One of his points was that we should all put our ideas on the web and let them be linked to
The problem with that idea is that it's still far too easy for someone like Amazon to see a useful non-patent like that, then gain their own US patent on it. The original owner now has to face not only a usurper using a patent that's morally theirs, but may even have to defend their right to access their own work.
Could you fight a patent battle with Amazon ? I couldn't...
Yes, I know this isn't how the patent system should work. Given some of the idiotic, obvious and non-original patents granted by the USPTO recently, then I doubt if thie own searches to extablish originality could extend as far as using Google. Publication, outside a paper journal, is just no longer a workable defence against false claims of originality.
My understanding is that a library is there to provide access to information for those who cannot arrange access to it for themselves.
More and more information is net-only, so despite the overabundance of pr0n, there are also a reasonable and justifiable grounds for putting community funds into net access at local libraries. If we do it for a sophisticated self-help medical textbook, or an expensive directory of local government affairs, then we ought to accept the need to fund access to similar information by use of net access in libraries. We already have a society that is segregated by money and resultant access to information. Our actions as a community should be to reduce this, not to increase it.
Whether libraries should censor or not is a separate thread, but I don't see any argument with the principle of libraries offering free (if time-limited or over-subscribed) web acces.
Where do they claim this ? The only quote I could see was a claimed life of "two weeks average use" for the IIIc and "a month" for the V. As they're both rechargeable and I assume are using similar battery technology, then that's makes the IIIc to be twice as hungry as the V.
Palm power-save architecture is also such that "typical" use is much more efficient than heavy use. As my Palm V currently gives me around a week to two weeks of actual use for my own usage patterns, then the colour lifetime does concern me. If I had one, I'd certainly want a second cradle/cable for charging away from home.
My worry isn't program footprint, but battery life.
Colour screens are power hungry and one of the Palm's greatest virtues is its enormous battery life. The Palm works by going to sleep even more frequently and more completely than my cat -- if running a colour LCD affects this, then I'd be very concerned. Battery life for colour isn't a trade off I'd want to make.
As far as footprint goes, then I don't think it's an issue. Colour Palm apps are already out there in beta (BugMe) and they still work just fine on old Palms.
I'm glad they've released this. It's a review feature point that they no longer have to concede to the WinCE boxes and someone may even find it useful. As far as helping Palm goes, I think it's great. OTOH, I'll not be repalcing my own Palm with one.
I don't understand it either, but the success of cubic zirconia jewellery sold on the Home Shopping Channel would seem to prove us both wrong. Who buys tacky crap from the Franklin Mint ? Maybe it looks nicer in trailers or something, but it certainly isn't me buying it.
Poor people still spend money -- and much of it is spent on trash.
The only "male supermodel" I could name is Fabio, and that's solely because he was hit on the nose by a low-flying goose during a rollercoaster ride (any surrealist would be jealous of an accident like that).
He's probably also the only model who will have a weapon named after him in the next edition of "Worms". 8-)
Why do we need CS grads anyway ? IT (the stuff we actually get paid real money to do) is quite a different field from the somewhat theoretical nature of academic CS. Personally I'm a laser physicist by training, and my most highly regarded coworkers are a mix of other numerate disciplines, but far from being CS biased. If I was 17-18 these days, I hope someone would advise me to go and study almost anything other than pure CS.
Lately I have mainly been working in a web design house. The place is full of young women; all moving into this lively, exciting and commercially hot field. Some are more techy, some less so, but none need a specific CS degree to do what they do.
PS - If your name was "Borg", would you want to go anywhere near a CS geekpit ? How many Trek jokes do you think she still hasn't heard, and how many do the saddo fratboys keep thinking are new ?
Let's assume that the AC who posted this is a sincere Xian who really believes that swearing will land you in Heck (if not Hell). What's wrong with that as an opinion ? It's not mine, but the AC has just as much right to hgold it as I might, so why do we blast them with the hair-trigger troll cannon ? If SP is so great, then why don;t a few of us defend it and explain to AC just what its moral justification is ? Surely we're all agreed that Columbine was A Bad Thing and that whatever it is in modern society that leads down that route ought to be stopped ? I just don't happen to blame swearing in South Park for it...
