Domain: mapquest.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to mapquest.com.
Comments · 367
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Re:bias? (Say NO to AvantGO)Read the freakin reference man! Do I say anything about their HTML? No! If an AvantGo is just like any other Web site (but without HTML whistles) then give me the URLs to those 'just like any other site'. The problem is the conduit.
Yes, I read the reference. Then I explained to you how AvantGo works. Now I will give you some URLs, as per your request, to show you that AvantGo does not fragment the web. All the conduit does is cache HTML pages and store them on your device. You might want to quit believing everything you read. That guy from your link didn't know what he was talking about and neither do you.
http://avantgo.hollywood.com/
http://www.pdalive.com/avantgo/
http://avantgo.10best.com/
http://www.women.com/avantgo/horoscopes/
http://www.all-legends.com/avantgo/
http://www.mapquest.com/avantgo/
Anything else you'd like to add?
wish
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Analysis of FIN Network
1) From paragraph 1 we learn that "The FIN is a non-partisan effort..." however from paragraph 2 we are told "The FIN is open to all Microsoft customers...". How do you spell NON-PARTISAN -- MICROSOFT ???? 2) From Paragraph 3 we learn that "Membership is absolutely free." however from paragraph 2, once again, "The FIN is open to all Microsoft customers...". This implies that you have to pay Microsoft a licensing fee, or enter into some other type of financial relationship with Microsoft to be eligible for membership. How do you spell FREE -- MICROSOFT ???? 3) From Paragraph 3 we are told that "the FIN is a purely grassroots communications tool..." As mentioned in another Slashdot comment look at the Redmond, WA address on the postcard. Not to mention the fact that the director of the FIN has a microsoft.com e-mail address. How do you spell GRASSROOTS -- MICROSOFT ???? If you still don't understand check out this map which has MS corporate offices in the NE corner and the FIN offices in the SW corner -- about two miles apart. 4) This is more of a technical point, but in paragraph 3 we are told that the FIN "...does not provide financial support to candidates." However, from an Oct 1998 ZDNet artic le we see that Microsoft technology campaing contributors. How do you spell NO FINANCIAL SUPPORT -- MICROSOFT ???? 5) Looking at paragraph 4 we see that FIN members "have an opportunity to ensure that important public policy decisions will be made on the basis of reason and accurate information." First of all should "public policy decisions" always be made on these basis regardless of my membership in the FIN. Assuming not, how does membership in the FIN "ensure" that they will now. Thirdly this sentence does NOT state, though it is easy it infer from a quick read, that FIN members will be given any special access to to congress or the like. Quite differently, it does not bother mentioning exactly who this "spokesperson" will be -- perhaps MICROSOFT???? 6) Look at the large type under the US flag made from a computer. Read the sentence "We must ensure that no new burdensome regulations affect our industry's continued ability to innovate." Think DMCA/MICROSOFT, SOFTWARE PATENTS/MICROSOFT ???? 7) I love this one, on the back read the first two questions and answers quickly without stopping. Notice how in the first question/answer combo it is stated that the FIN will "...provide you the tools necessary to help your opinions be heard!", however in the second question/answer combo, if you don't agree with the FIN you can communicate with public officials "...in the manner you choose." In other words if you don't agree with us you're on your own. 8) In the 4th question/answer combo we are told "...you will determine your own level of involvement." This is neat because it sounds like you can work as much or as little as you want. But understand the work of the membership is not needed. Once you join the FIN your name will forever be in there database when they report to congress that "the FIN, with membership of 503,248 technology professionals support this bill." This gives the FIN implied backing by the citizenship whether you do any work or not. If you don't think a large number of inactive members is any good I advise you check out the AARP and what kind of lobbying power they have. 9) Always read the names and their positions on advertisements. There are 5 names on this flyer of which 1 claims to be an MS investor, 1 is the director, 1 is the MS COO. Thus at least 60% of the people on this card have a financial relationship with Microsoft. And the other two are un-verifiable so they are a complete waste of ink. And this is only after reading this for about a 1/2 hour after work.
