Followed the link to Google for "strawberry-banana" and I found this!!! And because of the way Google ranks results, doesn't that mean it's popular?? The horror!
On December 24, 1906, at 9 P.M. eastern standard time, Reginald Fessenden transmitted human voices from Brant Rock near Boston, Massachusetts to several ships at sea owned by the United Fruit Company. Fessenden concluded the broadcast by extending Christmas greetings to his listeners - as well as asking them to write and report to him on the broadcast wherever they were. The mail response confirmed that Fessenden had successfully invented radio as we know it. Technically, he had invented radio telephony or what radio listeners would call "real" radio as opposed to Marconi's Morse code broadcasting. Fessenden could truly lay claim to be the inventor of radio and he fully expected the world to beat a path to his door. Instead, he never received his due recognition, lost control of his patents and the ensuing revenue which made other inventors and companies immensely wealthy. Even today the Encyclopedia Canadiana does not give him a separate listing. Mention of him is only included under the listing for his mother Clementina.
If you pass his german back into Babelfish, you get: "Or, if you German cannot do, please use Babelfish." Which is close enough I guess.
Or maybe he had a typo, and meant to say "kenn" (know) instead of "kann" (can). Then at least he has a verb in the sentence. (Babelfish translates that as "Or, if you German do not know, please use Babelfish.")
Let's assume for a sec that this is incredible unethical. Given that, what recourse does Microsoft even have? I kinda think the Supreme Court can do whatever the hell they want in matters of law, cause there ain't nobody higher than them to appeal to.
Just do a quick web search on it (Casio EV-550). Maybe he got it used, but it's not like this is some ancient device that he pulled off the trash heap. He's even got the original box for it!
Sure it's great to code an elegant design the first time that "does the job right". But what do you do when the definition of the job changes 75% of the way through coding? Doing the new job "right" would take more time than anyone is willing to give you. So you have to fudge it as best you can given the time you have.
Or how about when you have to deal with legacy code written by someone who didn't care (or couldn't do better)? Sure it would be nice if you could rewrite the code to be elegant and such. But... the more code you rewrite, the greater the chance of one of those typos or such. And in the real world, it doesn't fly when you say you introduced a bug while rewriting the code.
Can you believe that? Those evil hackers have figured out how to raise the dead and have them fight for them as a zombie army. Man, this is almost as bad as copying DVD's.
If you would bother to look at the site (http://www.olympics.com/eng/), you would see a basic flaw in most of the posts here. For some reason people are assuming that IBM didn't use any ALT tags on the images. That would obviously be moronic. But that's not the case. Most of the images on the site do use ALT tags.
Not that there are no problem there though. For a pointless breaking of the site for blind users, check out the "Sports" page off the front page. The popup javascript thingie to select a sport is completely worthless, and yes, the imagemap doesn't have any ALT tags. Why didn't they just do a straight HTML page?
IBM isn't doing the web sites for the Olympics after Sydney, so they no longer have any reason to play nice with these people. They can take the attitude "it wasn't in the contract", and not have to worry about who they piss off. I bet if they were still doing the Olympics, you would have never heard of this story.
It might just work by plugging it in, since there is a standard system for USB Human Interface devices. Of course, you'll immediately run into issues since you're missing a button. But I guess you could manage.
Someone has to make their boxes smaller first, and then their product will be less visible on the shelf. There ARE people who buy computer software by looking at the front and back of the box, and they're going to go for the bigger box. So the manufacturer will lose if they're the only ones who make their boxes smaller...
Now console game companies can do it because the console maker can impose packaging standards from above in a way that noone can in the PC world. Everyone's equal, and no one has to go first.
Their search box SUCKS unless you have the zip code you want...
How about "New York City"? Nope, "The city you entered was not found." No go for "Manhattan" either. It gives you a list of 4 Manhattans, none of which is in NY. "New York" is the only thing that will give you the page.
How about "Hartford, CT"? Nope, same result. "Hartford" works, but the one you want is buried in a list of 10 other ones.
Maybe they can spend some of the money they're saving on the servers and get a little smarts for the site.
Then they can write a script whose only goal is to create the most verbose log messages. As someone else said, it's hard to grep a stack of paper. But it's even harder to do it when someone is deliberately making your job harder by diluting the stream.
So Xift based their whole company's concept on something that google could get going in a month (from scratch)? Either this whole thing is nothing special or the Google guys are pretty damn smart/fast.
...Or maybe your insinuation that they stole the idea from Xift is just off-base and bitter on your part.
That should make it stop, right? This isn't because of bad servers or something. This is because a single person (or several) is acting maliciously. And crowing on the front page about their actions every day, just would give that person more power.
In a lot of areas, the former is MUCH worse than the latter. Recovering from gross damage like ILUVYOU is simple if you have good backups. Recovering from subtle damange FDIV is a little tricker... most people wouldn't even know they were affected. And that is pretty scary.
Slashdot Mirror
Followed the link to Google for "strawberry-banana" and I found this!!! And because of the way Google ranks results, doesn't that mean it's popular?? The horror!
Curried Carrot Soup and Strawberry-Banana Tofu
You could have submitted it, 2 years ago even.
