movie? Hoth ice corridors. IV, V & VI are so dependent on corridor shots.
Did you mean to say "The Corridors of Star Wars article will be out later today with a 58 page thesis on the strength of corridor running and combat between rebels and imperials in the Star Wars cinema"?
Sucks to be me though, I've got a dominate eye so I can't see the 3D stuff. Just looks like an out of tune tv. Guess i've got that to look forward to when they go mainstream :P
Um, almost all of the population has a "dominant eye" with a very small fraction having no ocular dominance at all. I haven't had the chance to demo any of these technologies but if you're asserting that ocular dominance renders them useless then I think Sony's market is drastically small. I'm not an optometrist but are you saying you experience ocular dominance far more than the average person? To a debilitating extent?
That is all.
Or it's to prevent scammers and phishers from making Google-like homepages. Think for a minute how awesome that would be if you got a rube to show up at your www.google.eldavo.com and it looked just like the Google homepage. They do a search for Bank of America and it takes them to www.bankofamerica.eldavo.com which looks just like bank of america. You could potentially do a lot of damage if you had the patience to go around scraping major sites and just making static HTML pages that sent username and password back to a database. And if you could get like three or four sites to correlate your identity theft ...
With domain name poisoning or the actions of some viruses on the hosts file in Windows, is it so hard to imagine an entrepreneurial scammer getting naive people to download and install a virus that simple takes them to www.google.eldavo.com instead of google's real homepage? Perhaps with this design patent (as everyone and their dog has pointed out already), their intent is to make prosecuting these scammers a possibility for them instead of having to wait for the feds to come up with some identity theft charges. After all, were I stealing your info, I'd just be selling it. Not directly doing the identity theft, mind you.
You can spin this both ways. Is it possible for Google to start attacking everyone with simple centered search boxes and links across the top? Maybe. I doubt they'd get far but if you can point me to a case of that, I'll conceded vileness.
'Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip.'
Colonists heading to the new world were heading from a place of high resource (to live) contention to a place of low resource contention. A smart move if you wish to succeed--the resources were there for the taking. The astronauts, however, are not just heading to a place of higher resource contention they are heading to a place of no resources. None for living anyway. You might find platinum ore on Mars but you aren't going to find fur trapping, fishing and logging. This isn't little house on the prairie, this is the cold deadness of space.
You're sending them there on a one trip for one reason and one reason only: saving money. You're not sending them to a new world with more people there and more people coming and food everywhere ripe for the picking. They will eke out a miserable existence and remember earth fondly and try to be live off of what they are doing for humanity.
Dude, there's only 10 items in the list, and they're alphabetized. Did you read each one for 30 seconds to see if it said "United States"?
Did ... did anyone else just stare at this guy's post for 20 minutes only to realize that he agreed with me and is just as confused as I am?
So some of us have more efficient strcmp implementations than others, so what? I code Java so stop picking on me.
Nokia, on the other hand, has just announced two more music phones that will feature Comes With Music, an unlimited music-download service that involves a one time fee, which is part of the price of the CMW phone, and lets you download music for free (and you get to keep it) for a year.
Am I the only person that went to the CWM page and slid the "Please Select Your Location" bar up and down for about 5 minutes? The United States of America does not appear to be on the list. Is this music going to be restricted by what region you live in? Because when I click UK they say they asked the best in the music industry to sign a deal with them and they all said yes ... are they talking UK only? How did they handle royalties and copyright fees? Is that why there's no US?
Why on /earth/ would Sony care about Linux on PS3's?
And honestly, for the great majority of users, why on earth would you bother putting Linux on a PS3 (aside from 'because I can' and scientific stuff ...
Well, via a slashdot article I submitted, there's a site that shows you how to make your own supercomputer with a cluster of PS3s that was about $4,000 at the time and probably less now. I think they were using Fedora 8 because of the Cell SDK support at the time. While you might call this "scientific stuff," some people might view it as a really cheap alternative for universities and hobbyists. Just a thought to consider.
... it has removed the final reason for the open source world to care about Sony.
I thought ImageWorks (of Sony Pictures) had recently opensourced OSL, Scala Migrations, Field3D, PyString and Maya Reticle or at least made them community endeavors. I can't seem to find the source code for browsing on OSL and some of the other projects are pretty tiny but if that's true it's a good sign on ImageWorks' part.
I'm certain they by and large use GPL LGPL in their products like their TVs and SOE using PostgreSQL over Oracle.
Writing off the PS3? Probably. They probably realized Linux support buys them little over the Wii and XBox360 despite what I and everyone else thinks. But the rest of Sony might have hope.
And I've been drinking Coca-Cola ever since I hit that hunderd an' eleven year old lady in Grand Theft Auto VI: The Ballad of Brawndo's Stories and her blood spilt across the sidewalk to make the Coca-Cola logo. Now ever time I crack open a can of Coca-Cola, it feels like someone's spine in my hands snapping like celery. And when I take that first drink of blood ... er ... Coca-Cola, it's like I'm drinking that old lady's life essence again.
