16-bit or even 8-bit registers instead of 32 bit registers. [...] need to be sure that the values in the registers are below 65536 or 256 to use these tricks,
Isn't that trivial old-tech for compiler optimisation ? If your type system is strong enough to know that it's an 8 bit operand, then you're only ever going to need the 8 bit register.
You can argue that multiplying two int8 only really needs an int16 result if the initial values are big enough, which is fair comment in favour of human optimisation. OTOH, it's not a rocket science extension to the type system to allow an int4 type to be declared, even if it's always held in an >=8 bit register and the compiler can then safely optimise that to place the result back into an int8. That way you even improve the code quality, as there's no discrepancy between the valid and the apparently valid numeric ranges, as you get with the human optimisation and the non-obvious limiting of the initial int8 to be <0xF
when the programmer has decided that space is more important than speed.
That would seem to be one of the issues where manual coding has the edge. I agree with your general point, but I think there's still work to do before auto-generation is perfect.
Imagine a case where an algorithm could easily optimise either way speed/space - maybe there's a hash table that's going to hold some programmer-controlled depth of the initial search and allowing it to expand would make usage quicker, but eat memory. A human coder would probably know the pattern of usage this routine would get. By knowing the practical number of data items to be encountered, they could optimise the hash size. A compiler can't do this, because the necessary information comes from the overall systemm domain, not just the source code. To allow compilers to compete effectively, we'll need much more subtle optimisation hinting than we currently have; especially that of the form "ignore this block, it's only used once" and "speed like crazy here, and you'll never have more than 5 items loaded simultaneously".
I'm not a compiler / assembler geek, so maybe someone is already doing this ?
First step to knowledge is realising when you don't know something.
A year ago, I realised that I was missing the XML boat and played some rapid catch-up. Now I'm a real evangelist for it. XML is the most exciting new tech I've seen since reliable IP stacks on every desktop. Until Summer I had to push clients into using XML, Autumn I was first recruited because of my XML knowledge, and this year the phone has gone into meltdown.
Should you rush out and dive into XHTML ? Not IMHO. Start out by getting a good grasp of XML in isolation. I don't know what you do all day, but many big markets will always be pure XML without any XHTML involvement. WAP/WML might be relevant to you too, if you're into palmtops or wireless.
XHTML is less revolutionary than XML. XML is a way of doing new and exciting stuff that just wasn't practical before, XHTML doesn't really add much to that, it just lets developers roll it out without breaking every existing client. It's good stuff and we should adopt it, but it isn't going to invent new business models the way that XML has (how do I syndicate content from everything in the known universe without something universal like XML ?).
I think this is another hype from Microsoft
No, definitely not Microsoft's hype. Microsoft are keen on it, for sure, but they're riding the bandwagon, not generating the hype.
Yes, Microsoft have broken things. Fortunately XML was up and running before Redmond woke up, so they didn't get to break it. OTOH, XSL has been thoroughly trashed by them and XML Schemas are under attack (it's neck & neck between MS & W3C). I haven't looked at this week's XPath goodies from Redmond (new MSXML download yesterday ! Go get it). Much of the M$oft steamroller effect is because they're actually implementing new and useful stuff like parameterising stylesheets (Caveat - I haven't yet seen what they've done, but I know I want it) and they're still the only people with a usable client-side XSL on desktop browsers. I hate IE5, but it's just so damn useful that I can't avoid it.
If XML is a failure, then I hope we should all fail so spectacularly ! I'll be writing the XML handlers that send out welfare cheques to you, and all the other unemployed CSV import coders.
The downside and "failure" of XML is that it's still immature as a wetware discipline (not as a protocol). XML and especially schema design is regarded in the same way as database design was 5-6 years ago. For years before RDBMS design had been the sole preserve of gurus like Ted Codd (i.e. the SGML era), then along come M$oft with Access and suddenly everyone and their dog thinks they're a real database designer. Cue a whole pile of badly normalised (or just downright ugly) data models, or in today's situation a lot of nasty slapped-together XML structures. It will be a year or so before people realise that XML schema design is a discipline in just the same way as good RDBMS design is.
TipOfTheDay: Use tags like <br/> instead of <br/> when writing "tight" HTML, otherwise older browsers choke on it.
this is hardware, so yes, this guy can do whatever he pleases with it once he owns it.
Hardware isn't entirely free of red tape. Just look at the legalese, hardware compatibility checks and NDA that Palm plug-on developers need to wade through, just to buy Palm connectors. The one-off hobbyists have to buy sync cables at retail and chop the ends off.
