I would consider the best thing about the net to be easy access to primary sources - the news, in the participants' own words. This was virtually impossible before.
Now, if I want to read the precise text of Osama bin Laden's fatwah against Americans, all I need to do is type a few words into Google. There it is! I know exactly what he said, without interpretation or distortion from media analysts.
If I want to explore an issue in depth, I can read what Hamas has to say. I can read what Israelis have to say. I can read what the US government has to say. I can read verbatim transcripts of press conferences. So in the end, I can make up my own mind about things from the root, which was virtually impossible before.
So I would say the net is an enormous advance in potential understanding, and has to be considered a major benefit in this direction, especially to thoughtful people.
I moved from using a Windows machine to run productivity software and graphics and using a Linux system as a programming workstation and web server to being almost all Mac. MacOS X let me perform both functions with a single machine, and when I feel like developing outside of my home, I can run all my favourite Unix applications on my PowerBook G4.
I'm delighted with my Macs, especially since they have vanquished X-Windows irritations (ugly screens, hideous fonts). I know you can at least somewhat relieve those problems, but it's difficult, time consuming, and I don't get the impression the result is that great.
What on earth is Kerskydee.com? I can't even tell that's the spelling - the font is so ambiguous in its nature that it could be about three dozen words.
It also doesn't seem to load for me at all. Or it's still loading. Or something. Check the load time; this might be quite an interesting site, but in all honesty I can't tell.
My best marketing strategy is to hang out on freerepublic.com, a conservative news site with a lot of tinfoil hatters and armchair speculators, some of which are intelligent, others who are totally out of line. Whenever you see a discussion of aviation disasters, post intelligently with your link in the sig. That will give you more links than you can handle, especially if you promise more information about the latest terrorist theory de jour. I'm not sure how much you will like the traffic you get, but I guarantee you'll get traffic.
The NTSB seems amazingly sluggish at getting their full text accident reports online; perhaps you could get a subscription to the paper versions and scan them in? I know I find them morbidly fascinating, and I'm sure plenty of others do too. If you put the full text and images in HTML instead of that ghastly PDF, you'll get yourself a healthy number of people who will come and return just for that.
(As of this writing, I have written this message, and during all the time I have, none of the site has loaded past the "Create an Account" bar. Time to get a new host, rearchitecture your site, or whatever. Or, since I'm using Netscape 4.x, just realize you gotta close those table tags - but "Stop" is not greyed out, so I don't know if that's the reason).
It's probably going under because the front page contains a 254k flash animation which is apparently necessary to view the site. Even on my work T1 it's going to take about a minute to load.
If I'd let it. I closed the window but fast, so it wouldn't do something crazy but typical, like crash my browser.
I'd only heard about the site once before, roughly a month ago, so I'd say they haven't given themselves enough time to build a community. But they don't even have a fighting chance as long as that Flash animation is up there.
That doesn't seem fair to Ubersoft, since I visit it at least a couple of times a week. Maybe I would visit daily if I knew there would always be new content, but I wouldn't say the site is losing users on a permanent basis because he doesn't update on a totally consistent basis.
Rockwood [rockwoodcomic.com] is a comparable site that is meticulous about updating three times a week, but I don't visit it any more often even though the two sites are comparable in quality.
Bonds are also investments, but are very different from stocks.
Bonds are an obligation to pay. They are like a credit card with a very high credit limit. If you got a credit card and bought a spiffy Apple Cinema Display with it, you have to pay the money back, but the people who loaned you the money aren't going to get more money if the Cinema Display doubles your productivity.
If you can't pay back the debt, you either renegotiate it - just like a credit card - or go into bankruptcy. If you go into bankruptcy, you probably have to give up your spiffy Cinema Display.
If you issued the bonds to make investments like Blue Mountain Arts, worth nearly a billion at the height of the boom, and then sell it for $30 million, the bond holders (credit card company) get nothing.
But if the business you've built up has value, as Excite@Home does, you can sell the business and pay back the bonds.
The heart of this issue is that AT&T is trying to buy Excite@Home for a bit under 50c on the dollar. Understandably, the bondholders want to sell it for more like 90c so they can get most of their money back. So they are insisting on shutting down the network, because then they will no longer be losing $6 million a month, and they want to convince AT&T to pay more for the assets.
