According to How to start your own country, he spent over $ 1.5 million in legal fees to clarify the legal position of his country vis-a-vis the UK. Hardly a "pathetic wanker", then, at least in the financial realm.
He apparently made that money in pirate radio stations operated on ships, so he had a lot of solid background in this before starting.
Personally, I feel real admiration for the guy - he had the guts to do what many people dream of.
Note that, although this seems like a fantastic idea, airtime is bone-crunchingly expensive - I think it's something like $ 0.10 a character (!). Even Inmarsat is cheaper than that.
I knew someone who had satellite access via Inmarsat B. He had a 120' motor yacht he was running on an open-ended round the world cruise. Since he and his wife are gregarious people, they financed the whole thing by chartering out the parts of the boat (little ship, really) they didn't use. You could go with them for some $45,000 a week all-inclusive. Amazingly enough, that is actually a bargain rate for the services they offer - check out http://www.cnconnect.com/ for some of the ghastly rates charged by other charter firms (normally not all-inclusive).
I think it's a reasonable statement to make that money is not a significant problem for those folks. They quite happily paid $9 a minute for their 56k Inmarsat B connection, which gave them trouble-free live Internet access. They told me the equipment cost is about $50,000, at least when they had it installed.
Of course they absolutely hated spam. Can you imagine downloading a 50k Make Money Fast message at $ 9 / minute? They wound up doing it all the time.
A very nice couple, very friendly. I think they were run off USENET by some of its less friendly denizens, which is why I haven't heard from them in an age:-(.
Unless things have changed significantly in the year or so ago since I've heard from them, Inmarsat B equipment is extremely bulky and heavy and can't be carried on vessels under 100'. This is a huge and expensive boat, making it cost-prohibitive for most sailors even if the cost of the equipment itself wasn't already.
If my memory serves, the suitcase-sized stuff is either C or Mini-M with maximum data rates in the slug-like 2400-9600bps range.
Telephone services via SSB were all but shut down a few months ago, which was probably no big loss since the satellite-based systems are both cheaper to use (SSB phone service was billed out at $5/minute!) and more reliable. I don't think SSB is a good long-term bet.
The service you're referring to is iDSL. The $90 a month is the full cost for the service.
What they do is route the DSL through ISDN, therefore extending the reach from their central office. This means they use a more expensive ISDN line, thus the added cost. This also means it's slower than most regular DSL connections.
It took Covad three different service calls, three different service people and three months to get my service operational, because of (i) the lousy wiring in my apartment complex, (ii) a mysterious conflict between them and Pacific Bell, and (iii) a significant difference in the competence and customer-friendly attitude of their service reps. I have been informed that such a difficult install is not typical.
In the month or so I've had the service, it's been down once, for about an hour, for Covad-related problems.
When it's worked, it's given me decent but not exceptional speed. I'd say it's worth the $90 a month - I wouldn't go back to a modem, surely. But at the same time, if you have any other alternatives, such as moving to an area where DSL works, or getting your own T1, you might want to take them. I understand T1 rates in the Bay Area are the world's lowest, so you might want to consider that option.
In one of those charming ironies that makes life worthwhile, only about a month after DSL service was turned on, I am moving to a much-improved residence. I dreaded calling them and discovering the costs, but apparently it's saving me money, not costing me. They will unwind the whole deal with the previous install, charging me nothing; then I have to pay for the eqiupment and install on the new deal. This seemed fair to me. So kudos to Speakeasy, my provider. Now let's see if they deliver on that promise. They certainly dropped a lot of money on the install; I was surprised to see how cooperative they appeared on the phone.
I called them, I signed up with them, and two days later I got an emailed offer for free equipment and no setup fee.
Of course by then I'd already agreed to pay for my equipment and the setup fee, so I feel a bit used. Moral is that if you're not in a total hurry where days matter, wait a couple of days between expressing interest and actually placing your order to get a better deal.
They do seem to offer pretty good customer service, though, although I'm underwhelmed by the speed of my iDSL connection (see my other comments).
Unfortunately, I really can't blame Concentric for it, since they go through Covad and it appears to have been Covad's fault. Of course this is no real consolation since virtually everyone goes with Covad.
Ever since I heard her on a "smooth jazz" radio station in Florida, Vanessa Daou has been one of my favourite artists. She's probably typical of a whole genre of people who make a living out of their work, but stay frustratingly far from the big time.
She started a web site [ http://www.vanessadaou.com ] to sell her newest CD as an "internet-only" venture. Naturally, being a big fan, I bought it. Sadly she went back to the record companies - I assume she, quite simply, needed their promotional muscle to push the music, just as Lars said in his interview.