Before realizing that we had to solve this storage problem ourselves, we considered Amazon S3, Dell or Sun Servers, NetApp Filers, EMC SAN, etc. As we investigated these traditional off-the-shelf solutions, we became increasingly disillusioned by the expense. When you strip away the marketing terms and fancy logos from any storage solution, data ends up on a hard drive.
That's odd, where I work we pay a premium for what happens when the power goes out, what happens with a drive goes bad, what happens when maintenance needs to be performed, what happens when the infrastructure needs upgrades, etc. This article left out a lot of buzzwords but they also left out the people who manage these massive beasts. I mean, how many hundreds (or thousands) of drives are we talking here?
You might as well add a few hundred thousand a year for the people who need to maintain this hardware and also someone to get up in the middle of the night when their pager goes off because something just went wrong and you want 24/7 storage time.
We don't pay premiums because we're stupid. We pay premiums so we can relax and concentrate on what we need to concentrate on.
Having never done this before, the government is bound to have problems. All of them do when they try new things. I can bear with them for some incorrectly rendered pie charts or -- gasp! -- an informative comment about the numbers being pretty poor. Sorry to sound so apologetic but I'll give the idea of transparency and A and the implementation a C-. So what? The numbers are there.
Because what did we have before? Data via third parties that had to use a FOIA and sit and wait for it? Numbers that were years old? Or we had to visit 50 state sites that were all laid out differently and aggregate the data? And we're ripping on usaspending.gov for design flaws? Okay, from a web developer's standpoint these are pretty egregious errors but so what?
At least it reads "These totals are pretty poor numbers." and not "We really had to cook the books to get this to look right." Hell, now you know where to start looking if you want to do what you should be doing: criticizing the government based on their spending and IT (mis)management!
How would you react if the next president did away with usaspending.gov? Happy that the travesty of a parody site is gone?
The patent process and IP lawyers help create innovation.
Actually, the article did point out capitalism
So on what do intelligent people base the idea that technological progress is moving faster than ever before? It's simple: a chart of productivity from the dawn of humanity to the present day. It shows a line that inclines very gradually until around 1750, when it suddenly shoots almost straight up.
But that's hardly surprising. Since around 1750 the world has witnessed the spread of an economic system, by the name of capitalism, that is predicated on economic growth. And how the economy has grown since then! But surely the creation of new markets and the increasingly fine division of labor cannot be equated with technological progress, as every consumer knows.
At least in the United States, patents have been granted as far back as 1646 with the first patent act being put in place in 1790. The concept of patents has been around as long (maybe even longer) than this explosion of technological progress the article talks about. And you can argue both ways quite easily that it promotes inventing. The first being that with patents I have such a huge reward waiting for me that I am driven to invent and license patents because it is so lucrative and there's a system in place to protect my interests. The second being that I can take other people's inventions and modify them or mash them together without having to pay royalties or worry about litigation. In the United States we currently have the former while in China you might find a mix of the two to foster growth at different levels. I'm not arguing for or against either idea but I don't think that really has a proven effect for or against inventing. I will say that the first patent act in the U.S. was passed in 1790, 40 years after the "productivity" explosion in 1750 that the article mentions. Just something to consider.
What if the author had found data on inventions that failed? Would the author see a huge amount in the lifetime of his grandmother (if those records exist) and very few during his own lifetime (per capita in both time periods)?
Sometimes it feels like for every one hobby project I take on there are nine more that die at some point in development. Perhaps today we bet on sure things -- like incremental developments on things already existing -- instead of investing our time in risky ventures? Possibly because development and production of an idea is a costly venture with many people needed along the way. It gets harder to be a one stop shop as we're trained to be specialized and therefore our failures become more costly. Our economic system has evolved to reward only those that succeed and really really punish those that don't.
Probably not an adequate explanation but may explain part of it.
There was no control group in this experiment. They did a before and after with a group of people.
Well, if this is true ... and I can't find the paper yet so I don't know. Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time. I hope they understand that with no control group they are setting themselves up for scientific disaster.
I mean, how are they going to eliminate alternative explanations? This is standard scientific procedure--I'd be shocked to hear this being published without adhering to something I learned about in fourth grade.
Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
This, says the doctors who undertook the study, shows that focusing on a "challenging visuospatial task" like a videogame can actually alter the structure of the brain, not just increase brain activity.
So you're saying this is akin to jamming the square block in the square hole and the triangle block in the triangle hole? Or, really, any sort of two dimensional puzzles like the mazes on the back of tray mats at a restaurant? Or maybe even -- *gasp* -- any game portrayed on a 2D surface like a TV or computer screen?
The study, funded by Tetris' makers ...
I understand now.
The study's subjects, a group of adolescent girls, underwent MRI scans before and after a three-month Tetris practice period.
The pretty pictures wouldn't happen to be statistically erroneous now would they?
