Slashdot Mirror

Wired had an interesting article a few months ago about Google's ad revenue model. I'll go look it up...

Got it.

From the excellent Wired article: So what went wrong? "Business schools will love this," says one survivor."

And very very true. Between this and Enron, the School of Management at my University (at Buffalo) should run out of curriculum on this in, say, 2020.

When Internet providing is exactly like telecomms today.

The scary thing is that, looking at the article, you're actually right.

• Dr Nielsen's quick and dirty ways to better usability [Sydney Morning Herald] (Feb. 19)
• Keep the web simple, stupid [BBC] (Feb. 18)
• Miss the Web's early days? Use this time machine to visit! [ZDNet] (Feb. 15)
• The Future of Cellphones Is Here. Sort Of [New York Times] (Feb. 14)
• Olympics Site Not Medal-Worthy [WIRED News] (Feb. 11)

And do put the source after the title, the title is what is interesting here, knowing the source is secodary. This also helps to keep the primary information (title) on one line, if the secodary information (source + date) wraps then that is less of an issue.

As much as people may want to believe this, there's a pretty obvious flaw with the argument that file swapping = CD sales - namely, that even though Napster is shut down, new file swapping services are bigger than Napster ever was.

Why not just use anti-cracking laws, laws against denial of service attacks, and laws that require (some?) sites to be reasonably usable by a blind person? Note that none of these laws are really "new" or specific to the tech world: there are "real-world" laws against breaking and entering with the intent to steal, breaking other people's toys, and building a store that is unnecessarily difficult for disabled people to navigate.

Windows Media Player does reports your playlists back to Microsoft secretly if you don't stop it. Download and run ZoneAlarm, fire up a CD with Media Player, and wait for the warning.

This discussion reminds me of an interesting article in last month's Wired regarding the standardization of screw threading.

The article relates how William Sellers actively campaigned for his 'Sellers thread' screw to replace the then semi-standard 'Whitworth' screw standard from England.

His thread design was simpler,cheaper and easier to fabricate than the Whitworth design. (analogy here of .txt or .rtf vs .doc). Sellars gave an impassioned speech in 1864 "On a Uniform System of Screw Threads" where he noted "In this country, no organized attempt has as yet been made to establish any system, each manufacturer having adopted whatever his judgment may have dictated as the best, or as most convenient for himself." (sound familiar?)

The article goes on to detail how Sellers had to tap into his political and economic connections in order to create momentum for his standard, which was opposed by many machinists. He first convinced the Navy, then Pennsylvania Railroad, then the Master Car Builder's association. By 1901 the Sellers thread design had become the standard in america.

But (and here's the 'interoperability' part of the analogy) Britain stuck with the Whitworth screw. This didn't create any problems for a long time... until the winter of 1941, when Germany's Afrika Korps started pummelling the Eighth Army in the desert. British tanks and trucks wore out, broke down, etc in the course of war. American factories churned out vehicles and parts for the British. But when the supplies arrived in North Africa... everyone was surprised to discover that American nuts did not fit British bolts.

("crap, that idiot in marketing sent me another unreadable .doc file...")

American factories retooled and ran two separate assembly lines for the rest of the war. In 1948, Britain decided next time, incompatible screws would not be a good reason to risk losing a battle, and adopted the Sellers thread standard.

Give me a break. The FCC has tended to be a corporate tool for the past few decades, and HDTV rollout is no exception; it was the corporations who pushed the FCC and Congress to set HDTV standards.

The corporate sector is a hundred times more greedy and short-sighted than even the most ineptly run government agency.

THIS is better.

Apart from being fastinating and a sign that further evolved life forms may exist, are there any potential advantages for finding extraterestrial bacteria?

Wired Fagazine reviews it here!

Wired Fagazine reviews it here!

i have a good friend who is from bulgaria, and there they mass-produced an apple IIe knockoff called the Pravetz. they reverse engineered the apple and started making their own version. He said that they ended up being more powerful than any of the apple II line. People like the Dark Avenger (ever had a real computer virus? he probably wrote it) grew up hacking these things. anyway, they are mentioned in a really good wired article about the Dark Avenger and the Soviet Bloc's more recent computing history, and Woz even has a picture of one on his website.

