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Now, If you just toss a frog straight into a pot of boiling water, this is not going to to anything but upset the frog and make the frog jump out of the pot. BUT, if you put the frog into the pot when tha water is cool, the frog will like it. If you then very gradually raise the temperature of the water the frog will not notice it. You can eventually raise the temperature of the water until it is boiling, and you now have one cooked frog dinner. NOTE, California bullfrogs, weighing in at about 3 or 4 pounds, have enough meat to make a decent meal.

How does this relate? Simple.

The long term strategy of MS is to slowly increment changes in the way things worked so that in the end, everything works they way they want, and they can dictate how it goes together. If they got greedy and tried to do it all in a year or so, then they would never get agreeement. But by implementing it bit and piece, they can continue to carve a large and larger section of the pie for themselves. All they have to do is think longer term than their opponents.

Actually, I am sure they have on a wall someplace their equivalent of a 5 or 10 year plan to conquer the known (software) world, subject to revision and new discoveries, etc. They likely planned killing off Windows about 3 to 5 years ago when it became obvious that the legal suites were beginning to be a real pain. They are not there yet, but they needed an escape plan. Part of the move to taking over the Internet was part of this escape plan, which is why Gates made sure it was the equivalent of a oceanliner coming to a halt and turning on a dime.

How to we handle this?

We need as far reaching an effort and long range vision as they do. A competitive Argument that resonates. Microsofts's sells to the inherently lazy streak in people, even if the PR is twisted. They sell to "we make it easier for you".

What competitive meme do we offer to fight this Microsoft meme virus?

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(For Example, this classic scene: having a house literally filled with money neatly wrapped in plastic bundles with no place to put it.) I can see kids now, "y'know, if I could only avoid getting busted ..."

a minor nitpick is the impression that the star of the film is depicted as the first person to introduce cocaine to the US, like the US was totally virgin territory.

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Which brings up the question of drivers for other platforms. Of course you could use generics. Some folks may like to use some of the more exotic features that you can get at by hacking the Win Registry.

But this might not be needed in some cases. For example, we all know that Linux users are all serious coders dedicated to the OS Revolution, and so *never* have any time available for something as trivial as games

[JOKE! JOKE!]

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I am sure there is a joke in here someplace, with the climate of Venus, etc. Probably along the line of "Love is Hell", or some such thing.

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So I wonder how smart it is to have sites like this available to the public and unpassworded, or not verified as coming from a .MIL domain or something.

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except for potential flybyes, none most likely.

After all, for both you would need something that could sustain extended times on the inside of a blast furnace.

and in the case of Venus a blast furnace whose primary atmospheric component is sulphuric acid, or some such thing.

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I mean, how many times do you have to send a packet or something before you figure out that the problem is at the other end?

We do not want to end up like that engineer in the old joke about the engineer at the army firing range, however.

Very quickly, he was at target partice, and kept missing the target. The DI chewed him out for missing the target. Engineer puts his finger in the barrel of the gun, pulls the trigger, blowing off the finger tip. And so he promptly informs the DI that the problem must be at the other end.

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There might be a reaction.

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Closed Peer Reviews can lead to group think and political agendas

Open peer reviews opens the process to people who are not peers, which is fine by itself, opens up the speculations and discussions of experts among themselves to criticism buy others with other political agendas.

This is not restricted to the easily cited religious groups.

For example, there is always the competition for research dollars. In support of this idea there is this article over at Netslaves, not particularly a geek site, but certainly devoted to the run of the mill technology worker. To quote one snippet:

Got a problem? Well, if you have you can be sure that a politician will tell you that "there is no evidence that..." that the problem exists. Of course, not - they don't put research money into exploring the really serious problems anyway. (Depleted uranium weapons for example). "Science" - it's what people with money decide they want measured up with numbers.

Academics often analyse, without providing real solutions, always expecting someone else to find the solutions. These other people (politicians, business leaders, etc.) often give research grants to academics, as a substitute for doing anything about the identified problems. The way it works is very clever - the officials give grants for academics to analyse problems as they say they cannot do anything about a problem until there is "evidence". The reseachers then produce research which concludes by proving the need for future research - i.e. more work for them. Sometimes, of course, the academics come up with a different way of doing things, then this is turned into a procedure which ensures that practioners in a field work in the new approved fashion. This "evidence based" method doesn't really change anything except it does provide another set of paper work so that the effected practioners tick boxes to prove they have done the things in the new way. Nothing else much changes - except that everyone becomes very highly educated.

You'll say that that is a jaundiced view - it doesn't quite match the way the world is. There is no way I can provide "scientific evidence" for it. Yet I think its "good enough" a description.

