Slashdot Mirror

Indie artists can use HTTP (and Torrent if necessary), theres plenty of willing hosts.

....they earn money from conferences and such and then turn that into grants and community hardware. Good times.

And yup, the grant PDF file is missing, I've emailed them about it.

Being some random griefer who sends flying phallic objects across the Metaverse doesn't make you an expert in anything except flying genitals. So let's step through your insolent propaganda point by point.

1. "...they're [sex and money] the only reasons anyone uses it [Second Life], despite claims to the contrary by media-whorish Linden Labs."
   Perhaps you're not aware of the number of corporate entities using Second Life, not even for direct profit, but simply as a platform to deliver product information, such as Sun Microsystems, or the educational institutions using it as part of a prototype distance learning initiative, such as Bowling Green State University. Maybe you're not aware of the high-profile full-time businesses in Second Life, or the many, many articles reputable business publications have written noting the unique opportunities that exist in SL. There's much more than just sex and money. As in real life, there is entertainment, education, experimentation and economy. You know little about these because you spend all your time making the experience inconvenient for others.
2. "A bank called "Ginko" that recently went insolvent sent shockwaves through the economy lately."
   This was no surprise to anyone not stupid.
3. "As the Linden (the currency of Second Life) is not based on anything, Linden Labs simply dumps currency into the market whenever they feel like it."
   A quick look through the SL Economy metrics and blogs shows you're full of it. There is an actual regulation to the currency in SL, you're just ignorant of it.
4. [Your last statements]
   Again, your ignorance shines through. Do you do any investing in the real world? Do you know what happens when you invest 100k in prime real estate in California and an earthquake devastates it? Unless you took out insurance of some kind with an organization who certainly makes more than they will ever put out (on a sidenote, there are investement insurers in SL), you are SOL. Linden is careful to use the terminology "unit of trade" for the Linden dollar, because the Metaverse is not a seperate governmental body, has no legal jurisdiction in the real world, and wants to avoid the IRS putting their grubby mitts any further in. If you are foolish enough to make an unwise investment in SL, then, just as in real life, you learn that a fool and his money are soon parted.

In conclusion, please know what the hell you're talking about before you respond. And stop griefing the Metaverse, it's obnoxious.

I'll agree with you that most of the original poster's points don't really make his case. However, I still think his main premise - that government is the biggest roadblock to IT development - stands, but for other reasons:

• Copyright "innovations"
• DRM regulations (DMCA)
• Software patents (and patent trolls)
• Business model patents (more trolls!)

You can come up with your own list, I'm sure. There's a cost of doing business that is directly related to government regulation, which is fine and acceptable - if the government says that you need to inspect your product before it ships or follow a prescribed process to produce it, then that's a direct cost. You can figure it into your business plan, allocated resources to meet the requirements, and so on.

There is also a cost of doing business that is indirectly related to government regulation. This is caused by overly vague, inefficient, and misapplied laws that have made the exploitation of the legal system a business model in and of itself. There is no way to say "At this point, we have complied with all the regulations, and we're in the clear" - everything needs to be taken to court and decided in front of a jury. The best you can do, even if you haven't broken any laws, is hope that you never run into someone with a grudge and more money than you. That is a business killer.

(To further make my point - while I was writing this, I got a notice that a company has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project... over "illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes". Does the case have merit? Who knows? Until the judge rules - or the suing company suggests a modest out-of-court settlement - it's like the Magic Eight Ball says: "Future hazy, try again later".)

You want adult content? Innuendo? Sexuality? You got it! Best kid's show ever made.

I used to watch that as a kid. Loved the show. Then... well, we all know what happened to Peewee. So, like all the other kids, I didn't get to watch the show anymore. Now they're running old episodes on Adult Swim. Frankly, I was surprised by the show when I watched it again. I didn't see any of the innuendo or sexuality in them when I was young, but I certainly do now that I'm older/wiser. I guess it's like the nine dolphins image. You don't see anything dirty about the picture unless you have a dirty/adult mind. If you're a kid, all you see is nine dolphins.

This is that card that Yahoo! will be sending to those families.

That's only true if the density of housing stays the same - and Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on the planet (see here), so density is likely to drop rapidly outside urban areas. I don't doubt that you do know people who are just outside ADSL range (indeed, my parents' house here in the UK is *right* on the edge), but 91% of the Australian population is already covered by broadband.

Whoever sets up the presentations for Steve Jobs, for example, tends to do a pretty good job for his keynotes

Over on Linux, my perception is that FastCGI enjoyed a brief reawakening as it was (for a while) _the_ way to deploy Ruby on Rails apps with Apache. But now that seems to have changed to over to using Apache + mod_proxy_balancer + Mongrel.