Of course if they actually do shut down, Excite@Home is worth LESS, not more, and AT&T will probably wind up paying LESS for the assets, if it even wants them anymore.
In short, the bondholders' gambit looks like it's failing, and they will wind up getting about 10c on the dollar instead of 50c.
I was going to move from my ugly old apartment to a spiffy rented house, and in my plans, I checked to see what DSL speed I could get. 384k, I was promised, which is faster - and cheaper - than the 144k iDSL I had before.
When I signed the lease and moved in, guess what the installer got me? That's right, 144k iDSL. Ick.
Oddly enough, when Rhythms crashed, I got 384/128 DSL from Pac Bell. I wonder why Rhythms couldn't have done that? It was strange because I checked Covad and Rhythms, and neither could give me over 144.
Actually, computers have a downright evil role here: They made it possible for our tax code to become so complex that most companies need outside firms to compute payroll on their behalf. Without computers, the computations now needed to produce a paycheck would be impossible.
Have you seen the screen of the Sony colour CLIE models? It runs at double the resolution of the regular Palm, and it shows - the screen is just stunning.
I saw it in Fry's and fell deeply in lust with it; pity I'm so good at losing tiny but horrendously expensive electronic devices...
As I go through the article, I see 90843ms and 117882ms, so I fear your are mistaken. Darn.
Almost every server I've ever seen using JSP is dog slow. They have what look like very nice reasons for using it, but it sure doesn't look like they quite work out in practice.
I worked with a fellow who owned a Mooney, which goes about 180mph and gets roughly 20mpg (as I have said in previous posts).
As it happens, I went to the same destination a few times with him, both on the Mooney and commercial. It turns out that, when you include the amount of time it takes to get to LAX, find parking and go to the terminal, it was actually faster on trips under about 1,000 miles.
So if you can split a cross-country trip into two or three 1,000 mile legs, you may well be better off with a private plane than one of our tiresomely crowded jets. Cost is pretty close, too.
I have a friend who owns a Mooney prop plane. Interior looks like a early 1980s Subaru, but it will make about 180mph.
It gets about 20mpg, which is better than my car. (Granted, my car is a great deal more comfortable and has much higher carrying capacity, but I don't use that capacity most of the time).
Also, remember that in the current urban world, a lot of time is spent in cars that are stopped in traffic, idling. That happens to be the highest level of pollution you can get. It might well be less polluting and more efficient to scrap the car and fly, as long as airspace doesn't get as full as freeways.
The cool thing about airspace is that it's nearly unlimited vertically, so traffic jams are a lot harder to get. Imagine if your freeway had 50 levels and was dispersed all over the city instead of concentrated, and you'll see the seductive advantages of moving travel to the air.
D
Re:As someone living in south florida
on
Message from Kabul
·
· Score: 2
(I could have sworn I wrote a response to this, but it appears to have vanished, or perhaps I forgot to hit submit while at home).
I suppose it wasn't actually South Florida, but Central. I was going down the West Coast from Tampa to the Everglades and heard virtually nothing but preachers.
In another Florida trip, I inhabited Palm Beach Gardens, went to Miami every weekend, and really loved it. I have to admit that I really loved the high-energy atmosphere in Miami, especially when tempered by the occasional Everglades boat trip. A cool place to live indeed.
Demand. Well-educated people are naturally drawn to Blue areas, and ignore the "opportunities" available in the cheaper Red ones. It's very much a cultural type of thing. Well-educated people also tend to have bucks, so housing prices are bid up big-time.
The huge downside, of course, is that only the Blues that are wildly successful have even what might be considered a middle-class lifestyle in Red-land. I think this may be why many Blues have leftist voting records; they don't think of themselves as rich, even though technically they have lots more money than the rest of the country. I'm personally conservative because I deeply resent the government's share of my income, in view of the exceptionally poor quality of most government services. Because we have a progressive tax structure, "rich" blues who still can't afford a half-decent house are penalized more than Reds who can.
The sophisticated stuff does cost lots of money, but you can avoid it if you want, so that's not the total answer.
