"Oracle apparently made a $25K donation to governor Gray Davis' campaign fund after the sale was made, several state officials have been suspended, and a criminal investigation into the deal is already underway."
If anyone really thinks that a $25k donation would have anything to do with a $95,000,000.00 deal for software, they need to get reacquainted with reality. $25k is nothing unusual. It's a Red Herring, and doesn't belong in an informed discussion on the Oracle/California mess.
"What are you allowed to do with MS's shared source?: Pretty much anything except make money. You can teach it, write books about it, and experiment with it, but you can't sell any program you write with it. Fine if you're a hobbyist, but some of us have families and stomachs and houses and cars to support."
I should mention that teaching, writing books, and experimenting are all very viable ways of making money.
I'm also in corporate America, but I don't give a shit if my software is open source or not, I just get the job done quickly, efficiently, and cheaply. Time spent evangalizing open source within a large corporation is time wasted. It's the end, not the means that the corporation cares about.
Since converting to compact flourescent bulbs at home over the past three years, I've often wondered why projectors still use incandescant bulbs. I certainly won't be buying a projector for home use until the problem of cooling is solved. Having brought a few projectors home to try, I've found that the noise from cooling fans outweighs the benefit of the big screen.
I've never heard this word before, what does it mean? Nervy as in nervous? Nervy as in 'having a lot of nerv', Nervy as in 'like the fictitious NERV organization in Neon Genesis Evangelon'
The point of the parent poster (and many others) is that the accelleration software is windows based, and without it you will see very poor performance. The accelleration software is absolutely necessary to compensate for the way most web pages work (often requiring 30-50 connections per page) and the inherent incompatibility of this this method for use over satellite, with minimum latency of >500 ms.
Sure you can connect in another way, but it would defeat all performance advantages of having the fat satellite pipe.
Glenn Reynolds has written an interesting, albeit a bit speculative, opinion in regards to the role of the US Government in the possible quieting of nanotechnology
.ps generally sounds like a good idea to many science-types.
I think it's rather tiring.
If I didn't have a full install of Acrobat on my system, I wouldn't have bothered with it. (It configured itself to handle.ps documents by converting them into.pdf.)
.pdf has been around for as long as the commercial Internet, and is understood by every computer I've used in the past five years. It can be created by innmuerable commercial and free (as in beer and as in speech) tools. It can be read by Acrobat reader, a fantastic free (as in beer) tool from Adobe.
There really are no reasons to publish in.ps other than whim, eliteism, or ignorance. All of those being sins in my book.
All you have to do is use Lotus Notes for a few days on an aging PowerMac with 8 or 16MB ram, and you'll give up on it forever. You'll also tell everyone you know 1. what a horrible thing Lotus Notes is, and 2. what a horrible thing a Macintosh is.
Those at Apple responsible for allowing PowerMacs to ship with System 7.5.x and less than 32MB ram should be banned from the industry. When an OS by default takes more ram than a system has, and is coupled with an application like Lotus Notes, which is hungry, nothing good can ever happen.
This is, IMNSHO, a good part of the reason that so many corporations ditched their Macs in the mid-ninteys.
By the way the aerospace companies probably wont turn to this kind of work, because cities cannot afford the fantastic overpayments that the fed govt gives them. they actually have to show a working model in return for their fees which may be a bit dissapointing for companies that are used to making missile defense systems.
After the time and difficulty involved with producing working trains for Amtrak's Acela, I don't know that Bombadier is much better than the aerospace companies.
In the past few years I have visited a quite a few cities in this world around the size of Las Vegas with excellent mass transit. Getting around Vegas was a disaster. (I had a car) Getting around these other cities was a much cheaper, faster, and more enjoyable experience.
Athens - 3 million (rode in 2001, damn is Greek hard to read) Barcelona - 1.6 million (rode in 2002, fantastic system, took two taxis in nine days) Budapest - 2 million (rode in 2000. took me everywhere) Bucharest - 2.3 million (rode in 2000. comprehensive but a little dodgy. about as clean as NYC) Prague - 1.2 million (rode in 2000. they even have English signs!) Warsaw 1.6 million (1999,2000,2001 - only one underground, but linked with dozens of tram lines.)