"It's a sign of respect that someone sends you an electric business card. It means he wants you as a customer," said Zhao Peng, owner of a computer store in Hong Kong.

What you can do:

Go to war!
Sue!
And win!
or...
Join them!

Yahoo (who helpfully censors search results and monitors online chats)

You sure about this? You would be amazed (or maybe you wouldn't...)at the amount of underage sexual activity, including child porn, easily flowing on Yahoo Chat. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of spam occurred on Yahoo's servers. Yahoo seems to have little, if any, direct moderation of their online chats and, subsequently, probably has little monitoring going on.

The US government is already monitoring citizens without the help of Cisco.
See Carnivore and Magic Lantern

As Morpheus would say: "Welcome... to the real world."

The researcher that is cited as developing the anonymizer Triangle Boy in this article is working for the company SafeWeb which is supposed to be:
1. A CIA front
2. A company that produces software that they won't bug fix and yet is supposed to ensure anonymity.
Tchah! The only thing governments and their spook-agencies are good at doing is fscking things up.

Another approach is to store the power in a wind-up spring, which turns a generator that supplies your power. There's been interest in this approach for years, but it never seems to go anywhere. Probably most people would rather look for a power outlet than turn a crank.

This sound like a great idea. Just combine it with a solar power charger, a sattelite phone, and you'll be able to get online anywhere in the world. :-)

There's also the hand cranked cellphone for when you need a workout for your arms.

Remember that $150 million in non-voting Apple stock purchased by Microsoft, and patent cross-licensing deal? Anyone? Here's the Apple Press Release [apple.com] in case you forgot. Apple was in bad shape, and Microsoft was up for monopolistic practices.

Getting a bit off-topic, but I just found it interesting that Microsoft did the same thing with Corel in Oct. 2000. It's no coincidence that Corel sells WordPerfect.

Microsoft is effectively helping competition stay alive, which is probably cheaper than buying a verdict via expensive lawyers. I don't know how a judge can look at that and not realise a conflict of interest.

It may be non-voting stock, but don't you think Microsoft will continually hold that over the company's heads like an older brother? "Remember that loan I gave you a while back? That was really nice of me, wasn't it?". So now all of these companies are expected to play nice with Microsoft even though they are really competition? Common sense sees right through that, and hopefully so will a judge.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Corel, but I do not speak on their behalf. My opinions are my own.

You can't port OS X to Intel simply because this would blow Hollywoods latest good/bad-clichés: According to Wired Good guys use Apple Macs, the baddies use Windows PCs. LOL... But I thought about it and except for Milennium I really can't come up with any counter-example...

Thanks to the rather zealous readership you've attracted, I think we all have a good idea of who you're marrying, and what she looks like. Truly a beautiful woman, and a sharp mind, too. Congratulations are definitely in order!

You certainly had to expect this would generate a lot of traffic here, but who imagined the reaction from the press?!? I was amazed to see Wired cover it... and The Register, and MSNBC (posting the C-Net story), etc! Geez Rob, you're a public icon!

Now that things have settled a bit and your proposal "story" has risen to be well-seated in the Hall of Fame (currently #5, and close to being #4!)... allow me to review the coverage your proposal generated:

• Cupid's Bull's-Eye on Nerd Site
  The co-founder of the popular Slashdot website proposes to his girlfriend on Valentine's Day. One reader wonders if the marriage would be an open-source arrangement. By Michelle Delio.
• Slashdot editor proposes on front page
  "Valentine's Day special" 14 February 2002 4:22pm
• News for Nerds: Will you marry me? (Cnet) or the same thing on MSNBC
• Geek pops the question online (ZDnet)
• A Google search on "Kathleen Fent" turns up 77 hits -- The first two being your proposal and its' place in the Hall of Fame, and nearly all of the rest referring to your proposal!

That's because you're thinking of this article in Wired Magazine: Never Say Die.