As a curious symbol of her return to the record company fold, by the way, her web site has turned Flash only, so I can't even view it properly on my computer! Oops.
Anyway, I thought this might be an interesting data point to confirm what Lars was saying in his interview. I'm not keen on metal-style music, but if you strip off the phone transcript sillies, I think he's smarter than most of you think. And I'm intrigued by his notion that the record companies are sleepier than ever in terms of trying to protect the artists they nominally serve. Interesting interview, Lars; thanks.
It was called Sonicwall, and as far as I could tell, it was working fine as a firewall.
But as a censorware package, it had a lot to be desired. I wanted to visit my own web site, http://www.amazing.com . "This site has been blocked by SonicWall". Fine, maybe my site has wierd stuff on it someplace, it has so many pages, how can I even tell nowadays? So I added my site to the "let through anyway" list and went on.
Then I tried visiting http://www.freshmeat.net/ to get some software for my Linux box.
"This site has been blocked by SonicWall"
In a moment of pure anger, I shut off filtering and rebooted the SonicWall. End of problem.
Problem is that you're not actually making changes in MacOS 9 to make it MacOS X; that would be impossible.
Instead, you're adapting NeXT, and changing it to be more Mac-like. Thus the Dock, which I believe is a NeXT feature, replaces several different MacOS 9 features that were never written for NeXT.
MacOS is arguably superior to Windows in user interface, and it's definitely far more attractive to look at. This may seem like a trivial point, but bear in mind that you likely spend more time with your computer nowadays than with your girlfriend, and I'd say few guys don't care about their girlfriend's looks.
The attraction of MacOS X is that it should bear the best attributes of its two parents: Reliability and stability from BSD, and ease of use and consumer accessibility for MacOS.
The way I see it, it can definitely give Windows a run for its money, since the essential applications are there (Office, Photoshop, etc), and the environment should be both slick and stable.
Okay, I know this isn't exactly on the topic, but I have to get an answer to this question somehow.
I have lost something like four different cell phones in the last couple of years.
What I want is a cell phone that includes a device that makes a loud quacking noise (or something) when it falls out of my pants pocket - as it always does.
Does anyone know of such a thing, or have alternative suggestions? I know I could clip it to my belt, but I know I'd forget to to that, too.
There must be some absent-minded slashdotters with my problem.
through the link someone kindly provided in one of the replies to your message.
I'm sorry, but that photo simply is not going to be devalued by anything like this parody. I've seen it before, and I'm going to see it again, and it's a very, very high-impact piece.
Furthermore, if you really think the parody would devalue the photo, it seems odd that you could say that you could pay the AP $250 and all of a sudden everything would be cool. That doesn't make sense.
As about a billion people have said, I don't doubt that the utilization of the photo was fair use. Certainly I don't think it will in any way impact the marketability of the photo, which is the traditional way of determining damages in copyright cases.
I think the photo will get the Pulitzer that it deserves, irregardless of this little creation. It wasn't quite to my taste, but it was well done.
Last time I looked, they were serving from 400,000-600,000 accesses per day.
The economics of life are a lot different when you're a major corporation. I was able to get my mid-sized 100-employee company to buy a $ 10,400 VA Linux FullOn 2x2 server even though it was overkill; the money simply wasn't worth thinking about in comparison to the costs associated with having a slow server.
The comment pages are actually static files that are loaded directly by the comment perl script to minimize the number of database lookups done. So the comment pages themselves are stored on the NFS server, and the personalized stuff on the right side of the page is slotted in by a relatively simple script.
One reason might be that mySQL is much faster than Oracle when it comes to building up and dropping connections.
This is really important for the web, because a typical web program will start by opening a connection and end by closing it. So you effectively have one connection for every hit that occurs.
Unless you do some fancy sharing of connections, this is going to be a big problem when you use Oracle. This forces Philip Greenspun to use TCL/AOLServer for his work, since it allows connections to stay up between CGI invocations.
In the mean time, I can open and close as many mySQL connections as I need to.
In addition, as I said in another post, he would probably have to rewrite the Slash engine to use another database; it's most likely very dependent on the mySQL API (as my programs are as well). We get a big payoff from this - far greater speed - so we pay the penalty of being stuck on one database unless we want to make a herculean effort to convert all the software we've already written.
I haven't looked at Postgres SQL specifically, but the mySQL API was designed to look just like the mSQL API. Most likely, they would have to change a lot of stuff around to make it compatible with any other database besides mSQL, and of course mSQL has been an inferior product to mySQL for quite some time now.