As Daniel (the anonymous coward below this post) said, it's harder to buy stuff in the Red zone; you can't get ballet tickets, and you can't get fantastic ethnic foods. Those things balloon Blue budgets beyond all reason. In Redworld, you are more or less forced to live within your means.
This is, of course, exactly why Blues are highly unlikely to venture into Redworld and be happy; we need (or think we need) that urban cornucopia of stuff.
You forget something interesting, which really hit home yesterday when I read an article in The Atlantic(*) about the difference between the Blues (people living in urban areas who voted for Gore) and Reds (people living in rural areas voting for Bush).
It noted that the average household income in a "Blue" area pushed $100k, while the average household income in a "Red" area was about $42k. So why weren't the reds resentful towards the blues?
Cost of living.
An average house in a Blue area goes for $400,000-1.5 million. The same house in a Red area costs $140k or so. A $ 42k household can easily afford a $140k house. A $100k household cannot easily afford even a $400k house. So who is really better off economically, the Reds or the Blues?
I looked this up in realtor.com and sure enough, he was right. And he had other examples. He couldn't spend $20 a plate dining out in ANY Red restaurant. This, of course, is par for the course around the Blue parts of town. He got a parking ticket in Redsville, and it cost him $3 instead of $25. And so on.
The phenomenon is going to be even more extreme in Afghanistan, a country where the average income is not even possible to determine with any accuracy. $1,000 a year is a fortune over there, but that wouldn't even pay my phone+DSL bill for the same period.
If you could make $1,000 a year in Afghanistan, you might well be better off than people making $100k in San Francisco, because that $100,000 just doesn't go very far.
The catch, though, is that living in a Blue area is a lot more enjoyable for more sophisticated people then red areas. When I wandered through South Florida, I saw plenty of places where the only radio was some preacher talking about having us saved. Sadly, if you're a True Blue, even the cheapest housing in the world probably won't make you happy in a Red zone. And that may apply to foreigners, too.
Do you really think that's realistic for such a beloved author? I really doubt Adams was capable of writing something that would upset his fans or cause offence.
At least other than Mostly Harmless. The sad thing about MH is that I really thought he was at the top of his form humour-wise - until the overtly depressing end.
Other than that, though, I don't expect to see something, say, covered with bigoted rants that would destroy his image. I think his future is secure no matter what of his writing is released.
Seems like a sound proposal, since it could be held to cheaper than a single shuttle flight. So even if two valid payloads are launched, we're ahead, and the rest is gravy. In other words, it could wind up being cost-effective even if it got very little use.
You know, I would say there's merit to this, except...
If I took a Vanessa Daou CD (one of my favourite artists) and burned it on one of those $6 CDs, Britney would get all the royalties (because they are based on artist popularity), and Vanessa wouldn't get a penny.
I paid my $25 for Vanessa's MP3 collection, (http://www.eq8r.com) so all my MP3s of her music are perfectly legit. So tell me, why on earth should I pay Britney Spears when I loathe her music?
Far as I'm concerned, the ASCAP and BMI folks, who make these charges, are stealing from Vanessa and the other obscure artists in their catalogue so Britney will get more, and this is deeply offensive to my sense of fair play.
You can find more interesting information on the workings of this here:
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.ht ml
D
PS I make a first-class living as a programmer using open source tools.
Slashdot Mirror
I would consider the best thing about the net to be easy access to primary sources - the news, in the participants' own words. This was virtually impossible before.
Now, if I want to read the precise text of Osama bin Laden's fatwah against Americans, all I need to do is type a few words into Google. There it is! I know exactly what he said, without interpretation or distortion from media analysts.
If I want to explore an issue in depth, I can read what Hamas has to say. I can read what Israelis have to say. I can read what the US government has to say. I can read verbatim transcripts of press conferences. So in the end, I can make up my own mind about things from the root, which was virtually impossible before.
So I would say the net is an enormous advance in potential understanding, and has to be considered a major benefit in this direction, especially to thoughtful people.
D
I moved from using a Windows machine to run productivity software and graphics and using a Linux system as a programming workstation and web server to being almost all Mac. MacOS X let me perform both functions with a single machine, and when I feel like developing outside of my home, I can run all my favourite Unix applications on my PowerBook G4.