One nice thing about mod_proxy_balancer is that it's easy to distribute the Mongrels across a couple of machines... and Apache will take them out of the loop if the machine goes down or they become unresponsive or whatever. Works for us, anyhow....

Let me see if I am getting this straight. You wrote a java script app that makes 1500 XHRs and keeps appending data to the end of the page and you are complaining about how FF is handling that. Is that your claim more or less? Here is my reaction.

• If you need to populate the GUI with 1500 pieces of data, why not code your server side such that you make 1 XHR to get all 1500 pieces? You performance will improve with fewer round trips.
• Any GUI that has 1500 pieces of data on it is way too complex. Consider redesigning the GUI to present less amounts of more relevant data to the user. This is called progressive disclosure and it is a good thing for improving usability. No one is going to be able to cognitively consider 1500 pieces of data simultaneously.
• That fact that FF doesn't handle well such poorly designed and ill conceived GUI doesn't really bother me. In fact, the only improvement I could wish for FF is that it wouldn't handle that kind of application at all. Think of it as a bandwidth and eyeball saving feature.

With any luck, I won't have to fire up MSOffice ever again...

Meanwhile the Italian labor union RSU is planning a virtual protest in response to pay negotiations that might result in an employee pay cut. The protest is currently planned for 9/25 at IBM's corporate campus in Second Life. Hopefully someone will youtube some of the action.

Say it isn't so.

> I wonder how much orphaned legacy Delphi code
> there is out there looking for a support route.

Here's an option - a Java to Delphi converter (in the second paragraph).

Far better to use Saturns or just slightly bigger and do many more launches. The high costs of launches are NOT the rockets themselves, but the ground crew. The shuttle costs about 1B/launch because of the fixed costs of ground crew to service them. Spacex is doing it right. They are designing their rockets to have a VERY minimal team (big part of the reason why they use jet fuel rather than hydrogen). They do have in the works a BFR (big fucking rocket), where the engine itself is pushing into the F1 (saturn V) class. Combine that with the spacex plan to use 9 engines on a booster, AND are tying together 3 boosters, and suddenly you are looking at a monster, in a hopefully cheap config. But that is planned for later this decade. perhaps combine that with a maglev launcher, and we are looking at a low costs launcher.

As a citizen: in France we have apparently 58 reactors, which provides around 75% of national energy needs, and greatly reduces CO2 emissions of the country, despite less than satisfying environmental politic on other fronts.

They were no publicly acknowledged serious incidents at those reactors (last year there were news about some engineers suicides cases that, according to the media, were due to the high standard of behavior: for example the media said that joking was judged inappropriate in those places).

I can't say I believe that there were no serious incidents, but what I can say is that we had a few very serious industrial accidents and that none has been caused by nuclear electricity generators. From Seveso to AZF*, a blast that killed 30 persons and injured 2500 in the city were parts of Airbus are assembled, chemical or petrochemical plants have been a lot more deadly. And I'll count the several oil tankers that raised havoc on our coasts, because it's not nothing at all.

* http://montoulouse.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/ azftour2.jpg

If someday a nuclear incident happens, it will have to be huge to overshadow the various blasts of non nuclear industrial sites. And I'm not sure if such a huge accident would be possible anyway with modern reactors. And I'm glad that we don't depend as much as others on coal or oil, for ecological, economical and political reasons.

Which leads me to wonder, where that "you" is stored and if that storage is "permanent" or easily disrupted. Is my knowledge of mathematics a "memory"? What about my general disposition?

....is on PostgreSQL. Good stuff!

> To use Ruby productively, you have to learn to
> take advantage of the dynamic typing.

So true. I translated a bunch of little artificial intelligence example programs when I was first learning Ruby and now when I look back at that code there's a lot of stuff I'd do differently. Even little idioms like using x = [] vs x = Array.new... I was a Java/C guy doing Ruby, and it showed.

> Want to show somebody a video or a picture you
> posted to your profile? They have to have an account.

Yup, but that's an enabler, too. For example, you can have an app that allows for conversations to develop around a video. Rather nice.

Disclaimer: I helped work on that one, tech details here.