I think their opinion of South Park is just plain wrong (please try watching it) as SP is deliberately far more sophisticated than the crude drawing, grating voices and language would have you believe. It really is a very witty, satirical and deeply moral show, at a level deeper than the obvious. Saying South Park is crude is like saying Reservoir Dogs is violent -- yes it is, but RD is also very much an anti-violence film that doesn't glory in destruction (like much of Hollywood) but presents Tim Roth's slow lingering death as the real horror that it ought to be seen as.
Would I let children watch either ? No way -- (and "child" extends into age 70+ for some people). A "child" doesn't have the moral awareness to see beneath the surface of either, and seeing them only on the surface level is not something I'd want to encourage, at any age.
Note to the original moderator here - I'm querying the moderation, not disagreeing with it. I think it's a valid point for discussion as to whether Slashdot should up or down posts like this; sincere posts with unfashionable viewpoints -- I'm still undecided.
Isn't the fundamental principle of any form of democracy the inviolable right to publically humiliate the President ?
When emperors refuse the right to have their subjects poke fun at them, then they are taking the first steps to delusions and dictatorship.
Could anyone humiliate Gandhi ? - no, because a quip that Gandhi wanted to see more net porn would be so farcical as to reflect only upon the joker. If Clinton is sensitive to suggestions of an interest in net porn, then that's because his own past behaviour makes it all too believable. That's not just a malicious prankster, that's a valid political comment -- besides which, you can't humiliate Clinton. Not post-Lewinsky anyway, he's just beyond further humbling.
I'm concerned about "reposession" and the analogy between cutting off software and repo'ing cars.
I live in the UK, where it's maybe a little different, but we don't have widespread car repo going on. It's possible, but very complex, to arrange to have a bailiff seize any assets, either those unpaid for, or in settlement of another debt. My concern is that "reposessing" a computer licence is likely to involve pressing one button at Redmond and having Sam Tuttle's copy of Word go up in smoke -- no court order, no independent bailiff, no checks and balances.
Europe also has stringent (sic) laws against "logic bombing" software. Legal precedent is that companies who make software time-expire after 18 months, so as to enforce a 12 month renewable maintenance agreement, are on extremely shaky ground if they're not careful how they phrase the contract.
General agreement, but I'd want less emphasis on old / voluminous / high karma posters being moderated up. That would make it more cliquey, less open to interesting newbies and (worst) dominated by the no-life-outside-Slashdot otaku.
How about more moderator points, definitely more often ? I'm always finding myself suprised by moderator status and often don't use them in time. Conversely, whenever I see something that deserves upping, I never have the points. How about points that die with time (as now), but leave 1 or 2 points remaining. That should stop troll hoarding, but still allow a reserve.
I doubt he's stupid, but he's certainly woefully out of touch.
The MPAA have a "theft protection system" that is broken and useless. It prevents an acknowledged legitimate use (GPL player for Linux) and it doesn't prevent bulk piracy (it was broken by a teenager). I sincerely weep bucketloads for the lost profits of studios, but if they want to prevent piracy, then damn well invent a copy protection system that isn't so inept as to disqualify perfectly legitimate usage of a disk that you've paid money for. Don't blame Johansen for the DVD's bad implementation.
Yellow and red text on black ? That certainly lights up my kook filter. OTOH, he's still basically right. Tesla is under-credited generally, and the Smithsonian is particularly bad at this. I don't particularly like the "Tesla the great American" spin though.
As we all know (A Brit writes) the lightbulb was invented by Swan anyway 8-)
If your system is cracked, and then used to attack me, can I sue you for negligence?
I doubt it. Legal decisions rest on precedent as much as possible, rather than an objective decision. Although it's not a good analogy, I suspect that a legal case on this basis woould be treated as an extension of burglary. There's already a precedent that when premises are burgled by entering the unsecured premises next door, then breaking through between the cellars, there isn't a case for negligence against the premises holder of the first place entered. IANAL
I'd like to know exactly who gets paid to make sites that don't work.