That's the most likely reason he did it; that's also why I've been sticking to mySQL. I don't have time to learn something new when I'm asked to take on 3,000 new projects every day:-).
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I visited Boo yesterday ...
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 3
when this started to hit.
I have a 144k DSL connection at home, and it was dog-slow even on that. It did have a tool to measure my data rate, and it claimed I had a 53k data rate, which was marginal to check out the "full" version. I went with the "full" version anyway because I was curious to see what it was like.
A clue as to the vast usability problems that were found on the site is that their "tour" was a condescending highlight-and-display of every single menu option on the site. It was slickly done, but too boring for me to sit through.
The actual shopping experience was sluggish, and despite using the high-bandwidth option, the product images were not large or distinctive enough to give me a good sense for what I would have been buying.
This whole thing reminds me of a friend of mine who created a very similar Javascript-laden "remove all control from the user" site. His site, like this one, was just about impossible to navigate. I felt a strong dislike for his approach, and I didn't feel any better about Boo, despite the massive budget.
I can surely shed a tear for the people who worked night and day trying to push this thing together, but as far as I can tell the site was, and still is, fatally flawed.
Binky and the mechanism used to send all your data to Redmond are totally separate pieces of programming. Just because we have Binky doesn't mean your data goes to Redmond; just because we didn't have Binky in Office 95 doesn't mean it didn't send data to Redmond.
The interesting psychology of this is that Binky makes it seem more real that there is something from MS analyzing your data and sending it to Redmond. I thought that myself the first time I saw Binky (see some of my other messages on this topic).
The good news is that if data was actually being sent, some Slashdot reader would have long since seen it - note how quickly the Windows 95 Registration fiasco got out. So we're safe. At least for now.
Slashdot Mirror
According to How to start your own country, he spent over $ 1.5 million in legal fees to clarify the legal position of his country vis-a-vis the UK. Hardly a "pathetic wanker", then, at least in the financial realm.
He apparently made that money in pirate radio stations operated on ships, so he had a lot of solid background in this before starting.
Personally, I feel real admiration for the guy - he had the guts to do what many people dream of.
D
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Note that, although this seems like a fantastic idea, airtime is bone-crunchingly expensive - I think it's something like $ 0.10 a character (!). Even Inmarsat is cheaper than that.
D
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Sadly, I don't remember the name of the company, but they were working out of South Florida if my memory serves. It looked like a really cool concept.
D
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I knew someone who had satellite access via Inmarsat B. He had a 120' motor yacht he was running on an open-ended round the world cruise. Since he and his wife are gregarious people, they financed the whole thing by chartering out the parts of the boat (little ship, really) they didn't use. You could go with them for some $45,000 a week all-inclusive. Amazingly enough, that is actually a bargain rate for the services they offer - check out http://www.cnconnect.com/ for some of the ghastly rates charged by other charter firms (normally not all-inclusive).
:-(.
I think it's a reasonable statement to make that money is not a significant problem for those folks. They quite happily paid $9 a minute for their 56k Inmarsat B connection, which gave them trouble-free live Internet access. They told me the equipment cost is about $50,000, at least when they had it installed.
Of course they absolutely hated spam. Can you imagine downloading a 50k Make Money Fast message at $ 9 / minute? They wound up doing it all the time.
A very nice couple, very friendly. I think they were run off USENET by some of its less friendly denizens, which is why I haven't heard from them in an age
Unless things have changed significantly in the year or so ago since I've heard from them, Inmarsat B equipment is extremely bulky and heavy and can't be carried on vessels under 100'. This is a huge and expensive boat, making it cost-prohibitive for most sailors even if the cost of the equipment itself wasn't already.
If my memory serves, the suitcase-sized stuff is either C or Mini-M with maximum data rates in the slug-like 2400-9600bps range.
Telephone services via SSB were all but shut down a few months ago, which was probably no big loss since the satellite-based systems are both cheaper to use (SSB phone service was billed out at $5/minute!) and more reliable. I don't think SSB is a good long-term bet.
D
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The service you're referring to is iDSL. The $90 a month is the full cost for the service.
What they do is route the DSL through ISDN, therefore extending the reach from their central office. This means they use a more expensive ISDN line, thus the added cost. This also means it's slower than most regular DSL connections.
It took Covad three different service calls, three different service people and three months to get my service operational, because of (i) the lousy wiring in my apartment complex, (ii) a mysterious conflict between them and Pacific Bell, and (iii) a significant difference in the competence and customer-friendly attitude of their service reps. I have been informed that such a difficult install is not typical.
