Given the number of friendly fire incidents which have occurred with human pilots in Iraq - would we expect Robotic Drone Squadrons to enhance the safety of friendly forces or to erode it?
And would they be more or less likely to kill enemies? Harder to capture them, I imagine?
Finally - doesn't seem like the ideal way to win hearts and minds - imagine growing up in a City patrolled by Western death machines?
The thing is a prime example of bad bad technology. I'm fortunate enough to be a trial user. Only, I've never actually used it. I can't. I've tried and tried but it just doesn't work.
It started badly - it refuses to accept registrations via firefox (no technology issue - just a browser check which barfs). Once I switched to IE, it let me go further - registration followed by the download of a.exe. Firing up the.exe I had to reregister. Multiple times. And got no further. Some days later, an apology email from the BBC explaining that they'd sent the wrong login details.
So I tried again, and after much mucking about, finally got in. The UI is very very bad - but I navigated to my favourite programme, which claimed it had episodes available - but once clicked stated none. So I went for my second favourite programme - same again. And so on.
So - two weeks after first receiving an invitation to give up; after switching browsers, downloading software, installing it, changing my media settings, registering multiple times, and clicking through a clunky interface multiple times, all to no avail, I gave up.
If the bbc were working in an open way - maybe, just maybe, they'd have access to a wider range of talents - or perhaps competing suppliers and technology platforms - and have delivered a usable product. As it is, we're all subject to two monopolies, who'll slowly and cumbersomely work towards a semi-acceptable solution at great cost. And in doing so, the BBC will help Microsoft maintain its hegemony - remember - it wouldn't let us use Firefox just to register and download the software.... defend that.
The comparison with environmental matters is a good one; but the connection is not film. It's that in both cases, people in the know have long been aghast that the public and politicians are oblivious to the issue. In the case of the environment, the niche interest has finally spouted into the public arena. I'm desperately hoping that privacy will also reach such a tipping point and we'll suddenly find that general apathy and disinterest turns into sudden and serious action (although leave cookies alone!)
... not all users know how or what to uninstall - and some of it is virtually uninstallable.
By way of example; my Grandmother got a Dell. She's 80 odd, but can use a browser, email, etc. Her Dell was great - but she couldn't wo
rk out why she wasn't able to receive emails. Time and again, she, or her friends would, with or without telephone support - would configure Outlook Express correctly - only to find that that it kept changing the POP3 server URL. I gave her remote assistance - and could swear it was working; but every time she told me it wasn't owrking, sure enough - the POP3 details had changed. Eventually, I tracked it down to McAfee which had a year's subscription to anti-virus; but 30 days' subscription to an entirely unnecessary spam blocker. A bug in their spam blocker meant that it correctly diverted all attempted POP3 connections to itself; but then screwed up the address of the actual POP3 box and couldn't actually connect. Of course, it only inserted itself at boot time - so every time I'd fixed it by remote desktop it looked great; till Gran rebooted...
I disabled this - but only after Gran had basically been emailless for 3 weeks. Lo and behold! On day 30 - it suddenly prevented here using email again - this time because its license had expired - so it refused to allow her to use her email app - even without it! Cue - Add/Remove Programs. Only it wouldn't allow itself to be removed because its AntiVirus companion was running... it took me hours to clear out this crap. And yet - without me doing it; Gran couldn't get her email, first because of their sloppy coding - and then because of their "license expiry" hijack.
That's why crapware preinstall should be banned. By all means - include a CD or a link to a website where I can choose to download trials - but preinstalling them is outrageous. Imagine if a car came with a pre-installed alarm system which wouldn't let you drive the car without getting out your credit card or a screwdriver?
Governments have a great habit of wasting money by trying to dot every 'i' and cross every 't'. Of course, you can never achieve perfection, but their endless quest does have the effect of each extra step costing enormous amounts of extra money with minimal incremental benefit.
In this case: WPA (and many other layers of encryption) = free. Painting a building with special paint = £$massive.
What's scary is that someone from a government department will mandate this kind of tosh - and suddenly every government building (including leisure centres) will have to have it.
Of course, the irony is that - once they get paint like this, people will feel overly secure - reduce the more sensible types of encryption - and then leave the loading bay doors open, right next to a wireless repeater, pouring forth their unencrypted secrets.