Sadly, I do.
When the client only ever sees the site as roughed-out bitmaps, buried in a PowerPoint presentation, then this is what you get. Most high-spending clients have never heard of the W3C, barely use the Web, and certainly wouldn't know the accessibility guidelines. If this is ever to change, then consumers need to feed back to the buyers of design effort that they want good design, not just glitzy.
PowerPoint - it's a lobotomy on a disk. There's nothing inherently wrong with a good presentation tool, but how often have you seen the OHP projector light up in a meeting and the collective IQ drop by 50% ?
The real culprits here are the web design houses - particularly those from long-established marketing organisations that suddenly decided to join the new media boom. They declared themselves to be "web designers" simply by changing the notepaper, not changing the working practices.
Corporate buyers of web presence are often more used to buying magazine or TV coverage. They have no knowledge of what "good web" ought to look like, not are they likely to improve. A single magazine ad might be delegated to a junior, but a single web site is such a large single investment that it's likely to attract their marketing head honcho. Given the corporate sluggardliness of these people, they're unlikely to be young enough, or technically literate enough, to have much a clue web-wise.
I'm a self-employed freelance, but I'm currently working for just such a web design house. This place embarasses me, and their work is shoddy in exactly the way this article complains of. As an example, a "creative spec" for a page is a single 640x480 bitmap. That's magazine thinking; seeing content as being a single static image and taking no account of how it can be implemented, how it changes with window size, how it degrades across browsers, or accessibility. I've had meetings where major content loss of function is swept under the carpet, but changing a simple bitmap (logo or screen background) is regarded as an earth shattering change.
If web-buildng is done by people who understand nothing more than the look of a static image, then that's what you'll get as a site.
It would appear that you have lots and lots of spare cash to throw around, so that you can have only one application per box.
I do have sufficient spare cash that I don't need to install AOL applications (sic) on a box that is also running my business. I have boxes that would cost me $500 / day if they stopped working, and I have boxes that are there for the slaughtering. NO WAY do you install anything, especially not from AOL or M$oft, on the development boxes unless it's vital and trusted. Bitter experience tells me that either of these companies will deliver "trivial browser upgrades" that shaft major system components.
no fscking software author should be breaking my stuff without asking me, first.
Absolutely, hence whacking them with the punitive damages (and devils with red hot pokers too, for all I care)
My point though isn't that AOL didn't do A Bad Thing, but that users who "need" $1000 compensation shouldn't have been so stupidly trusting in the first place. This isn't a mature field as yet, and most of the products out there are majorly broken in one or more ways.
I'm a Brit, so US use f opunitive damages is a bit vague to me.
Isn't this a good case (moral, if not legal) for AOL to have to pay punitive damages, but not individual damages ?
AOL, whether by design or accident, shipped a product that trashed machines in an unacceptable manner.
Users of the AOL software had implicitly accepted that the AOL software might do such a thing (whether by accident or design), and so had indemnified AOL against doing so.
IMHO, AOL deserve to be hit with large punitive damages to discourage this sort of stunt again. The users don't deserve compensation though, because you shouldn't install software on a box you care about, and especialy not when the product has AOL's track record (and other ISPs) of interfering with existing networking settings.
if you replace the [...] antenna [...] you can massively extend the range.
I'm impressed with 15km !, although I've done this myself on similar kit with good, but lesser, results. My experience was in the UK with MPT1340 pre-built modules at 418MHz (car alarm / door opener tech) - maybe the use of spread spectrum for the wireless LAN accounts for your greater success ? (all hail Hedy)
still be within regulations.
Now this I'm not so sure about. Certainly UK rules for the MPT1340 are very specific about keeping with the standard antennae designs they were certified with (not that it stopped me !). Some of the model rocket fliers and ferret keepers who use these things as retrieval homing beacons have built massive reception Yagi arrays.
That's good advice for the traditional "build it and ship it" approach to software development.