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Re:Biological Computing
Think for a minute about how this would be bad. You have to grow a computer right? Well then you would most likely have to do all sorts of very precise measurements and set up conditions. These are going to require a massive lab to get to work properly. Also there is a high degree of failure possible. If people are having a hard time getting organs created via cloning and the like how likely is it that a computer is going to be created?
The point you're missing is the self-organization of these systems. The goal is NOT to have to spend months in a lab just to set up conditions to create one unit. These systems will grow, perhaps very quickly into the desired functionality, like a seed grows into a tree. I recall a story last fall about researchers growing LCD in an organic process that didn't require the high temperatures currently used in the manufacturing process. These high temperatures force the requirement of something like glass, which can withstand them without melting or burning. Using the organic process, LCDs can be 'grown' on thin plastic film, creating FLEXIBLE lcd displays, electronic paper, etc. We're only BEGINNING to tap the potential of organic technology.
Also AI for the most part is still a plaything and something that one really can't easily study or actually get a job in. Sure you might learn something but getting money is top priority for survival.
What could EVER lead you to say this? Sorry to go off-topic for a bit, but do you have any idea how ignorant that sounds? AI itself is an extremely quickly expanding field. Shall I give examples? AI is responsible for PDAs being able to perform hand-writing recognition. Via-Voice and other recognition technologies use AI. GIS systems use AI to generate routes. Played any video games lately? AI now produces better, faster, tougher monsters. AI is being used to detect insurance fraud, see Infoglide for example. Search engines use AI to produce better results. I could go on and on, but I'll finish with Slash, which uses a kind of AI in the form of moderation. Please moderate me up! ha-ha Anyway, go do some real research before spouting off like that. AI is not just about the Turing test. -
Re:In a related story..
wisconsin does not exist.
Just so you know, you're not fooling anyone. It might be that I was not paying attention and Minnesota invaded Wisconsin and that the latter no longer exists, though I seriously doubt that's the case. Just to make sure, I checked a recent map of the US. As of 1999 Wisconsin did indeed exist, but still, maybe this is recent news. I went ahead and checked MapQuest. It's there and their maps appear to be up to date. Still, I was not entirely satisfied, so I also checked a few news sites. I would imagine that if something happened to Wisconsin it would receive some coverage. I searched CNN, MSNBC, ABC and even Slashdot (hey, Wisconsin should be right across the lake from the Geek Compound). Strangely enough, none of these sites had any coverage of Wisconsin disappearing, getting destroyed, blowing up, sinking into the Great Lakes or in any other way ceasing to exist. In fact, I got quite a bit of recent news that almost seems to suggest Wisconsin does exist.
This leads me to believe that your sig might just be false. Now, it did eventually occur to me that you may have intended the statement to be true. Perhaps you meant to say
Wisconsin does exist.
However, such a statement is terribly obvious, so I came to the conslusion that either 1) you were misinformed about whether or not Wisconsin exists, or 2) you intentionally stated a falsehood in your sig. The fact that Wisconsin exists has been well known since May 29, 1848 (they even have a stamp) leads me to believe the first option (you were misinformed) is not the case, so the only option then is that you are well aware it exists and are trying to mislead people. Well, I've figured out your game and you're not fooling me and hopefully nobody else because it's fairly obvious Wisconsin does indeed exist.
Also, wisconsin should be capitalized.
That said, it's time you got yourself a new sig. Thank you. -
Nah, the best has to be..
Normal, IL. It is just too funny to go through there and see the cop cars that say NORMAL POLICE riding around town.
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Re:How Silly
My personal favorite (especially since I have gone around it many times) is Detour, MD
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and when you're in NJ or KY
don't even think about visiting beaverville.
You're right though. The names should stay, even if they do make teenagers chuckle
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How Silly
Pennsylvania is known for all it's silly and slightly odd town names. I mean while you're visiting Beaver College drive through Amish country and go to Intercourse, if you run out of gas before you get there, you'll end up in Blue Ball. Oh, and if you're worried about anti-drug web censorship then don't mention that you're from Smoketown or Pottstown.
