Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: :CueCat, Exercise, Wormage
When pranksters float your trial balloons for you. ninenet writes "A follow-up on the story posted earlier on Slashdot ... The RIAA has now officially stated that the claims of an elaborate P2P worm are 'a complete hoax.' A story on eWeek quotes an RIAA spokesman as saying, "Someone forwarded the message to us and that was the first we heard or read about it.""
<Location>,<location>,<location > A few days ago, we mentioned the interesting geographic lookup / markup system of GeoURL. Joshua Schachter, the fellow who runs GeoURL (and editor of memepool, to boot), writes with "some responses of mine to comments posted:
Q: "Why not use the WHOIS database for address information?"A: GeoURL is geographic content markup. Nobody cares where your server is - where are YOU? That said, I'm waiting for someone to hook their GPS into their web page and keep GeoURL updated.
This way different URLs can have different coordinates, as well.
Q: "Blah blah blah blah privacy."
A: If you want privacy, don't put your location on your web page.
Q: "You're evil and you're going to steal this information and go private, just like CDDB did."
A: The content is marked up on the pages and not entered into my database. Anyone could easily write a similar service (and I hope they do.)
I plan to create a page containing lessons learned and useful code snippets for other people who would like to implement similar stuff."
Most importantly, I hope this helps the development of distributed speed-trap logging and mapping!
Making this up would be too easy. An anonymous reader writes "Egomaniacal former Dot.Bomb 'entrepreneur' J. Jovan Philyaw has escaped the asylum and is back with even bigger delusions of grandeur. When last we saw him, J.J. was trying to shove the misbegotten :CueCat/:CRQ combination on unsuspecting users. Now, he's apparently writing a couple of books, selling his 'power crystals' that adorned the offices of Digital:Convergence, and changing his name: his sites refer to him now as J. Hutton Pulitzer. Apparently the utter and complete failure of Digital:Convergence (loss of at least $185M) hasn't dented his ego one bit. In his bio, he actually compares himself to Thomas Edison. A hilarious must-read for those who followed the :CueCat debacle (and for those of us who worked there)."
I hope all these things can be adapted for recumbents. Jamie Briant writes: "Saw your update to the slashdot story on games for exercise bikes. I'm a developer for exertris.com that makes a bike with LCD screen built in, which we sell primarily to gyms, but you can buy in the UK at Harrods. We write and tune the games specifically to motivate you to exercise."
Might be apt if you're not a fan of his (and many of us aren't). He did have a way of stealing ideas and claiming them as his own. He was just a really good marketer.
I play DDR some (my brother has it), and I can say, it's not "tried and true." It requires way too much coordination for me to be much interested in it, and for people looking for something to get them started on an exercise program, well, the more overweight you are, the more uncomfortable "Have You Never Been Mello" becomes after your third round.
:P As long as I'm not thinking about the exercise portion, I'd absolutely love it.
I don't mind anaerobic exercise, which is what you get if you do something for an extended duration, like jog, or ride a bike.
I like the concept of immersing a game into a bike. I'm thinking about putting rotary encoders on my bike's handlebars and pedals, and mounting it to a frame. I should be able to rig up some box that translates the signals into something the Linux kernel joystick drivers can use. Maybe I can set up Need For Speed III under Wine.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Yeah, I saw that, too. I'd like to know who considers giving the damn things away to everybody who subscribes to Wired and-- what was the other one? Fortune? Popular Science? Something or other.
Shit, dude, if I give away my inventions, can I achieve "unprecedented market saturation" too?
I write in my journal
J. who? Did you notice that nowhere on the site does it list *anything* he's done, just lists of "awards" and such. Awards for what? If I had invented the internet or any such thing, I'd be hollering about it to high heaven on my web site ... oh, wait a minute, Al Gore already beat me to it!
Smells like BS to me...
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
I actually think the CueCat would've been a pretty cool idea if they'd sold the thing for $19.95 with some decent software for cataloguing your CDs and other home items. You'd have a permanent list, perfect for insurance companies, finding out product information, etc. Another natural partnership might have been with Webvan or one of the other grocery-delivery companies -- scan a package when you run out and have it added automatically to your next grocery list.
The idea wasn't stupid, just their marketing and business plan.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
This is an infection vector that security "experts" are not taking sufficiently seriously.
I'm still a bit amazed that anyone was taking the Gobbles claim seriously to begin with. It's an advisory for an mpg123 exploit... the bit about the RIAA in the intro is just Gobbles having some fun.
Gobbles has always had a rather twisted sense of humour, their bugtraq advisories are always full of stuff like this.. they're probably having quite a laugh right now over the fact that paranoid bloggers everywhere took it at face value and started freaking out like this.
In Britain ordinary household lightbulbs have a bayonet attachment. You just shove it in and give it a little twist and it's in. American style bulbs where you have to fiddle with the proper placement to get the screw threads lined up just right, then back off, and try again are called "Edison Style." Yet another item he was on the wrong side of, it's just that in the UK they took the other path whereas we in America are still stuck with the stupid Edison idea.