I'm delighted with my Macs, especially since they have vanquished X-Windows irritations (ugly screens, hideous fonts). I know you can at least somewhat relieve those problems, but it's difficult, time consuming, and I don't get the impression the result is that great.
D
Can someone tell me what that infamous (and hideous) picture has to do with goats and/or sex with them?
Seems to me that pictures of goats having sex would be a great deal more attractive than what's up there, assuming it hasn't changed in a while.
D
What on earth is Kerskydee.com? I can't even tell that's the spelling - the font is so ambiguous in its nature that it could be about three dozen words.
It also doesn't seem to load for me at all. Or it's still loading. Or something. Check the load time; this might be quite an interesting site, but in all honesty I can't tell.
My best marketing strategy is to hang out on freerepublic.com, a conservative news site with a lot of tinfoil hatters and armchair speculators, some of which are intelligent, others who are totally out of line. Whenever you see a discussion of aviation disasters, post intelligently with your link in the sig. That will give you more links than you can handle, especially if you promise more information about the latest terrorist theory de jour. I'm not sure how much you will like the traffic you get, but I guarantee you'll get traffic.
The NTSB seems amazingly sluggish at getting their full text accident reports online; perhaps you could get a subscription to the paper versions and scan them in? I know I find them morbidly fascinating, and I'm sure plenty of others do too. If you put the full text and images in HTML instead of that ghastly PDF, you'll get yourself a healthy number of people who will come and return just for that.
(As of this writing, I have written this message, and during all the time I have, none of the site has loaded past the "Create an Account" bar. Time to get a new host, rearchitecture your site, or whatever. Or, since I'm using Netscape 4.x, just realize you gotta close those table tags - but "Stop" is not greyed out, so I don't know if that's the reason).
Hope that helps.
D
It's probably going under because the front page contains a 254k flash animation which is apparently necessary to view the site. Even on my work T1 it's going to take about a minute to load.
If I'd let it. I closed the window but fast, so it wouldn't do something crazy but typical, like crash my browser.
I'd only heard about the site once before, roughly a month ago, so I'd say they haven't given themselves enough time to build a community. But they don't even have a fighting chance as long as that Flash animation is up there.
D
That doesn't seem fair to Ubersoft, since I visit it at least a couple of times a week. Maybe I would visit daily if I knew there would always be new content, but I wouldn't say the site is losing users on a permanent basis because he doesn't update on a totally consistent basis.
Rockwood [rockwoodcomic.com] is a comparable site that is meticulous about updating three times a week, but I don't visit it any more often even though the two sites are comparable in quality.
D
Bonds are also investments, but are very different from stocks.
Bonds are an obligation to pay. They are like a credit card with a very high credit limit. If you got a credit card and bought a spiffy Apple Cinema Display with it, you have to pay the money back, but the people who loaned you the money aren't going to get more money if the Cinema Display doubles your productivity.
If you can't pay back the debt, you either renegotiate it - just like a credit card - or go into bankruptcy. If you go into bankruptcy, you probably have to give up your spiffy Cinema Display.
If you issued the bonds to make investments like Blue Mountain Arts, worth nearly a billion at the height of the boom, and then sell it for $30 million, the bond holders (credit card company) get nothing.
But if the business you've built up has value, as Excite@Home does, you can sell the business and pay back the bonds.
The heart of this issue is that AT&T is trying to buy Excite@Home for a bit under 50c on the dollar. Understandably, the bondholders want to sell it for more like 90c so they can get most of their money back. So they are insisting on shutting down the network, because then they will no longer be losing $6 million a month, and they want to convince AT&T to pay more for the assets.
Of course if they actually do shut down, Excite@Home is worth LESS, not more, and AT&T will probably wind up paying LESS for the assets, if it even wants them anymore.
In short, the bondholders' gambit looks like it's failing, and they will wind up getting about 10c on the dollar instead of 50c.
Hope this has been informative.
D
Problem is you can't, at least not reliably.
I was going to move from my ugly old apartment to a spiffy rented house, and in my plans, I checked to see what DSL speed I could get. 384k, I was promised, which is faster - and cheaper - than the 144k iDSL I had before.
