Well, unlike the iPod, this thing is WalMart Music compatible.
As long as you use Internet Explorer. Try the above link with Firefox.
The next step with portable music players is to break the link with the home computer. Think something that uses the cell phone network but doesn't make calls.
"The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill has been called the "Abolition of Parliament Bill" by several leading lawyers because it appears to give the Government an unrestrained ability to rewrite laws as it chooses without passing them through Parliament."
To find the intrusive Starforce device,
look in Windows Device Manager, select Show Hidden Devices, and
look for Starforce in the Non-Plug and Play tree.
Now that's something an application program should not be doing.
There's a StarForce removal tool, but it's from the Starforce people, and probably should not be trusted.
Starforce is threatening to sue Cory Doctorow for calling their product "malware". That would be amusing if they went through with it.
Specialham, the spammer hangout, usually has ads for botnets. Today, though, the spammers are discussing someone who got caught:
Adam Vitale aka Batch1 arrested by Secret Service
From what I heard it was a guy named Sean Dunaway (spelled wrong I think). He used to work for AOL, sold out their huge 90+ million members dbase, got jail time, and apperently is working for the man now. This is a big case, pump and dump stock scams can hurt people to the tune of millions of dollars. M.
Yeah pump & dump would seem more like the Secret Service's department... the article just spoke of "promoting computer security software"... perhaps additional charges will be filed later... maybe this was just the SS's way to get him jailed and put pressure on him... Saw your other post too.. U r right, whoever isn't mailing compliant these days and is promoting illegal shit like pharm or stocks on top of it, is just asking for the feds to bust through their door... Hamster
From what i hear it wasnt about stocks or spamming, the security spam stuff was just a coverup. What the feds were really after was a botnet the guys were mailing from. Dont know the truth to this but i would not doubt it one bit, it would make sense why the SS was involved.
Just goes to show swank has ties with the antis look at this http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/evidence.lasso?rokso _id=ROK4262 I am not saying this guy didnt scam tons of people which is not right however if swank does not like you for whatever reason he will post you info on his anti friends websites so be very very carefull when dealing with swank and make sure your personal info is kept to you.. Personal revenge is the key to try and recover money that was scammed not whoring shit out to the anti's.... P.S. swank you know I dont like fake people.. You guys get a kick of this one http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/evidence.lasso?rokso _id=ROK4021 Look half way down the message and you will see this "Swank"(Chris Brown) and "Batch1"(Adam Vitale) are in a tiff over a spam deal gone bad, and are in a flame-war on spamforum.biz. Swank has repeatedly posted "Batch1's contact info that was used in their spam dealings with each other. I think this is what I have been explaining all along about how swank has ties to the antis and posts peoples info if he doesnt like them and if you notice reading these articals the anti's really never say anything bad about swank HMMMM I wonder if he is friends with them.. Enjoy guys.....
Sean Dunaway is spelt correctly and he did not work for AOL and did not receive jail time. Soo sad that people are this missinformed.
Also the math makes no sense: Spammed 1.2 million AOL users with onbly 47,000 messages? Huh? ... 1200000 / recipients_per_Email = 47,000 emails sent. hard to understand isnt it hamster;) also if you've paid any attention to the forum, the informant (sean dunaway) is already notified and you've started a double thread because of your ignorance:P
This is starting to sound like those Mafia wiretap transcripts that came out as the New York Mafia was coming unglued. Law enforcement was doing well enough that the crooks were more afraid than the good guys, and were desperately trying to figure out who was selling out.
Spamming is starting to yield to straightforward police work.
For all eligible invalid clicks, we will offer credits which can be used to purchase new advertising with Google. We do not know how many will apply and receive credits, but under the agreement, the total amount of credits, plus attorneys fees, will not exceed $90 million.
-- Google blog.
Just what we needed, a way for search engine "optimizers" to generate giant automated link farms. Even with manual blogging, there's an annoying tendency for blogs to link to blogs, and, eventually, to spam-type press releases. You know, stuff like this: We'd like to give a high five to our research team.