I hope my point is clear.
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How Silly
Pennsylvania is known for all it's silly and slightly odd town names. I mean while you're visiting Beaver College drive through Amish country and go to Intercourse, if you run out of gas before you get there, you'll end up in Blue Ball. Oh, and if you're worried about anti-drug web censorship then don't mention that you're from Smoketown or Pottstown.
I hope my point is clear.
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How Silly
Pennsylvania is known for all it's silly and slightly odd town names. I mean while you're visiting Beaver College drive through Amish country and go to Intercourse, if you run out of gas before you get there, you'll end up in Blue Ball. Oh, and if you're worried about anti-drug web censorship then don't mention that you're from Smoketown or Pottstown.
I hope my point is clear.
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How Silly
Pennsylvania is known for all it's silly and slightly odd town names. I mean while you're visiting Beaver College drive through Amish country and go to Intercourse, if you run out of gas before you get there, you'll end up in Blue Ball. Oh, and if you're worried about anti-drug web censorship then don't mention that you're from Smoketown or Pottstown.
I hope my point is clear.
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How Silly
Pennsylvania is known for all it's silly and slightly odd town names. I mean while you're visiting Beaver College drive through Amish country and go to Intercourse, if you run out of gas before you get there, you'll end up in Blue Ball. Oh, and if you're worried about anti-drug web censorship then don't mention that you're from Smoketown or Pottstown.
I hope my point is clear.
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Keyboard vs mouse - that old thing again?
The reason is that lynx has a much better UI. First of all, navigation is done with keyboard - which is inherently faster than mouse...
Oh, come on. That old argument again? One might as well say that a screw driver in inherently faster then a hammer.
Go to a page with dozens of links on it, pick a link at random, and compare the navigation between Lynx and Navigator:
Navigator
1. Point with a minor wrist movement.
2. Click once.
Lynx
1. Down arrow.
2. Down arrow.
3. Down arrow.
... [edited for brevity] ...
31. Down arrow.
32. Down arrow.
33. Press [ENTER].
Even if you turn on the link numbers, I find a simple point-and-click is just as fast as entering in a two or three digit number and pressing [ENTER]. Not to mention a lot easier. To say nothing of those interfaces which cannot easily be accomplished in text mode.
Since I'm here, let me also say...
1. download - hit d, Enter.
Click.
2. save rendered page to disk - hit p, enter, enter
[ALT]+[S]. Two in Navigator compared to three for Lynx. :)
3. add current doc to bookmark - a, d, enter
[ALT]+[K]. Again, Navigator wins.
4. add current link to bookmark file - a, l, enter
Press. Point. Release.
show source - \
[ALT]+[U]. Lynx wins by a mere keypress here.
6. Next page - space
Ditto.
revious page - b
[PGUP]
first page ctrl-A
last page ctrl-E
Here you score a few points. These two work flawlessly with [CTRL]+[HOME] and [CTRL]+[END] under Windoze. For some reason known only to Netscape, Navigator on Linux ignores those keystrokes. Grrrrr.
reload is ctrl-R
[ALT]+[R] here, close enough.
redraw is ctrl-L
Not applicable. :)
quit is Q
[ALT]+[Q] to quit Navigator. I usually have it open all the time, so I don't do it much.
What's the keystroke to open a new window in Lynx? Oh yes, I forgot -- Lynx limits you to one window at a time. :) Which, for me, is unaccaptable. I middle-click as often as I left-click, sometimes. I usually have no less then four browser windows open at once. More then ten is not uncommon. (And, no, running multiple instances of Lynx in an xterm is not the same thing.)
I *can* use Netscape but it feels like a huge slow down to reach for a mouse every now and then.
Well, here's a tip -- stop using that screw driver to hammer in nails. Put one hand on the mouse, and keep it there. :) Keep your other hand over the keyboard. Ta-da!