OTOH, I think the original poster was talking about the post-Web business madness model. This is all about hyping the nuts off it, then selling out quick (IPO or whatever). Yes, it's stupid -- but how many of us really are prepared to turn down the cash bucket that's on offer these days ?
There's also the third model "Build it and they will come" (especially for web services). Great if you're the next Amazon, bad news if you're the next boo.com.
All three of these business models require a radically different approach to investment; how much you sell long-term for how much short-term benefit, attitude towards customers, and attitude towards product (roll it out gradually and sell as much as you can, when you can vs. keep it secret, then let the world now everything at once). All of these work in their right field, but they cause problems if you try to cross-apply them - don't mix them.
Magneto-optical is probably one of the most stable storage mediums available.
Theory and practice diverge in an unhelpful manner. 3 years ago I worked on a project to convert a 5 year old MO system to another MO system, simply because the old drives were no longer available and ongoing maintenance was a hassle. Owing to stupid cost-cutting on my project, the "new" drives we used were already becoming obsolete. Today no-one still makes drives that can read either set of disks and on-going maintenance of the #2 system is dubious.
Very little of the data volume becomes useless, because we don't know what "useless" will be to the readers in the future. Contemporary archaeologists spend much useful time sifting the contents of rubbish pits and latrines - if that turns out to bhe interesting, how can we ever say that data won't be. Maybe your schoolwork is dull and uninteresting to you, but how about an educational historian in a century or so ? Wouldn't you like to know how teaching was carried out in the past ?
Also the majority (by volume) of data will always automatically generated sensor data (humans can't type fast to keep up), and that tends not to become useless with time. NASA have already lost interesting telemetry data.
Authors have definitely lost early book drafts because modern WPs don't open old WP formats. Word 1.0 isn't old ! that's not even a decade ago. What about stuff from the '70s on hardware formats that no longer have players ? CP/M WP formats used by some of the first great novelists to work digitally ? (mind you, losing the whole of Pournelle is fine by me). Personally I'd find it very hard to read my own degree work, and I'd probably have to do it by scanning in the paper copies
Solutions ? I'm not a hardware guy, so I can only talk about the soft data side of it. I think XML (and similar) has a big part to play here. Let's stop thinking of data formats subjectively as "the data format that belongs to SprongWriter 4.2a" and instead work with formats that have objective definitions that extend beyond the client app of the day. Why should I need a copy of that particular WP to open the data, if the data is already in a format that's inherently accessible. We already have the technical skills and tools for this, I call on all developers to make use of them and to stop writing these proprietary data oubliettes.
Book Recommendation: The Clock of the Long Now Stewart Brand Why this sort of thing matters, and what a few people are trying to do about it. Best book I've read this year.
PS - SciAm also had a piece on digital data loss, a year or so back.
That's the problem with Stoll's approach. He starts with a minute error and insists that it's a consequence of something untoward.
These days we all work on Web Time. If it's not done and dusted by Monday, it will be obsolete by Tuesday. No-one has the time to chase pennies. Even individual fraudsters aren't hunted down - I've met ecomm retailers who simply couldn't chase single frauds and would only go after something that looked like a volume syndicate. For the one-offs, the only thing they had the time and money to cope with was letting the item be shipped and then swallow the back-charge from the cc company. RealShopping outlets have taken a similar line for years - they just accept a certain level of stock wastage.
There's also the volume issue. In Stoll's day a hack attempt was done by a hacker who created the tools himself. Now we're drowned under a barrage of dull script kiddies and bad NT holes. It's a panic out there ! I'd regard a serious probe from a skilled old-school hacker as a welcome and interesting diversion.
Hacker/cracker - we lost that argument. Get over it.
Things change. Net things change insanely fast. Even governments can't be relied upon to stay stupid forever (*). If you read a net book that was in print a month ago, chances are that it's only fot for fish & chip wrappers by now.
* Well, maybe not repeatably stupid in a consistent manner 8-)
Slashdot Mirror
One of his points was that we should all put our ideas on the web and let them be linked to
The problem with that idea is that it's still far too easy for someone like Amazon to see a useful non-patent like that, then gain their own US patent on it. The original owner now has to face not only a usurper using a patent that's morally theirs, but may even have to defend their right to access their own work.