Our portfolio is up 70% so far in 2006 and looking
stronger every day! We hope our members have been
keeping up with these incredible picks. Let's take
a look at this next winner. (From a real spam.)
Now we'll have thousands of phony "news sources" like that, all linking to each other.
So now each search engine will have to develop an automated tool to find and ignore this dreck.
Sony could build PS2 emulation hardware into the PS3, but they don't seem to have done so. The PS2 has the IOP from the PS1, which simplifies compatibility. The PS3 doesn't seem to have any legacy hardware. When the chief architect of the Cell chip spoke at Stanford two weeks ago, he indicated that the PS3 is using stock Cell parts.. It's too close to launch for that to change.
Remember, the current Cell implementation is a PowerPC with eight (seven for bad chips) "Synergistic Processing Elements", which are relatively conventional CPUs tied to 256K of uncached memory but with hardware to support asynchronous scatter-gather copy to and from main memory. This is very different hardware from the PS2. It's not going to be an easy emulation.
Trying to get the NVidia part to emulate the PS2's VS1 and GS units will be a neat trick; the graphics power is there, but in a very different form. It's a reasonable porting job, but straightforward emulation at the binary level is tough.
There's kind of a "build it and they will come" attitude from some of the Cell people. They're not quite sure how to use all those little isolated processors effectively, but hope someone will figure it out.
What makes anybody think that the PS3 will be backwards compatible with the PS2? The hardware is totally different. The PS2 is a MIPS machine with two streaming vector processors. The PS3 is a PowerPC machine with seven or eight "cell" processors and an NVidia GPU. Not even close.
Sony has been backing away from claiming compatibility.
"It's hard to say the PlayStation 3 will be 100 percent backwards compatible but as we said earlier this year we aim to make it so as much as possible."
Sony will probably try software emulation, but there's no guarantee it will be fast enough to play all PS2 games. Tetris, no problem. Call of Duty, maybe not. "Compatible" might have to be an upgrade deal; turn in your PS2 game disk and get a discount on a PS3 version.
"Active Record", I gather, is some kind of database wrapper. That's useful, but it's not a breakthrough. I've done similar things in Perl; one of them drives Downside's financial statement extractor. Admittedly, object-oriented Perl 5 is textually clunky, but adequate.
This "let's use all-new terminology and claim we have something new" stuff is annoying. Especially for what are, really, rather minor improvements.
France now gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power. Most of the rest is from hydroelectric plants. France exports 15% of its electricity.
All the high speed trains are electrified. In some cities, you can rent electric cars by the hour.
Bigfoot Networks has a job ad. They need someone to make their magic card work.
Bigfoot Networks, Inc. - Senior Video Game Network Programmer (C++, C, Game Design, Networking)
Full Time Employee will be responsible for architecture and implementation of programming interface and device driver interaction for a next generation network acceleration device targeted towards video games.
Responsibilities include API interface architecture and programming, development and implementation of sample implementations of the accelerator, implementation of other related game network low level software.
10+ years of game software design, experience in client/server game networking architecture and programming, socket programming, and superior skills in C++ and C, all a must.
Knowledge of Windows WDM, PCI, TCP/IP, and embedded programming, a plus.
Medical and Dental insurance is available through company.
Yup, open source usability problem. "What it lacks in obviousness, OpenOffice makes up for in the many ways to find the tools. They're in four places." Bad sign. Worse if some of options are only in some of the places.
This is an generic problem with open source GUI programs. Some features are reached through menus, some through toolbars, and some by right clicking. The interface tends to be determined more by who added the feature than by coherent design.
The original "Macintosh User Interface Guidelines" are still a good read. You may disagree with some of them, but if you have no idea what they are, you shouldn't be designing interfaces.
Apple no longer offers their QuickTime without iTunes. Seriously annoying in a corporate environment, where you may need a video player but don't want a music shopping application that phones home on your machines.
Monster Cables, the darling of high-end audio wannabees, now sells computer cables. All you need is to connect your joystick using a gold-plated Monster USB cable to realize its "true performance potential
".
