If I couldn't use email and IM, people might know EXACTLY what I was saying and they might be able to focus on the problem at hand.
I am a consultant and I make a damn good piece of change on the fact that people don't realize that, while I do know exactly what I am about, they don't have a clue, nor do they the means to buy one.
Its the same old profitable problem of "I think you believe you understand what you heard but you can't know that what I said was not what I meant."
They are like babes in the woods; naked and helpless. People like that are easy to manipulate and deceive. They are unable to formulate thoughts and defenseless against blather.
The beauty of jargon, TLAs and obfuscating verbiage is that my billings DON'T STOP.
I worked with one man whose command of the written word was nil. He thought he was an 'inspiring, motivational speaker' because he couldn't formulate a thought that you didn't have to flesh out from your own experience. (He was an Israeli and at least had that as an excuse.) But he was a CEO.
I worked for one man who taught me everything I know about optimization. He would review code and could shift things around to shave off a millisecond. But his specification for a cost-of-gods-sold system was a sheet of paper covered with two crudely drawn file symbols and a box in the middle. (I quit after I kept coming up with totals that were off by $120,000 and he kept telling me that my system must be in error. I KNEW it wasn't. A week later I ran into the daughter of someone who turned out to be his bookie. He was into her father about 120 large. I laugh now but I was supremely pissed at the time. My system worked to the penny and had detected his fraud.) He ran an IT department.
I worked for another man who suffered from the same disease but different reasons. (For him putting a coherent sentence together on paper was a traumatic experience [Not quite as traumatic as my having to read it though.]) But he was a project manager.
I worked for one woman who believed in the Socratic model of education and NEVER whote ANYTHING DOWN. Then whenever something happened, it was never her fault. It was because her crew hadn't been listening. But she was a project manager.
When people of this caliber try to put together a spec, the resuts are hilarious, and very profitable for me.
The illescribate are fun to watch.
Oh, by the way, computers are extremely tolerant of bad ideas, poor designs, lousy analyses, buggy implementation and everything else that can 'compile cleanly' and yield utter crap.
I remember a salesman who had a Sun 'luggable' (it was built like the original Apple luggable.)
The product he sold was interesting (and was primarily a data mining product) but not as interesting as that luggable laptop.
I wonder what the beast LOOKS like. Saying its a laptop conjures up everything from a PowerBook to an Osborne 1 (after lugging that thing around BWI, my are STILL hurts!)
Its so refreshing to find somebody who puts it that way...
I work on the software side and I wish that the people who design software worked with the same thought.
Anything complicated rarely works. (Rovira's law of systemantics: The availablity of a resouce [A] is inversely proportional to [=1/] its complexity [C] to the power of [^] the urgency with which it is required [U] therefore [A=1/C^U])
Sometimes things are so complicated that total non-function is undetectable.
including he was pleased to be 'the fact and fiction section of the Wattford public library' and it might have been recorded as 'from Edinborough.'
Hansard in Canada has the same problem. The staff end up working overnight and errors (like somebody in the next room watching a DVD,) may get confused in, along with the occasional contents of a ham sandwitch and milk that went up someone's nose at a guffaw.
The numbers quoted don't make any sense (nor are they supposed to as they are probably [get the Stats 101 pun?] all pulled out of the author's ass,) and in general are indicative of somebody who only watches CSpam (yes that's an 'm'.)
They're pulling the same shit that Ma Bell did of charging $300 + monthly blood letting for a crappy modem back in the mid eighties. And you had to jump through hoops to get one.
Microsoft is now in the same bind that all companies who are sucessful find themselves in when they stop listening to their "deep R&D' department and start listening to their marketing department.
Ask youself "When was the time that Microsoft wasn't just reacting to what's happening to the desktop?"
The answer is they have never done it any other way. They had to break the law and violate the Sherman act to get to where they were. But is it enough?
They would now have to be able to react to some fundamentals in the business adn there's nobody there who can think that way (they get weeded out by the corporate culture.)
How's Eerie-Bucyrus doing? How is Xerox doing? (They threw away the entire PC revolution.)
You could run a large simulation as a neural net in distributed Smalltalk, taking advantage of the inherent parallelizability (if such a word exists?) of the actions of a neuron firing when inputs hit certain critical tresholds.