I should mention that all of these cities have extensive bus and streetcar networks which mesh seamlessly with their metros. And that all of these systems have incredibly high ridership. They're always packed, and yet they always run on time.
Next to what I've seen abroad, NYC is ok, Washington DC is fair, and Chicago and Boston (where I live and ride the T daily) are utterly pathetic. (I wish the crooked politicians in Boston would put 1/10th of what they put into the roads and the "big dig" into the MBTA. It'd be a city worth living in.)
I do believe that I'll visit Vegas again when their Monorail is up and running. And I bet I'll see a lot more of the city than I did on my last visit. (then again, if you've seen one glitzy casino...)
I spent some more time thinking this through, and I believe I'll argue both points.
For a wearable application one would want as few moving parts as possible, low power consumption, and low heat output. I believe solid state CF wins on all counts. In fact, the Sandisk product was actually so tempting to me that I bought a 512 MB CF card this afternoon, albeit for a camera and not for a PDA.
As for the display, the Zaurus does quite well with 240*320, which should work with Sony's cheap ($500) Video Glasstron. (resolution of 800x255) Other head mounted displays at the exact resolution of 320*240 exist. Information is available from Steve Mann. (the Canadian cyborg guy in the news lately.)
I think I'll start playing with this at work. It's not too far off my remit. All I have to do is find a problem to solve that needs a wearable solution.:-)
I wonder how much more useful a 266mhz Pentium wearable would be than a Sharp Zaurus hacked to use a head-mounted display, like a Sony glasstron. I played with a Zaurus the other day, and noted that it had both SD and CF slots. Sandisk 512 MB CF is $329.99 direct, and I know of few linux apps that won't run in 128MB RAM and 512MB disk.
Given the power of today's handhelds, I think the wearables makers might just have to lower their prices.
(Ironically, I've got about 250 megs worth of RAM in the form of 48-pin simms that are probably all perfectly working, but obsolete to the point of useless. I think they'd make good secondary storage if there was some sort of PCI card to plug em all into - they'd make a great RAM drive - they'd outperform disk).
48-pin simms? I'd like to see those. I've only ever seen 30, 72, and 168 pin simms.
apparently, you burn less fossil fuel over time if you "dig more oil out of the ground to make new plastics from scratch" than you do in "melting down old plastics to make new plastics".
Maybe we should make more out of paper than plastic? Much can be done with even recycled paper.
I'm not one to care too much for "the cute fluffy bunnies", but I find many things wasteful. And in the tradition of hackers and punks (I'm neither, but admire both) I think that waste is bad.
Thus I take canvas bags to the grocery store, and use plastic bags obtained elsewhere to dispose of my trash. My coke I buy in Aluminum cans, and my beer and wine in glass bottles. (which I recycle in the convenient bin in the basement)
It just makes sense to me. As does this recycling fee. You know they'd only apply it to complete systems. That's the majority of what's sold. And the amount of pollution it would prevent would be extrordinary. PCs are something that middle-class families in the States replace every 2-3 years. I say let'm pay an extra 5% on their PC purchase; it'll save more than that in landfill cleanup costs later on.
The New York Times had an interesting article a few months ago about the fact that most PCs "recycled" in the US are shipped to Asia, where the valuable metals are stripped out while the rest are left to contaminate the ground and water.
I suggest VoiceStream. I have had no trouble using several phones with them. It's just a matter of popping the sim card out and moving it to a different phone. I have so far resisted getting a triband phone (I prefer Nokia and their triband is $$$) and so pop my sim card out of one Nokia 69xx series and in to another. I have had no trouble using the service in the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Greece, or Spain.
This is probably because VoiceStream is owned by Deutsch Telekom.
"It was like their PC lines. They were always $500 - $1000 more than anyone else. Who the hell would want to pay that?"
I think you ought to look back at what they've been charging for PCs in the past three years. Each year they've had sub $1000 machines on the market. Granted they've lost money on them, but they have been price competitive, and not, as you say, $500-$1000 above everyone else.