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From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: LINUX is obsolete Date: 29 Jan 92 23:14:26 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki

If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now.

[shudder]

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What Is Interesting is to take look at the series, which was so prescient in so many ways, which also missed the Internet as being a part of world culture. It was really too hot for TV, and took more than a nibble out of the hand that fed it. For those who do not remember it, it was a 1987 TV show based on a world run entirely by the multimedia moguls, and where the Internet did not exist, and TV was mandatory.

Talk about hitting a little close to home.

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• Sheldon Schultz Quick Bio
• Research Group Page
• UsCD Press Release
• Nature Summary
• Space Daily summary - Excellent!

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Between that and satanic rituals, I am sure there is enough there to make a good hollywood movie. Folklore has always muttered things about Bill's deal with the Devil, so why not?

:-)

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Would it be a place where technology posts got moderated down as a "troll"?

Probably would get a bunch of hits ...

;-)

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Regardless of the various moral positions we wish to promote, this is a quandry we all run into.

To a certain degree, it is a measure of our social skills, to be able to be in communication with someone who does not want to listen. Some poeple who are not very skilled try to insist on it as a right, when in fact it is a matter of social agreement (yah, I'll watch your commercial)

And let's face it the freedom to not listen is often taken as an act of integrity. Republicans not listening to Democrats, dogs not listening to cats, Microsoft not listening to anyone (except when it hurts), etc.

I am sure each of us can think of dozens of things you don't want to listen to. It is an interesting quandry.

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The other thing I think I have archived achieves hiding data in an image file by subtly shifting the bits. Basically similar to a water mark, but for hiding binary data.

So while this is interesting, I'm hoping that they don't try for a patent or anything.

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But like everything that gets you ahead of the curve performance only for a little while. If not next year, then in 5 or ten years, it will be obsolete and they'll have to look at rebuilding the whole thing in terabyte network speeds. I imagine you'll be able to do interesting things with that kind of bandwidth. (3d movies, for example)

Although you should not really get into the attitude of "If someone's doing it, it must be old" type of thinking.

(I am reminded of the "keepup with the jone's" attitude you see sometimes in hardware ownership, etc.)

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;-)

While this is important in terms of the field, as far as day to day life goes, it is not very important. After all, we have billions and billions of years before the wrap party.

Other areas of research, like the search for planets are slightly more relevant. I want to know if we have neighbors, and if we have to worry about them

The rest is somewhat abstract for my taste.

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if you are into Beowulf clusters, there is the Parallel Virtual File System. Basically it is something that allows you to configuration the drives from many machines into one large drive.

You can find added information here on other similar systems

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Microsoft has knifed Bluetooth by refusing to support the technology in Windows XP.

"The format still seems to have some bugs in it... It looks like Bluetooth is not ready for prime time" Carl Stork, general manger of the Windows division told EE Times at WinHEC last week. Stork added, we presume with a straight face, that "we wouldn't want to ship something that doesn't work".

hahahahahehehe hohoho

But in hind site, this is exactly the problem on auto updates. How can you trust them IF you want to exercise some control over your own technology.

Heck the most recent IE patch was bobbled, as reported here:

. . . the company's patch to fix a potentially seriously security problem works only if they upgrade their browsers.

I look forward to the following headline:

"It was announced today that the latest update of IE from Microsoft replaces all web links, etc with Microsoft equivalents, erasing all previously existing data as being irrelevant.

An MS spokesman said: 'Why wouldn't you want Microsoft Porn? It's simply better!' "

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I like this alot

unfortunately, if you have a company addicted to MS, making the transition is going to be uncomfortable. In a lot of smaller companies, the Access databases are designed by people with home grown skills. They are not professionals. You have the most amazing kludges running just to keep everything going.

I have a friend who went into a place where they wanted him to fix a database (just patch it up) in 2 days, and the setup would need at LEAST two weeks to inventory. And they were trying to gype him every step of the way. and this IS a 100 million dollar company retailling upscale womens clothing. (names omitted to protect the guilty), They wanted to do the fix inside certain budget parameters that were far too small. But this is the database that runs the financials for the whole company. It is only the lifeblood of the firm. Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.

And yet they sort of manage to stagger by. I wonder how they stay in business at all.

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NOTE: they even have a 800 number for customer care. Remember kiddies, no foul language.

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"Your desired configuration is not compatible with our marketing plans, you will be upgrade accordingly.

it used to be a joke about MS and the Borg. Now it is not so funny.

It is this sort of thing that leads to "bad thoughts"

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Microsoft should probably put in etraordinarily clear armor plated language that this does not license them to theft of corporate secrets, not that this has never stopped them before.

