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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."
So, no more lawsuits
but instead there will be worms
From bad to evil.
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
"Someone forwarded the message to us and that was the first we heard or read about it."
"Thanks for the idea though!"
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.
"J. Jovan Philyaw ... his sites refer to him now as J. Hutton Pulitzer.
;)
Might as well have changed it to Max Power
I couldn't fail to disagree with you less.
I write in my journal
So... besides the tried and true DanceDanceRevolution (and all its spinoffs - the korean versions seems the hardest so far), there are many others nowadays. (and have been)
For those who complains that there is insufficient stuff for your hands to do because "nobody dances like that", there is also ParaParaParadise or somesuch that focuses on the hands. If you follow *exactly* what the person do onscreen, it actually gets pretty fancy.
Moreover, in Japan I have seen some boxing games where you would put on a pair of gloves and hit targets as they come up; at least one of them is themed after "Fist of the Northern Star." Also gives you quite a cardiovascular workout after a while.
Then we have the horse-riding ones... While looking silly, those gets tiring!
Another "all the rage" game is a drumming one. The Playstation version is not so tiring, but in the arcade with big drums and relatively heavy sticks, they can get interesting mighty quick (since for fast tracks you have to accelerate a fairly massy stick to the drum at high frequency).
In ESPN-zone in downtown Chicago, there is also a rock-climbing thingy. Nobody can afford one on their own, but that's probably the most physically engaging "game" I have ever played.
so... no reason to stick just to the bikes, y'all.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I got my :CueCat back in 98 I think; came with the issue of Wired Mag. There were some driver issues and it didn't install, so I just threw it in the closet where it still is.
In fact, here's a picture to prove I was part of the moron revolution.
For all you paranoid types out there, this GEOUrl thing is remarkably easy to defeat
1. don't participate - it ain't mandatory, so you have no reason to bitch.
2. lie - hell, it could even help. make it look like you live someplace glamorous rather than in the basement of your parent's house in Poughkeepsie.
I fail to see a problem here.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Go read about your hero... assuming you can read. Edison was a brilliant marketeer, but a piss-poor pseudo-scientist who blundered into most of his "inventions" by sheer dumb luck when he didn't steal them outright. He lived by patents, and had a stable of lawyers file for patents everywhere patents were obtainable. Tesla had gas-discharge lighting in his labs years before Lamb invented incandescent electric lights (two years before Edison). Edison thought alternating current was an abomination (he had no clue how it worked) and tried to push DC generation... ooh, a generator on every city block, great idea. Lucky for all of us that he fired Tesla, and that Tesla hooked up with George Westinghouse. Had Edison been a scientist, he would have done something besides patent the "edison effect" and not left the invention of the vacuum tube to DeForest. And on and on... Edison was a jerk, a joke, and the original abuser of IP patents. What a guy.
Actually it was pretty useful--free barcode reader. I cataloged my entire library with it. I scanned each book and used some software I downloaded that looked up each book's barcode on Amazon, Library of Congress, (or other sites) and added it to a database.
(Not sure how just how much abuse this'll generate, but let's see...)
So we all hate Bill Gates. Apparently for being ruthlessly successful at exploiting the (fairly) free, capitalist system we all hold dear. We're constantly shocked at the audacity of Microsoft, and Bill is the epitome of the evil that company represents.
This is a guy who (with his wife) is in the process of donating $24 Billion to good causes. Not frat house good causes, not pussyfooting PC good causes. He has set up a well-run foundation (you know, managment and accountability) to see that money put to use combatting aids in India, that sort of thing.
$24 Billion is more than most developed countries in the world will put into that sort of work in our lifetimes.
But we do enjoy banging on that "He tried to squash Netscape!", because that's a) more important and b) surely nothing to do with how we like to run things?
The wrong place to point it out, maybe, but it's fun to sit back and reflect on the irony sometimes.
Oh, and guess what? The school made several stops to various Radio Shacks a few years ago and currently has nine CueCats that they plan to use on the library terminals. Nine. They read Code 128 for free, what more could you want?
This could be a discussion about, oh, bio-engineered hamsters or the moons of Neptune, and you'd still get the pathetic Microsoft non-sequitur.
Why? Because someone with mod points will probably think it's funny.
BTW, welcome to Slashdot. Or something.