My old Palm III now wears a coat of aircraft walkway anti-slip paint. It's black, looks rugged (in that ubiquitous neo-Gibson stylee) and is abrasive enough to sand plastic.
Why do you think your Palm is better than my Psion ?
Because my Palm can do this < grind, grind, grind> to your Psion.
there will need to be a "compression extension" because XML is verbose, thus making messages large.
This isn't a problem.
Compression belongs at the presentation layer (and preferably below transport), not at the application layer. XML content is certainly bulky, but it squashes very well. I've spent the last few weeks benchmarking verbose XML travelling over dial-up modems and anything that has the slightest compression smarts squeezes it right up.
There already is a compression extension for XML. It's part of the WAP / WML work, where XML is really trying to squeeze itself down a thin pipe. It's currently very tailored to WML, but that's fixable.
Microsoft [...] main thrust in the distributed web [...] SOAP -- XML-based RPC
I'd agree with that much.
But when that little GetWidget element comes winging its way into the server, there has to be some sort of gadget receiving and processing it. What do we write that in ?
Java (which can't do this week's new IE6 performing-wombat trick, because it's not an M$ product)
Perl/Python/SpodScript (see above)
C++ (Bob preserve me from ever again having to write COM in C++)
VB (yes, well)
EczemaScript (You thought VB was going to be slow?)
So what do those of us who leech our living from the hordes of fat-cat M$oft corporates do now for a coding language ?
Get yourself over to www.scripting.com and (!Wavey) Davey's world of XML-RPC.
Yes, it's SOAP. SOAP isn't Microsoft proprietary though, nor is there any obvious way in which the progenitors of The Language Formerly Known As XSL can break it as they did with IE5.
SOAP is damned marvellous. Simple, works really well, every home should have some. If the ****** (sorry, NDA'ed) appliance design crew get their way, every home will do.
It's also good for exactly those long-haul firewall-paranoid trans-internet tasks that Corba can't easily cope with (and don't even think about using DCOM).
Microsoft aren't attempting to kill Java, they're just annoyed at Sun's legal succes. If they can't win the game, then they're going to take their marbles and go home in a sulk.
This move was expected a long time ago. Soon after the lawsuit, Project COOL made it clear that M$oft internal work was going back to C++, after an all too brief dalliance with J++.
I'm a COM developer, so I'm well pissed off. C++ is a ghastly platform for COM work (you can always do everything, but development speed grinds to a halt) and VB is well, still just VB (still my main language, in terms of billed hours, but I know its limits). VJ++ was nowhere near being Java, but it was excellent as a Windows development language for stuff that VB couldn't hack.
Rational's attempt is doomed. It's never going to compete with the PureJava fraternity (Visual Cafe is probably going to be my choice) and it no longer has the tie-in to M$oft internals that made it attractive in the first place. The whole Win32 baggage of VJ++ was the only thing attractive about it in the first place, but if that's no longer a hot track to the latest new Redmond arcana, then it's just a legacy albatross.
Oh yes, and if J++ is going to be anything like as unreliably buggy as Rational's recent products, then it can join them under my desk in the same dustbin. Their UML Modeller was a lot of money out of my budget for a product that wasn't fit to ship as beta-test $10 shareware.
XML as a coding language ? Don't make me laugh... Sounds like VNU still don't know their Arse++ from their ElbowScript
I think they used to. Back in the days when PDAs were rare and expensive, they were bought by geeks who cared about such things. Now we're moving to a more mature (sic) market, where they're bought by the naive, or bought as gifts, and sold by the untrained and simian. Increasingly, the only differentiable features between PDAs will be the logo on the case and an inaccurate display card on the shelf at Electrode Hut.
Take a walk through Electrode Hut sometime and listen to people buying real retail products from the real retail sales chain (all shrinkwrap developers should do this regularly). They don't understand the technical issues, and if the sales staff even mention them, they frequently get it wrong (the number of mis-sold Palm IIIe I over-hear !). Maybe you and I know that colour means unusable battery life, but very few retail purchasers do.
Cookie "security" relies on cookies not being shared between servers. For a simple site, this works fine. When banner ad companies sell banners to many sites, then a loophole has opened whereby they can see cookies that were placed there by many sites that share the same banner servers. As banner servers are near monopoly industries, then that's a big source of cross-tracking data.
The fix is obvious, but it needs to be done in the browsers (or by a filter near to the browser).