Today's Advanced, High Speed USB Peripherals Require A Higher Performance USB Cable
Not long ago, the world of USB was limited to low-speed devices like keyboards, hubs, and scanners, so using ordinary USB cable could suffice. Things have changed. USB is now used for high-speed peripherals like speakers and video capture delivering larger and different kinds of data at much faster rates with incredible bandwidth. Ordinary USB cable isn't designed to meet the new high speed demand. High attenuation can occur, which may result in "clipped" sound, lost frames of video when capturing, and connection failure. Of course, data isn't the only element a USB cable carries. In many cases, it must carry power, too. Average USB cables often promote loss, because they can't transfer all the power needed. This invites, lockup, hard shutdowns, etc...
Introducing Ultimate Performance Monster USB: The Only High Speed USB Cable You'll Ever Need
Higher speed. More bandwidth. That's what the latest generation of USB devices demand and only Monster USB delivers. Here's how: Internally, the conductors are specially wound using our advanced SingleHelix(TM) helical winding process. This enables Monster USB cable to deliver 500 MHz of bandwidth. That's five times the minimum USB requirement! You'll enjoy crystal clear sound and the highest resolution images possible. The RF and EM noise problems that commonly plague lesser cables is combated with not one or two, but three separate layers of high density shielding. As a result, you'll get the fastest, most accurate data transfer possible. Thanks to our ultra-large gauge power conductor, you'll get all the power needed to power-hungry USB devices, without loss. The internal construction of every Monster USB cable is created by a laser-controlled USB Extruder which ensures that the cable meets the highest performance standards for ultra-fast data transfer, up to 400 Mbps. And, precision 24k gold contacts maximize signal integrity and corrosion resistance.
Prices start at only $24.95!
And for that extra, melee-winning boost, get Monster Cable Ethernet Cable. Advanced XLN® Xtra Low Noise® construction delivers fast, reliable data transfer -- up to 100Mbps.
24k gold contacts provide error--free data transfer and maximum corrosion resistance.
A few years ago, back in my CG-tool days, I was talking to a Hollywood director. He'd come from a stop-motion and animation background and had moved up to directing feature films with live actors and a substantial CGI component.
His big question was whether we could get the costs of CG down.
He thought things looked promising. "Reboot", the first all-CG TV show, was produced at one episode per week by a team of thirty people. That showed how cost-effective CG for TV was possible. Then there was "Roughnecks", the Starship Troopers spinoff, also produced with a comparable budget. "Roughnecks" had live action and CG, and most of the complexity of a movie, yet it was affordable. So things were looking good.
For a few years after that, though, CG budgets seemed to climb and climb. You'd see films with five to ten effects houses credited. (Someone at ILM once told me that where they make their real money is in bailing out failed productions, where someone else botched the effects and the producers now desperately need a quick fix to get the film out the door.) Audiences were expecting all big scenes, all the time, all the way through the movie. CG costs were becoming a studio nightmare.
But now, the tools are starting to mature. A film project rarely needs a technical R&D operation today. The computer hardware is off the shelf.
The software comes as a boxed product. Many artists now know how to drive a 3D animation system. Cramming the detail of a big scene into the computers is no longer a problem. Need an alien city? No big.
Seamless integration of live action and CG backgrounds? No problem.
Unless your principal character is CGI, as in "Shrek", CG is as routine as background painting once was.
There's more CG in a typical TV show today than in a movie of a decade ago.
So costs are starting to come back down to reasonable levels. And they'll fall further.
Managing all this is tough.
One wrenching change in the industry has come from CGI. Preproduction planning now dominates, and this has been a shock to directors who came from a theatrical background. Theatrical directors build scenes by putting actors on a bare stage and having them walk through the scene, seeing how it works, and adjusting the dialog and staging until it looks right. Some film directors work that way, and while it's slow, some great films took many takes before the scenes settled down and worked. For CGI-heavy films, this runs costs through the roof.
Animation directors, though, make movies by starting with a storyboard and filling in the blanks. Once the storyboard is locked in, the scenes and shots change little. CGI-heavy films require that discipline to keep costs under control. One result of this overcontrol is rather wooden acting, even by good actors.
