Tried it.. some interviews.. second interviews even.. all seem to go well but then none of them ever hire me. I have no idea why. I am very experienced in Linux and programming but I don't seem to get any decent jobs. I don't even ask for a lot of money or extras so I don't know what the problem is. The unemployment rate here is claimed to be the lowest in the U.S. but the best tech job I can get pays like $8/hr.. the pizza guy makes $10/hr here. Really frustrates me. I'd really like a contract job by some company for web sites or something so I had my free time to write OSS software but so far I haven't found such a job. My current favorite language is PHP. I love it because it makes developing complex web sites so easy. No nasty hoops to dance through like with C or Perl, though those languages are of course better for some specific tasks.:)
The problem with fighting this battle is that it is a moral issue. To many people copying intellectual property is stealing. To many other people, most of which are probably tech-savvy youth, the old hacker cry of 'information is meant to be free' has became reality and to them it is wrong to obstruct the free flow of information. Here you have the two sides pushing at each other to kill the evil in what is a classic religious war. As most people will agree you can be Catholic or Jewish and neither makes you really an evil person yet people have fought and killed each other over this mere point of idealism. nobody even wins such a war, everyone losses. Today the information as property group has the most power and they can cause a great deal of pain to the information as freedom group but they can not completely stamp it out. All they can do is create martyrs in a group that is composed of the majority of youth today. This group will grow up and when they do they will have money and political power and then they'll strike back against what they see as the evil oppressors and then you can expect intellectual property laws weakened so much it may not even exist anymore. All those who've built their business on a model of control will be sent into shock and many will doubtless loss their shirt or worse. I think many artists would do well to look at where their real revenue comes from, the fans, and feed that frenzy. If free software can make a multi-billion dollar industry I'm quite sure free music, movies, etc can do the same. It'd probably be even more successful as these are more accessible forms of art so the user base is much wider in general. The artist would get to keep their only money rather than some huge media company. The change is coming so everyone involved should decide which side of the whip they want to be on. Youth always bring changes and often art has been involved. I hope nobody misses out on this cultural shift.
It appears the local power company here in Miami gives free electricity to electric car owners. I've gone over and played with their pumps (or whatever you call them) and they have no keys or access number or anything you need to make them start. Also they leave the electric cars unlocked on their lot and you can get in and try them out. It isn't like you could steal one anyway, they look so funky retarded the first cop would spot you, but hey it's fun to check em out. I think it'd be awesome to put up publicly funded stations at all rest stops and such that gave free charges to electric car owners and the stations were powered from solar/wind/whatever power so the only cost would be upkeep of the stations. Sure as hell beats these gasoline prices. I know a lot of people talking about how they'd change right now with gas prices so high. Any car makers listening? This is the time to push these babies to the public.
Does anyone have suggestions on books that teach writing compiler compilers? I'm working on one that can parse/compile/execute anything from C++ to LISP to XML but as I've had no formal training in the subject and wasn't allowed to check out the one book I ever found that was good (and out of print, arghh) I'm mostly making it up as I go along and teaching myself from my own errors which is of course a very slow method.:)
*nods* If the reasons given are anywhere near correct I don't think having a limited number of TLD's has worked. A good many companies will register at least the top three.com.net and.org for their trademarks and often more these days. I also highly doubt that computing power for handling the list of TLD's would be a problem these days if the system was programmed correctly. I think a lot of the problem is companies refusal to use the system as it was designed to be used and the publics inability to grasp addresses outside the www.anything.tld format. Most non-technical people I know don't even understand what makes a domain name a name and just use the Internet by clicking links. Maybe the web itself is usurping the role domain names once played?
I don't know of any bands who don't usually have one or two songs at least per CD that I don't care for. Even if the song is good, it doesn't mean I'll like it. Other than those couple bands probably the other 99% of music I like is by bands who aren't quite as good overall but do have a song here and there that I like and I have every right to listen to the songs I like without paying for 10 other songs on the CD that all suck and being forced to listen to those songs every time I play the CD. If you only buy CD's who have only good songs on them then you must have a collection of about three discs.
I'd agree that native versions are always better and I hope everyone bothers companies to release the source to old programs, especially games, so that they can be ported and kept alive. I try to send an email to all my favorite game makers every couple months asking them to release old programs as source but thus far none have done it. I long for the day I can play Commander Keen native in Linux as I sit cleaning up the source code to the same.:) But since many old programs have been lost so that source no longer even exists or the companies refuse to give it away I think there will always be a need for emulators.
What is the reason for limiting the number of TLD's? It seems to me it'd be just as well to allow any organization to register a single TLD as their own. So that a page at IBM might be es.research.ibm and would take people to the Spanish version of IBM's R&D web site. By limiting each organization to a single one it means they can't fight over every single word in the fricken dictionary. They get a tidy little address that actually makes sense and anyone can register any SLD they want under their own TLD without stupid rules about squating and trademarks and such. I don't see any reason why the system couldn't be adjusted to migrate to such a domain name scheme without disabling the current scheme. I'd go as far as to decentralizing the TLD's so that no central authority can keep you from registering whatever you want. Make it so you just point out the list of IP's you want to get TLD's from and then try them in order and whichever is first in your list gets priority. Sure 99% of us would still use some central group but by opening the system up as much as possible it'd make it so that if one domain registar got snotty people could just migrate painlessly. Maybe there are technical reasons why this shouldn't be done. If so I'd love to hear about it.