When I signed the lease and moved in, guess what the installer got me? That's right, 144k iDSL. Ick.
Oddly enough, when Rhythms crashed, I got 384/128 DSL from Pac Bell. I wonder why Rhythms couldn't have done that? It was strange because I checked Covad and Rhythms, and neither could give me over 144.
D
I don't remember where I read this - it was some news story about the meltdown, I believe - but I think @home got only $12 per subscriber.
The remaining balance was absorbed by the cable company for marketing expenses and the like.
That explains a lot, no?
D
Actually, computers have a downright evil role here: They made it possible for our tax code to become so complex that most companies need outside firms to compute payroll on their behalf. Without computers, the computations now needed to produce a paycheck would be impossible.
:-).
Almost makes me want to be a luddite
D
Have you seen the screen of the Sony colour CLIE models? It runs at double the resolution of the regular Palm, and it shows - the screen is just stunning.
...
I saw it in Fry's and fell deeply in lust with it; pity I'm so good at losing tiny but horrendously expensive electronic devices
D
As I go through the article, I see 90843ms and 117882ms, so I fear your are mistaken. Darn.
Almost every server I've ever seen using JSP is dog slow. They have what look like very nice reasons for using it, but it sure doesn't look like they quite work out in practice.
Anyone know why?
D
I worked with a fellow who owned a Mooney, which goes about 180mph and gets roughly 20mpg (as I have said in previous posts).
As it happens, I went to the same destination a few times with him, both on the Mooney and commercial. It turns out that, when you include the amount of time it takes to get to LAX, find parking and go to the terminal, it was actually faster on trips under about 1,000 miles.
So if you can split a cross-country trip into two or three 1,000 mile legs, you may well be better off with a private plane than one of our tiresomely crowded jets. Cost is pretty close, too.
D
I have a friend who owns a Mooney prop plane. Interior looks like a early 1980s Subaru, but it will make about 180mph.
It gets about 20mpg, which is better than my car. (Granted, my car is a great deal more comfortable and has much higher carrying capacity, but I don't use that capacity most of the time).
Also, remember that in the current urban world, a lot of time is spent in cars that are stopped in traffic, idling. That happens to be the highest level of pollution you can get. It might well be less polluting and more efficient to scrap the car and fly, as long as airspace doesn't get as full as freeways.
The cool thing about airspace is that it's nearly unlimited vertically, so traffic jams are a lot harder to get. Imagine if your freeway had 50 levels and was dispersed all over the city instead of concentrated, and you'll see the seductive advantages of moving travel to the air.
D
(I could have sworn I wrote a response to this, but it appears to have vanished, or perhaps I forgot to hit submit while at home).
I suppose it wasn't actually South Florida, but Central. I was going down the West Coast from Tampa to the Everglades and heard virtually nothing but preachers.
In another Florida trip, I inhabited Palm Beach Gardens, went to Miami every weekend, and really loved it. I have to admit that I really loved the high-energy atmosphere in Miami, especially when tempered by the occasional Everglades boat trip. A cool place to live indeed.
D
Demand. Well-educated people are naturally drawn to Blue areas, and ignore the "opportunities" available in the cheaper Red ones. It's very much a cultural type of thing. Well-educated people also tend to have bucks, so housing prices are bid up big-time.
The huge downside, of course, is that only the Blues that are wildly successful have even what might be considered a middle-class lifestyle in Red-land. I think this may be why many Blues have leftist voting records; they don't think of themselves as rich, even though technically they have lots more money than the rest of the country. I'm personally conservative because I deeply resent the government's share of my income, in view of the exceptionally poor quality of most government services. Because we have a progressive tax structure, "rich" blues who still can't afford a half-decent house are penalized more than Reds who can.
The sophisticated stuff does cost lots of money, but you can avoid it if you want, so that's not the total answer.
As Daniel (the anonymous coward below this post) said, it's harder to buy stuff in the Red zone; you can't get ballet tickets, and you can't get fantastic ethnic foods. Those things balloon Blue budgets beyond all reason. In Redworld, you are more or less forced to live within your means.