Yeah. Did you notice what actually holds up the tower? Three threaded
rods pushed into wet cement. The only thing holding that tower against
wind loading is the friction between the rod thread and the cement.
He should have had a plate or two between the rods down in the cement.
There's no rebar in there, either.
He's depending on tensile strength in cement, usually a mistake.
And those dinky welds... Remember, he cut off the base of the tower when he got it, and had to homebrew a new base. It looks like there's just one inch of weld (with rust!) holding each tower leg.
And it's a weld on galvanized steel. You have to grind or burn off the galvanized zinc coating before welding, or you get a weld to the coating, which is like glueing to paint. The weld doesn't look good, either - the bead isn't even. Here's a welding tutorial. Look at their pictures of good and bad welds. Then
compare the weld in the article. It's worse than any "bad weld" shown.
A good weld is stronger than the material it attaches. Not this one.
He's got plenty of cement base, and the tower itself is probably strong enough, but the connections between the two are far weaker than either.
When it breaks, it's going to break at the weld between the tower leg and the metal gusset. Right where the rust shows through the paint.
It's always been a bit strange that TCP, which is a streaming protocol and ignores message boundaries, is the standard for request/response message type traffic. You have to add a framing protocol on top of TCP to do messaging, which is what everybody does.
The first attempt in the IP world to add a protocol of this type was
Reliable Data Protocol, in 1984. (See RFC 908). But that never went anywhere. Since then, nobody has really addressed this.
There was ISO TP4, but that didn't go anywhere either, althoug it was fully supported in Windows NT.
SCTP has reasonable congestion behavior, like TCP, so it's an improvement over UDP-based protocols in that regard. Moving some UDP-based protocols to SCTP could be a step up. That's where it could be most useful. It might make sense to put remote procedure call type protocols that now use UDP onto SCTP. If a protocol has to do retransmission, it's better to do it at the transport layer than at the application layer.
The "multihoming" thing seems badly placed, because that's not properly a transport layer function. But I haven't really looked at that.
The US should give up on NASA actually doing anything and outsource. Space probes to JPL, boosters to Energia in Russia, and everything else to China. Close most of NASA's "centers". We'd get more bang for the buck.
Out here in Silicon Valley, we have NASA Ames, which has a good wind tunnel and a large number of marginal NASA programs. The wind tunnel is worth keeping, but everything else, including the airfield, could be canned with no great loss.
We have clicks! We have eyeballs! But profits?
on
A History of Flickr
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Flickr is so 1999. We have clicks! We have eyeballs! We have users! We have traffic!
What's wrong with this picture? Where's the revenue?
It's a free hosting service, and they boast about how many people take up their offer of free image hosting.
Back around 1997, I came up with the concept of "rapture loans". The idea was to sell balloon-payment second mortgages to fundamentalist Christians. If the Rapture came before the end of 2001, they owed nothing. They could thus enjoy "abundance" until the Rapture. At the end of 2001, interest payments started, and if they couldn't pay, foreclosure would follow.
Marketing would be on Christian TV and radio stations, in the form of infomercials. "Quit your job now! Don't work again! Jesus is coming soon!", along with pictures of happy people with consumer goods. We considered finding some Christian figure to promote the product. Enough people were talking about the Rapture and the "Jubilee" back then that a modest market for the product clearly existed.
(For those of you interested in financial mechanics, the money for the mortgages would be obtained by creating a derivative security that could be resold in the secondary mortgage market. The "rapture" contingency would be taken care of by obtaining an insurance policy against the "rapture" for each mortgage (probably from Lloyds or Swiss Re), using exactly the same definition of "rapture" as in the loan. The combination of the insurance policy and the loan would constitute a resellable security without a "rapture" contingency that could be packaged up and sold in the mortgage-based security market. So we wouldn't have to finance the deal, just broker it.)
We didn't go through with it. It just seemed too evil.
Nevertheless, when there are people running around claiming that Jesus is coming back soon, it's quite feasible to make money taking the other side of that bet.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as you use Internet Explorer. Try the above link with Firefox.