Could you fight a patent battle with Amazon ? I couldn't...
Yes, I know this isn't how the patent system should work. Given some of the idiotic, obvious and non-original patents granted by the USPTO recently, then I doubt if thie own searches to extablish originality could extend as far as using Google. Publication, outside a paper journal, is just no longer a workable defence against false claims of originality.
Why do we need libraries ?
My understanding is that a library is there to provide access to information for those who cannot arrange access to it for themselves.
More and more information is net-only, so despite the overabundance of pr0n, there are also a reasonable and justifiable grounds for putting community funds into net access at local libraries. If we do it for a sophisticated self-help medical textbook, or an expensive directory of local government affairs, then we ought to accept the need to fund access to similar information by use of net access in libraries. We already have a society that is segregated by money and resultant access to information. Our actions as a community should be to reduce this, not to increase it.
Whether libraries should censor or not is a separate thread, but I don't see any argument with the principle of libraries offering free (if time-limited or over-subscribed) web acces.
they've /extended/ battery life
Where do they claim this ? The only quote I could see was a claimed life of "two weeks average use" for the IIIc and "a month" for the V. As they're both rechargeable and I assume are using similar battery technology, then that's makes the IIIc to be twice as hungry as the V.
Palm power-save architecture is also such that "typical" use is much more efficient than heavy use. As my Palm V currently gives me around a week to two weeks of actual use for my own usage patterns, then the colour lifetime does concern me. If I had one, I'd certainly want a second cradle/cable for charging away from home.
My worry isn't program footprint, but battery life.
Colour screens are power hungry and one of the Palm's greatest virtues is its enormous battery life. The Palm works by going to sleep even more frequently and more completely than my cat -- if running a colour LCD affects this, then I'd be very concerned. Battery life for colour isn't a trade off I'd want to make.
As far as footprint goes, then I don't think it's an issue. Colour Palm apps are already out there in beta (BugMe) and they still work just fine on old Palms.
I'm glad they've released this. It's a review feature point that they no longer have to concede to the WinCE boxes and someone may even find it useful. As far as helping Palm goes, I think it's great. OTOH, I'll not be repalcing my own Palm with one.
I don't understand it either, but the success of cubic zirconia jewellery sold on the Home Shopping Channel would seem to prove us both wrong. Who buys tacky crap from the Franklin Mint ? Maybe it looks nicer in trailers or something, but it certainly isn't me buying it.
Poor people still spend money -- and much of it is spent on trash.
The only "male supermodel" I could name is Fabio, and that's solely because he was hit on the nose by a low-flying goose during a rollercoaster ride (any surrealist would be jealous of an accident like that).
He's probably also the only model who will have a weapon named after him in the next edition of "Worms". 8-)
Why do we need CS grads anyway ? IT (the stuff we actually get paid real money to do) is quite a different field from the somewhat theoretical nature of academic CS. Personally I'm a laser physicist by training, and my most highly regarded coworkers are a mix of other numerate disciplines, but far from being CS biased. If I was 17-18 these days, I hope someone would advise me to go and study almost anything other than pure CS.
Lately I have mainly been working in a web design house. The place is full of young women; all moving into this lively, exciting and commercially hot field. Some are more techy, some less so, but none need a specific CS degree to do what they do.
PS - If your name was "Borg", would you want to go anywhere near a CS geekpit ? How many Trek jokes do you think she still hasn't heard, and how many do the saddo fratboys keep thinking are new ?
This was moderated down to -1, as mere flamebait.
Is that actually a reasonable response to it ?
Let's assume that the AC who posted this is a sincere Xian who really believes that swearing will land you in Heck (if not Hell). What's wrong with that as an opinion ? It's not mine, but the AC has just as much right to hgold it as I might, so why do we blast them with the hair-trigger troll cannon ? If SP is so great, then why don;t a few of us defend it and explain to AC just what its moral justification is ? Surely we're all agreed that Columbine was A Bad Thing and that whatever it is in modern society that leads down that route ought to be stopped ? I just don't happen to blame swearing in South Park for it...