Don't get me wrong, I grew up on Tetris 2 and The New Tetris. They both still have massive replay value and really spurred me to look into polyomino based puzzles which had increased fame in the mid 1960s until everyone realized that they had little real world application (but they still show up in papers). Still, it lead me to a book by Martin Gardner who wrote Scientific American columns on Mathematical Games. If you remember those, I recommend this book. So something good came out of studying tile theory and Tetris for me but there's no evidence yet it did anything more for me than say playing Gauntlet on the NES would have.
Strictly logically speaking, celebrating "gay culture and heritage" would be like me celebrating "diabetic culture and heritage". It's bullshit.
With all due respect, I probably wouldn't make comparisons between diabetes status because there is little discrimination against diabetes sufferers. You can claim they had no choice to have diabetes but your analogy really ends there. There's no Mark Shepherd of the diabetes community. While awareness is important, you don't have a phobia of diabetes running rampant in some communities.
I don't know why you deny it but there is a culture to homosexuality. It's no secret to acknowledge historically that homosexuals have been viewed or shunned as a counterculture and it's that counterculture that we should not be afraid of and -- actually -- recognize.
It's like racism in a way. If a black guy calls me whitey, pasty, whatever.. what happens? I don't give a shit, because my skin is indeed roughly the color of light dough (at least compared to the black guy). Now reverse the situation, see what happens if I refer to a black guy as black. It doesn't matter how politically correct I try to be, it doesn't matter that in a room full of white people his skin color is his most easily identifiable visible feature. He might be a cool guy, but most likely I will get a fist to the face, repeatedly. Likewise, if a gay guy calls me straight, even if he means it as a demeaning thing to say, he completely gets off the hook because noone cares. Refer to a raging homosexual as.. well.. gay, and you at the very least get a good screaming too.
Um, your over generalizations are down right embarrassing. I'm not sure who you're hanging out with or why you think this way but I have several gay friends and if someone says "fag" or "gay" in a demeaning manner, they start saying "breeder" to refer to something as stupid or dumb. They handle it quite well, no screaming or punching. In fact, it's more "Oscar Wilde wit" than "Stone Cold Steve Austin physical violence". I'm not saying no one's touchy about these topics and if they are it's because they've suffered because of them. My friends have grown up safe from the most violent forms of persecution and that's why I would consider it important to recognize homosexuality and make it known that it's not punishable and it's not wrong in the eyes of the law.
*sigh* Can't we design some virus or some such that forces the right half of the brain to be the dominant one already?
Thanks for your judgment, I hope you enjoy forcing your values and ideas on people. Good luck "making" everyone correct.
Whether you care about him, whether you apologize, frankly, it doesn't matter.
Right, but Turing was homosexual and you're not ... or at least all accounts and his trial for "gross indecency" indicated it. I think that historically we need to not only recognize people who were homosexual but celebrate them. An apology from the British government and/or knighthood would not only be an apology to Turing but an apology to those that were tried for the same reason. Turing isn't alone in famous figures tried for "gross indecency" with Oscar Wilde suffering the same charge. I'm sure there's a lot more. But if you had an uncle or aunt that was tried and jailed long ago for homosexuality, you could view this apology as an apology to every British citizen who was persecuted for the way they were born.
Also, I often find myself (an American) debating people who believe that homosexuality is a choice. Alan Turing is a great counterexample. Why would you "choose" to be gay if it meant this kind of punishment and drove you to take your life? And it's not like he was illogical, he's one of the greatest recent logicians.
I think the apology would mean a lot to a lot of people and be another reason to 1) learn more about the man Alan Turing and remember him as more than just a computer scientist and 2) celebrate gay culture and heritage.
So that explains why I couldn't reach www.BjörnsSpankBank.se and I'll have you know that I expect a full refund for the *cough* services that "Björn" failed to render. Thankfully www.BjörnsPörn.se is still up or I'd have to switch to Swiss or *shudder* German sites.
So if the Pantacene is made of Benzene and the Benzene is C6H6, what is that gray flat smooth material that the molecules are sitting on top of in the second picture? Is this simply due to a focus so incredibly tuned that you can't see past the Pentacene molecules? I would expect that to be a field of bumps and crazy random shapes because it has to be made of some molecule or atom, right? How would they finish the slide/table/surface of that so accurately? I'm used to seeing that when you see bacteria or viruses with an electron microscope, what is in effect here that we don't see an alien landscape back-dropping these molecules? I'm not calling into question the authenticity of the image, just curious if anyone knows.
TPB really helps me find my torrents. This kind of file sharing is exactly what BT is great for.
I've used DistroWatch since the first time someone told me to try out Debian in college and it turned out I needed a different distribution because Debian was for me to start out on. Very memorable learning experience.
Even today, the site does a really good job of keeping up to date. An example is Slackware 13.0 that was released today and there in one paragraph with all the links you could want and direct links to mirrors for torrents and the MD5s.
A lot of times when I want to know what a distro is up to, I click that pull down bar -- like say Fedora -- and get a convenient history of recent releases with a paragraph about the release. Hats off to the people who maintain that site.