Basically, it the same structure I would use when doing a terrain simulation using finite state automata. The wider you can spread the computational net, the more computational fish you can catch.
Its not the object that is so complicated, (a neuron is, uh, stupidly simple [despite its exquisitely complex bio-chemical processes], and can be likened to a wet on-off swich,) its the Relationship and Connections to other objects that become extremely rich.
Luckily connections are existentatial in nature and either, to wax Shakespearian, __be__ (and can request the objects objects connected to acknowledge each other,) or __not be__ (in which case the only thing that can happen is that a connection be created between the objects.)
One of the objects can itself be a connection which means that Relationships are recursive.
(Smalltalk bit block transfer) He was always making assmptions about the underlying virtual engine.
He was always getting it wrong too. I have logged thousands of hours and thousands of miles, from Montreal, Canada to Lisbon, Portugal cleaning up after this yobbo. What a fuckup he was.
The opinion was shared too. It got to the point to where we could write code that would detect his code and, as soon as we came across it and confirmed it we would remove it and read the original spec to know what to code.
"Ghoul" was a geek's geek. He stayed married about a week to a co-worker's daughter. Sad in a funy sort'o way.
They will eventually patent something that infringes on other patents (if they haven't already, I'm just waiting for conflicting patents to make it to the news.)
The lawyers will have a field day picking over the carcass of the ignorant six year old who allowed the patent.
The whole whorish system is busted and had been since Reagan made the patent office 'a profit centre.'
Proof that his Alzeimer's was already advanced by the time he was elected.
Now if only I was coordinated enough not to wear out the backspace/delete key.
And the interesting 'content' can't funded and ...
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 1
so it goes out on the web, where anybody can google for it, find it, download it (paying for it of course,) and enjoy it.
This is a devastating development for 'copyright owners', such as 'studios' of all stripe as it means that they don't control what gets made, (the eye-candy of the week,) how it gets made (ever notice that everything has to have the right look or the right sound and it all sounds the same?) and WHO COLLECTS THE MONEY!
Since the studio system doesn't actually produce anything (apart from censored songs/movies) they are running the very real risk that somebody will get wise and that everybody will start distributing WITHOUT them.
I'll be the first in line, metaphorically speaking, when you can download a TV show, from a site where the artists actually get the money, (something iTunes-like) for works produced on desktops (like Babylon5, Sin City and other 'direct to DVD movies [its interesting that Gooling for 'Independent record production' doesn't show any US companies, try it!])
There goes the lock on the market, when everybody can do it, and cheaply. There goes the exclusive, gated Beverly Hills neighborhood.
complaining about something or other to his vicodin infested audience.
Think Rush Limbau. Think Dr. Gene Scott. Think Jeff Rense. Think all the execrable shlock out there. Some of it might actually be good schlock.
And remember Charles Dickens was a serializing pain in the conservative ass with his whiny "Little Dorit" writings. (And po' li'l Tiny Tim too... Boo Hoo...)
A pod cast is one (but usually more) audio casting of somebody crying out in the wilderness. Sometimes they cry something worth hearing.
Apple has found the business model that everybody else skipped or did wrong.
First it was audio, then internet radio, then audio books, then "Garage Band", then they 'cross-marketed' iTunes & QuickTime. Now its pod casts (which are named after their product after all.)
Soon it will be movies. The billion dollar industry is about to get democratized with tools like the ones Apple is selling using the media channel of iTunes.
The movie makers couldn't have got a foot in a door anyway with the current ball-busting 'block buster' system but as the quality goes up, the more the **AAs will realize what they have loosed in the 'vulnerable' world. (Imagine a terrorist bomb going off in a crowded theater... Why not? Al Queda strikes at bus stops in Iraq. Anywhere people gather.)
And they're going to do it outside the **AAs as well as within. Got a book/song/movie in you? They may be your fee-charging, limited-copying communication channel.
The reason you CAN'T add a feed manually is that they want to be able to sell you the feeds. Its not like a CD which is 'the echo of dead music' PodCasts are produced and damn near live for dirt cheap.
They're what's happening, baby... And if you don't want to be square, you go there.