The next step with portable music players is to break the link with the home computer. Think something that uses the cell phone network but doesn't make calls.
Opposition editorial in the Times by a member of Parlament.
"The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill has been called the "Abolition of Parliament Bill" by several leading lawyers because it appears to give the Government an unrestrained ability to rewrite laws as it chooses without passing them through Parliament."
Pixar didn't release anything to theaters in 2005. Of course revenue is down.
To find the intrusive Starforce device, look in Windows Device Manager, select Show Hidden Devices, and look for Starforce in the Non-Plug and Play tree.
Now that's something an application program should not be doing.
There's a StarForce removal tool, but it's from the Starforce people, and probably should not be trusted.
Starforce is threatening to sue Cory Doctorow for calling their product "malware". That would be amusing if they went through with it.
Adam Vitale aka Batch1 arrested by Secret Service
M.
Saw your other post too.. U r right, whoever isn't mailing compliant these days and is promoting illegal shit like pharm or stocks on top of it, is just asking for the feds to bust through their door...
Hamster
I am not saying this guy didnt scam tons of people which is not right however if swank does not like you for whatever reason he will post you info on his anti friends websites so be very very carefull when dealing with swank and make sure your personal info is kept to you.. Personal revenge is the key to try and recover money that was scammed not whoring shit out to the anti's....
P.S. swank you know I dont like fake people.. You guys get a kick of this one http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/evidence.lasso?roks
Look half way down the message and you will see this
"Swank"(Chris Brown) and "Batch1"(Adam Vitale) are in a tiff over a spam deal gone bad, and are in a flame-war on spamforum.biz.
Swank has repeatedly posted "Batch1's contact info that was used in their spam dealings with each other.
I think this is what I have been explaining all along about how swank has ties to the antis and posts peoples info if he doesnt like them and if you notice reading these articals the anti's really never say anything bad about swank HMMMM I wonder if he is friends with them.. Enjoy guys.....
1200000 / recipients_per_Email = 47,000 emails sent.
hard to understand isnt it hamster
also if you've paid any attention to the forum, the informant (sean dunaway) is already notified and you've started a double thread because of your ignorance
This is starting to sound like those Mafia wiretap transcripts that came out as the New York Mafia was coming unglued. Law enforcement was doing well enough that the crooks were more afraid than the good guys, and were desperately trying to figure out who was selling out.
Spamming is starting to yield to straightforward police work.
All this is costing Google are the legal fees.
Now we'll have thousands of phony "news sources" like that, all linking to each other.
So now each search engine will have to develop an automated tool to find and ignore this dreck.
Remember, the current Cell implementation is a PowerPC with eight (seven for bad chips) "Synergistic Processing Elements", which are relatively conventional CPUs tied to 256K of uncached memory but with hardware to support asynchronous scatter-gather copy to and from main memory. This is very different hardware from the PS2. It's not going to be an easy emulation.
Trying to get the NVidia part to emulate the PS2's VS1 and GS units will be a neat trick; the graphics power is there, but in a very different form. It's a reasonable porting job, but straightforward emulation at the binary level is tough.
There's kind of a "build it and they will come" attitude from some of the Cell people. They're not quite sure how to use all those little isolated processors effectively, but hope someone will figure it out.
We'll all know more after GDC in two weeks.
Sony has been backing away from claiming compatibility. "It's hard to say the PlayStation 3 will be 100 percent backwards compatible but as we said earlier this year we aim to make it so as much as possible."
Sony will probably try software emulation, but there's no guarantee it will be fast enough to play all PS2 games. Tetris, no problem. Call of Duty, maybe not. "Compatible" might have to be an upgrade deal; turn in your PS2 game disk and get a discount on a PS3 version.
This "let's use all-new terminology and claim we have something new" stuff is annoying. Especially for what are, really, rather minor improvements.
What oil crisis?
Oil today (NYMEX): $61.47/bbl.
Bigfoot Networks, Inc. - Senior Video Game Network Programmer (C++, C, Game Design, Networking)
Full Time Employee will be responsible for architecture and implementation of programming interface and device driver interaction for a next generation network acceleration device targeted towards video games.
