He's TWO. His curiosity right now is limited to how when he moves that white thing with the tail, the little arrow moves too, and how an A on the screen might just be the same thing as the A on his chalkboard. If he was bored with it, we wouldn't have to limit him to an hour a day, because he'd quit before that.
He doesn't know condescension from condensation, and too bad if he does. I give him his milk in a spill proof plastic cup, and he doesn't touch the Waterford stemware.
Nobody cares if I can't play Half Life/Quake/Doom/WWF Bitchslap, not even me. But I do care if I have to sit up all night rebuilding and restoring disks full of business-critical data.
And when he gets old enough that he can go beyond Reader Rabbit and has outgrown his junker machine, I'll get him a new one with capabilities appropriate for him. He's STILL not going to touch my main machines.
We're the parents, he's the child, and a healthy and happy one at that. We are not peers.
I don't dare let my kid TOUCH my "real" machines, much less actually use them. They're not even on the same floor of the house.
He has his own P133 Windows box that does Reader Rabbit et al just fine, and when (not if) he destroys it, we won't lose anything critical. When it's dead, we'll replace it with another similarly equipped junkpile cast-off.
It's nothing special to have AM broadcasts travel long distances at night--it's an inherent property of that frequency range. You'll sometimes hear about "50,000 watt clear channel" stations. For each AM broadcast frequency, one station in the US has permission to crank up their transmitter to 50KW, and every other station on that frequency in the country either has to drastically lower their power or go off the air altogether, hence the existence of dawn-to-disk AM stations.
(I remember one AM station that broadcast road conditions for all major US Interstates, since they knew that their signal could be heard all over North America at that time of night.)
"Skip" (explained in other posts) is common in the HP range (3-30MHz), but much less so in the VHF range (30-300MHz). HF's skip characteristics are varied depending on frequency, but fairly predictable. Hams talk of "maximum usable frequency" (MUF), which deals with the less-predictable frequencies in the upper parts of HF and lower parts of VHF. It is significant to hams when the MUF tops 50MHz, because that allows skip traffic over 6 meters (50-54MHz-so THAT's what happened to channel 1!), which most of the time is restricted to line-of-sight.
On rare occasions, such as during this radiation storm, the MUF can go past 150MHz, allowing skip for FM broadcast, 2-meter (144-148MHz) ham, and many of the VHF broadcast TV channels.
It can be loads of fun seeing what all you can pick up on your FM radio which this happens.
I did read the article[1], and it gave no patent number, stating that M$ "declined to confirm the existence of the patent," which, as you say, they're within their rights to do.
Without a patent number, regardless of how you'd have to go about finding it out, the article could have said that M$ holds a patent on using ASCII letters to make the word SAMBA and I still wouldn't be worried yet.
Wary, yes, but not worried.
[1] And sorry for taking the flamebait, but CHRIST I wish people would stop throwing that fucking accusation around!
If they're holding a patent, it should be public knowledge. So what's the patent number? Why all the "I think there might be..."? Until we find out, let's drop this whole thing down the FUD bucket.
(I fully suspect they do have a whole file cabinet full of patents, but I'd like to see them before I start making assumptions about the future of open source.)
Not only do we not know the specifics of the alleged patent, but we don't know if it's trivial or not. There's no guarantee it won't flunk the prior art or novelty tests.
Bell Labs' CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computing, where you got to be the CPU and the program counter was a bug. I used one for the first time in the late 60's or so, and I still have it.
On the bare OS front I've spent more on Linux (RH 4.1 and 6.1, maybe SuSE next) than Windows (one PC, whatever the OEM price was).
But I've spent a lot more on application software for my Windows box. (Call me when GNU Cash can replace Quicken and the GIMP knows about Pantone and CMYK. Admittedly, GNU Cash is getting Really Close.)
Oh, and I'm still sad about losing FrameMaker on Linux. I'd pay more for that than the Windows version, if only Adobe hadn't canned it (or let it fizzle, like the Irix version of Photoshop).
My next computing appliance would be a Mac (for color management), except that I work for a Big Evil Closed-Source PC Maker, so I get Wintel boxes cheap enough to give away as Christmas presents. I'm probably still paying the full Microsoft Tax, though.:(
Remember, with HIT shows, folks like to discuss the latest episode the next day at work
Which is why my wife and I sit down 15 minutes into a show TiVo's recording, FF over the commercials, and if we time it right, catch up exactly at the end. No commercials, effectively real-time viewing, and a bit of extra free time (and with a two-year-old, fifteen minutes makes a difference!)
It takes more to sell to the younger generation than it does to the older generation.