The receipts are in and movie houses takes have sucked. All the blockbusters have been ball busters. Movies are a mugs game and the production budgets are so astronomical that they have to resort to draconian measures, like suing their audiences, to see a dime.
They won exclusive rights to what exactly?
I'm looking forward to the day when I can legally download a movie that was put together at an indie house (from an iMovie-iTunes look/work alike) and we can get rid of all these movie houses.
Actually, these movie houses are terrorist magnets. Why blow your self up in the street and take out a few people when you can take out a whole theatre full?
They'll probably be made illegal as soon as somebody figures that out.
before Balmer realizes that his company is in deep doo-doo.
Nobody likes to be strong armed into accepting inferior crap at usurious prices and will willingly accept cheap 'inferior'er crap that does what they need, without launching them on an 'upgrade treadmill.'
Most of what people are doing doesn't require more than a Z80 with CPM client-side. The rest is eye-candy.
How often have people upgraded only to find that their spanking new hardware doesn't run that much faster than the one they just traded in because Windows sucks the CPU dry?
the first Gulf war. Now its of the mentality that chooses to do "All Laci! All the time!" or "All Terry! All the time" or whatever is the latest dead, or nearly dead, body "du jour."
I have bothered to go to their site in a while. I'd rather go to BBC.co.uk
I would recommend that you do so if you want news.
Slashdot Mirror
Silly person.
Bush bull-shitted us and the **IAs are blowing it up out of proportion.
If I couldn't use email and IM, people might know EXACTLY what I was saying and they might be able to focus on the problem at hand.
I am a consultant and I make a damn good piece of change on the fact that people don't realize that, while I do know exactly what I am about, they don't have a clue, nor do they the means to buy one.
Its the same old profitable problem of "I think you believe you understand what you heard but you can't know that what I said was not what I meant."
They are like babes in the woods; naked and helpless. People like that are easy to manipulate and deceive. They are unable to formulate thoughts and defenseless against blather.
The beauty of jargon, TLAs and obfuscating verbiage is that my billings DON'T STOP.
I worked with one man whose command of the written word was nil. He thought he was an 'inspiring, motivational speaker' because he couldn't formulate a thought that you didn't have to flesh out from your own experience. (He was an Israeli and at least had that as an excuse.) But he was a CEO.
I worked for one man who taught me everything I know about optimization. He would review code and could shift things around to shave off a millisecond. But his specification for a cost-of-gods-sold system was a sheet of paper covered with two crudely drawn file symbols and a box in the middle. (I quit after I kept coming up with totals that were off by $120,000 and he kept telling me that my system must be in error. I KNEW it wasn't. A week later I ran into the daughter of someone who turned out to be his bookie. He was into her father about 120 large. I laugh now but I was supremely pissed at the time. My system worked to the penny and had detected his fraud.) He ran an IT department.
I worked for another man who suffered from the same disease but different reasons. (For him putting a coherent sentence together on paper was a traumatic experience [Not quite as traumatic as my having to read it though.]) But he was a project manager.
I worked for one woman who believed in the Socratic model of education and NEVER whote ANYTHING DOWN. Then whenever something happened, it was never her fault. It was because her crew hadn't been listening. But she was a project manager.
When people of this caliber try to put together a spec, the resuts are hilarious, and very profitable for me.
The illescribate are fun to watch.
Oh, by the way, computers are extremely tolerant of bad ideas, poor designs, lousy analyses, buggy implementation and everything else that can 'compile cleanly' and yield utter crap.
This is a bunch of legal fees piling up. (Like SCO) Nobody's gonna get rich or right but the lawyers are gonna bill their clients per hour anyway.
(Actually I wonder how many lawsuits are started by lawyers when they can find a gulible sucker?)
Every God is lame because he cannot know he is lame.
(Or, as George Carlin put it: 'God can do anything' Well 'Can God make a rock so big that he himself can't lift it?')
I remember a salesman who had a Sun 'luggable' (it was built like the original Apple luggable.)
The product he sold was interesting (and was primarily a data mining product) but not as interesting as that luggable laptop.