I'll say first off that I never buy a CD without first having it as MP3's. The reason I usually buy the CD is because I want to make a better rip of my favorite songs and then I pretty much throw the CD away as it's useless to me. Since getting into MP3's my CD buying has gone up about 500%. I highly resent the high price of CD's and the fact that I'm forced to buy a CD that has songs I don't even like on it. CD's tend to get scratched, cracked, lost, stollen, etc. By ripping the discs I can listen to a huge playlist without switching discs or replacing broken discs and if I decide to I can write my favorite songs in any order I choose to a CD-R. I'd have to agree that I'd rather buy tshirts or concert tickets to fund the artists I like than pay for some shitty CD. Also as a programmer, artist, and inventor I hope the day does come when patents and copyrights no longer exist. I don't care if other people want to keep their copyrighted stuff to themself but patents are just wrong. At least the copyrighted stuff can just be replaced for the most part by others. I'd hope more artists would realize that money is not the end but a means. Do you really want to profit from your work or do you want to be happy because of it? Myself I choose to look for my own happiness and making others happy as much as possible.
Exactly the point. Why would anyone want to buy an opensource app besides for support or manuals or some other useful add-on? Why should I give away mine only to have someone else try to sell it back to me? Sure I could always copy whatever additions they made if they were worth the effort but that is a duplication of effort and is silly. At least with GPL'd work if you have a duplication of effort you can try both ways and if one works better choose that way. This is a perfect example, why should they give away Quake source just so that some lameass company can come up and use the code to make a clone called Quaker that adds insane Quakers running around doing nifty things and get to keep it all for themselves. Sure it's great if they want to package it and sell it but they have to give their changes back to the original code owner and anybody he thinks should see it. If they don't want to abide by the codes license then they could always pay a licensing fee to get the code under a different license if id were willing. Stealing GPL'd code is nothing but pirating software. It's like someone offering to share their lunch and you eat what they give you, take the rest, and then beat them up and take their wallet too.
Stop and consider it. Which has the most assimilating power? For years Microsoft has been our Borg but we created a postive assimilating army to fight back and we call it Linux. Microsoft is only a company but Linux is a viral culture. Trying to stop Linux is like trying to stamp out a the Bible. Pretty damn unlikely right? When the two combine Linux will eventually be the part that shines through. It might actually help our cause if we gave Microsoft a 4% share of all the major Linux companies. Enough to benefit from the profit without being enough to give them control. When they see profit coming from it they'd be foolish to make any attacks and foolish not to grow their own market share by making their apps Linux compatible.
If it was me making the choice as to what M$ was going to have to do to avoid being broken up I'd force them to release all their source code under a true opensource license (ie it must get the approval just as any other OSS license has to) and preferably either under GPL or BSD. GPL might be best in this case as it'd help keep fragmentation down but it isn't needed as once the source was open anyone could make things compatible. Releasing only Windows allows them to simply rename the product. Releasing only the OS allows them to simply recatagorize large chunks of the code. We have seen companies prosper with all OSS'd code so there is no reason M$ couldn't. They have a large R&D labs and could turn out an amazing amount of wonderful code if they were just taken and shoved into the light kicking and screaming. They'd probably come out stronger as it'd force them to make prices more affordable and fix their support (which honestly sucks) -- they already charge enough for their support to make a large profit off of it if they tried. The new commercial could be, "Where do you want to go today, call us and we'll show you how." M$ almost missed the Internet, will they miss opensource? Linux may catch up some with Windows it's true but Windows would also catch up with Linux. Imagine tomorrows students having such a wide list of OSS OS's to study from. It can't do anything but make tomorrow's computing better.
The answer to that is to stop avoiding alternate fuels and electric cars and such. Car makers have been foolish to stay with only one fuel type as it lets control out of their own hands. The consumer has been foolish for not forcing car makers to give us more choices. Luckily many solutions already exist and hopefully some executives someplace will get some nerve and change the balance of power. Choice is always power.
Rather than just highlight PC's I think it's important that companies do their best to push their employees (and families) educations in all areas. IMO an intelligent company will see that they can create a thriving culture where they educate and build trust with the public and that public will have more money to spend and be more likely to buy from that company. Currently most companies (and governments) try to keep control by playing off poor education and marketing hype and while this does work it slowly shrinks the possible income whereas the education way will build it. I see Linux companies playing in this feild though perhaps they don't fully see it. Because they educate their customers they raise the general level of education which in turn will create both more free software developers and consumers with more money to spend thus creating a rising tide of income. People who think tech stocks are overpriced only look at them in dollars and forget that good tech companies will seemingly cause money to grow on trees because they educate and when they educate the world has more resources. The day of counting raw materials as out most precious asset are past, information and knowledge is what will make our society strong and wealthy. If I were Bill Gates or someone else with money to burn I'd move into very poor regions with low education and provide adequate housing and food and education. Sure the initial investment is high but the growth would be exponential and would benefit not only that community and that company but the world in general. Want to make the world a better place? Take some children and teach them.