Responsibilities include API interface architecture and programming, development and implementation of sample implementations of the accelerator, implementation of other related game network low level software.
10+ years of game software design, experience in client/server game networking architecture and programming, socket programming, and superior skills in C++ and C, all a must.
Knowledge of Windows WDM, PCI, TCP/IP, and embedded programming, a plus.
Medical and Dental insurance is available through company.
For more information, please contact Harlan at BigfootNetworks dot com
This is an generic problem with open source GUI programs. Some features are reached through menus, some through toolbars, and some by right clicking. The interface tends to be determined more by who added the feature than by coherent design.
The original "Macintosh User Interface Guidelines" are still a good read. You may disagree with some of them, but if you have no idea what they are, you shouldn't be designing interfaces.
Great concept, but user comments on that indicate that version 1.68 still crashes frequently.
Didn't earlier versions of the QuickTime player go full-screen in the free version?
Apple no longer offers their QuickTime without iTunes. Seriously annoying in a corporate environment, where you may need a video player but don't want a music shopping application that phones home on your machines.
Monster USB(TM) Ultimate Performance USB Cable
Today's Advanced, High Speed USB Peripherals Require A Higher Performance USB Cable
Not long ago, the world of USB was limited to low-speed devices like keyboards, hubs, and scanners, so using ordinary USB cable could suffice. Things have changed. USB is now used for high-speed peripherals like speakers and video capture delivering larger and different kinds of data at much faster rates with incredible bandwidth. Ordinary USB cable isn't designed to meet the new high speed demand. High attenuation can occur, which may result in "clipped" sound, lost frames of video when capturing, and connection failure. Of course, data isn't the only element a USB cable carries. In many cases, it must carry power, too. Average USB cables often promote loss, because they can't transfer all the power needed. This invites, lockup, hard shutdowns, etc...
Introducing Ultimate Performance Monster USB: The Only High Speed USB Cable You'll Ever Need
Higher speed. More bandwidth. That's what the latest generation of USB devices demand and only Monster USB delivers. Here's how: Internally, the conductors are specially wound using our advanced SingleHelix(TM) helical winding process. This enables Monster USB cable to deliver 500 MHz of bandwidth. That's five times the minimum USB requirement! You'll enjoy crystal clear sound and the highest resolution images possible. The RF and EM noise problems that commonly plague lesser cables is combated with not one or two, but three separate layers of high density shielding. As a result, you'll get the fastest, most accurate data transfer possible. Thanks to our ultra-large gauge power conductor, you'll get all the power needed to power-hungry USB devices, without loss. The internal construction of every Monster USB cable is created by a laser-controlled USB Extruder which ensures that the cable meets the highest performance standards for ultra-fast data transfer, up to 400 Mbps. And, precision 24k gold contacts maximize signal integrity and corrosion resistance.
Prices start at only $24.95!
And for that extra, melee-winning boost, get Monster Cable Ethernet Cable. Advanced XLN® Xtra Low Noise® construction delivers fast, reliable data transfer -- up to 100Mbps. 24k gold contacts provide error--free data transfer and maximum corrosion resistance.
His big question was whether we could get the costs of CG down. He thought things looked promising. "Reboot", the first all-CG TV show, was produced at one episode per week by a team of thirty people. That showed how cost-effective CG for TV was possible. Then there was "Roughnecks", the Starship Troopers spinoff, also produced with a comparable budget. "Roughnecks" had live action and CG, and most of the complexity of a movie, yet it was affordable. So things were looking good.
For a few years after that, though, CG budgets seemed to climb and climb. You'd see films with five to ten effects houses credited. (Someone at ILM once told me that where they make their real money is in bailing out failed productions, where someone else botched the effects and the producers now desperately need a quick fix to get the film out the door.) Audiences were expecting all big scenes, all the time, all the way through the movie. CG costs were becoming a studio nightmare.