Very droll - but your links kind of prove the issue. When one buys a PC from Dell - wouldn't it be more transparent if, just like with memory or hard drives, it prompted the user "Operating System: " and then a different price for Windows vs [Linux] (and if one could trust that the Windows cost was the real Windows cost; not some cross-subsidised, invented price)?
It matters because soon as a major PC manufacturer starts shipping machines without the Windows tax, we can finally get some real competition in the OS world (how ironic that if I want to try free Linux, I usually have to buy Windows - which comes with my PC - and I can't get a discount if I don't want Windows).
Basically - Dell don't offer it because - and I have to be careful here- Dell get a volume discount on the Windows licenses they preinstall. If they start to offer Linux, they'll fall into a lower discount level on Windows and suddenly be uncompetitive in the crucial Windows market.
My experience (in a slightly different sector) of such deals is that they always coincidentally have break points remarkably close to what happens when the reseller starts dealing with a competitor of the dominant vendor. Of course, MS cannot charge Dell more for Windows just because Dell happens to ship some Linux machines, but it can double the price of Windows if Dell falls below a certain sale volume - which they can vary any time they like.
The solution? Manufacturers could [be forced to] [by France?] publish the embedded cost of software which ships with each machine so MS shenanigans could be spotted, but I'm sure plenty of fellow readers will point out the impracticality of that. The alternative is whistle blowers...
The key driver (pardon the pun) will not be how many extra widgets they sell but the the strategic importance to most companies of reducing reliance upon Microsoft's hegemony. If you are a widget developer, you do not want to be in the position of most, dancing to the unrestricted tune of Microsoft. You need some collective force to help push back on Microsoft when necessary, or to demonstrate the worth of new ideas which Microsoft may not have picked up on. Having a competitor to Microsoft (even quite a small one) is a massively powerful force in this.
By most standards (although perhaps not those of/.ers) I'm no newbie - I used to write assembly on the Z80 and x86. I run a number of Linux servers and am fairly confident with a degree of admin on them via ssh. However, my only attempts at running desktop Linux (without destroying Windows, which I dislike but need) have been abject failures. Sure, I believe it's probably not too hard - but life's too short for the endless pages of details I have to read. Still, I want to do my bit for the cause. The easier we make it for people like me - the more chance we've got of making it easier for everyone else. It's important for the future of technology that we break the Windows hegemony (not anti-MS, just pro-competition). Steps like this might just help.
1) Isn't it great that the guy comes on and is open and helpful? There are plenty of organisations could learn from this
2) I found it amusing that the/. summary states "quite a few RSS feeds around the web probably stopped working properly" - what; so perhaps none stopped working? Would be great to see a list of ones which actually did.... anyont?
As often, purism is the enemy of progress here. Whilst it'd be great to be able to render, faithfully, every detail of any legacy document - it's an unnecessary and unrealistic constraint.
One day, Microsoft themselves will choose to drop support for WPx or WW8 etc. They will. Really, they will. For owners of documents whose only record is held in proprietary formats - that will happen one day. Might as well happen with the adoption of a standard which prevents it happening again.
Let's face it - PC's no longer ship with 5.25 inch floppies. Try opening an EBCDIC WordStar document in anything now; or a Tasword III document. Legal documents usually specify in the preamble that the layout is purely for ease of reading and of no legal significance. Even old photocopies and faxes are usually mashed in some way.
To be honest - the inability of many earlier versions of Word to render correctly on different printers (even making it dificult to use A4 in the UK when Word insists on US Letter) was much more of an issue for many of us than the lack of WP support.
At the end of the day, if the document retains the right characters and numbers in the right order, it meets the real needs of users. Let's make it easier to open up the document market by being realistic; not close it down through artificial maintenance of unnecessary standards.
So, someone posts a non-story about Skype being used by the police and bbc to report infomration on murdered women. Slashdot users don't discuss the fakeness of the story, or the skype marketing angle, or the future of telecoms. They feel it appropriate to make declarations and guenuinely offensive 'humour' about murdered women. Seriously, these women may be prostitutes, but the key facts are: 5 people were murdered in a market town in the space of a couple of weeks. These people were people; daughters, mothers, sisters. They were all, I believe, hooked on drugs. And one day they may have got off drugs and enjoyed a normal life. Not now. The fascination some/.ers have shown for the 'sex angle' makes me worry about who I'm associating with here, and says far more about the writers than the victims.