I think their opinion of South Park is just plain wrong (please try watching it) as SP is deliberately far more sophisticated than the crude drawing, grating voices and language would have you believe. It really is a very witty, satirical and deeply moral show, at a level deeper than the obvious. Saying South Park is crude is like saying Reservoir Dogs is violent -- yes it is, but RD is also very much an anti-violence film that doesn't glory in destruction (like much of Hollywood) but presents Tim Roth's slow lingering death as the real horror that it ought to be seen as.
Would I let children watch either ? No way -- (and "child" extends into age 70+ for some people). A "child" doesn't have the moral awareness to see beneath the surface of either, and seeing them only on the surface level is not something I'd want to encourage, at any age.
Note to the original moderator here - I'm querying the moderation, not disagreeing with it. I think it's a valid point for discussion as to whether Slashdot should up or down posts like this; sincere posts with unfashionable viewpoints -- I'm still undecided.
--
Julian Cope died for your sins
Isn't the fundamental principle of any form of democracy the inviolable right to publically humiliate the President ?
When emperors refuse the right to have their subjects poke fun at them, then they are taking the first steps to delusions and dictatorship.
Could anyone humiliate Gandhi ? - no, because a quip that Gandhi wanted to see more net porn would be so farcical as to reflect only upon the joker. If Clinton is sensitive to suggestions of an interest in net porn, then that's because his own past behaviour makes it all too believable. That's not just a malicious prankster, that's a valid political comment -- besides which, you can't humiliate Clinton. Not post-Lewinsky anyway, he's just beyond further humbling.
I'm concerned about "reposession" and the analogy between cutting off software and repo'ing cars.
I live in the UK, where it's maybe a little different, but we don't have widespread car repo going on. It's possible, but very complex, to arrange to have a bailiff seize any assets, either those unpaid for, or in settlement of another debt. My concern is that "reposessing" a computer licence is likely to involve pressing one button at Redmond and having Sam Tuttle's copy of Word go up in smoke -- no court order, no independent bailiff, no checks and balances.
Europe also has stringent (sic) laws against "logic bombing" software. Legal precedent is that companies who make software time-expire after 18 months, so as to enforce a 12 month renewable maintenance agreement, are on extremely shaky ground if they're not careful how they phrase the contract.
General agreement, but I'd want less emphasis on old / voluminous / high karma posters being moderated up. That would make it more cliquey, less open to interesting newbies and (worst) dominated by the no-life-outside-Slashdot otaku.
How about more moderator points, definitely more often ? I'm always finding myself suprised by moderator status and often don't use them in time. Conversely, whenever I see something that deserves upping, I never have the points. How about points that die with time (as now), but leave 1 or 2 points remaining. That should stop troll hoarding, but still allow a reserve.
I doubt he's stupid, but he's certainly woefully out of touch.
The MPAA have a "theft protection system" that is broken and useless. It prevents an acknowledged legitimate use (GPL player for Linux) and it doesn't prevent bulk piracy (it was broken by a teenager). I sincerely weep bucketloads for the lost profits of studios, but if they want to prevent piracy, then damn well invent a copy protection system that isn't so inept as to disqualify perfectly legitimate usage of a disk that you've paid money for. Don't blame Johansen for the DVD's bad implementation.
Yellow and red text on black ? That certainly lights up my kook filter. OTOH, he's still basically right. Tesla is under-credited generally, and the Smithsonian is particularly bad at this. I don't particularly like the "Tesla the great American" spin though.
As we all know (A Brit writes) the lightbulb was invented by Swan anyway 8-)
If your system is cracked, and then used to attack me, can I sue you for negligence?
I doubt it. Legal decisions rest on precedent as much as possible, rather than an objective decision. Although it's not a good analogy, I suspect that a legal case on this basis woould be treated as an extension of burglary. There's already a precedent that when premises are burgled by entering the unsecured premises next door, then breaking through between the cellars, there isn't a case for negligence against the premises holder of the first place entered. IANAL
I'd like to know exactly who gets paid to make sites that don't work.
