It's interesting to see the trend of sizes of commercial and governmental satellites. The commercial sats are getting larger and outfitted with better hardware that can support more simultaneous users. The governmental sats are getting smaller and work in tandem to do their work.
Given that satellites can't last forever, I wonder which model pays off better in the long run. Does having many smaller satellites work better than having fewer larger sats? If so, could we find an optimal size or configuration of these small fries?
Or is having this many small things whizzing about going to cause trouble later on as we decide we need to add more birds to our skies? A few big birds are easier to spot and avoid than many little ones.
Treason is to act against your own countrymen in the service of another country. But is that really what it boils down to when you prevent more deaths through dissemination of state secrets? Is it really an offense worthy of death to act according to your own morality?
Many people have protested the Iraq War. And with good reason. It is almost wholly a bad war to have started without a plausible benefit for the American people. In fact, the only thing it has done is to deplete our treasure and kill many of our fine soldiers (not to mention many many of innocent Iraqis). Undertaking the war in Iraq is an act against our beloved American countrymen.
So is George Bush a traitor? Should he be held to such standards and punishment as those who may have, in good conscience, shared state secrets that no doubt hastened the end of the War? It's unfortunate that the little guy doing the right thing is punished for minor transgressions when the leaders of the very same country are allowed to escape punishment scott-free due to their position of power at the time.
Once, passing through LAX, I was pulled aside for a millimeter scan. It was painless and over relatively quickly.
Here's the problem: all this extra security sucks. And with the numerous accounts of tests showing weapons passing through security checkpoints unnoticed, the extra security is fairly useless as well.
What is cool about the Web is that it is the most Agile of all release environments. Unlike shrinkwrap software, web software can be changed very easily and universally for all users. It brings a raw edge to the development of the software.
In this, there is also the possibility of becoming complacent and ill-tuned to the needs of your users. Taking Google as an example, they keep their services in a perpetual state of beta, always in testing, never reaching a final v1. This type of reliance on constant feedback from customers may work for a short while, but unless the product reaches a state of relative stability (in terms of both not crashing and also not changing) the users will typically find some other software to use.
So when Microsoft decides to impact a few customers with degraded QoS, they may be setting themselves up for a bigger fall later. By introducing the possibility that MS may actively sabotage your user experience in the name of experimentation and testing, they degrade their own reputation (as much as it can be degraded from its current levels) and needlessly increase FUD regarding their proffered services.
It may be for a good cause, but customers should not be the ones testing Microsoft's software. As a professional software house, they should provide good quality control before software hits the servers. It doesn't matter if this is the age of Agile or not.
It's a shame that he's turning into a loudmouthed pundit rather than an author I'd care to read.
I drove down the highway today and was stuck in traffic for a long while. There were lots of cars zipping in and out, but the main problem was a group of long-haul trucks taking up a mile of roadway. The amount of road we have is finite, so the addition of these large trucks is fine for a few, but once you start getting more than a handful of trucks on the road, all traffic is affect.
But Net Neutrality is a tough issue. Yes, clearly, as users we want as unfettered a line as possible. However, the ISP also needs to balance the needs of all the users against the needs of certain special users.
If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.
In school, I used to get told that if I wanted to eat candy in class that I would have to provide enough for everyone. Toshiba brought enough for everyone, but some companies are trying to get more than their fair share by not paying for a license. Toshiba is completely in the right to demand payment for the licenses.
On the other hand, this is why killing HD-DVD was such an important thing. Putting two major patent holders (Toshiba and Microsoft) in charge of the direction of the de facto media format would have been disastrous.
Maybe it's because it's one letter away from Delta, but Della just sounds like a "fat" person name. Like "Gertrude" sounds like an old person name. And "Candy" is a stripper name.
Maybe it wasn't the targeting of women that was gimmicky. Maybe it was the use of an unattractive person name.
I'm not one of those Steve Jobs idolizers, so I think I can look at this with at least a somewhat even-handed view.
Apple never had this kind of problem of serious security vulnerabilities while the Mac ran on non-x86 CPUs. It's only been in the past year that we've seen serious problems like this Safari browser vulnerability and the remote wifi vulnerability.
It's easy to point fingers at Microsoft for a faulty OS, but with Apple also suddenly suffering from the same type of security problems, I have to wonder if it isn't related to the choice of application processor.
Sales of Linux netbooks collapsed. Google is providing a standardized UI on top of Linux. Symbian is dead. Basically, there is very little need for a specialized UI toolkit like Qt now that there are both fewer platforms for it to run and more mature competitors on the remaining platforms.
Seems to be the growing trend; instead of listening to their fans, which would net them even more money, game developers continue to lock down old gaming IP
There is no proof that listening to their fans would net them more money, especially since those fans are creating their own games and not necessarily buying the real product.
It's almost the same argument as the filesharing canard that says that companies need to either give away their music for free or face going out of business.
Spread your tiny wings and fly away, And take the snow back with you Where it came from on that day. The one I love forever is untrue, And if I could you know that I would Fly away with you.
In a world of good and bad, light and dark, black and white, it remains very hopeful that Apple still sees itself as a beacon of purity. It pushes them to do good things to reinforce their own self-image.