I wonder what the beast LOOKS like. Saying its a laptop conjures up everything from a PowerBook to an Osborne 1 (after lugging that thing around BWI, my are STILL hurts!)
Its so refreshing to find somebody who puts it that way...
I work on the software side and I wish that the people who design software worked with the same thought.
Anything complicated rarely works. (Rovira's law of systemantics: The availablity of a resouce [A] is inversely proportional to [=1/] its complexity [C] to the power of [^] the urgency with which it is required [U] therefore [A=1/C^U])
Sometimes things are so complicated that total non-function is undetectable.
including he was pleased to be 'the fact and fiction section of the Wattford public library' and it might have been recorded as 'from Edinborough.'
Hansard in Canada has the same problem. The staff end up working overnight and errors (like somebody in the next room watching a DVD,) may get confused in, along with the occasional contents of a ham sandwitch and milk that went up someone's nose at a guffaw.
Is this a delayed April Fools' joke?
The numbers quoted don't make any sense (nor are they supposed to as they are probably [get the Stats 101 pun?] all pulled out of the author's ass,) and in general are indicative of somebody who only watches CSpam (yes that's an 'm'.)
PBS mst be having a chortle over this...
an open source open framework for puttting together a phone you actually want (instead of having to put up with features you don't)
The hardware would have to be modular (thin substrate ICs form the components) and you could have the gust in a range of hand sets.
Somebody should work on that...
The marketing flacks must have weak brains.
They're pulling the same shit that Ma Bell did of charging $300 + monthly blood letting for a crappy modem back in the mid eighties. And you had to jump through hoops to get one.
Ask 'em why and its "because we can"
I for one don't miss Ma Bell.
Microsoft is now in the same bind that all companies who are sucessful find themselves in when they stop listening to their "deep R&D' department and start listening to their marketing department.
Ask youself "When was the time that Microsoft wasn't just reacting to what's happening to the desktop?"
The answer is they have never done it any other way. They had to break the law and violate the Sherman act to get to where they were. But is it enough?
They would now have to be able to react to some fundamentals in the business adn there's nobody there who can think that way (they get weeded out by the corporate culture.)
How's Eerie-Bucyrus doing? How is Xerox doing? (They threw away the entire PC revolution.)
They're not even IN the PC area anymore.
They sold it off.
Way back when, I used to know people who worked for that division in Boca Raton.
Even the money making section of laptops is now gone to Lenovo.
They're now out of the business of making x86 style desktops and strictly into the POWER and Cell architectures and supporting chip sets.
You could run a large simulation as a neural net in distributed Smalltalk, taking advantage of the inherent parallelizability (if such a word exists?) of the actions of a neuron firing when inputs hit certain critical tresholds.
Basically, it the same structure I would use when doing a terrain simulation using finite state automata. The wider you can spread the computational net, the more computational fish you can catch.
Its not the object that is so complicated, (a neuron is, uh, stupidly simple [despite its exquisitely complex bio-chemical processes], and can be likened to a wet on-off swich,) its the Relationship and Connections to other objects that become extremely rich.
Luckily connections are existentatial in nature and either, to wax Shakespearian, __be__ (and can request the objects objects connected to acknowledge each other,) or __not be__ (in which case the only thing that can happen is that a connection be created between the objects.)
One of the objects can itself be a connection which means that Relationships are recursive.
(Smalltalk bit block transfer) He was always making assmptions about the underlying virtual engine.
He was always getting it wrong too. I have logged thousands of hours and thousands of miles, from Montreal, Canada to Lisbon, Portugal cleaning up after this yobbo. What a fuckup he was.
The opinion was shared too. It got to the point to where we could write code that would detect his code and, as soon as we came across it and confirmed it we would remove it and read the original spec to know what to code.
"Ghoul" was a geek's geek. He stayed married about a week to a co-worker's daughter. Sad in a funy sort'o way.
has become.
They will eventually patent something that infringes on other patents (if they haven't already, I'm just waiting for conflicting patents to make it to the news.)
The lawyers will have a field day picking over the carcass of the ignorant six year old who allowed the patent.
The whole whorish system is busted and had been since Reagan made the patent office 'a profit centre.'
Proof that his Alzeimer's was already advanced by the time he was elected.
holy shit they're pricey. ($129, $149)
I'm glad I can see (and hear.)