That said, If it wasn't news last week, why is it news now?

(People moan about news items around here being old if they saw it twelve hours ago, but the age on this seems a little extreme)

Heck, it could have made a wonderful story for April Fools day, the one legit story that would have looked like a fake.

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Help!(tm) Help!(tm)

Before(tm) I(tm) Do(tm) something(tm) radical!(tm)

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And the amount of internet traffic continues to increase, dragging the net to a halt.

a modified/updated Internet Cleanup day is being contemplated, with the intent of deleting spammers from the internet.

Stay tuned

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More on the Formula, since I looked into this when I used to work with RF stuff.

Let the radius of the Earth = A
Let the distance from the transmittion point to the horizon = B
Let the height of the tower (ie, the transmission point) = H
Let the Radius of the Earth plus the Height of the tower = C

We can now put this into the classic form of the Pythagorean theorem.

A Squared plus B Squared = C Squared Where we want to solve for B

(Make sure that the Units of measure are uniform throughout.)

We could even get geekier by wanting to get the distance as measured along the surface, using trigometric tools, etc. Drawing it out for illustration purposes is useful, too.

The resulting formula is more combersome that the old rule of thumb given in the O'Reilly article, based on the Parabola, etc. But the formula is Good Enough(tm)

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In some cases, the wireless towers would be 1000 ft tall. But that only gets you to just under 38 miles to the horizon. As noted in the article 10k feet gets you 126 miles. There is a diminishing returns factor here.

second minor nitpick point. The formula in question is very practical but only works for near earth heights. The geometry it uses is in fact based on the shape of the parabola (note the simple square root element). The higher the object, the less accurate it is, but it doesn't get bad until you get to hundreds on miles high above the surface. At which point alot of other factors are getting in the way as well.

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But this is not a story of gene transplant for geeks for four color sight.

And there was a story a while back about a new basic taste being "discovered" (basic tastes being sweet, bitter salty), this being a flavor that is more common in asian foods, and is found in many oriental dishes.

But what about re-engineering the monitors to take advantage of the new discovery?

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If you want to see how slash would look like in haxor speak - click here (courtesy of this web tool)

I am shocked.

Are you suggesting that Slashdot should censor the authors of this stuff, no matter how awful it is?

Let's face it, this is Open Source Literature at its' best.

or maybe not.

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It might make SlashDot look more respectable

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Don't believe it? Remember that George Bush the senior used to be head of the CIA. Who knows what he did as part of those Black Budget programs. A perfectly programmed candidate.

Really, this is a joke

Really.

Don't look at those men behind the curtain

Please?

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Wait ... Spam does that now with the ask off questions.

we are doomed

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Some people need to get out more.

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Alot of this freedom of speech stuff tends to vanish when you get folks outside the cultural norm of the group in question. Doesn't matter what the cultural norm is, and it tends to be amplified by folks with lack of experience as a cultural minority.

Living overseas, even just for a summer, in a place where you just cannot get your MTV and your Dew or Jolt, and you have to make do with what the locals do is educational, if you can get over being an ugly american.

That being said, there are times when you do not blow off the conditions you see because "that's how they do things there". But you got to REALLY understand what the folks are about.

It is one thing to go after MS because of shoddy coding technique, and quite another to go after them as a personality cult.

I can recall arguments that I had with folks where the other person destroyed every objection I made and proved convincingly that I was wrong in every respect, and therefore I had to believe what he said and agree with him. And all it did was leave me completely unconvinced and alienated from him. It took me weeks to spot the flaws in the argument. And it never made a friend or convinced me in any way.

The Big Stick method of debate is maybe a way to grab power, but ultimately it only makes more enemies. Which is not convenient when you can't kill them off utterly. Unfortunately, many in politics like to practice some version of the big stick method. Changing individual minds is much more difficult.

It is better done through other techniques, such as artisitic expression, because this forces people to think. A two edged sword if there ever was one.

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However, it doesn't have the pedigree of the Raymond peice. A quick sample:

This is the logic of "geekboy dating":

+ Want someone
+ Can't get them immediately (at all)
+ Declare that you don't want them after all
+ Repeat

If that reads like shampoo instructions, you're getting the picture. If you think that's normal or healthy, you're missing the point.

Definitely worth a read

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I know there has to be a really dumb joke about MS in there someplace.

really.

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"But Dave, I don't like Hollywood.......Dave? Aren't they just asking for trouble here?

I don't know about you, but I sure as heck hope that this bit is someone's April Fool's joke that launched a little early.

really

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1 = "You had data"

0 = "Now you don't"

very efficient under some situations :P

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