Humans have an uncanny knack for finding faces in randomness. It's been said that this is an evolutionary feature. This explains why we sometimes think we see ghosts or Virgin Maries or even Jesus on the asses of dogs. But in reality, it's nothing more than our brain cleverly interpreting the random patterns into something we can easily comprehend.
So when the Old Man of the Mountain crumbled, we didn't just lose a pile of rocks. We lost one of our conceptual markers. Like the mountain in South Dakota that bears an uncanny resemblance to former presidents, this natural monument symbolizes a very dear slice of our history. To have lost it to nature is a blow to not only New Hampshire but our own national pride as Americans.
However simply replacing it with a glass structure is not necessarily the right thing to do. One key aspect of the monument was its permanence and impenetratibility. By replicating the shape in glass, the monument loses both aspects. It would be, in other words, better to have simply left the rubble alone.
I would encourage you to write your congressmen and representatives to stop this wrong-headed "artistic" solution. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban destroyed centuries-old statues, they are rebuilding them in stone. So too should the majesty of the stone face be returned in stone form.
Does freedom mean that you can do anything you want any time you want? Or is freedom the life you lead based upon rules set out by the government?
What does freedom require of you? Is responsibility a facet of freedom? Is societal responsibility actually slavery?
Maybe after we stopped throwing around loaded code words like Freedom and Police State, perhaps we can find that sometimes freedom isn't what we think it ought to be, but that the actual practice of freedom is more humane and invigorating than true freedom.
First, do away with the standard File menu bar. Put the most common actions (Create new file, Save file, Print file, etc) in a big button in the corner. Then create a tabbed menu "strip" separated logically by function. Have something like a Format strip and an Insert strip with all the actions you'd expect included there.
As computers become more touch-panel oriented, bigger buttons will be mandatory. The old File Edit Options Help bar is going to be a millstone.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, that must be Maria Ozawa's real name, then.
It's cumulative.
It's interesting to see the trend of sizes of commercial and governmental satellites. The commercial sats are getting larger and outfitted with better hardware that can support more simultaneous users. The governmental sats are getting smaller and work in tandem to do their work.
Given that satellites can't last forever, I wonder which model pays off better in the long run. Does having many smaller satellites work better than having fewer larger sats? If so, could we find an optimal size or configuration of these small fries?
Or is having this many small things whizzing about going to cause trouble later on as we decide we need to add more birds to our skies? A few big birds are easier to spot and avoid than many little ones.
Treason is to act against your own countrymen in the service of another country. But is that really what it boils down to when you prevent more deaths through dissemination of state secrets? Is it really an offense worthy of death to act according to your own morality?
Many people have protested the Iraq War. And with good reason. It is almost wholly a bad war to have started without a plausible benefit for the American people. In fact, the only thing it has done is to deplete our treasure and kill many of our fine soldiers (not to mention many many of innocent Iraqis). Undertaking the war in Iraq is an act against our beloved American countrymen.
So is George Bush a traitor? Should he be held to such standards and punishment as those who may have, in good conscience, shared state secrets that no doubt hastened the end of the War? It's unfortunate that the little guy doing the right thing is punished for minor transgressions when the leaders of the very same country are allowed to escape punishment scott-free due to their position of power at the time.
Once, passing through LAX, I was pulled aside for a millimeter scan. It was painless and over relatively quickly.
Here's the problem: all this extra security sucks. And with the numerous accounts of tests showing weapons passing through security checkpoints unnoticed, the extra security is fairly useless as well.
At least they have a nice shot of my genitals.
What is cool about the Web is that it is the most Agile of all release environments. Unlike shrinkwrap software, web software can be changed very easily and universally for all users. It brings a raw edge to the development of the software.
In this, there is also the possibility of becoming complacent and ill-tuned to the needs of your users. Taking Google as an example, they keep their services in a perpetual state of beta, always in testing, never reaching a final v1. This type of reliance on constant feedback from customers may work for a short while, but unless the product reaches a state of relative stability (in terms of both not crashing and also not changing) the users will typically find some other software to use.
So when Microsoft decides to impact a few customers with degraded QoS, they may be setting themselves up for a bigger fall later. By introducing the possibility that MS may actively sabotage your user experience in the name of experimentation and testing, they degrade their own reputation (as much as it can be degraded from its current levels) and needlessly increase FUD regarding their proffered services.
It may be for a good cause, but customers should not be the ones testing Microsoft's software. As a professional software house, they should provide good quality control before software hits the servers. It doesn't matter if this is the age of Agile or not.
Cory Doctorow is working his ass off to come out of obscurity.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/why-publishing-shoul.html
It's a shame that he's turning into a loudmouthed pundit rather than an author I'd care to read.
I drove down the highway today and was stuck in traffic for a long while. There were lots of cars zipping in and out, but the main problem was a group of long-haul trucks taking up a mile of roadway. The amount of road we have is finite, so the addition of these large trucks is fine for a few, but once you start getting more than a handful of trucks on the road, all traffic is affect.