In the month or so I've had the service, it's been down once, for about an hour, for Covad-related problems.
When it's worked, it's given me decent but not exceptional speed. I'd say it's worth the $90 a month - I wouldn't go back to a modem, surely. But at the same time, if you have any other alternatives, such as moving to an area where DSL works, or getting your own T1, you might want to take them. I understand T1 rates in the Bay Area are the world's lowest, so you might want to consider that option.
In one of those charming ironies that makes life worthwhile, only about a month after DSL service was turned on, I am moving to a much-improved residence. I dreaded calling them and discovering the costs, but apparently it's saving me money, not costing me. They will unwind the whole deal with the previous install, charging me nothing; then I have to pay for the eqiupment and install on the new deal. This seemed fair to me. So kudos to Speakeasy, my provider. Now let's see if they deliver on that promise. They certainly dropped a lot of money on the install; I was surprised to see how cooperative they appeared on the phone.
D
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I called them, I signed up with them, and two days later I got an emailed offer for free equipment and no setup fee.
Of course by then I'd already agreed to pay for my equipment and the setup fee, so I feel a bit used. Moral is that if you're not in a total hurry where days matter, wait a couple of days between expressing interest and actually placing your order to get a better deal.
They do seem to offer pretty good customer service, though, although I'm underwhelmed by the speed of my iDSL connection (see my other comments).
D
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My company has business DSL with Concentric.
We had a 12 hour (!) outage in Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, I really can't blame Concentric for it, since they go through Covad and it appears to have been Covad's fault. Of course this is no real consolation since virtually everyone goes with Covad.
Anyone have experience with Northpoint?
D
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Ever since I heard her on a "smooth jazz" radio station in Florida, Vanessa Daou has been one of my favourite artists. She's probably typical of a whole genre of people who make a living out of their work, but stay frustratingly far from the big time.
She started a web site [ http://www.vanessadaou.com ] to sell her newest CD as an "internet-only" venture. Naturally, being a big fan, I bought it. Sadly she went back to the record companies - I assume she, quite simply, needed their promotional muscle to push the music, just as Lars said in his interview.
As a curious symbol of her return to the record company fold, by the way, her web site has turned Flash only, so I can't even view it properly on my computer! Oops.
Anyway, I thought this might be an interesting data point to confirm what Lars was saying in his interview. I'm not keen on metal-style music, but if you strip off the phone transcript sillies, I think he's smarter than most of you think. And I'm intrigued by his notion that the record companies are sleepier than ever in terms of trying to protect the artists they nominally serve. Interesting interview, Lars; thanks.
D
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It was called Sonicwall, and as far as I could tell, it was working fine as a firewall.
But as a censorware package, it had a lot to be desired. I wanted to visit my own web site, http://www.amazing.com . "This site has been blocked by SonicWall". Fine, maybe my site has wierd stuff on it someplace, it has so many pages, how can I even tell nowadays? So I added my site to the "let through anyway" list and went on.
Then I tried visiting http://www.freshmeat.net/ to get some software for my Linux box.
"This site has been blocked by SonicWall"
In a moment of pure anger, I shut off filtering and rebooted the SonicWall. End of problem.
D
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Problem is that you're not actually making changes in MacOS 9 to make it MacOS X; that would be impossible.
Instead, you're adapting NeXT, and changing it to be more Mac-like. Thus the Dock, which I believe is a NeXT feature, replaces several different MacOS 9 features that were never written for NeXT.
D
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MacOS is arguably superior to Windows in user interface, and it's definitely far more attractive to look at. This may seem like a trivial point, but bear in mind that you likely spend more time with your computer nowadays than with your girlfriend, and I'd say few guys don't care about their girlfriend's looks.
The attraction of MacOS X is that it should bear the best attributes of its two parents: Reliability and stability from BSD, and ease of use and consumer accessibility for MacOS.
The way I see it, it can definitely give Windows a run for its money, since the essential applications are there (Office, Photoshop, etc), and the environment should be both slick and stable.
D
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Okay, I know this isn't exactly on the topic, but I have to get an answer to this question somehow.
I have lost something like four different cell phones in the last couple of years.
What I want is a cell phone that includes a device that makes a loud quacking noise (or something) when it falls out of my pants pocket - as it always does.
Does anyone know of such a thing, or have alternative suggestions? I know I could clip it to my belt, but I know I'd forget to to that, too.
There must be some absent-minded slashdotters with my problem.
Many thanks for any ideas.
D
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D
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I must say I got a laugh out of The Wizard of OS.
:-(.
If I have to be obsessed with someone, though, it will be someone I have a non-zero chance of meeting
D
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through the link someone kindly provided in one of the replies to your message.