Lynx is a fine browser, and has a lot of things going for it, but let's not by silly, here. -
Would you prefer it the other way?Today's web pages are so full of animations of anykind. What are there goals anyway: sale things on the web or inform people. You can't go on those sites without being invade by publicity. I think this is sad.
Don't consider yourself being invaded, consider it a very fair exchange: A couple of seconds' worth of your attention in exchange for a service. You may find it sad, but if it weren't for advertising, the amount of good information available on the web absolutely free would be miniscule compared to what it is. And that would be truly sad, because the Internet wouldn't have seen the phenomenal acceptance and growth it's been through in the last decade. (I won't even go into the huge positive economic impact.)
This happened with the print media centuries ago, radio 80 years ago and television 50 years ago. There are bills to be paid for providing content at a bargain price (sometimes free) to a large audience, and your choices are to charge for it, take on advertisers or go bankrupt and close your doors. Radio and TV stations have the same monthly operating expenses whether they've got ten thousand or ten million people tuned in at a given instant. More listeners/viewers means higher ad rates and therefore revenue at very little (if any) extra expense. Once you pass the break-even point, every additional person means a profit, and that's why you're in business to begin with.
Print media and web sites are a different story because they have increased costs to bear as more prople use them. Magazines have to print and deliver more copies; web sites have to add bandwidth and server capacity. Call a national ISP sometime and ask them what a full T3 costs. Multiply that figure by 4 or 5 and you've got what a Yahoo! or MapQuest is paying for Internet access alone. Then add the cost of racks of servers and the facilities and staff to run them and provide the content. It adds up very quickly.
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that if an oft-used site like MapQuest dropped their advertising started charging for their services, there'd be something about it here on Slashdot and 500 replies about how terrible it is. (And it would be pretty terrible. I remember the bad old days of the mid 1980s when you had to pay an online service a pretty hefty fee to look at airline schedules.)
In terms of the Fox site, it's not about providing information, it's about getting more viewers for their shows. You visit Fox.com, see a banner for their new show When Slashdotters Attack, decide it's worth watching and plop down on the sofa to watch it. That's one more set of eyeballs seeing the national ads, and a few cents more Fox can charge their advertisers for 30 seconds of air time. The advertisers get the exposure they want, and in exchange you get 22 minutes of entertainment absolutely free.
If it were just about providing information, Fox would have a single, static home page listing their programs and what they're about. Web sites are like electronic brochures, and you can bet that the boring ones get passed over. Fox is a TV network, and the TV business lives on glitz. They want to be able to give visitors to their web site the same glitzy experience they'd get if parked in front of the tube watching channel 5. Their web designers chose a good vehicle for it that unfortunately excluded Unix users. But they've promised to rectify the problem, and that's a step in the right direction.
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Good
Because that would be a nasty commute.
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Netscape Fails Acid Box Test Woefully
I did here's a link to the site.
View it in Netscape Communicator 4.7 it looks like the product of a night of drugs, booze and bad code. Look at it in IE 5 and besides a spacing problem it looks fine.
Since the page is completely standards compliant and IE shows it better than Netscape this means that IE is the more standards compliant browser.
This is more obvious to anyone who has tried to create a website and expected that because something is in the standards it should look fine in Netscape, sadly this is not so.My homepage looks fine in IE but Netscape acts really funky about certain things so I ended up having to sniff browsers to decide what pages to show people.
I loved Netscape when I first got on the Web and hated IE. Slowly but surely IE drew level with Netscape and now (as much as I hate to admit it) IE is a better product. Even without the useful and timesaving features like Auto form filling (I fill forms every other day online and it's great that now each form has a memory of the things I've typed in it...no more constantly retyping my address at MapQuest every time I need directions) or Auto Password fill (use with care) IE5 is more standards compliant and thus is a better than Communicator 4.7 .
We need to help Mozilla. If we fail, we will lose the war.
Bad Command Or File Name -
No cableI had no idea my area (Tampa Bay) was so lucky. $40/month for unlimited access @ 10Mb/s. They even (unofficially) support Linux.
Mike