Sadly, I do.
When the client only ever sees the site as roughed-out bitmaps, buried in a PowerPoint presentation, then this is what you get. Most high-spending clients have never heard of the W3C, barely use the Web, and certainly wouldn't know the accessibility guidelines. If this is ever to change, then consumers need to feed back to the buyers of design effort that they want good design, not just glitzy.
PowerPoint - it's a lobotomy on a disk. There's nothing inherently wrong with a good presentation tool, but how often have you seen the OHP projector light up in a meeting and the collective IQ drop by 50% ?
The real culprits here are the web design houses - particularly those from long-established marketing organisations that suddenly decided to join the new media boom. They declared themselves to be "web designers" simply by changing the notepaper, not changing the working practices.
Corporate buyers of web presence are often more used to buying magazine or TV coverage. They have no knowledge of what "good web" ought to look like, not are they likely to improve. A single magazine ad might be delegated to a junior, but a single web site is such a large single investment that it's likely to attract their marketing head honcho. Given the corporate sluggardliness of these people, they're unlikely to be young enough, or technically literate enough, to have much a clue web-wise.
I'm a self-employed freelance, but I'm currently working for just such a web design house. This place embarasses me, and their work is shoddy in exactly the way this article complains of. As an example, a "creative spec" for a page is a single 640x480 bitmap. That's magazine thinking; seeing content as being a single static image and taking no account of how it can be implemented, how it changes with window size, how it degrades across browsers, or accessibility. I've had meetings where major content loss of function is swept under the carpet, but changing a simple bitmap (logo or screen background) is regarded as an earth shattering change.
If web-buildng is done by people who understand nothing more than the look of a static image, then that's what you'll get as a site.
It would appear that you have lots and lots of spare cash to throw around, so that you can have only one application per box.
I do have sufficient spare cash that I don't need to install AOL applications (sic) on a box that is also running my business. I have boxes that would cost me $500 / day if they stopped working, and I have boxes that are there for the slaughtering. NO WAY do you install anything, especially not from AOL or M$oft, on the development boxes unless it's vital and trusted. Bitter experience tells me that either of these companies will deliver "trivial browser upgrades" that shaft major system components.
no fscking software author should be breaking my stuff without asking me, first.
Absolutely, hence whacking them with the punitive damages (and devils with red hot pokers too, for all I care)
My point though isn't that AOL didn't do A Bad Thing, but that users who "need" $1000 compensation shouldn't have been so stupidly trusting in the first place. This isn't a mature field as yet, and most of the products out there are majorly broken in one or more ways.
I'm a Brit, so US use f opunitive damages is a bit vague to me.
Isn't this a good case (moral, if not legal) for AOL to have to pay punitive damages, but not individual damages ?
IMHO, AOL deserve to be hit with large punitive damages to discourage this sort of stunt again. The users don't deserve compensation though, because you shouldn't install software on a box you care about, and especialy not when the product has AOL's track record (and other ISPs) of interfering with existing networking settings.
if you replace the [...] antenna [...] you can massively extend the range.
I'm impressed with 15km !, although I've done this myself on similar kit with good, but lesser, results. My experience was in the UK with MPT1340 pre-built modules at 418MHz (car alarm / door opener tech) - maybe the use of spread spectrum for the wireless LAN accounts for your greater success ? (all hail Hedy)
still be within regulations.
Now this I'm not so sure about. Certainly UK rules for the MPT1340 are very specific about keeping with the standard antennae designs they were certified with (not that it stopped me !). Some of the model rocket fliers and ferret keepers who use these things as retrieval homing beacons have built massive reception Yagi arrays.
Wirles LAN Hack FAQ. Yes Please !
That's good advice for the traditional "build it and ship it" approach to software development.
OTOH, I think the original poster was talking about the post-Web business madness model. This is all about hyping the nuts off it, then selling out quick (IPO or whatever). Yes, it's stupid -- but how many of us really are prepared to turn down the cash bucket that's on offer these days ?