Yeah, it seems goofy and far-fetched, but there seems to be no end of surprises about the way folks interact in/with virtual worlds.

http://woodside.blogs.com/cosmologycuriosity/2006/ 05/queens_39_and_r.html

http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/04/26/relatively-pl easant/

For those not aware of how British politics works: Blair (and now Brown's) government both follow what is known as the 'tabloid agenda', the most read tabloid in the world is 'The Sun' this is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Heads of the Labour government regularly meet with Rupert Murdoch, in fact Murdoch was known as the hidden member of Tony Blair's government. Don't think Brown is any better though: an interview (sadly I think that's been taken off-air so you'll have to trust me) with the editor of The Sun revealed that Rupert Murdoch often used to joke about having to visit both Number 10 and Number 11 whenever he was in the UK.

As the BBC is competition to Murdoch he would like to see it shutdown. This is natural. Unfortunately for him the BBC is not controlled by the government, but the BBC Trust is. So when the government comes out with weird statements like:

there is evidence that certain aspects of the proposals may have a negative effect on investment in similar commercial services which would not be in the long-term public interest.

It's pretty obvious to me who's behind the complaints. The people--whom the government are supposed to serve--just want the BBC to be the best it can be, and if private media can't keep up? Then it shouldn't be in business! Particularly when considering how these words are touting 'public interest' then enforcing the use of DRM? Public interest my arse. In the words of Hugo Swire (shadow culture secetary):

We're going to have to see if this trust has teeth and the iPlayer is the test... There are companies who feel threatened by the BBC.

So as usual, it's all big company interests. I somehow doubt that the BBC Trust will listen to the Open Source Consortium. Not that I think they shouldn't try, however it's unlikely they'll be able to remove their heads from Rupert Murdoch's arsehole long enough to listen. :)

At JavaOne 2007, SUN announced their new Java phone that includes JavaFX script mobile. Their demo showed a very interactive user experience that was very similar to the iPhone and a, potentially, easy to work with development story. After doing some digging, it turns out that their phone is essentially the old SavaJe platform running JavaFX mobile on top of Linux on an OpenMoko phone.

So, it does seem that a good, interactive, UI will be available, accessible to regular developers and have a good starting point based on work done by professionals at SUN.

It's also interesting to note that all of this stuff predates the iPhone despite the eerie similarities.

wow, they just keep coming, though this isn't a video, just a reality check :

http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/the-p hone-of-th.html

ooh, another one :

http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone-2.html

darn...links got broken. Lets try again :

http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone--.html
http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone-1.html

(Looks like /. code inserts a space between 'v' and 's' in the URL for some reason...but they still work when I put URL around them.

darn...links got broken. Lets try again :

http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone--.html
http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone-1.html

(Looks like /. code inserts a space between 'v' and 's' in the URL for some reason...but they still work when I put URL around them.

..and some comments from some nay-sayers (Apple Mac vs PC ad spoofs):

http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone--.html [blogs.com]
http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone-1.html [blogs.com]

Mildly amusing, I suppose.

..and some comments from some nay-sayers (Apple Mac vs PC ad spoofs):

http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone--.html [blogs.com]
http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone-1.html [blogs.com]

Mildly amusing, I suppose.

> The iPhone is locked to AT&T services. That's how it is until we know otherwise.

Actually, I'd suggest that we don't even know that.

Until it actually ships, it is all speculation. IMO, there's nothing wrong with speculating, especially when so many seem so interested in it.

Why do you have a problem with speculation on this issue? Too much noise for you? I can understand that. I'm fairly sure I won't be buying an iPhone, but I might just be able to stretch to a Nokia N95, which doesn't have the flash UI that the iPhone is touting, but it has everything else (except, perhaps, this voice mail thing) and it doesn't have (m)any of the disadvantages either - here are some (Apple Mac vs PC ad spoof):

http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone--.html
http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone-1.html

I might be more interested in the second version, but time will tell.

> The iPhone is locked to AT&T services. That's how it is until we know otherwise.

Actually, I'd suggest that we don't even know that.

Until it actually ships, it is all speculation. IMO, there's nothing wrong with speculating, especially when so many seem so interested in it.

Why do you have a problem with speculation on this issue? Too much noise for you? I can understand that. I'm fairly sure I won't be buying an iPhone, but I might just be able to stretch to a Nokia N95, which doesn't have the flash UI that the iPhone is touting, but it has everything else (except, perhaps, this voice mail thing) and it doesn't have (m)any of the disadvantages either - here are some (Apple Mac vs PC ad spoof):

http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone--.html
http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2007/06/n95-v s-iphone-1.html

I might be more interested in the second version, but time will tell.

Amateur. I'm still using my 15 button (by your standards of what are considered "buttons") MediaPlay mouse. I love it.