But now, the tools are starting to mature. A film project rarely needs a technical R&D operation today. The computer hardware is off the shelf. The software comes as a boxed product. Many artists now know how to drive a 3D animation system. Cramming the detail of a big scene into the computers is no longer a problem. Need an alien city? No big. Seamless integration of live action and CG backgrounds? No problem. Unless your principal character is CGI, as in "Shrek", CG is as routine as background painting once was. There's more CG in a typical TV show today than in a movie of a decade ago.
So costs are starting to come back down to reasonable levels. And they'll fall further.
Managing all this is tough. One wrenching change in the industry has come from CGI. Preproduction planning now dominates, and this has been a shock to directors who came from a theatrical background. Theatrical directors build scenes by putting actors on a bare stage and having them walk through the scene, seeing how it works, and adjusting the dialog and staging until it looks right. Some film directors work that way, and while it's slow, some great films took many takes before the scenes settled down and worked. For CGI-heavy films, this runs costs through the roof.
Animation directors, though, make movies by starting with a storyboard and filling in the blanks. Once the storyboard is locked in, the scenes and shots change little. CGI-heavy films require that discipline to keep costs under control. One result of this overcontrol is rather wooden acting, even by good actors.
It's been hard on some directors.
This was a casual comment from the guy while at a party. Big deal. Maybe he was just drunk.
Somebody has got to photograph some big-name rapper with that speaker box on his shoulder, early '80s style.
And those dinky welds... Remember, he cut off the base of the tower when he got it, and had to homebrew a new base. It looks like there's just one inch of weld (with rust!) holding each tower leg. And it's a weld on galvanized steel. You have to grind or burn off the galvanized zinc coating before welding, or you get a weld to the coating, which is like glueing to paint. The weld doesn't look good, either - the bead isn't even. Here's a welding tutorial. Look at their pictures of good and bad welds. Then compare the weld in the article. It's worse than any "bad weld" shown. A good weld is stronger than the material it attaches. Not this one.
He's got plenty of cement base, and the tower itself is probably strong enough, but the connections between the two are far weaker than either. When it breaks, it's going to break at the weld between the tower leg and the metal gusset. Right where the rust shows through the paint.
The first attempt in the IP world to add a protocol of this type was Reliable Data Protocol, in 1984. (See RFC 908). But that never went anywhere. Since then, nobody has really addressed this. There was ISO TP4, but that didn't go anywhere either, althoug it was fully supported in Windows NT.
SCTP has reasonable congestion behavior, like TCP, so it's an improvement over UDP-based protocols in that regard. Moving some UDP-based protocols to SCTP could be a step up. That's where it could be most useful. It might make sense to put remote procedure call type protocols that now use UDP onto SCTP. If a protocol has to do retransmission, it's better to do it at the transport layer than at the application layer.
The "multihoming" thing seems badly placed, because that's not properly a transport layer function. But I haven't really looked at that.
John Nagle
Out here in Silicon Valley, we have NASA Ames, which has a good wind tunnel and a large number of marginal NASA programs. The wind tunnel is worth keeping, but everything else, including the airfield, could be canned with no great loss.
What's wrong with this picture? Where's the revenue? It's a free hosting service, and they boast about how many people take up their offer of free image hosting.
Does Flickr actually make money for Yahoo?
Marketing would be on Christian TV and radio stations, in the form of infomercials. "Quit your job now! Don't work again! Jesus is coming soon!", along with pictures of happy people with consumer goods. We considered finding some Christian figure to promote the product. Enough people were talking about the Rapture and the "Jubilee" back then that a modest market for the product clearly existed.
(For those of you interested in financial mechanics, the money for the mortgages would be obtained by creating a derivative security that could be resold in the secondary mortgage market. The "rapture" contingency would be taken care of by obtaining an insurance policy against the "rapture" for each mortgage (probably from Lloyds or Swiss Re), using exactly the same definition of "rapture" as in the loan. The combination of the insurance policy and the loan would constitute a resellable security without a "rapture" contingency that could be packaged up and sold in the mortgage-based security market. So we wouldn't have to finance the deal, just broker it.)
We didn't go through with it. It just seemed too evil.
Nevertheless, when there are people running around claiming that Jesus is coming back soon, it's quite feasible to make money taking the other side of that bet.