The service looks nice, but I have had very mixed experiences calling Poland using VoIP via Net2Phone's phone-phone VoIP. This is a calling card that dials you in to such a box as Vonage uses, though on a much larger scale. The call is routed over IP and then plugged back into the local phone system of the place you're calling. (sometimes such that different latas have different charges. Warsaw $.06/minute, Radom $.15/minute, mobile phone $.24/minute)
My experience? It works correctly about 60% of the time. The other 40%, delays, echos, or frequently duplex problems (ie, one person can talk and the other can listen, but that's it. damn frustrating.)
Net2Phone keeps emailing me, encouraging me to spend the $50 prepaid I have left on my account, but I'm going to wait another month or two to see if they can work out the bugs.
For now I'll continue to pay through the teeth using my VoiceStream cellphone to call Europe.
Marconi did 6,942 million pounds in business in 2001 as stated in their annual report. (That's over ten billion USD)
They're not a startup, nor a consumer products company, and they certainly don't need to put prices for their telco carrier equipment on their website.
Think about the rest of the world, where many countries still have telecommunications monopolies. If the state owns the Telephone company, the Cable providers, the Internet Service Providers, this is quite a good way for them to replace aging infrastructure.
It also sounds like a great idea for new developments, which, especially in the US, never seem to stop popping up.
Your point about current cable modems isn't particularly valid either. Yes the modems can do higher speeds. I actually used an uncapped 10 megabit Zenith CableMizer in 1996. There are many too many problems with uncapped service to go in to here, but they include the fact that cable is a shared medium and that upstream bandwidth is still very expensive.
Next time try fucking around with a real company. You'll be laughed at if you ever go after an mp3 server in an engineering department at General Electric, or Chemistry lab at SmithKleinGlaxo. Real companies wouldn't give you the time of day, let alone answer your phone calls or sign for your registered letters. You're pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oracle apparently made a $25K donation to governor Gray Davis' campaign fund after the sale was made, several state officials have been suspended, and a criminal investigation into the deal is already underway."
If anyone really thinks that a $25k donation would have anything to do with a $95,000,000.00 deal for software, they need to get reacquainted with reality. $25k is nothing unusual. It's a Red Herring, and doesn't belong in an informed discussion on the Oracle/California mess.
"What are you allowed to do with MS's shared source?: Pretty much anything except make money. You can teach it, write books about it, and experiment with it, but you can't sell any program you write with it. Fine if you're a hobbyist, but some of us have families and stomachs and houses and cars to support."
I should mention that teaching, writing books, and experimenting are all very viable ways of making money.
I'm also in corporate America, but I don't give a shit if my software is open source or not, I just get the job done quickly, efficiently, and cheaply. Time spent evangalizing open source within a large corporation is time wasted. It's the end, not the means that the corporation cares about.
Actually I think 40 bills would be about two week long trips to Amsterdam for me. :-)
Since converting to compact flourescent bulbs at home over the past three years, I've often wondered why projectors still use incandescant bulbs. I certainly won't be buying a projector for home use until the problem of cooling is solved. Having brought a few projectors home to try, I've found that the noise from cooling fans outweighs the benefit of the big screen.
:-)
Cool stuff. Literally.
I've never heard this word before, what does it mean? Nervy as in nervous? Nervy as in 'having a lot of nerv', Nervy as in 'like the fictitious NERV organization in Neon Genesis Evangelon'
Just a click away, dictionary.com has the answer.
(was this a "a nervy thing to say"?)
The point of the parent poster (and many others) is that the accelleration software is windows based, and without it you will see very poor performance. The accelleration software is absolutely necessary to compensate for the way most web pages work (often requiring 30-50 connections per page) and the inherent incompatibility of this this method for use over satellite, with minimum latency of >500 ms.
Sure you can connect in another way, but it would defeat all performance advantages of having the fat satellite pipe.
Glenn Reynolds has written an interesting, albeit a bit speculative, opinion in regards to the role of the US Government in the possible quieting of nanotechnology
.ps generally sounds like a good idea to many science-types.
.ps documents by converting them into .pdf.)
.ps other than whim, eliteism, or ignorance. All of those being sins in my book.
I think it's rather tiring.
