Well, what about Tron? Is it sufficient just to "mention" Tron? Tron. There, I mentioned it. It has been mentioned.
Of course, if you see anything particularly relevant about Tron, feel free to take up the mantle yourself and contribute your thoughts about Tron vis a vis the doomed Asteroid movie.
The story is told from the point-of-view of the spacecraft's pilot. But it's a two-dimensional universe, so the pilot sees nothing, because the lines he's looking at have no depth.
Let's grant some creative license and assume that the lines can be seen by the pilot. His field of view is just a line, with line segments on it. He needs to rotate around, looking at line segments. If a line segment appears to be getting longer over time, it could mean that an asteroid is approaching, or it could be that the larger part of an asteroid is just rotating into view. He fires at it, and the line segment breaks into two line segments, one of which is getting bigger, but drifting to the right, while the other gets smaller and smaller, apparently receding. Or, maybe they're entirely different objects, it's hard to tell.
The pilot pushes the thrust button. Some of the line segments shift their positions, some get longer, some get shorter. He realizes that moving around just makes things more difficult to keep track of, and that it's better to stay in one place and rotate quickly. But it's a lesson that's come too late; he's moving, and it's hard to stop. He could spin around 180 degrees and try to slowly thrust to a stop, but that means losing vision in the direction he's moving for too long. So he lays into the rotation control and starts firing blindly. That, too, is a bad move; soon the line segments are everywhere. And now, because there is so much variety in their absolute sizes, it's impossible to tell how close each one actually is. It might be a small one about to smash into him, or it might be a big one far away.
Suddenly, two line segments of about equal size converge. But they don't appear to be a threat because the converged segment is moving harmlessly to the right. Suddenly, the segment becomes two, and the truth becomes sickeningly clear: an asteroid moving laterally past his field of vision was concealing another asteroid coming right at him. He tries to rotate into firing position, but it's too late. He's only been on the board for ten excruciating seconds, but at last his mission is over.
When this happens to me, it's usually because either (1) I've done the design and I'm at a point where things are becoming mechanical, or (2) I'm blocked in the design phase by some sort of circular dilemma. I need to do two things. First, get away from the project for a few days. Second, use the time away to learn something new.
When I get blocked and can't work on a project, I tend to do meaningless things. Surf the web, reading various news sites. Check my email over and over and over, I do things instead of working to pretend that I'm taking a short break, and that I'll get back to it right after I check xkcd one more time, in case it's not REALLY Thursday.
If I'm going to be away from the project, I need to be really away from it, and away from the computer completely. I go and buy a dead tree book about programming, or a new language, and spend some time reading. I'll usually find a technique that is interesting, and get interested in coding again.
Czech Republic, don't think they care too much about copyright over there.
Oh, please, don't pull this kind of crap. The Czech Republic is a modern industrialized democracy with a high standard of living and as much respect for law as they have wherever you are (which, by your attitude, I deduce to be Canada). Don't tell me that this couldn't happen at a small grocery store chain in Canada.
If you go to "My Electronic MD (dot com)", tell it you're a female, and give it the symptoms "chronic diarrhea" and "fever," Crohn's Disease is the first of three things to pop up, along with Ulcerative Colitis and Infectious Colitis.
Of course, anyone can diagnose him or herself with a computer. It's encouraging that this young woman did it with a microscope.
I think I read once (no citation, sorry) that something like 80% of drivers believe they're above average in driving skill. They can't all be right!
The hell they can't. If your population has 80 drivers who perform correct actions 90% of the time, and 20 drivers who perform correct actions 75% of the time, the average driver in that population performs correct actions 87% of the time, with 80% of them being above-average drivers.
Back in 1998, when I actually used AvantGo with a Palm m100, I was annoyed by the need to sync, but I knew that it wouldn't be long before handheld devices could access the internet on their own. AvantGo had a pretty decent service for the time, and they should have been pretty well-positioned for handheld internet a long time ago.