It is understood that the committee decision to allow UWB was based on a far from unanimous majority, with some Scandinavian countries and France opposing the proposal
France has a long tradition of objetcing to things on spurious technical, moral or other grounds - but usually the real basis is a little simpler. If UWB were owned/invented/marketed by a French company (preferably a state-backed one) then it'd be not only legal by now, but probably compulsory. As a protectionist government, they usually end up 'protecting' their people from useful new advances, and catching the rest of europe with it too.
Citigroup has a target of 50,000 slum-dwelling customers. That means the total deposits might be $100 * 50,000 = $5million. Assuming Citigroup makes 5% on this, it's $250,000 profit opportunity. This barely justifies 25 ATMs and the effort to get these people banking.
The reality is that Citigroup is trialling (a) biometrics and (b) low income banking. They are separate trials..
Slashdot readers all know that fingerprint reading has not yet reached the point we'd trust our own bank accounts to it. Citigroup know this too - they are using people with little to lose to carry out large scale experiments. If someone gets 'hacked'- it'll cost $100 to reimburse them. Tops. Much better there than here...
Low income banking; China and India account for 1/4 - 1/3 of the world's population - and they are currently not very wealthy. Still, make a margin and there's a good volume. What's more - over time, they may become wealthy and it'd be nice to 'own' these economies...
Youtube's all well and good; but not exactly what I'd call an evening's entertainment. If video pricing is anything like music pricing; the limiting factor is income not memory; if you have an iPod with 10000 paid-for tunes (a fraction of the capacity of some), you're looking at the hardware cost being 2% of your total expenditure...
We'd need a radical new system of pricing - quality media very cheap/free; or free at point of download and then paid for when used (perhaps after a few minutes' trial)
Anyway - by the time this is possible, won't downloading be a bit old-fashioned? Isn't google's plan that we do everything online? Wouldn't we be better off with ubuiquitous high speed wireless?
Should I ever need to do anything a bit cheeky, I just pop out to the street, find an unsecured wifi, and do anything I like, safe in the knowledge that the cops will have someone else's IP address, and that they'll find it rather hard to find me. Should I say that?
These companies have increasingly adopted unethical tacttics themselves - just try uninstalling McAfee from a Dell pre-install. Worse, when my grandmother (who was technically capable enough to set herself up for broadband) recently bought a new PC (a Dell) - it took two weeks of frequent support from me finally to identify why she was not getting any email: McAfee's entirely unnecessary, premium, spam filter 'trial' program was changing the settings in Outlook Express so that it could intercept email. Only it was so buggy that whilst it intercepted the POP3 checking, it failed to connect to the mailbox, so Gran got no email. Finally, you only have to see all the nonsense press releases from these companies ("barcode scanning virus" [no, it was nonsense]). Desperate and unethical marketing has wiped out my faith in these companies, and the sooner they cease to exist the better.
Whenever writing a significant bit of code, ask yourself if you can represent the functionality graphically. If so, recode it the function as a graphical problem and use the GPU. If these figures are right, this conversion can carry a 99% 'inefficiency overhead' and still run faster on the GPU than the original code could in the CPU...
Slashdot usually provides a forum where it would be hard to tell what continent people are from, at least from their attitudes. Generally intelligent people seem to have plenty in common wherever they sit. However, this discussion is fascinating - and seems, to a European, to shed more light on attitudes towards climate change than any amount of direct media coverage. The conversation is about whether oil prices will lead to riots, whether we'll have neough oil for the future, etc. Surely the sooner we run out of oil the better - a 20 year transition to fuels which don't wreck the planet would be a good thing. It's easy in gas-guzzler land to forget about the effects of climate change on the rest of the world - but it's probably the biggest issue our planet faces now, and barely gets a mention among this usually considered and intelligent crowd...
Slashdot Mirror
Given the number of friendly fire incidents which have occurred with human pilots in Iraq - would we expect Robotic Drone Squadrons to enhance the safety of friendly forces or to erode it?