If I didn't have a full install of Acrobat on my system, I wouldn't have bothered with it. (It configured itself to handle
.pdf has been around for as long as the commercial Internet, and is understood by every computer I've used in the past five years. It can be created by innmuerable commercial and free (as in beer and as in speech) tools. It can be read by Acrobat reader, a fantastic free (as in beer) tool from Adobe.
There really are no reasons to publish in
All you have to do is use Lotus Notes for a few days on an aging PowerMac with 8 or 16MB ram, and you'll give up on it forever. You'll also tell everyone you know 1. what a horrible thing Lotus Notes is, and 2. what a horrible thing a Macintosh is.
Those at Apple responsible for allowing PowerMacs to ship with System 7.5.x and less than 32MB ram should be banned from the industry. When an OS by default takes more ram than a system has, and is coupled with an application like Lotus Notes, which is hungry, nothing good can ever happen.
This is, IMNSHO, a good part of the reason that so many corporations ditched their Macs in the mid-ninteys.
By the way the aerospace companies probably wont turn to this kind of work, because cities cannot afford the fantastic overpayments that the fed govt gives them. they actually have to show a working model in return for their fees which may be a bit dissapointing for companies that are used to making missile defense systems.
After the time and difficulty involved with producing working trains for Amtrak's Acela, I don't know that Bombadier is much better than the aerospace companies.
For a population of 2 million, why?
In the past few years I have visited a quite a few cities in this world around the size of Las Vegas with excellent mass transit. Getting around Vegas was a disaster. (I had a car) Getting around these other cities was a much cheaper, faster, and more enjoyable experience.
Athens - 3 million (rode in 2001, damn is Greek hard to read)
Barcelona - 1.6 million (rode in 2002, fantastic system, took two taxis in nine days)
Budapest - 2 million (rode in 2000. took me everywhere)
Bucharest - 2.3 million (rode in 2000. comprehensive but a little dodgy. about as clean as NYC)
Prague - 1.2 million (rode in 2000. they even have English signs!)
Warsaw 1.6 million (1999,2000,2001 - only one underground, but linked with dozens of tram lines.)
I should mention that all of these cities have extensive bus and streetcar networks which mesh seamlessly with their metros. And that all of these systems have incredibly high ridership. They're always packed, and yet they always run on time.
Next to what I've seen abroad, NYC is ok, Washington DC is fair, and Chicago and Boston (where I live and ride the T daily) are utterly pathetic. (I wish the crooked politicians in Boston would put 1/10th of what they put into the roads and the "big dig" into the MBTA. It'd be a city worth living in.)
I do believe that I'll visit Vegas again when their Monorail is up and running. And I bet I'll see a lot more of the city than I did on my last visit. (then again, if you've seen one glitzy casino...)
I spent some more time thinking this through, and I believe I'll argue both points.
:-)
For a wearable application one would want as few moving parts as possible, low power consumption, and low heat output. I believe solid state CF wins on all counts. In fact, the Sandisk product was actually so tempting to me that I bought a 512 MB CF card this afternoon, albeit for a camera and not for a PDA.
As for the display, the Zaurus does quite well with 240*320, which should work with Sony's cheap ($500) Video Glasstron. (resolution of 800x255) Other head mounted displays at the exact resolution of 320*240 exist. Information is available from Steve Mann. (the Canadian cyborg guy in the news lately.)
I think I'll start playing with this at work. It's not too far off my remit. All I have to do is find a problem to solve that needs a wearable solution.
I wonder how much more useful a 266mhz Pentium wearable would be than a Sharp Zaurus hacked to use a head-mounted display, like a Sony glasstron. I played with a Zaurus the other day, and noted that it had both SD and CF slots. Sandisk 512 MB CF is $329.99 direct, and I know of few linux apps that won't run in 128MB RAM and 512MB disk.
Given the power of today's handhelds, I think the wearables makers might just have to lower their prices.
(Ironically, I've got about 250 megs worth of RAM in the form of 48-pin simms that are probably all perfectly working, but obsolete to the point of useless. I think they'd make good secondary storage if there was some sort of PCI card to plug em all into - they'd make a great RAM drive - they'd outperform disk).
48-pin simms? I'd like to see those. I've only ever seen 30, 72, and 168 pin simms.
apparently, you burn less fossil fuel over time if you "dig more oil out of the ground to make new plastics from scratch" than you do in "melting down old plastics to make new plastics".