To solve that problem it must come up with ONE and ONLY ONE solution, and im sure you could do lots of with the horn and still get something which sounds close enough to be concidered the "correct" one.
And "close enough" is important here, because there never was a One True Lituus. Modern acoustic musical instruments exhibit a great deal of variety in dimensions, materials, shape, and even UI (for example, number of keys or valves), and still go by the same name. It's always been that way.
So they know the instrument's range and typical length. They know what materials were available in the past. It's an interesting exercise to have a computer reproduce it, but hardly necessary, given the skill of the makers. What they have here can almost certainly be called a Lituus.
The title--surprise!--sucks. They're not patenting the use of regular expressions to validate anything. They're patenting a field that validates itself as you type, and highlights invalid characters:
[0009]What is needed is a solution that provides real-time validation feedback during entry into a text input field. That is, characters are validated as they are inputted with invalid characters being visually accentuated. For example, any numbers accidentally typed into the text field for a city name would be highlighted.
You don't see this sort of thing implemented much because individual characters can't be "highlighted" within regular HTML input elements. And the overhead required for putting that sort of thing together just doesn't seem worth it, because you still need to perform traditional server-side validation.
This is also amusing:
[0008]Conventional validation scripts require that the developer include all possible valid and/or invalid character permutations in the actual code. The inclusion of these permutations increases script size and decreases performance. Additionally, future modifications to the range of valid permutations can result in having to rewrite the entire script.
> Patterson said that he did not believe this flaw > had been exploited in the wild, and that to > deduce a message of appreciable length could take > days.
Is my social security number a "message of appreciable length?"
> I'm actually surprised that [text-only pages have] not been made mandatory in the US due to > ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requirements.
You're surprised that the ADA doesn't require more compliance than it requires? I'm glad we have the First Amendment to save us from reverse tautologies.
> It is worth noting that each item relates to > interfaces to proprietary hardware and/or > proprietary media.
Well, sure, my examples were chosen to reflect hardware difficulties that I've personally had. Of course, I want to use iTunes and Finale, so there are software issue as well. I'm not saying that the Linux community has failed anyone, or that life wouldn't be better if hardware vendors opened their specifications. But these are things that people feel when they dangle their feet in the Linux water.
Okay, nobody get mad at me, I run my hosting business on CentOS and all my computers dual boot to Ubuntu. My six-year old son likes Ubuntu so much that he writes his name in that roundy Ubuntu lettering.
But when I mentally set the stage for this commercial, I imagine a little dwarf coming out and saying, "I'm Linux, do you guys know how to get my wireless card working? I'm having trouble printing. Why can't I play this damn DVD?"
I'll be 38 next month, and I'm a way better programmer than I was when I was 25. I just can't write code after about 11:30 any more.
I've got coworkers between 26 and mid-40s, and my non-coworker programmer friends are around my age. I see some evidence of ageism, but it seems to be in force more for fifty-ish than forty-ish.
If what you want to do requires a CS degree, or you're trying to hide from a high-unemployment economy for a while, then do it.
> He's concerned about a small group of people being able to hold the rest of the world hostage by > threatening to cut them off from the infrastructure they depend on, and he's concerned > about a vast group of people being abandoned by those they trusted to handle their essential > infrastructure.
Sure, but that doesn't address patro's question. Even if you could change a JavaScript application to suit your needs and seamlessly integrate it, you still rely on responses from a server. If the service provider abandons the product, you're still SOL, except now you've got an assload of time invested in modifying the obsolete client.
> Does that mean I should get hyped up over every advancement in everything because it might one day meet a niche demand for someone?
Don't worry, nobody's trying to hype you up. It's just that there's this thing here now in some state of development, and you can do whatever you want to with the information.
You could even get hyped up about it, if you wanted to.
Saying that Flash can be viewed by "99% of internet viewers" is not saying that Flash is on "99% of internet devices." My Centro doesn't have Flash, but my work laptop does, so I'd say "yes" if polled about whether I have access to Flash content. My ratio of internet devices to Flash-capable devices (5:2) doesn't interest Abobe.