And would they be more or less likely to kill enemies? Harder to capture them, I imagine?
Finally - doesn't seem like the ideal way to win hearts and minds - imagine growing up in a City patrolled by Western death machines?
The thing is a prime example of bad bad technology. I'm fortunate enough to be a trial user. Only, I've never actually used it. I can't. I've tried and tried but it just doesn't work.
.exe. Firing up the .exe I had to reregister. Multiple times. And got no further. Some days later, an apology email from the BBC explaining that they'd sent the wrong login details.
It started badly - it refuses to accept registrations via firefox (no technology issue - just a browser check which barfs). Once I switched to IE, it let me go further - registration followed by the download of a
So I tried again, and after much mucking about, finally got in. The UI is very very bad - but I navigated to my favourite programme, which claimed it had episodes available - but once clicked stated none. So I went for my second favourite programme - same again. And so on.
So - two weeks after first receiving an invitation to give up; after switching browsers, downloading software, installing it, changing my media settings, registering multiple times, and clicking through a clunky interface multiple times, all to no avail, I gave up.
If the bbc were working in an open way - maybe, just maybe, they'd have access to a wider range of talents - or perhaps competing suppliers and technology platforms - and have delivered a usable product. As it is, we're all subject to two monopolies, who'll slowly and cumbersomely work towards a semi-acceptable solution at great cost. And in doing so, the BBC will help Microsoft maintain its hegemony - remember - it wouldn't let us use Firefox just to register and download the software.... defend that.
The comparison with environmental matters is a good one; but the connection is not film. It's that in both cases, people in the know have long been aghast that the public and politicians are oblivious to the issue. In the case of the environment, the niche interest has finally spouted into the public arena. I'm desperately hoping that privacy will also reach such a tipping point and we'll suddenly find that general apathy and disinterest turns into sudden and serious action (although leave cookies alone!)
... not all users know how or what to uninstall - and some of it is virtually uninstallable.
By way of example; my Grandmother got a Dell. She's 80 odd, but can use a browser, email, etc. Her Dell was great - but she couldn't wo rk out why she wasn't able to receive emails. Time and again, she, or her friends would, with or without telephone support - would configure Outlook Express correctly - only to find that that it kept changing the POP3 server URL. I gave her remote assistance - and could swear it was working; but every time she told me it wasn't owrking, sure enough - the POP3 details had changed. Eventually, I tracked it down to McAfee which had a year's subscription to anti-virus; but 30 days' subscription to an entirely unnecessary spam blocker. A bug in their spam blocker meant that it correctly diverted all attempted POP3 connections to itself; but then screwed up the address of the actual POP3 box and couldn't actually connect. Of course, it only inserted itself at boot time - so every time I'd fixed it by remote desktop it looked great; till Gran rebooted...
I disabled this - but only after Gran had basically been emailless for 3 weeks. Lo and behold! On day 30 - it suddenly prevented here using email again - this time because its license had expired - so it refused to allow her to use her email app - even without it! Cue - Add/Remove Programs. Only it wouldn't allow itself to be removed because its AntiVirus companion was running... it took me hours to clear out this crap. And yet - without me doing it; Gran couldn't get her email, first because of their sloppy coding - and then because of their "license expiry" hijack.
That's why crapware preinstall should be banned. By all means - include a CD or a link to a website where I can choose to download trials - but preinstalling them is outrageous. Imagine if a car came with a pre-installed alarm system which wouldn't let you drive the car without getting out your credit card or a screwdriver?
Governments have a great habit of wasting money by trying to dot every 'i' and cross every 't'. Of course, you can never achieve perfection, but their endless quest does have the effect of each extra step costing enormous amounts of extra money with minimal incremental benefit.
In this case: WPA (and many other layers of encryption) = free. Painting a building with special paint = £$massive.
What's scary is that someone from a government department will mandate this kind of tosh - and suddenly every government building (including leisure centres) will have to have it.
Of course, the irony is that - once they get paint like this, people will feel overly secure - reduce the more sensible types of encryption - and then leave the loading bay doors open, right next to a wireless repeater, pouring forth their unencrypted secrets.