Hacking obscure browser loopholes just isn't worth it for commercially honest (sic) data capture. There's not enough good data to be had that way(If you still use Mosaic on an Amiga with an unpatched ActiveX hole, then I doubt that you'd buy my product anyway). Illegal cracking (stealing credit card info etc.) is maybe worth looking for obscure browser holes, but market research is by its very nature a mass-market task.
Re:I really don't believe in this whole Zen concep
on
Interface Zen
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· Score: 2
There is not logical notion that human kind has any implied fuzzy quasi-telepathic state wherin they gain "mystical" powers.
There certainly is, although there's nothing "mystical" about it.
Some tasks are executed rarely, and are complex. Higher, conscious, parts of the mind are involved in performing them so it's a conscious mental effort. Other tasks (walking, running, playing soccer (for some of us)) OTOH, have become so ingrained that they really are almost automatic. A good interface gets far enough out of the way so that you can begin to learn this autonomic (?) response. Once you've acquired that (it takes both a good interface, and practice) then you'll see a vastly improved performance, even with far less effort.
I'm both an (occasional, and dismal) Zen practioner and a skier. I empathise completely with what Tom was talking about in that fine piece.
There's never a neurologist around when you need one...
Someone just needs to develop the killer app for it
Killer app ? Not sure about that, but this is amusing. It's a new slant on putting the personal touch into eCommerce; get a few gargoyles on rollerblades and have them skate around a Paris department store checking out the merchandise for you.
We also have a wearable project here at HP Labs. It's called the predictable, but still cringe-making "BlaserJet".
Oxygen bonds well, but it doesn't form interesting bonds. As others have mentioned, silicon and sulphur are the only real competitors for carbon as a "core" atom in life-forming molecules.
Much also depends on temperature; sulphur isn't likely to work at room temperature. Earth based extremophiles (sea-floor hydrothermal vents) have already been found where some of their chemistry relies on sulphur instead of carbon; using sulphides as an energy source instead of carbohydrates.
Silicon is a possible as a basis for life, but only in an oxygen-poor environment. Otherwise it's too likely (as happens on Earth) to find itself oxidising almost immediately from free silicon to unreactive quartz (SiO2).
Why shouldn't alien life be carbon based anyway ? Assuming our model of nuclear synthesis is correct, carbon will be plentiful on any ball of rock, so why not use it ? Even on a gas giant, there's plenty of available carbon around.
Your point about the OSA is mere anti-British sophistry. Anyway, that nice Mr Blair has promised us a FOIA soon and we all trust him completely. We also look forward to the day when the Labour Party's favoured candidate for Lord Mayor of London, Jeffrey Archer (BA, Oxon) is placed in a position to rule us all equally wisely.
I think this is fair if a consumer has the right to see everything in the database under his name and delete it if he so wishes
Two problems with this:
You won't have the right to "delete" items. If you're lucky, the law is worded well, you have the patience to pursue the process and you can actually prove things, then you might have the right to have those items that were demonstrably false removed.
If you're lucky.
Naturally you won't be able to remove that little incident with the dope at college (where you didn't inhale), or your heroic stint in the school crossing patrol during Vietnam (or whatever else your presidentials have been up to lately).
Last year I bought a house; a mortgage debt repossession. I still receive interesting mail related to the previous owner, I still have an amusing time with my business bankers (I also work from home) and I (rarely) get big guys in long coats turn up on the doorstep. Fortunately I have a lot of sympathy for the previous owner and the sense of humour that finds debt collectors on the doorstep funny (so long as they're not really after me). Yes, I have taken the appropriate measures to correct the UK's centralised databases on all this, yes, I still get the fallout.
Power in this situation rests with the powerful (the rich). This is a fundamentally undemocratic measure, because it emphasises this difference between rich and poor. The rich (and this includes the information-rich) will have the ability to hide things, will have the offshore banking facilities that let them hide transactions, and will have the ability to use whatever corrective measures are available. They'll also be able to exploit the snooping ability on their neighbours.
The poor will have none of this. They'll collect whatever petty judgements against them (maybe a trivial fine, maybe missed payments on over-priced credit), and they'll be blacklisted from future credit or employment as a consequence. This is a fundamentally divisive measure for society as a whole. We already have a big problem in Western society where kids from large "sink" estates are blacklisted as proto-criminals before they've even left school. This measure will extend such lifelong marks of Cain from the housing ghetto to the information ghetto.