Now if only I was coordinated enough not to wear out the backspace/delete key.
so it goes out on the web, where anybody can google for it, find it, download it (paying for it of course,) and enjoy it.
This is a devastating development for 'copyright owners', such as 'studios' of all stripe as it means that they don't control what gets made, (the eye-candy of the week,) how it gets made (ever notice that everything has to have the right look or the right sound and it all sounds the same?) and WHO COLLECTS THE MONEY!
Since the studio system doesn't actually produce anything (apart from censored songs/movies) they are running the very real risk that somebody will get wise and that everybody will start distributing WITHOUT them.
I'll be the first in line, metaphorically speaking, when you can download a TV show, from a site where the artists actually get the money, (something iTunes-like) for works produced on desktops (like Babylon5, Sin City and other 'direct to DVD movies [its interesting that Gooling for 'Independent record production' doesn't show any US companies, try it!])
There goes the lock on the market, when everybody can do it, and cheaply. There goes the exclusive, gated Beverly Hills neighborhood.
complaining about something or other to his vicodin infested audience.
Think Rush Limbau. Think Dr. Gene Scott. Think Jeff Rense. Think all the execrable shlock out there. Some of it might actually be good schlock.
And remember Charles Dickens was a serializing pain in the conservative ass with his whiny "Little Dorit" writings. (And po' li'l Tiny Tim too... Boo Hoo...)
A pod cast is one (but usually more) audio casting of somebody crying out in the wilderness. Sometimes they cry something worth hearing.
do the same for movies.
Apple has found the business model that everybody else skipped or did wrong.
First it was audio, then internet radio, then audio books, then "Garage Band", then they 'cross-marketed' iTunes & QuickTime. Now its pod casts (which are named after their product after all.)
Soon it will be movies. The billion dollar industry is about to get democratized with tools like the ones Apple is selling using the media channel of iTunes.
The movie makers couldn't have got a foot in a door anyway with the current ball-busting 'block buster' system but as the quality goes up, the more the **AAs will realize what they have loosed in the 'vulnerable' world. (Imagine a terrorist bomb going off in a crowded theater... Why not? Al Queda strikes at bus stops in Iraq. Anywhere people gather.)
And they're going to do it outside the **AAs as well as within. Got a book/song/movie in you? They may be your fee-charging, limited-copying communication channel.
The reason you CAN'T add a feed manually is that they want to be able to sell you the feeds. Its not like a CD which is 'the echo of dead music' PodCasts are produced and damn near live for dirt cheap.
They're what's happening, baby... And if you don't want to be square, you go there.
And the **AAs don't get to say squat.
and the best part is that it will be even more expensive to take this monstrosity apart than it was to loft up there.
NFW the congress could ever aprove any kind of budget that fat. There would be fights do the death over this turkey.
have all died.
The receipts are in and movie houses takes have sucked. All the blockbusters have been ball busters. Movies are a mugs game and the production budgets are so astronomical that they have to resort to draconian measures, like suing their audiences, to see a dime.
They won exclusive rights to what exactly?
I'm looking forward to the day when I can legally download a movie that was put together at an indie house (from an iMovie-iTunes look/work alike) and we can get rid of all these movie houses.
Actually, these movie houses are terrorist magnets. Why blow your self up in the street and take out a few people when you can take out a whole theatre full?
They'll probably be made illegal as soon as somebody figures that out.
before Balmer realizes that his company is in deep doo-doo.
Nobody likes to be strong armed into accepting inferior crap at usurious prices and will willingly accept cheap 'inferior'er crap that does what they need, without launching them on an 'upgrade treadmill.'
Most of what people are doing doesn't require more than a Z80 with CPM client-side. The rest is eye-candy.
How often have people upgraded only to find that their spanking new hardware doesn't run that much faster than the one they just traded in because Windows sucks the CPU dry?
the first Gulf war. Now its of the mentality that chooses to do "All Laci! All the time!" or "All Terry! All the time" or whatever is the latest dead, or nearly dead, body "du jour."
I have bothered to go to their site in a while. I'd rather go to BBC.co.uk
I would recommend that you do so if you want news.