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Well, what about Tron? Is it sufficient just to "mention" Tron? Tron. There, I mentioned it. It has been mentioned.
Of course, if you see anything particularly relevant about Tron, feel free to take up the mantle yourself and contribute your thoughts about Tron vis a vis the doomed Asteroid movie.
The story is told from the point-of-view of the spacecraft's pilot. But it's a two-dimensional universe, so the pilot sees nothing, because the lines he's looking at have no depth.
Let's grant some creative license and assume that the lines can be seen by the pilot. His field of view is just a line, with line segments on it. He needs to rotate around, looking at line segments. If a line segment appears to be getting longer over time, it could mean that an asteroid is approaching, or it could be that the larger part of an asteroid is just rotating into view. He fires at it, and the line segment breaks into two line segments, one of which is getting bigger, but drifting to the right, while the other gets smaller and smaller, apparently receding. Or, maybe they're entirely different objects, it's hard to tell.
The pilot pushes the thrust button. Some of the line segments shift their positions, some get longer, some get shorter. He realizes that moving around just makes things more difficult to keep track of, and that it's better to stay in one place and rotate quickly. But it's a lesson that's come too late; he's moving, and it's hard to stop. He could spin around 180 degrees and try to slowly thrust to a stop, but that means losing vision in the direction he's moving for too long. So he lays into the rotation control and starts firing blindly. That, too, is a bad move; soon the line segments are everywhere. And now, because there is so much variety in their absolute sizes, it's impossible to tell how close each one actually is. It might be a small one about to smash into him, or it might be a big one far away.
Suddenly, two line segments of about equal size converge. But they don't appear to be a threat because the converged segment is moving harmlessly to the right. Suddenly, the segment becomes two, and the truth becomes sickeningly clear: an asteroid moving laterally past his field of vision was concealing another asteroid coming right at him. He tries to rotate into firing position, but it's too late. He's only been on the board for ten excruciating seconds, but at last his mission is over.
When this happens to me, it's usually because either (1) I've done the design and I'm at a point where things are becoming mechanical, or (2) I'm blocked in the design phase by some sort of circular dilemma. I need to do two things. First, get away from the project for a few days. Second, use the time away to learn something new.
When I get blocked and can't work on a project, I tend to do meaningless things. Surf the web, reading various news sites. Check my email over and over and over, I do things instead of working to pretend that I'm taking a short break, and that I'll get back to it right after I check xkcd one more time, in case it's not REALLY Thursday.
If I'm going to be away from the project, I need to be really away from it, and away from the computer completely. I go and buy a dead tree book about programming, or a new language, and spend some time reading. I'll usually find a technique that is interesting, and get interested in coding again.
Oh, please, don't pull this kind of crap. The Czech Republic is a modern industrialized democracy with a high standard of living and as much respect for law as they have wherever you are (which, by your attitude, I deduce to be Canada). Don't tell me that this couldn't happen at a small grocery store chain in Canada.
I certainly wouldn't generalize to that extent. If I'm sick, I'd still prefer a doctor with medial training.
If you go to "My Electronic MD (dot com)", tell it you're a female, and give it the symptoms "chronic diarrhea" and "fever," Crohn's Disease is the first of three things to pop up, along with Ulcerative Colitis and Infectious Colitis.
Of course, anyone can diagnose him or herself with a computer. It's encouraging that this young woman did it with a microscope.
she said...?
The hell they can't. If your population has 80 drivers who perform correct actions 90% of the time, and 20 drivers who perform correct actions 75% of the time, the average driver in that population performs correct actions 87% of the time, with 80% of them being above-average drivers.
Back in 1998, when I actually used AvantGo with a Palm m100, I was annoyed by the need to sync, but I knew that it wouldn't be long before handheld devices could access the internet on their own. AvantGo had a pretty decent service for the time, and they should have been pretty well-positioned for handheld internet a long time ago.