SDI failed because (one of many reasons) several of the technologies involved, particularly X ray lasers, relied on putting extremely large power sources into orbit, which basically means nukes, and there are already treaties in place that forbid the exo-atmospheric use of nuclear weapons.
Using this meteor-smashing as an excuse to start orbiting a Death Star is just giving carte blanche to the US military-industrial complex to gear up for full blown SDI again. An international anti-meteor shield treaty would be exploited in seconds by the US.
You agree that the Australian regulation is ignorant and inept, then seem to be trying to justify it on the basis that there is evil in the world.
Will these new rules make the World a better place ?
Will these new rules make Australia a worse place ?
Laws have been around for a very long time, and we already have of the ones we could ever need. Very rarely is it really necessary to invent new laws, when a law that is properly drafted in the first place (and is enforced by judges who aren't afraid to LART a few loophole-seeking lawyers) will often serve. How many things are there on the Net which are immoral now, were already illegal outside the Net yesterday and have actually had their illegal status appreciably changed by this new law ? If something is already illegal to do, then you don't need anew law to cover it, just because it happens in a new place.
Whenever governments are let loose with a lawbook, they write in new laws which reduce personal freedom in favour of government control, and at little benefit to the general population. We already had the means to punish many of the crimes that "occur on the Net" and if we needed any more, then it certainly wasn't a draconian ruling of this magnitude.
Why is it that a body to regulate Net content for the population at large, is composed predominantly of schoolteachers ? Australia appears to have selected the perfect "k12 regulatory body", then placed them in charge of everything.
At least being forced to wear a chador in Australia will reduce the risk of skin cancer.
PS - Have you seen some of the linked pages in the.gov.au domain ? "Test Page", "Under Construction" and flakey ASP search engines. these people clearly can't run their own corner of the Net, let alone everyone else's.
USofA [...] have some troops start wearing blue berets
I don't have anything like as much of a problem with US troops, as I do with US covert action. Sure, there's a US tendency to bomb the crap out of things first, then worry about what to do with the displaced civilians, but that's just the over-enthusiasm of a young nation. If only the US army started wearing blue berets and joined in with the rest of the world, rather than leading from the front and straight into a debacle.
If you want to see what peacekeeping involves, hassle your local TV station to screen a two-part drama made by the BBC called "Warriors". This was screened last weekend in the UK and is a really excellent piece of work about how impossible the UN peacekeeper's role is.
I work as a "contractor" according to UK practice. Hourly paid freelance, but hired out on 3 month+ terms for fairly static contracts. If I wourk 41 hours, I typically bill it as the agreed 40, because there's management pressure not to have worked the extra hour in the first place. If I work 50-60 hours for weeks at a time, I bill it and get rich and exhausted.
Do I care between salary and hourly ? Not a bit of it -- I care far more about the other issues; the staff management culture, the project management culture, the nerd interest in the work and the quality of the office coffee. I often have great difficulty in finding my next contract; it's easy enough to find "a contract" and it's pretty easy to find the best paid contract (because that's all that the agencies see as significant). It's much, much harder to find a contract I'll be happy with; one that has a good atmosphere and interesting technical aspects.
As for security, salaries aren't secure anyway (these days). My security comes from a month's living expenses in the bank and a skillset that I keep up to date. I've worked in plenty of offices where the employed staff expressed horror at my "insecurity", then have found themselves downsized a month later.
you all know that they do a lot to protect your way of life.
When did my way of life rely on complicity in the assasination of democratically elected heads of state (Allende, Lumumba, et al.) ? American foreign policy throughout the entire 20th century has been inept and blundering, where brutish attempts to over-rule populations in the interests of US business (pre-war, how about Panama or the Phillipines) has frequently back-fired (Ho Chi Minh was originally trained by the USA as a nationalist resistance fighter against the Japanese)in a way that reflects badly on America and often far worse on other "Western" nations (As a Brit, I'm only just now re-establishing diplomatic relations with Libya, no thanks to an ineffectual US bombing raid).
Uncle Sam clearly wants to be the World's Policeman. Unfortunately he's more of the pig-bellied donut-swilling redneck with a fondness for beating up Rodney King, than the firm-jawed Harrison Ford hero that the US would like us to believe.
Just for the record, the CIA aren't killing on my behalf.
the PTA was passed by a Labour government, not a Conservative one.
Stallmann never actually says this, although his wording is admittedly very unclear: What the previous (Conservative) government did do was to begin the removal of a right to jury trials for all criminal offences.
IANAL, but:
We never had a right to juries for all offences, as the more trivial have been dealt with by magistrates since time immemorial.