> the Ruby web sites are so completely littered with dead
> projects, projects that have never released code, and
> so on, not to mention rampant wheel-reinvention.

That's just the nature of open source. It takes a minute to start an open source project in Ruby or any other language - and neglecting that project take even less time. :-)

That said, if anyone has a dead project on RubyForge, put in a support request to have it deleted; keep things tidy! And I posted some notes on cleaning up live projects too. Good times.

> RAILS makes it easy to develop in but it's achilles heel it's
> still it's scalability; and it has a problem scaling due
> to the way it's architectured.

Nah. We use it on thenewsroom.com; it's yet another Rails success story.

> I used to run ship fire simulations, with actual fire and
> smoke in a building setup for this type of deal when I was in the Navy.

We did the same thing in the Coast Guard in boarding officer school. We'd go into a ship's hold armed with pistols and blanks, with hidden cameras everywhere and an instructor playing the role of drug runner. It was very effective - dark, quiet, and you never knew where the guy would pop out from. Add to that the fact that he had the tactical advantage since we had to approach shouting variants on "This is the Coast Guard, come on out of there!" and it was a pretty tense experience. We'd do the debrief and everyone would be sweating bullets... good time.

CGA 94, baby!

...at least, the fellows at CGA are looking into using Linux for Coast Guard systems. Coast Guard, the armed service that works for a living!

... the actual press release, including the estimated price - $600-$700.

Looks like there's a Star Wars marathon in Australia... storm trooper Olympics, w00t!

A nice cousin to Maher's quote earlier:

"Don't be so open minded that your brain falls out."

http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/10/the_app eal_to_b.html

Hm, I don't know... I still get people emailing me about this post on a JavaCC grammar for COBOL. COBOL may be dying, but it's lingering on...

> Dell got its name by selling direct. Dell == Direct.
> After spending 20 years proving to everybody that "direct is better and cheaper",
> them selling direct thru a major distributor like Wally World is a
> major, major change in their product placement and emphasis.

Yup, but in this CBC article they say they know that most of their customers will still buy direct. Note that the Ubuntu thing is mentioned in the same article, but I don't see a mention of any overlap there.

An article about a Wordpress vulnerability from last month sounded like a SQL injection flaw, and Secunia has a bunch listed here. Mostly DOS and cross-site scripting... plus some "unspecified"...

For a good, readable, non-boring history of technology, read Andy Kessler's "How We Got Here." It's available as a free PDF download at http://akessler.blogs.com/andy_kessler/2005/04/hwg h.html.

Kessler is a former electrical engineer who now heads a hedge fund. Along the way he has written several books on technology and Wall Street. This book starts with Blaise Pascal and ends up in the modern electronic stock market, with stops along the way at the steam engine, cannon building, railroads, the transistor, and gigabit fiber. His writing style is conversational and he does an excellent job of relating innovation to market forces and military tech. Along the way he drops in some fascinating tidbits of information--for instance, did you know that Reuters started out as a service to investors that used carrier pigeons to relay stock prices between Aachen and Brussels? By beating messengers on horseback, traders could use information their competitors didn't have to increase profits.

This book is full of similar information and is an entertaing read to boot.

It appears that Community Management for MMOG's and the game industry has suddenly hit the pop-culture wave and is gaining a lot of attention.

Sanya's posts are somewhat lacking, but entertaining. Whereas, Terra Nova's Lisa Galarneau has repeatedly taken on tough topics that stand out against the miasma of current trends.

On the other hand, blogs like Virtual Cultures take on the Gamer's motivations and explore the society that forms through these communities.

It surprises me what in the chaff is separated from the wheat.

There have been various articles about it, but I only found one that talked about pricing - $17.70 per month (via thenewsroom.com).

> anyone who can dismantle supertankers with their bare hands

Looks like even they have their standards, though.

I remember seeing these container ships cruise by - our Coast Guard ship would be going north at 12-13 kts and they'd be going south at 40 kts... lots of mass and lots of relative velocity there. Even with a CPA of a mile they were pretty impressive.

> why have a link

It's because thenewsroom is not a destination; see this post for more info.

...and as far as I can see VMWare has done nothing but good for Ubuntu.

> All CBS has to do to make money off this is have advertising in a corner of the screen

Right on. thenewsroom is one of those content distribution sites, and the beauty of it is that you can do things like create a custom feed of Coast Guard videos and you'll get the latest content both from CBS and from other content providers. The videos are of pretty high quality and the ads aren't too long. Ditto for text content, too, except it's a static ad and thus doesn't take up any time.

Disclaimer: I'm working on the Rails app that's powering thenewsroom.