And "close enough" is important here, because there never was a One True Lituus. Modern acoustic musical instruments exhibit a great deal of variety in dimensions, materials, shape, and even UI (for example, number of keys or valves), and still go by the same name. It's always been that way.
So they know the instrument's range and typical length. They know what materials were available in the past. It's an interesting exercise to have a computer reproduce it, but hardly necessary, given the skill of the makers. What they have here can almost certainly be called a Lituus.
The title--surprise!--sucks. They're not patenting the use of regular expressions to validate anything. They're patenting a field that validates itself as you type, and highlights invalid characters:
You don't see this sort of thing implemented much because individual characters can't be "highlighted" within regular HTML input elements. And the overhead required for putting that sort of thing together just doesn't seem worth it, because you still need to perform traditional server-side validation.
This is also amusing:
Yeah, if you're an idiot.
> Patterson said that he did not believe this flaw
> had been exploited in the wild, and that to
> deduce a message of appreciable length could take
> days.
Is my social security number a "message of appreciable length?"
This is all very interesting, and I can see the point-of-view of both sides.
But really, if he buys a bigger hard drive and gets over his fear of dual-booting, then there's no problem in the first place.
> I'm actually surprised that [text-only pages have] not been made mandatory in the US due to
> ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requirements.
You're surprised that the ADA doesn't require more compliance than it requires? I'm glad we have the First Amendment to save us from reverse tautologies.
> It's not rocket science
Is too!
> It is worth noting that each item relates to
> interfaces to proprietary hardware and/or
> proprietary media.
Well, sure, my examples were chosen to reflect hardware difficulties that I've personally had. Of course, I want to use iTunes and Finale, so there are software issue as well. I'm not saying that the Linux community has failed anyone, or that life wouldn't be better if hardware vendors opened their specifications. But these are things that people feel when they dangle their feet in the Linux water.
Thanks!
I think it's more that I was qualifying it with "but I really use it," which is just a rhetorical device to lend my criticisms a bit more weight.
But I get your point. Speaking to the audience, I guess.
Okay, nobody get mad at me, I run my hosting business on CentOS and all my computers dual boot to Ubuntu. My six-year old son likes Ubuntu so much that he writes his name in that roundy Ubuntu lettering.
But when I mentally set the stage for this commercial, I imagine a little dwarf coming out and saying, "I'm Linux, do you guys know how to get my wireless card working? I'm having trouble printing. Why can't I play this damn DVD?"
Man, I hope I've got some karma to spare...
I'll be 38 next month, and I'm a way better programmer than I was when I was 25. I just can't write code after about 11:30 any more.
I've got coworkers between 26 and mid-40s, and my non-coworker programmer friends are around my age. I see some evidence of ageism, but it seems to be in force more for fifty-ish than forty-ish.
If what you want to do requires a CS degree, or you're trying to hide from a high-unemployment economy for a while, then do it.
> He's concerned about a small group of people being able to hold the rest of the world hostage by
> threatening to cut them off from the infrastructure they depend on, and he's concerned
> about a vast group of people being abandoned by those they trusted to handle their essential
> infrastructure.
Sure, but that doesn't address patro's question. Even if you could change a JavaScript application to suit your needs and seamlessly integrate it, you still rely on responses from a server. If the service provider abandons the product, you're still SOL, except now you've got an assload of time invested in modifying the obsolete client.
Fifty characters! That's going to look terrible on my VIC-20. Please, everyone, start wrapping at 22.
> Does that mean I should get hyped up over every advancement in everything because it might one day meet a niche demand for someone?
Don't worry, nobody's trying to hype you up. It's just that there's this thing here now in some state of development, and you can do whatever you want to with the information.
You could even get hyped up about it, if you wanted to.
> You should have read the article.
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot!
Saying that Flash can be viewed by "99% of internet viewers" is not saying that Flash is on "99% of internet devices." My Centro doesn't have Flash, but my work laptop does, so I'd say "yes" if polled about whether I have access to Flash content. My ratio of internet devices to Flash-capable devices (5:2) doesn't interest Abobe.
Their claim is probably about right.