We aren't losing the right to jury trials, just the right for some offences (which ones, aren't yet clear)
That said, it's a bad rule, which is part of an even worse bill. This government is shaping up to be worse than the last one, and Jack Straw is one of the most centralist, controlling, power-crazed and even downright fascist Home Secretaries we've ever had (including Michael Howard). I don't claim to understand it, but a government which is generally spineless seems to regard it as important to impose draconian rules on almost everything.
Slashdot Mirror
16-bit or even 8-bit registers instead of 32 bit registers. [...] need to be sure that the values in the registers are below 65536 or 256 to use these tricks,
Isn't that trivial old-tech for compiler optimisation ? If your type system is strong enough to know that it's an 8 bit operand, then you're only ever going to need the 8 bit register.
You can argue that multiplying two int8 only really needs an int16 result if the initial values are big enough, which is fair comment in favour of human optimisation. OTOH, it's not a rocket science extension to the type system to allow an int4 type to be declared, even if it's always held in an >=8 bit register and the compiler can then safely optimise that to place the result back into an int8. That way you even improve the code quality, as there's no discrepancy between the valid and the apparently valid numeric ranges, as you get with the human optimisation and the non-obvious limiting of the initial int8 to be <0xF
Anyone remember BCPL ? 8-)
when the programmer has decided that space is more important than speed.
That would seem to be one of the issues where manual coding has the edge. I agree with your general point, but I think there's still work to do before auto-generation is perfect.
Imagine a case where an algorithm could easily optimise either way speed/space - maybe there's a hash table that's going to hold some programmer-controlled depth of the initial search and allowing it to expand would make usage quicker, but eat memory. A human coder would probably know the pattern of usage this routine would get. By knowing the practical number of data items to be encountered, they could optimise the hash size. A compiler can't do this, because the necessary information comes from the overall systemm domain, not just the source code. To allow compilers to compete effectively, we'll need much more subtle optimisation hinting than we currently have; especially that of the form "ignore this block, it's only used once" and "speed like crazy here, and you'll never have more than 5 items loaded simultaneously".
I'm not a compiler / assembler geek, so maybe someone is already doing this ?
First step to knowledge is realising when you don't know something.
A year ago, I realised that I was missing the XML boat and played some rapid catch-up. Now I'm a real evangelist for it. XML is the most exciting new tech I've seen since reliable IP stacks on every desktop. Until Summer I had to push clients into using XML, Autumn I was first recruited because of my XML knowledge, and this year the phone has gone into meltdown.
Should you rush out and dive into XHTML ? Not IMHO. Start out by getting a good grasp of XML in isolation. I don't know what you do all day, but many big markets will always be pure XML without any XHTML involvement. WAP/WML might be relevant to you too, if you're into palmtops or wireless.
XHTML is less revolutionary than XML. XML is a way of doing new and exciting stuff that just wasn't practical before, XHTML doesn't really add much to that, it just lets developers roll it out without breaking every existing client. It's good stuff and we should adopt it, but it isn't going to invent new business models the way that XML has (how do I syndicate content from everything in the known universe without something universal like XML ?).
I think this is another hype from Microsoft
No, definitely not Microsoft's hype. Microsoft are keen on it, for sure, but they're riding the bandwagon, not generating the hype.
Yes, Microsoft have broken things. Fortunately XML was up and running before Redmond woke up, so they didn't get to break it. OTOH, XSL has been thoroughly trashed by them and XML Schemas are under attack (it's neck & neck between MS & W3C). I haven't looked at this week's XPath goodies from Redmond (new MSXML download yesterday ! Go get it). Much of the M$oft steamroller effect is because they're actually implementing new and useful stuff like parameterising stylesheets (Caveat - I haven't yet seen what they've done, but I know I want it) and they're still the only people with a usable client-side XSL on desktop browsers. I hate IE5, but it's just so damn useful that I can't avoid it.
If XML is a failure, then I hope we should all fail so spectacularly ! I'll be writing the XML handlers that send out welfare cheques to you, and all the other unemployed CSV import coders.
The downside and "failure" of XML is that it's still immature as a wetware discipline (not as a protocol). XML and especially schema design is regarded in the same way as database design was 5-6 years ago. For years before RDBMS design had been the sole preserve of gurus like Ted Codd (i.e. the SGML era), then along come M$oft with Access and suddenly everyone and their dog thinks they're a real database designer. Cue a whole pile of badly normalised (or just downright ugly) data models, or in today's situation a lot of nasty slapped-together XML structures. It will be a year or so before people realise that XML schema design is a discipline in just the same way as good RDBMS design is.