I admit that this comment is going to sound very ad hominum: We need to examine Obasanjo's claims carefully. He's worked for Microsoft very recently.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't call attention to this, but Microsoft as a company has a really bad track record of astroturfing just about any kind of on- or off-line forum:

• CompuServe forums
• Political Action Committee
• "Independent" research groups
• Letter writing campaigns
• MSNBC articles
• online poll 1, online poll 2
• ZDNet talk backs

Sorry, Dare, but that's the facts: if you lie down with pigs, you wake up smelling a bit like pig excrement.

[sigh]

another dam buncha lawyers who think the world owes them a living.living. and then there the the state regulators getting into the act with their brilliance in trying to regulate the internet.

pardon me, while I bang my head against this convenient stone wall to get rid of this head ache.

here!

this actually held up the first attempt at an IPO several weeks ago.

another thing to remember is, unlike most business that IPO today (and not in the .BOOM), paypal doesn't and hasn't made a profit. keep that in mind.

Positive I'm not the first one to post this, but: Taco's Antics make Wired News

Now tomorrow, Wired will probably run an in-depth analysis of WWWuv. Bret Hume (of Fox News probably will have something smartass to say too.

I bet that includes the wired.com article. Did anyone knoew we were bitten by the love bug?

See the wired article about all of this.

Incredible.

This site has details, and appears to be sponsored by the same organization.

Cupid's Bull's-Eye on Nerd Site
now your really famous ;)

Thousands of geeks were hit hard by the Love Bug on Valentine's Day morning. This time the bug isn't spreading an e-mail virus, but through a message on techie website Slashdot. Rob Malda, better known as CmdrTaco, editor and founder of Slashdot, posted a marriage proposal to his long-time girlfriend, Kathleen Fent, on the front page of the techie website Thursday morning.

Congrats!

I saw Phil Zimmermann speak a few years ago and Phil spoke about how technical infrastructures rarely go away. There are no laws mandating 120 volts @ 60 cycles in the US. It's just an infrastructure that's in place, that will likely not go away, ever.

But if we install the infrastructure now, we get to control how it works. Insead of a mysterious Big Brother, we can make a "spying infrastructure" that, allows anyone (not just the governement) to see just what the spies can see. We can make an infrastructure with auditing and accountability, and hopefully it will have the inertia to survive and keep a "big brother" style one away.

--
Benjamin Coates

There's nothing new in a government monitoring such phone calls. Hasn't anyone heard of Echelon or Carnivore?

I'm not saying it's a good thing, but we can pretty much assume that it goes on all the time if you don't use strong encryption for your communications. The only thing unusual about Australia in this regard is firstly that this sort of intelligence gets mentioned publicly and secondly we Australians are very good at whipping up one-sided outrage in the national media.

In the same vein, Slashdot has a nasty tendency to go with the "Australians do it again" angle every time that nation is mentioned. "Australia" translates directly to "privacy issue" in the lexicon of Slashdot-level understanding.

We've been a netflix survivor for half a year or so, and I really like it. It's especially great for watching things like The Sopranos, where there are four one-hour episodes on each disc, and you don't necessarily want to watch them all in the same night -- you can keep it as long as you want.

Unlike the reviewer, we're all the way in Boston, so turnaround time is much higher -- sometimes more than a week round-trip. This means that unlike the 45 movies he mentions, we can only fit seven or eight in a month, and that only if we watch right when they come, so I'm highly looking forward to the rumored east-coast distribution center. (This article was the first I'd heard of that.)

Still, it works out to a pretty decent deal for us, and the convenience is unbeatable, especially in these sad and dark post-Kozmo days. We've got a queue of about 45 movies stacked up (and like the reviewer, pretty much always get the first thing on our list -- I don't know if they do this, but I can imagine crunching everyone's upcoming queues for optimal dispersal of inventory...). It's basically like TV-on-demand, with really high latency.

No. IBM did that job.

Wired magazine talked about this a while ago. The archived article is here

For one, Hank is dead.

Not sure if that answers your question or not...

Just reading that article was a cultural experience.

While it wasn't hard to remember its self description as the travelogue of a "hacker tourist" the article title "Mother Earth Mother Board" certainly didn't stick in the old memory.

The specific clauses in the EULA in question are (according to the lawsuit):

****
2. The customer shall not disclose the results of any benchmark test to any third party without
Network Associates' prior written approval.