On December 24, 1906, at 9 P.M. eastern standard time, Reginald Fessenden transmitted human voices from Brant Rock near Boston, Massachusetts to several ships at sea owned by the United Fruit Company. Fessenden concluded the broadcast by extending Christmas greetings to his listeners - as well as asking them to write and report to him on the broadcast wherever they were. The mail response confirmed that Fessenden had successfully invented radio as we know it. Technically, he had invented radio telephony or what radio listeners would call "real" radio as opposed to Marconi's Morse code broadcasting. Fessenden could truly lay claim to be the inventor of radio and he fully expected the world to beat a path to his door. Instead, he never received his due recognition, lost control of his patents and the ensuing revenue which made other inventors and companies immensely wealthy. Even today the Encyclopedia Canadiana does not give him a separate listing. Mention of him is only included under the listing for his mother Clementina.
/radio/radio_unsung.html
http://www.ieee.ca/millenn ium
Just a perfect match...
OK, obviously an awesome comment...
But wouldn't that be a great demo as well? If the little plastic players ACTUALLY RAN PLAYS? People would throw money at you
That's really cool that they notified the real fans ahead of time. Shows that they understand the community spirit much better than most companies.
Actually, babelfish will accept arbitrary text in one of the input boxes. No need to whip up HTML.
If you pass his german back into Babelfish, you get: "Or, if you German cannot do, please use Babelfish." Which is close enough I guess.
Or maybe he had a typo, and meant to say "kenn" (know) instead of "kann" (can). Then at least he has a verb in the sentence. (Babelfish translates that as "Or, if you German do not know, please use Babelfish.")
Let's assume for a sec that this is incredible unethical. Given that, what recourse does Microsoft even have? I kinda think the Supreme Court can do whatever the hell they want in matters of law, cause there ain't nobody higher than them to appeal to.
A little know secret of the Space Imageing site is that you can pretend you're the media and get MUCH better versions of the images.
.co m/ikonos/anniversary/media.htm
http://www.spaceimaging
Like that pretty 1800x1800 Olympic stadium image? How about a 3090x4516 San Fran image? (watch out, it might crash Netscape)
Just watch out if you don't have a nice pipe. Let's see if spaceimaging can handle it.
Just do a quick web search on it (Casio EV-550). Maybe he got it used, but it's not like this is some ancient device that he pulled off the trash heap. He's even got the original box for it!
Sure it's great to code an elegant design the first time that "does the job right". But what do you do when the definition of the job changes 75% of the way through coding? Doing the new job "right" would take more time than anyone is willing to give you. So you have to fudge it as best you can given the time you have.
Or how about when you have to deal with legacy code written by someone who didn't care (or couldn't do better)? Sure it would be nice if you could rewrite the code to be elegant and such. But... the more code you rewrite, the greater the chance of one of those typos or such. And in the real world, it doesn't fly when you say you introduced a bug while rewriting the code.
Just some things to consider.
Can you believe that? Those evil hackers have figured out how to raise the dead and have them fight for them as a zombie army. Man, this is almost as bad as copying DVD's.
If you would bother to look at the site (http://www.olympics.com/eng/), you would see a basic flaw in most of the posts here. For some reason people are assuming that IBM didn't use any ALT tags on the images. That would obviously be moronic. But that's not the case. Most of the images on the site do use ALT tags.
Not that there are no problem there though. For a pointless breaking of the site for blind users, check out the "Sports" page off the front page. The popup javascript thingie to select a sport is completely worthless, and yes, the imagemap doesn't have any ALT tags. Why didn't they just do a straight HTML page?
IBM isn't doing the web sites for the Olympics after Sydney, so they no longer have any reason to play nice with these people. They can take the attitude "it wasn't in the contract", and not have to worry about who they piss off. I bet if they were still doing the Olympics, you would have never heard of this story.
Wouldn't the argument be that it's a German word, and thus un protectable?
It might just work by plugging it in, since there is a standard system for USB Human Interface devices. Of course, you'll immediately run into issues since you're missing a button. But I guess you could manage.
There's a dial on the bottom that allows you to adjust the sensitivity.
Someone has to make their boxes smaller first, and then their product will be less visible on the shelf. There ARE people who buy computer software by looking at the front and back of the box, and they're going to go for the bigger box. So the manufacturer will lose if they're the only ones who make their boxes smaller...
Now console game companies can do it because the console maker can impose packaging standards from above in a way that noone can in the PC world. Everyone's equal, and no one has to go first.
Their search box SUCKS unless you have the zip code you want...
How about "New York City"? Nope, "The city you entered was not found." No go for "Manhattan" either. It gives you a list of 4 Manhattans, none of which is in NY. "New York" is the only thing that will give you the page.
How about "Hartford, CT"? Nope, same result. "Hartford" works, but the one you want is buried in a list of 10 other ones.
Maybe they can spend some of the money they're saving on the servers and get a little smarts for the site.
Then they can write a script whose only goal is to create the most verbose log messages. As someone else said, it's hard to grep a stack of paper. But it's even harder to do it when someone is deliberately making your job harder by diluting the stream.
Rather than the retail price that you quoted?
So Xift based their whole company's concept on something that google could get going in a month (from scratch)? Either this whole thing is nothing special or the Google guys are pretty damn smart/fast.
...Or maybe your insinuation that they stole the idea from Xift is just off-base and bitter on your part.
That should make it stop, right? This isn't because of bad servers or something. This is because a single person (or several) is acting maliciously. And crowing on the front page about their actions every day, just would give that person more power.
FDIV bug: corrupts individual calculations/data silently
ILUVYOU: corrupts whole files completely and obviously
In a lot of areas, the former is MUCH worse than the latter. Recovering from gross damage like ILUVYOU is simple if you have good backups. Recovering from subtle damange FDIV is a little tricker... most people wouldn't even know they were affected. And that is pretty scary.