TipOfTheDay: Use tags like <br /> instead of <br/> when writing "tight" HTML, otherwise older browsers choke on it.
this is hardware, so yes, this guy can do whatever he pleases with it once he owns it.
Hardware isn't entirely free of red tape. Just look at the legalese, hardware compatibility checks and NDA that Palm plug-on developers need to wade through, just to buy Palm connectors. The one-off hobbyists have to buy sync cables at retail and chop the ends off.
My old Palm III now wears a coat of aircraft walkway anti-slip paint. It's black, looks rugged (in that ubiquitous neo-Gibson stylee) and is abrasive enough to sand plastic.
Why do you think your Palm is better than my Psion ?
Because my Palm can do this < grind, grind, grind> to your Psion.
Engineering is making things that don't break any more often than you expected to, or more often than the budget allowed you to.
there will need to be a "compression extension" because XML is verbose, thus making messages large.
This isn't a problem.
Microsoft [...] main thrust in the distributed web [...] SOAP -- XML-based RPC
I'd agree with that much.
But when that little GetWidget element comes winging its way into the server, there has to be some sort of gadget receiving and processing it. What do we write that in ?
So what do those of us who leech our living from the hordes of fat-cat M$oft corporates do now for a coding language ?
Get yourself over to www.scripting.com and (!Wavey) Davey's world of XML-RPC.
Yes, it's SOAP. SOAP isn't Microsoft proprietary though, nor is there any obvious way in which the progenitors of The Language Formerly Known As XSL can break it as they did with IE5.
SOAP is damned marvellous. Simple, works really well, every home should have some. If the ****** (sorry, NDA'ed) appliance design crew get their way, every home will do.
It's also good for exactly those long-haul firewall-paranoid trans-internet tasks that Corba can't easily cope with (and don't even think about using DCOM).
Microsoft aren't attempting to kill Java, they're just annoyed at Sun's legal succes. If they can't win the game, then they're going to take their marbles and go home in a sulk.
This move was expected a long time ago. Soon after the lawsuit, Project COOL made it clear that M$oft internal work was going back to C++, after an all too brief dalliance with J++.
I'm a COM developer, so I'm well pissed off. C++ is a ghastly platform for COM work (you can always do everything, but development speed grinds to a halt) and VB is well, still just VB (still my main language, in terms of billed hours, but I know its limits). VJ++ was nowhere near being Java, but it was excellent as a Windows development language for stuff that VB couldn't hack.
Rational's attempt is doomed. It's never going to compete with the PureJava fraternity (Visual Cafe is probably going to be my choice) and it no longer has the tie-in to M$oft internals that made it attractive in the first place. The whole Win32 baggage of VJ++ was the only thing attractive about it in the first place, but if that's no longer a hot track to the latest new Redmond arcana, then it's just a legacy albatross.
Oh yes, and if J++ is going to be anything like as unreliably buggy as Rational's recent products, then it can join them under my desk in the same dustbin. Their UML Modeller was a lot of money out of my budget for a product that wasn't fit to ship as beta-test $10 shareware.
XML as a coding language ? Don't make me laugh... Sounds like VNU still don't know their Arse++ from their ElbowScript
Time to re-write the CV again.
s/J++/Java/
I think the consumer cares [...]
I don't.
I think they used to. Back in the days when PDAs were rare and expensive, they were bought by geeks who cared about such things. Now we're moving to a more mature (sic) market, where they're bought by the naive, or bought as gifts, and sold by the untrained and simian. Increasingly, the only differentiable features between PDAs will be the logo on the case and an inaccurate display card on the shelf at Electrode Hut.
Take a walk through Electrode Hut sometime and listen to people buying real retail products from the real retail sales chain (all shrinkwrap developers should do this regularly). They don't understand the technical issues, and if the sales staff even mention them, they frequently get it wrong (the number of mis-sold Palm IIIe I over-hear !). Maybe you and I know that colour means unusable battery life, but very few retail purchasers do.
Read old Slashdot on cookies and banner ads.
Cookie "security" relies on cookies not being shared between servers. For a simple site, this works fine. When banner ad companies sell banners to many sites, then a loophole has opened whereby they can see cookies that were placed there by many sites that share the same banner servers. As banner servers are near monopoly industries, then that's a big source of cross-tracking data.
The fix is obvious, but it needs to be done in the browsers (or by a filter near to the browser).