There's also the third model "Build it and they will come" (especially for web services). Great if you're the next Amazon, bad news if you're the next boo.com.
All three of these business models require a radically different approach to investment; how much you sell long-term for how much short-term benefit, attitude towards customers, and attitude towards product (roll it out gradually and sell as much as you can, when you can vs. keep it secret, then let the world now everything at once). All of these work in their right field, but they cause problems if you try to cross-apply them - don't mix them.
Magneto-optical is probably one of the most stable storage mediums available.
Theory and practice diverge in an unhelpful manner. 3 years ago I worked on a project to convert a 5 year old MO system to another MO system, simply because the old drives were no longer available and ongoing maintenance was a hassle. Owing to stupid cost-cutting on my project, the "new" drives we used were already becoming obsolete. Today no-one still makes drives that can read either set of disks and on-going maintenance of the #2 system is dubious.
I disagree almost entirely.
Very little of the data volume becomes useless, because we don't know what "useless" will be to the readers in the future. Contemporary archaeologists spend much useful time sifting the contents of rubbish pits and latrines - if that turns out to bhe interesting, how can we ever say that data won't be. Maybe your schoolwork is dull and uninteresting to you, but how about an educational historian in a century or so ? Wouldn't you like to know how teaching was carried out in the past ?
Also the majority (by volume) of data will always automatically generated sensor data (humans can't type fast to keep up), and that tends not to become useless with time. NASA have already lost interesting telemetry data.
Authors have definitely lost early book drafts because modern WPs don't open old WP formats. Word 1.0 isn't old ! that's not even a decade ago. What about stuff from the '70s on hardware formats that no longer have players ? CP/M WP formats used by some of the first great novelists to work digitally ? (mind you, losing the whole of Pournelle is fine by me). Personally I'd find it very hard to read my own degree work, and I'd probably have to do it by scanning in the paper copies
Solutions ? I'm not a hardware guy, so I can only talk about the soft data side of it. I think XML (and similar) has a big part to play here. Let's stop thinking of data formats subjectively as "the data format that belongs to SprongWriter 4.2a" and instead work with formats that have objective definitions that extend beyond the client app of the day. Why should I need a copy of that particular WP to open the data, if the data is already in a format that's inherently accessible. We already have the technical skills and tools for this, I call on all developers to make use of them and to stop writing these proprietary data oubliettes.
Book Recommendation: The Clock of the Long Now Stewart Brand Why this sort of thing matters, and what a few people are trying to do about it. Best book I've read this year.
PS - SciAm also had a piece on digital data loss, a year or so back.
I never thought of that.
Neither did I until it bit me.
I thought it wasn't well-formed XML if there was a space before the backslash.
Nope. Take a look at rule 44 in the XML spec
[44] EmptyElemTag ::= '<' Name (S Attribute)* S? '/>'
The place you can't have a space is after the slash and before the tagname in an ending tag: </ P>
That's the problem with Stoll's approach. He starts with a minute error and insists that it's a consequence of something untoward.
These days we all work on Web Time. If it's not done and dusted by Monday, it will be obsolete by Tuesday. No-one has the time to chase pennies. Even individual fraudsters aren't hunted down - I've met ecomm retailers who simply couldn't chase single frauds and would only go after something that looked like a volume syndicate. For the one-offs, the only thing they had the time and money to cope with was letting the item be shipped and then swallow the back-charge from the cc company. RealShopping outlets have taken a similar line for years - they just accept a certain level of stock wastage.
There's also the volume issue. In Stoll's day a hack attempt was done by a hacker who created the tools himself. Now we're drowned under a barrage of dull script kiddies and bad NT holes. It's a panic out there ! I'd regard a serious probe from a skilled old-school hacker as a welcome and interesting diversion.
Hacker/cracker - we lost that argument. Get over it.
Stoll ? Isn't that a decade old by now ?
Things change. Net things change insanely fast. Even governments can't be relied upon to stay stupid forever (*). If you read a net book that was in print a month ago, chances are that it's only fot for fish & chip wrappers by now.
* Well, maybe not repeatably stupid in a consistent manner 8-)