Very droll - but your links kind of prove the issue. When one buys a PC from Dell - wouldn't it be more transparent if, just like with memory or hard drives, it prompted the user "Operating System: " and then a different price for Windows vs [Linux] (and if one could trust that the Windows cost was the real Windows cost; not some cross-subsidised, invented price)?
It matters because soon as a major PC manufacturer starts shipping machines without the Windows tax, we can finally get some real competition in the OS world (how ironic that if I want to try free Linux, I usually have to buy Windows - which comes with my PC - and I can't get a discount if I don't want Windows).
Basically - Dell don't offer it because - and I have to be careful here- Dell get a volume discount on the Windows licenses they preinstall. If they start to offer Linux, they'll fall into a lower discount level on Windows and suddenly be uncompetitive in the crucial Windows market.
My experience (in a slightly different sector) of such deals is that they always coincidentally have break points remarkably close to what happens when the reseller starts dealing with a competitor of the dominant vendor. Of course, MS cannot charge Dell more for Windows just because Dell happens to ship some Linux machines, but it can double the price of Windows if Dell falls below a certain sale volume - which they can vary any time they like.
The solution? Manufacturers could [be forced to] [by France?] publish the embedded cost of software which ships with each machine so MS shenanigans could be spotted, but I'm sure plenty of fellow readers will point out the impracticality of that. The alternative is whistle blowers...
Given that dinosaurs (broadly speaking) died out rather a long time ago - it's very unlikely that there are any new species.
Perhaps there's a newly identified species?
I'll get my coat.
The key driver (pardon the pun) will not be how many extra widgets they sell but the the strategic importance to most companies of reducing reliance upon Microsoft's hegemony. If you are a widget developer, you do not want to be in the position of most, dancing to the unrestricted tune of Microsoft. You need some collective force to help push back on Microsoft when necessary, or to demonstrate the worth of new ideas which Microsoft may not have picked up on. Having a competitor to Microsoft (even quite a small one) is a massively powerful force in this.
By most standards (although perhaps not those of /.ers) I'm no newbie - I used to write assembly on the Z80 and x86. I run a number of Linux servers and am fairly confident with a degree of admin on them via ssh. However, my only attempts at running desktop Linux (without destroying Windows, which I dislike but need) have been abject failures. Sure, I believe it's probably not too hard - but life's too short for the endless pages of details I have to read. Still, I want to do my bit for the cause. The easier we make it for people like me - the more chance we've got of making it easier for everyone else. It's important for the future of technology that we break the Windows hegemony (not anti-MS, just pro-competition). Steps like this might just help.
1) Isn't it great that the guy comes on and is open and helpful? There are plenty of organisations could learn from this
/. summary states "quite a few RSS feeds around the web probably stopped working properly" - what; so perhaps none stopped working? Would be great to see a list of ones which actually did.... anyont?
2) I found it amusing that the
As often, purism is the enemy of progress here. Whilst it'd be great to be able to render, faithfully, every detail of any legacy document - it's an unnecessary and unrealistic constraint. One day, Microsoft themselves will choose to drop support for WPx or WW8 etc. They will. Really, they will. For owners of documents whose only record is held in proprietary formats - that will happen one day. Might as well happen with the adoption of a standard which prevents it happening again. Let's face it - PC's no longer ship with 5.25 inch floppies. Try opening an EBCDIC WordStar document in anything now; or a Tasword III document. Legal documents usually specify in the preamble that the layout is purely for ease of reading and of no legal significance. Even old photocopies and faxes are usually mashed in some way. To be honest - the inability of many earlier versions of Word to render correctly on different printers (even making it dificult to use A4 in the UK when Word insists on US Letter) was much more of an issue for many of us than the lack of WP support. At the end of the day, if the document retains the right characters and numbers in the right order, it meets the real needs of users. Let's make it easier to open up the document market by being realistic; not close it down through artificial maintenance of unnecessary standards.
It's a very fair point that, depending on your threshold you see a different /. ...
So, someone posts a non-story about Skype being used by the police and bbc to report infomration on murdered women. Slashdot users don't discuss the fakeness of the story, or the skype marketing angle, or the future of telecoms. They feel it appropriate to make declarations and guenuinely offensive 'humour' about murdered women. /.ers have shown for the 'sex angle' makes me worry about who I'm associating with here, and says far more about the writers than the victims.