I'm sorry, but that photo simply is not going to be devalued by anything like this parody. I've seen it before, and I'm going to see it again, and it's a very, very high-impact piece.
Furthermore, if you really think the parody would devalue the photo, it seems odd that you could say that you could pay the AP $250 and all of a sudden everything would be cool. That doesn't make sense.
As about a billion people have said, I don't doubt that the utilization of the photo was fair use. Certainly I don't think it will in any way impact the marketability of the photo, which is the traditional way of determining damages in copyright cases.
I think the photo will get the Pulitzer that it deserves, irregardless of this little creation. It wasn't quite to my taste, but it was well done.
D
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User areas were numbered instead of named, so you could go to area 1, 2, 3, etc. I think there were up to 8 of them on a disk.
There were, of course, no subdirectories in either CP/M or pre-2.0 MS-DOS.
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Good points; I use the C API, so it would be a big pain for me to switch.
In the end, it's probably the speed, and since they're used to it and its various quirks.
D
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I suppose I'm old-fashioned - I like to see and touch the equipment myself.
What's are SLA Terms?
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Last time I looked, they were serving from 400,000-600,000 accesses per day.
The economics of life are a lot different when you're a major corporation. I was able to get my mid-sized 100-employee company to buy a $ 10,400 VA Linux FullOn 2x2 server even though it was overkill; the money simply wasn't worth thinking about in comparison to the costs associated with having a slow server.
D
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The comment pages are actually static files that are loaded directly by the comment perl script to minimize the number of database lookups done. So the comment pages themselves are stored on the NFS server, and the personalized stuff on the right side of the page is slotted in by a relatively simple script.
D
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One reason might be that mySQL is much faster than Oracle when it comes to building up and dropping connections.
This is really important for the web, because a typical web program will start by opening a connection and end by closing it. So you effectively have one connection for every hit that occurs.
Unless you do some fancy sharing of connections, this is going to be a big problem when you use Oracle. This forces Philip Greenspun to use TCL/AOLServer for his work, since it allows connections to stay up between CGI invocations.
In the mean time, I can open and close as many mySQL connections as I need to.
In addition, as I said in another post, he would probably have to rewrite the Slash engine to use another database; it's most likely very dependent on the mySQL API (as my programs are as well). We get a big payoff from this - far greater speed - so we pay the penalty of being stuck on one database unless we want to make a herculean effort to convert all the software we've already written.
D
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I mean, if I had $ 1 million a year, I could run multiple redundant T3s to my own office and use them for my own personal/company use, too.
Why would people use Exodos instead?
D
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I haven't looked at Postgres SQL specifically, but the mySQL API was designed to look just like the mSQL API. Most likely, they would have to change a lot of stuff around to make it compatible with any other database besides mSQL, and of course mSQL has been an inferior product to mySQL for quite some time now.
:-).
That's the most likely reason he did it; that's also why I've been sticking to mySQL. I don't have time to learn something new when I'm asked to take on 3,000 new projects every day
D
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when this started to hit.
I have a 144k DSL connection at home, and it was dog-slow even on that. It did have a tool to measure my data rate, and it claimed I had a 53k data rate, which was marginal to check out the "full" version. I went with the "full" version anyway because I was curious to see what it was like.
A clue as to the vast usability problems that were found on the site is that their "tour" was a condescending highlight-and-display of every single menu option on the site. It was slickly done, but too boring for me to sit through.
The actual shopping experience was sluggish, and despite using the high-bandwidth option, the product images were not large or distinctive enough to give me a good sense for what I would have been buying.
This whole thing reminds me of a friend of mine who created a very similar Javascript-laden "remove all control from the user" site. His site, like this one, was just about impossible to navigate. I felt a strong dislike for his approach, and I didn't feel any better about Boo, despite the massive budget.
I can surely shed a tear for the people who worked night and day trying to push this thing together, but as far as I can tell the site was, and still is, fatally flawed.
D
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But hold on a minute.
Binky and the mechanism used to send all your data to Redmond are totally separate pieces of programming. Just because we have Binky doesn't mean your data goes to Redmond; just because we didn't have Binky in Office 95 doesn't mean it didn't send data to Redmond.
The interesting psychology of this is that Binky makes it seem more real that there is something from MS analyzing your data and sending it to Redmond. I thought that myself the first time I saw Binky (see some of my other messages on this topic).
The good news is that if data was actually being sent, some Slashdot reader would have long since seen it - note how quickly the Windows 95 Registration fiasco got out. So we're safe. At least for now.
D
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