Hacking obscure browser loopholes just isn't worth it for commercially honest (sic) data capture. There's not enough good data to be had that way(If you still use Mosaic on an Amiga with an unpatched ActiveX hole, then I doubt that you'd buy my product anyway). Illegal cracking (stealing credit card info etc.) is maybe worth looking for obscure browser holes, but market research is by its very nature a mass-market task.
There is not logical notion that human kind has any implied fuzzy quasi-telepathic state wherin they gain "mystical" powers.
There certainly is, although there's nothing "mystical" about it.
Some tasks are executed rarely, and are complex. Higher, conscious, parts of the mind are involved in performing them so it's a conscious mental effort. Other tasks (walking, running, playing soccer (for some of us)) OTOH, have become so ingrained that they really are almost automatic. A good interface gets far enough out of the way so that you can begin to learn this autonomic (?) response. Once you've acquired that (it takes both a good interface, and practice) then you'll see a vastly improved performance, even with far less effort.
I'm both an (occasional, and dismal) Zen practioner and a skier. I empathise completely with what Tom was talking about in that fine piece.
There's never a neurologist around when you need one...
Someone just needs to develop the killer app for it
Killer app ? Not sure about that, but this is amusing. It's a new slant on putting the personal touch into eCommerce; get a few gargoyles on rollerblades and have them skate around a Paris department store checking out the merchandise for you.
We also have a wearable project here at HP Labs. It's called the predictable, but still cringe-making "BlaserJet".
how hard it is to bind to most gases
Oh, yeah. Oxygen especially, right?
Oxygen bonds well, but it doesn't form interesting bonds. As others have mentioned, silicon and sulphur are the only real competitors for carbon as a "core" atom in life-forming molecules.
Much also depends on temperature; sulphur isn't likely to work at room temperature. Earth based extremophiles (sea-floor hydrothermal vents) have already been found where some of their chemistry relies on sulphur instead of carbon; using sulphides as an energy source instead of carbohydrates.
Silicon is a possible as a basis for life, but only in an oxygen-poor environment. Otherwise it's too likely (as happens on Earth) to find itself oxidising almost immediately from free silicon to unreactive quartz (SiO2).
Why shouldn't alien life be carbon based anyway ? Assuming our model of nuclear synthesis is correct, carbon will be plentiful on any ball of rock, so why not use it ? Even on a gas giant, there's plenty of available carbon around.
The treaty bans weapons of mass destruction, not nukes as such.
It's an offshoot of the atmospheric test ban treaty - anything with a prompt criticality is seen as a device and so is included.
Your point about the OSA is mere anti-British sophistry. Anyway, that nice Mr Blair has promised us a FOIA soon and we all trust him completely. We also look forward to the day when the Labour Party's favoured candidate for Lord Mayor of London, Jeffrey Archer (BA, Oxon) is placed in a position to rule us all equally wisely.
I think this is fair if a consumer has the right to see everything in the database under his name and delete it if he so wishes
Two problems with this:
If you're lucky.
Naturally you won't be able to remove that little incident with the dope at college (where you didn't inhale), or your heroic stint in the school crossing patrol during Vietnam (or whatever else your presidentials have been up to lately).
Last year I bought a house; a mortgage debt repossession. I still receive interesting mail related to the previous owner, I still have an amusing time with my business bankers (I also work from home) and I (rarely) get big guys in long coats turn up on the doorstep. Fortunately I have a lot of sympathy for the previous owner and the sense of humour that finds debt collectors on the doorstep funny (so long as they're not really after me). Yes, I have taken the appropriate measures to correct the UK's centralised databases on all this, yes, I still get the fallout.
The poor will have none of this. They'll collect whatever petty judgements against them (maybe a trivial fine, maybe missed payments on over-priced credit), and they'll be blacklisted from future credit or employment as a consequence. This is a fundamentally divisive measure for society as a whole. We already have a big problem in Western society where kids from large "sink" estates are blacklisted as proto-criminals before they've even left school. This measure will extend such lifelong marks of Cain from the housing ghetto to the information ghetto.
It scares the hell out of me.
SDI failed because (one of many reasons) several of the technologies involved, particularly X ray lasers, relied on putting extremely large power sources into orbit, which basically means nukes, and there are already treaties in place that forbid the exo-atmospheric use of nuclear weapons.
Using this meteor-smashing as an excuse to start orbiting a Death Star is just giving carte blanche to the US military-industrial complex to gear up for full blown SDI again. An international anti-meteor shield treaty would be exploited in seconds by the US.