What makes "Got Milk" any more memorable than "Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz," or "He likes it! Hey Mikey!"? The best ad campaigns become (for better or worse) a permanent part of the cultural lexicon.
This decade, people pay for "Got Milk" T-shirts. In the 80's it was "I've fallen and I can't get up." In the 60's, it was "I can't believe I ate the whole thing."
The remote control is what makes advertising harder, not the age of the audience or the year on the calendar.
Security through blood loss:
The comparisons to car stereos brought to mind a trick a friend of mine once used. He figured out where the thieves would grab the enclosure, and strategically taped razor blades there. On more than one occasion he found blood in his car. He stopped when he found out that somene else who did this was successfully prosecuted for, essentially, endangering life to protect property.
Let's stipulate a couple things: 1) DMCA is the law of the land, like it or not; 2) There was sufficient probable cause that Sklyarov violated DMCA to warrant his arrest. If you agree to those two points, then his arrest was not unfair.
What is irrefutably unfair is his detention without bail. So what if there's a threat of flight? He's still getting worse treatment than many violent criminals, and that's what's inexcusable.
Then again, maybe it'll speed up the process of getting this to Rehnquist and the gang.
According to the article, all Doubleclick measured was recognition. Admittedly, that's 90% of the battle in advertising, but it doesn't translate into positive response.
Consider the scenario of buying a car from a dealer whose ads are reasonable, then calling the owner of the dealership who carpet bombs the airwaves with explosions and screaming carnival barkers and telling him that his expensive ads were precisely why you didn't buy from him.
If I learned to ignore banners, I can learn to ignore bigger ones. I hate playing Whack-A-Mole with popups, but I can usually get them before the image is downloaded--how well can I recognize an image I never see?
What is the intrigue of seeing someone pitch a baseball, now, in a fashion that we know is not the best?
It's not whether a pitcher is/isn't the best, but when.
There's baseball as hitting and pitching, then there's baseball the game. Machines might make better pitchers or hitters, but they won't improve the game just by doing what they do better than any human could.
One of the best lines I ever read about Schindler's List was that "only Spielberg could make a feel-good movie about the biggest feel-bad event of the 20th century."
I think that Usenet is the one thing that can survive all the upheavals, because you can create its infrastructure out of nothing.
When the Web is spammed and commercialized until its content approaches zero, when better-than-a-modem bandwidth is either unaffordable or choked with advertising, any group of three people with modems can start a new Usenet, with a lot less cost and effort than it would take to build a new Internet.
Then we'll just have to ask the M$ spinmeisters to go down to the development areas, and ask the people how those coffee stains got on the conference room walls.
Slashdot Mirror
He's TWO. His curiosity right now is limited to how when he moves that white thing with the tail, the little arrow moves too, and how an A on the screen might just be the same thing as the A on his chalkboard. If he was bored with it, we wouldn't have to limit him to an hour a day, because he'd quit before that.
He doesn't know condescension from condensation, and too bad if he does. I give him his milk in a spill proof plastic cup, and he doesn't touch the Waterford stemware.
Nobody cares if I can't play Half Life/Quake/Doom/WWF Bitchslap, not even me. But I do care if I have to sit up all night rebuilding and restoring disks full of business-critical data.
And when he gets old enough that he can go beyond Reader Rabbit and has outgrown his junker machine, I'll get him a new one with capabilities appropriate for him. He's STILL not going to touch my main machines.
We're the parents, he's the child, and a healthy and happy one at that. We are not peers.
I don't dare let my kid TOUCH my "real" machines, much less actually use them. They're not even on the same floor of the house.
He has his own P133 Windows box that does Reader Rabbit et al just fine, and when (not if) he destroys it, we won't lose anything critical. When it's dead, we'll replace it with another similarly equipped junkpile cast-off.
That's a meritocratic free market, not capitalism.
"Skip" (explained in other posts) is common in the HP range (3-30MHz), but much less so in the VHF range (30-300MHz). HF's skip characteristics are varied depending on frequency, but fairly predictable. Hams talk of "maximum usable frequency" (MUF), which deals with the less-predictable frequencies in the upper parts of HF and lower parts of VHF. It is significant to hams when the MUF tops 50MHz, because that allows skip traffic over 6 meters (50-54MHz-so THAT's what happened to channel 1!), which most of the time is restricted to line-of-sight.
On rare occasions, such as during this radiation storm, the MUF can go past 150MHz, allowing skip for FM broadcast, 2-meter (144-148MHz) ham, and many of the VHF broadcast TV channels.
It can be loads of fun seeing what all you can pick up on your FM radio which this happens.