Maybe we should make more out of paper than plastic? Much can be done with even recycled paper.
I'm not one to care too much for "the cute fluffy bunnies", but I find many things wasteful. And in the tradition of hackers and punks (I'm neither, but admire both) I think that waste is bad.
Thus I take canvas bags to the grocery store, and use plastic bags obtained elsewhere to dispose of my trash. My coke I buy in Aluminum cans, and my beer and wine in glass bottles. (which I recycle in the convenient bin in the basement)
It just makes sense to me. As does this recycling fee. You know they'd only apply it to complete systems. That's the majority of what's sold. And the amount of pollution it would prevent would be extrordinary. PCs are something that middle-class families in the States replace every 2-3 years. I say let'm pay an extra 5% on their PC purchase; it'll save more than that in landfill cleanup costs later on.
The New York Times had an interesting article a few months ago about the fact that most PCs "recycled" in the US are shipped to Asia, where the valuable metals are stripped out while the rest are left to contaminate the ground and water.
1 EF83E5E0C708EDDA80994D8404482
I think the article can be purchased here:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/abstract?res=F509
but I have not paid to view old NYTimes articles yet, and so can't be sure.
(Someday soon I will. Just not tonight.)
I suggest VoiceStream. I have had no trouble using several phones with them. It's just a matter of popping the sim card out and moving it to a different phone. I have so far resisted getting a triband phone (I prefer Nokia and their triband is $$$) and so pop my sim card out of one Nokia 69xx series and in to another. I have had no trouble using the service in the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Greece, or Spain.
This is probably because VoiceStream is owned by Deutsch Telekom.
RedBull and Vodka is quite a popular drink, though the name of it slips my mind at the moment.
"It was like their PC lines. They were always $500 - $1000 more than anyone else. Who the hell would want to pay that?"
I think you ought to look back at what they've been charging for PCs in the past three years. Each year they've had sub $1000 machines on the market. Granted they've lost money on them, but they have been price competitive, and not, as you say, $500-$1000 above everyone else.
The service looks nice, but I have had very mixed experiences calling Poland using VoIP via Net2Phone's phone-phone VoIP. This is a calling card that dials you in to such a box as Vonage uses, though on a much larger scale. The call is routed over IP and then plugged back into the local phone system of the place you're calling. (sometimes such that different latas have different charges. Warsaw $.06/minute, Radom $.15/minute, mobile phone $.24/minute)
My experience? It works correctly about 60% of the time. The other 40%, delays, echos, or frequently duplex problems (ie, one person can talk and the other can listen, but that's it. damn frustrating.)
Net2Phone keeps emailing me, encouraging me to spend the $50 prepaid I have left on my account, but I'm going to wait another month or two to see if they can work out the bugs.
For now I'll continue to pay through the teeth using my VoiceStream cellphone to call Europe.
Marconi did 6,942 million pounds in business in 2001 as stated in their annual report. (That's over ten billion USD)
They're not a startup, nor a consumer products company, and they certainly don't need to put prices for their telco carrier equipment on their website.
(In other words, this is not vaporware.)
Yes but you're assuming that we're in the US.
Think about the rest of the world, where many countries still have telecommunications monopolies. If the state owns the Telephone company, the Cable providers, the Internet Service Providers, this is quite a good way for them to replace aging infrastructure.
It also sounds like a great idea for new developments, which, especially in the US, never seem to stop popping up.
Your point about current cable modems isn't particularly valid either. Yes the modems can do higher speeds. I actually used an uncapped 10 megabit Zenith CableMizer in 1996. There are many too many problems with uncapped service to go in to here, but they include the fact that cable is a shared medium and that upstream bandwidth is still very expensive.
I've found a text file works as well. Spambots don't seem to bother loading "contact.txt".
/me slaps the FBI bot with a limp trout
Dear RIAA lawyers,
Next time try fucking around with a real company. You'll be laughed at if you ever go after an mp3 server in an engineering department at General Electric, or Chemistry lab at SmithKleinGlaxo. Real companies wouldn't give you the time of day, let alone answer your phone calls or sign for your registered letters. You're pathetic.
Cheers,
JB