This is, of course, exactly why Blues are highly unlikely to venture into Redworld and be happy; we need (or think we need) that urban cornucopia of stuff.
D
You forget something interesting, which really hit home yesterday when I read an article in The Atlantic(*) about the difference between the Blues (people living in urban areas who voted for Gore) and Reds (people living in rural areas voting for Bush).
It noted that the average household income in a "Blue" area pushed $100k, while the average household income in a "Red" area was about $42k. So why weren't the reds resentful towards the blues?
Cost of living.
An average house in a Blue area goes for $400,000-1.5 million. The same house in a Red area costs $140k or so. A $ 42k household can easily afford a $140k house. A $100k household cannot easily afford even a $400k house. So who is really better off economically, the Reds or the Blues?
I looked this up in realtor.com and sure enough, he was right. And he had other examples. He couldn't spend $20 a plate dining out in ANY Red restaurant. This, of course, is par for the course around the Blue parts of town. He got a parking ticket in Redsville, and it cost him $3 instead of $25. And so on.
The phenomenon is going to be even more extreme in Afghanistan, a country where the average income is not even possible to determine with any accuracy. $1,000 a year is a fortune over there, but that wouldn't even pay my phone+DSL bill for the same period.
If you could make $1,000 a year in Afghanistan, you might well be better off than people making $100k in San Francisco, because that $100,000 just doesn't go very far.
The catch, though, is that living in a Blue area is a lot more enjoyable for more sophisticated people then red areas. When I wandered through South Florida, I saw plenty of places where the only radio was some preacher talking about having us saved. Sadly, if you're a True Blue, even the cheapest housing in the world probably won't make you happy in a Red zone. And that may apply to foreigners, too.
D
(*) Sadly, the article is not online.
Do you really think that's realistic for such a beloved author? I really doubt Adams was capable of writing something that would upset his fans or cause offence.
At least other than Mostly Harmless. The sad thing about MH is that I really thought he was at the top of his form humour-wise - until the overtly depressing end.
Other than that, though, I don't expect to see something, say, covered with bigoted rants that would destroy his image. I think his future is secure no matter what of his writing is released.
D
Strange, because all my Amazon boxes wind up on my porch just fine, waiting patiently for me upon my return.
It must depend on your route and the loss experience of your carrier.
D
Oh, I don't have any doubt of this at all.
But they still shouldn't have broken his fragile stuff, clearly marked as such, no?
D
For anyone curious, AUSTRALIAN$4,400 is US$2,278-odd(*), which would buy you a really nice three-chip camcorder like a Sony TRV-900 or Canon GL1.
:-(.
If you're serious about high-quality images, this thing is clearly junk
D
(*) I closed the window a little too early, so I don't remember the amount to the dollar, but that's pretty close.
Well, obviously there is a very straightforward solution to this problem.
Create a one-hour TV show about LEO satellites.
But what would happen if it got cancelled?
Okay, okay.
Does space junk have any value? Most of it was pretty expensive when new, could it be collected and saved for use in new satellites?
D
Interesting article, thanks.
Seems like a sound proposal, since it could be held to cheaper than a single shuttle flight. So even if two valid payloads are launched, we're ahead, and the rest is gravy. In other words, it could wind up being cost-effective even if it got very little use.
D
So?
When it stops working, the orbit will decay and it will fall back into the atmosphere. Since it's the size of a TV, it will burn up in reentry.
So what's the problem?
D
You know, I would say there's merit to this, except ...
t ml
If I took a Vanessa Daou CD (one of my favourite artists) and burned it on one of those $6 CDs, Britney would get all the royalties (because they are based on artist popularity), and Vanessa wouldn't get a penny.
I paid my $25 for Vanessa's MP3 collection, (http://www.eq8r.com) so all my MP3s of her music are perfectly legit. So tell me, why on earth should I pay Britney Spears when I loathe her music?
Far as I'm concerned, the ASCAP and BMI folks, who make these charges, are stealing from Vanessa and the other obscure artists in their catalogue so Britney will get more, and this is deeply offensive to my sense of fair play.
You can find more interesting information on the workings of this here:
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.h
D
PS I make a first-class living as a programmer using open source tools.