Yeah, but judging by how much of the time telco's right hand doesn't have a clue what its left hand is doing, they've squandered that time.
OK, now I'm worried. :)
Without a patent number, regardless of how you'd have to go about finding it out, the article could have said that M$ holds a patent on using ASCII letters to make the word SAMBA and I still wouldn't be worried yet.
Wary, yes, but not worried.
[1] And sorry for taking the flamebait, but CHRIST I wish people would stop throwing that fucking accusation around!
(I fully suspect they do have a whole file cabinet full of patents, but I'd like to see them before I start making assumptions about the future of open source.)
Not only do we not know the specifics of the alleged patent, but we don't know if it's trivial or not. There's no guarantee it won't flunk the prior art or novelty tests.
Bell Labs' CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computing, where you got to be the CPU and the program counter was a bug. I used one for the first time in the late 60's or so, and I still have it.
But I've spent a lot more on application software for my Windows box. (Call me when GNU Cash can replace Quicken and the GIMP knows about Pantone and CMYK. Admittedly, GNU Cash is getting Really Close.)
Oh, and I'm still sad about losing FrameMaker on Linux. I'd pay more for that than the Windows version, if only Adobe hadn't canned it (or let it fizzle, like the Irix version of Photoshop).
My next computing appliance would be a Mac (for color management), except that I work for a Big Evil Closed-Source PC Maker, so I get Wintel boxes cheap enough to give away as Christmas presents. I'm probably still paying the full Microsoft Tax, though. :(
Which is why my wife and I sit down 15 minutes into a show TiVo's recording, FF over the commercials, and if we time it right, catch up exactly at the end. No commercials, effectively real-time viewing, and a bit of extra free time (and with a two-year-old, fifteen minutes makes a difference!)
What makes "Got Milk" any more memorable than "Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz," or "He likes it! Hey Mikey!"? The best ad campaigns become (for better or worse) a permanent part of the cultural lexicon.
This decade, people pay for "Got Milk" T-shirts. In the 80's it was "I've fallen and I can't get up." In the 60's, it was "I can't believe I ate the whole thing."
The remote control is what makes advertising harder, not the age of the audience or the year on the calendar.
I thought "southern" was an R.C. Cola and a Moon Pie.
You mean you're going to boycott Microsoft? Aww, SHOOT!
Security through blood loss: The comparisons to car stereos brought to mind a trick a friend of mine once used. He figured out where the thieves would grab the enclosure, and strategically taped razor blades there. On more than one occasion he found blood in his car. He stopped when he found out that somene else who did this was successfully prosecuted for, essentially, endangering life to protect property.
Let's stipulate a couple things: 1) DMCA is the law of the land, like it or not; 2) There was sufficient probable cause that Sklyarov violated DMCA to warrant his arrest. If you agree to those two points, then his arrest was not unfair.
What is irrefutably unfair is his detention without bail. So what if there's a threat of flight? He's still getting worse treatment than many violent criminals, and that's what's inexcusable.
Then again, maybe it'll speed up the process of getting this to Rehnquist and the gang.
Consider the scenario of buying a car from a dealer whose ads are reasonable, then calling the owner of the dealership who carpet bombs the airwaves with explosions and screaming carnival barkers and telling him that his expensive ads were precisely why you didn't buy from him.
If I learned to ignore banners, I can learn to ignore bigger ones. I hate playing Whack-A-Mole with popups, but I can usually get them before the image is downloaded--how well can I recognize an image I never see?
It's not whether a pitcher is/isn't the best, but when.
There's baseball as hitting and pitching, then there's baseball the game. Machines might make better pitchers or hitters, but they won't improve the game just by doing what they do better than any human could.
No, I believe him. They've never tried to hide the fact that they want to make as much money as they can, any way that they can.
One of the best lines I ever read about Schindler's List was that "only Spielberg could make a feel-good movie about the biggest feel-bad event of the 20th century."
Yes, there is. IE5 runs on (at least) HP-UX and Solaris. But the HP-UX version is buggy and deathly slow, so Moz still doesn't need -turbo.
I think that Usenet is the one thing that can survive all the upheavals, because you can create its infrastructure out of nothing.
When the Web is spammed and commercialized until its content approaches zero, when better-than-a-modem bandwidth is either unaffordable or choked with advertising, any group of three people with modems can start a new Usenet, with a lot less cost and effort than it would take to build a new Internet.
Your right to free speech does not obligate me to provide you a forum in which to exercise that right.
Must have been a temporary outage -- I'm reading it now.
Then we'll just have to ask the M$ spinmeisters to go down to the development areas, and ask the people how those coffee stains got on the conference room walls.