Seriously, these women may be prostitutes, but the key facts are: 5 people were murdered in a market town in the space of a couple of weeks. These people were people; daughters, mothers, sisters. They were all, I believe, hooked on drugs. And one day they may have got off drugs and enjoyed a normal life. Not now. The fascination some
It is understood that the committee decision to allow UWB was based on a far from unanimous majority, with some Scandinavian countries and France opposing the proposal
France has a long tradition of objetcing to things on spurious technical, moral or other grounds - but usually the real basis is a little simpler. If UWB were owned/invented/marketed by a French company (preferably a state-backed one) then it'd be not only legal by now, but probably compulsory. As a protectionist government, they usually end up 'protecting' their people from useful new advances, and catching the rest of europe with it too.
Citigroup has a target of 50,000 slum-dwelling customers. That means the total deposits might be $100 * 50,000 = $5million. Assuming Citigroup makes 5% on this, it's $250,000 profit opportunity. This barely justifies 25 ATMs and the effort to get these people banking. The reality is that Citigroup is trialling (a) biometrics and (b) low income banking. They are separate trials.. Slashdot readers all know that fingerprint reading has not yet reached the point we'd trust our own bank accounts to it. Citigroup know this too - they are using people with little to lose to carry out large scale experiments. If someone gets 'hacked'- it'll cost $100 to reimburse them. Tops. Much better there than here... Low income banking; China and India account for 1/4 - 1/3 of the world's population - and they are currently not very wealthy. Still, make a margin and there's a good volume. What's more - over time, they may become wealthy and it'd be nice to 'own' these economies...
Youtube's all well and good; but not exactly what I'd call an evening's entertainment. If video pricing is anything like music pricing; the limiting factor is income not memory; if you have an iPod with 10000 paid-for tunes (a fraction of the capacity of some), you're looking at the hardware cost being 2% of your total expenditure...
We'd need a radical new system of pricing - quality media very cheap/free; or free at point of download and then paid for when used (perhaps after a few minutes' trial)
Anyway - by the time this is possible, won't downloading be a bit old-fashioned? Isn't google's plan that we do everything online? Wouldn't we be better off with ubuiquitous high speed wireless?
Remember when one blade was enough?
Should I ever need to do anything a bit cheeky, I just pop out to the street, find an unsecured wifi, and do anything I like, safe in the knowledge that the cops will have someone else's IP address, and that they'll find it rather hard to find me. Should I say that?
...We may not like it, but it seems to work..
These companies have increasingly adopted unethical tacttics themselves - just try uninstalling McAfee from a Dell pre-install.
Worse, when my grandmother (who was technically capable enough to set herself up for broadband) recently bought a new PC (a Dell) - it took two weeks of frequent support from me finally to identify why she was not getting any email: McAfee's entirely unnecessary, premium, spam filter 'trial' program was changing the settings in Outlook Express so that it could intercept email. Only it was so buggy that whilst it intercepted the POP3 checking, it failed to connect to the mailbox, so Gran got no email.
Finally, you only have to see all the nonsense press releases from these companies ("barcode scanning virus" [no, it was nonsense]).
Desperate and unethical marketing has wiped out my faith in these companies, and the sooner they cease to exist the better.
Whenever writing a significant bit of code, ask yourself if you can represent the functionality graphically. If so, recode it the function as a graphical problem and use the GPU. If these figures are right, this conversion can carry a 99% 'inefficiency overhead' and still run faster on the GPU than the original code could in the CPU...
(sorry)
Slashdot usually provides a forum where it would be hard to tell what continent people are from, at least from their attitudes. Generally intelligent people seem to have plenty in common wherever they sit. However, this discussion is fascinating - and seems, to a European, to shed more light on attitudes towards climate change than any amount of direct media coverage.
The conversation is about whether oil prices will lead to riots, whether we'll have neough oil for the future, etc.
Surely the sooner we run out of oil the better - a 20 year transition to fuels which don't wreck the planet would be a good thing. It's easy in gas-guzzler land to forget about the effects of climate change on the rest of the world - but it's probably the biggest issue our planet faces now, and barely gets a mention among this usually considered and intelligent crowd...
Whether the virgin is male or female will make a big difference to the nature and level of scathedness.