I don't understand your point.
You agree that the Australian regulation is ignorant and inept, then seem to be trying to justify it on the basis that there is evil in the world.
Laws have been around for a very long time, and we already have of the ones we could ever need. Very rarely is it really necessary to invent new laws, when a law that is properly drafted in the first place (and is enforced by judges who aren't afraid to LART a few loophole-seeking lawyers) will often serve. How many things are there on the Net which are immoral now, were already illegal outside the Net yesterday and have actually had their illegal status appreciably changed by this new law ? If something is already illegal to do, then you don't need anew law to cover it, just because it happens in a new place.
Whenever governments are let loose with a lawbook, they write in new laws which reduce personal freedom in favour of government control, and at little benefit to the general population. We already had the means to punish many of the crimes that "occur on the Net" and if we needed any more, then it certainly wasn't a draconian ruling of this magnitude.
Why is it that a body to regulate Net content for the population at large, is composed predominantly of schoolteachers ? Australia appears to have selected the perfect "k12 regulatory body", then placed them in charge of everything.
At least being forced to wear a chador in Australia will reduce the risk of skin cancer.
PS - Have you seen some of the linked pages in the .gov.au domain ? "Test Page", "Under Construction" and flakey ASP search engines. these people clearly can't run their own corner of the Net, let alone everyone else's.
USofA [...] have some troops start wearing blue berets
I don't have anything like as much of a problem with US troops, as I do with US covert action. Sure, there's a US tendency to bomb the crap out of things first, then worry about what to do with the displaced civilians, but that's just the over-enthusiasm of a young nation. If only the US army started wearing blue berets and joined in with the rest of the world, rather than leading from the front and straight into a debacle.
If you want to see what peacekeeping involves, hassle your local TV station to screen a two-part drama made by the BBC called "Warriors". This was screened last weekend in the UK and is a really excellent piece of work about how impossible the UN peacekeeper's role is.
I work as a "contractor" according to UK practice. Hourly paid freelance, but hired out on 3 month+ terms for fairly static contracts. If I wourk 41 hours, I typically bill it as the agreed 40, because there's management pressure not to have worked the extra hour in the first place. If I work 50-60 hours for weeks at a time, I bill it and get rich and exhausted.
Do I care between salary and hourly ? Not a bit of it -- I care far more about the other issues; the staff management culture, the project management culture, the nerd interest in the work and the quality of the office coffee. I often have great difficulty in finding my next contract; it's easy enough to find "a contract" and it's pretty easy to find the best paid contract (because that's all that the agencies see as significant). It's much, much harder to find a contract I'll be happy with; one that has a good atmosphere and interesting technical aspects.
As for security, salaries aren't secure anyway (these days). My security comes from a month's living expenses in the bank and a skillset that I keep up to date. I've worked in plenty of offices where the employed staff expressed horror at my "insecurity", then have found themselves downsized a month later.
you all know that they do a lot to protect your way of life.
When did my way of life rely on complicity in the assasination of democratically elected heads of state (Allende, Lumumba, et al.) ? American foreign policy throughout the entire 20th century has been inept and blundering, where brutish attempts to over-rule populations in the interests of US business (pre-war, how about Panama or the Phillipines) has frequently back-fired (Ho Chi Minh was originally trained by the USA as a nationalist resistance fighter against the Japanese)in a way that reflects badly on America and often far worse on other "Western" nations (As a Brit, I'm only just now re-establishing diplomatic relations with Libya, no thanks to an ineffectual US bombing raid).
Uncle Sam clearly wants to be the World's Policeman. Unfortunately he's more of the pig-bellied donut-swilling redneck with a fondness for beating up Rodney King, than the firm-jawed Harrison Ford hero that the US would like us to believe.
Just for the record, the CIA aren't killing on my behalf.
the PTA was passed by a Labour government, not a Conservative one.
Stallmann never actually says this, although his wording is admittedly very unclear: What the previous (Conservative) government did do was to begin the removal of a right to jury trials for all criminal offences.
IANAL, but:
That said, it's a bad rule, which is part of an even worse bill. This government is shaping up to be worse than the last one, and Jack Straw is one of the most centralist, controlling, power-crazed and even downright fascist Home Secretaries we've ever had (including Michael Howard). I don't claim to understand it, but a government which is generally spineless seems to regard it as important to impose draconian rules on almost everything.
Why just write to an MP when you can Adopt An MP
?Not all the Bad Bills come from Redmond