3. The customer will not publish reviews of this
product without prior consent from Network
Associates, Inc.
****

This doesn't appear to restrict people's personal opinions at all. There's nothing here that prevents anyone from bad mouthing a product to their friends.

The key areas are:

"Benchmark Tests" - Normal users don't sit at home and do "Benchmark tests" on software, running and testing it's performance on a system versus others. Generally only magazines and certain companies do this. This wouldn't appear to affect your average user at all.

"Publish Reviews" - Normal users don't generally "publish reviews" of software. At a stretch, they may post some comments about a piece of software on the web somewhere, but not a full-fledged software review. This also appears to not be aimed at your typical computer user.

They also appear to have only used this clause once, more than 2 years ago, against "Network World" magazine, again referenced from the lawsuit.

And according to the Wired article, the Network Associates Lawyer says that the reason this clause was in place was because they did not want people publishing reviews of older products, i.e. they wanted reviewers to check in with Network Associates to see that they were testing/benchmarking the latest version.

I see no reason to attribute nefarious motives to the company. Maybe the products suck. maybe not. It just seems that they wanted to make sure they were getting reviewed/benchmarked fairly.

Wired has a better article about this situation. It goes into more detail than the short blurb cited in this story.

• Wired 9.09: The Need For Speed
  
• Wired 9.09: Pocket Monster
  
• Wired 9.11: Must Read
  

• Wired 9.09: The Need For Speed
  
• Wired 9.09: Pocket Monster
  
• Wired 9.11: Must Read
  

• Wired 9.09: The Need For Speed
  
• Wired 9.09: Pocket Monster
  
• Wired 9.11: Must Read
  

This is absolutely correct, and a very important thing to consider. People don't realize that their every move is on some camera somewhere. By making the output from these cameras available, people can see what others are seeing. They are more aware of the fact that they're on camera.

For a much more articulate description of why this is a good thing, please read David Brin's The Transparent Society. A good exerpt can be found at wired.com.

noah

Libertarians typically believe that the government can't do anything right, and they prefer to forget or ignore the part government has played in the Net's triumph. Giving Gore credit means admitting the government's role; distorting and mocking his claims helps deny it.

McCullagh, who is outspoken in his libertarian views, argues that, though he didn't use the word "invent," it is "a not entirely unreasonable paraphrase of the vice president's remarks," and suggests that the pro-Gore comments from Cerf may have a partisan basis: ...

Again, this isn't me. This is Salon . The Libertarian politics is interwoven all throughout the events, from origin to resistance to eventual retraction.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

No offense taken, but note what you've written is in fact much closer structurally to the true argument ad hominem. You've attempted to infer something about the truth of the statements from impolite aspects of them. That is, you've stated my some of my comments are "emotional words" or "political slant", etc. You haven't said they are false. Note the difference.

In fact, they are emotional, because I have very deep and complex associations here. It's a long story. But I'd defend what I wrote as accurate

Moreover, I would assert that a key part of the smear was that it was deliberate. It was not an innocent misquote. Declan McCullagh knows, e.g. Dave Farber. He (Declan) knows who he can ask for factual comments. Rather, the "story" was a deliberate fabrication, and Declan did his best to dismiss people who were "there" via published personal attacks.

Note the difference - Declan did not say that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn were wrong, AND that the motive for their defense was that they were "Friends of Al". Rather, he dismissed what they said BECAUSE of that, which is classical ad hominem.

Consider the two propositions
1) Declan McCullagh wrote a false story
2) Declan McCullagh wrote the story because he's a Libertarian proselytizer

You are correct to note that #1 can be argued independently from #2. However, it would be incorrect to argue #1 is false because of #2 being argued. And #2 is relevant in itself, and should stand or fall on its own merits.

There really isn't a nice way to say someone wrote a political hatchet-job. But I'd say refusing to discuss that aspect does history a disservice.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html and rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is politically a dogmatic Libertarian so extreme that he managed to get a book chapter using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues, and a different book chapter using him as Libertarian joke-fodder.

If you think this is flame-bait, the aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece on Al Gore was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon

After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farberto Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, Declan finally grudgingly retracted the "story"

But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)