But Net Neutrality is a tough issue. Yes, clearly, as users we want as unfettered a line as possible. However, the ISP also needs to balance the needs of all the users against the needs of certain special users.
If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.
In school, I used to get told that if I wanted to eat candy in class that I would have to provide enough for everyone. Toshiba brought enough for everyone, but some companies are trying to get more than their fair share by not paying for a license. Toshiba is completely in the right to demand payment for the licenses.
On the other hand, this is why killing HD-DVD was such an important thing. Putting two major patent holders (Toshiba and Microsoft) in charge of the direction of the de facto media format would have been disastrous.
I was surfing The Hun and accidentally put some of my genome on my keyboard.
Thank goodness for Purell and Kleenex.
When your lawyer won't even stick around to see you get torn apart in the courtroom, perhaps it's time to cut a deal.
Below average Dave is just kind of below average.
Maybe it's because it's one letter away from Delta, but Della just sounds like a "fat" person name. Like "Gertrude" sounds like an old person name. And "Candy" is a stripper name.
Maybe it wasn't the targeting of women that was gimmicky. Maybe it was the use of an unattractive person name.
Culling data and presenting context-aware results is something that Wolfram is working on too.
Wolfram, a genuine genius, against a company full of above-average engineers. It's a tossup as to who came up with this idea first.
So the virus is found in the poor countryside of Mexico...
And someone thinks it was created somewhere in a lab?
I've heard some far out conspiracy theories, but creating a mild flu in a lab and then transported out to Colillacarajo, Mexico? That's just dumb.
I'm not one of those Steve Jobs idolizers, so I think I can look at this with at least a somewhat even-handed view.
Apple never had this kind of problem of serious security vulnerabilities while the Mac ran on non-x86 CPUs. It's only been in the past year that we've seen serious problems like this Safari browser vulnerability and the remote wifi vulnerability.
It's easy to point fingers at Microsoft for a faulty OS, but with Apple also suddenly suffering from the same type of security problems, I have to wonder if it isn't related to the choice of application processor.
Timeliness is next to Cleanliness is next to Godliness.
Sales of Linux netbooks collapsed. Google is providing a standardized UI on top of Linux. Symbian is dead. Basically, there is very little need for a specialized UI toolkit like Qt now that there are both fewer platforms for it to run and more mature competitors on the remaining platforms.
Sayonara, Qt. Hope you beat Gnome on the desktop!
Never heard of them
I can make do without their game. Can they make do without my money?
So far, so good.
Seems to be the growing trend; instead of listening to their fans, which would net them even more money, game developers continue to lock down old gaming IP
There is no proof that listening to their fans would net them more money, especially since those fans are creating their own games and not necessarily buying the real product.
It's almost the same argument as the filesharing canard that says that companies need to either give away their music for free or face going out of business.
Spread your tiny wings and fly away,
And take the snow back with you
Where it came from on that day.
The one I love forever is untrue,
And if I could you know that I would
Fly away with you.
In a world of good and bad, light and dark, black and white, it remains very hopeful that Apple still sees itself as a beacon of purity. It pushes them to do good things to reinforce their own self-image.
I can't wait to try this latest OS!
Humans have an uncanny knack for finding faces in randomness. It's been said that this is an evolutionary feature. This explains why we sometimes think we see ghosts or Virgin Maries or even Jesus on the asses of dogs. But in reality, it's nothing more than our brain cleverly interpreting the random patterns into something we can easily comprehend.
So when the Old Man of the Mountain crumbled, we didn't just lose a pile of rocks. We lost one of our conceptual markers. Like the mountain in South Dakota that bears an uncanny resemblance to former presidents, this natural monument symbolizes a very dear slice of our history. To have lost it to nature is a blow to not only New Hampshire but our own national pride as Americans.
However simply replacing it with a glass structure is not necessarily the right thing to do. One key aspect of the monument was its permanence and impenetratibility. By replicating the shape in glass, the monument loses both aspects. It would be, in other words, better to have simply left the rubble alone.
I would encourage you to write your congressmen and representatives to stop this wrong-headed "artistic" solution. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban destroyed centuries-old statues, they are rebuilding them in stone. So too should the majesty of the stone face be returned in stone form.
Perhaps then an anarchy like Somalia would be more preferable to you than an oppressive nanny state like England?
Does freedom mean that you can do anything you want any time you want? Or is freedom the life you lead based upon rules set out by the government?
What does freedom require of you? Is responsibility a facet of freedom? Is societal responsibility actually slavery?
Maybe after we stopped throwing around loaded code words like Freedom and Police State, perhaps we can find that sometimes freedom isn't what we think it ought to be, but that the actual practice of freedom is more humane and invigorating than true freedom.
Did I just goatse... myself?
No. In the event of an actual goatse, you would be quivering in the corner desperately searching for your innocence.
First, do away with the standard File menu bar. Put the most common actions (Create new file, Save file, Print file, etc) in a big button in the corner. Then create a tabbed menu "strip" separated logically by function. Have something like a Format strip and an Insert strip with all the actions you'd expect included there.
As computers become more touch-panel oriented, bigger buttons will be mandatory. The old File Edit Options Help bar is going to be a millstone.