I think that innovators tend to be counterculture in nature which is why many in science (especially theory), philosophy, and technology have been somewhat of a subversive nature throughout history. It isn't that drugs and geeks have to go together but that they just tend to as long as drugs are also counterculture which of course the drug war keeps going. Also I think drugs can be used to help boost creativity and relaxation for overworked geeks trying to keep up. Geeks are artists and art has often been linked with creativity and drugs. I myself have learned to psych myself up which causes various natural drugs to be produced and also now and then drink alcohol or Pepsi to boost myself. Sleep deprivation does a good job of boosting creativity too. When I'm stuck I go without sleep for a week or so and it comes to me how to do something.
Here comes Jabber.. the new Usenet!
on
Is Usenet Dying?
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With Jabber's flexibility I see it merging what ICQ, Napster, and Usenet do all into one. I expect to see J loops (web circles, newsgroups kinda thing) pop up along w/ an add-on protocol to support them. The basic idea is that the time of every message on the whole freaking Usenet being piped to all those servers is past and that centralizing them to a couple main servers that are logically connected is better. Then users would add the loops they want to their ICQ list and would get a list of messages and waiting file transfers, contact, urls, etc they could either choose to get or ignore until they expired. Since files would be stored and transfered as binary that'd be quicker and save hdd space and since the system would be built on XML searches could be far more powerful. Since each loop is somewhat self contained it'd be easier to moderate messages. The XML would let the moderator choose to either delete the message or tag a SPAM rating depending on how spammy it was and their policy for the group. It'd be possible to even set up a peer review system like Slashdot has.
A group of us has been considering either lobbying various small/poor countries to set us up as a non-profit body that controls bandwidth issues as well as intellectual property issues for the country with total control over all such issues. For allowing us to make their country into a data haven they would get a percentage of the profits from us leasing the bandwidth to various organizations for net servers etc as well as the fact they'd be pushed into the information economy. For anyone who has watched small or 3rd world countries the past few years there has been a trend where they are trying to jump right over industrial into information. Singapore and Malaysia would be good examples. Look at all the countries who just let any shmuck company control their tld's! We get what we want which is freedom and they get what they want which is power and prosperity. If that couldn't be arranged we've considered the possibility of a floating data haven if we could buy an old aircraft carrier or something like that and set it up as a huge network serving platform out in international waters. By creating such a data haven we'd 1. make it so we were sure to have access to the data and 2. apply pressure to various governments around the world to lossen their laws. Look at how the U.S. is finally starting to allow encryption export, largely because so many foreign firms already had that freedom and American firms were suffering.
Nobody I've wrote to ever responds or does anything useful either. I fear this is one of these discrimination issues that won't change until a younger generation that grew up online with many multinational friends begins taking office. The old guard is to afraid to risk not being elected again by the masses who actually believe foreign workers take jobs. This is America people, anyone who isn't a criminal should be able to come here and make a decent life for themself. Without a ton of useless paperwork! Discrimination of place of birth is no better than any other form. People can no more help where they are born than their skin color or gender. Does the fact they can't vote mean we can use them as we wish to keep or throw away on whim? Nice of us to give corporations these free slaves.
Someone at Loki told me they were working towards a FF8 port to Linux. How far along they might be I don't know but since it just hit Windows I hope to see a Linux version to appear soon.:)
I work w/ AI and computer language theory both as hobbies and see no reason why code can't be evolved. True, it'd take some effort to do it well but the main point is the more you ran the compiler the better it'd get as it'd learn more and more tricks. First I assume it'd jsut compile a base version.. the same version any old compiler would give you.. then it'd begin trying various optimizations and as it went it'd learn what works best in certain situations and even begin to make it's own optimization combos. After it gained enough experience it could do the job far faster than any human. I've played with this some, mostly in running interp'd languages of my own design and it seems to work fairly well. I've also wondered if you couldn't create something similar for file compression. Might be interesting to see what you get.
Remember back to like '94 or '95 when we had the sudden popularity of scratch n' sniff web sites. Well now, it's back! Just think.. Microsoft will create a special button on the M$ ScentMouse(tm) that allows you to scratch ad banners. Upon installation you get the smell of money.. your money joining all the rest in Bill Gates pocket.
How about the smell of fear coming from those fat cats trying to delegalize MP3's and DeCSS. We can invent a scent compression technology and then let all their lawyer come screaming at us that they invented the ability to smell. Napster gets a smell-that-tune feature. I'm afraid to imagine Weird Al's remake of Sixpence None the Richer's 'Love Me' song as 'Smell Me.'
How bout a chain letter or web site that checks you for BO and then instructs you on how to get rid of it. If you get rid of the BO and pass on the email/link you're love will finally go out with you, but if you don't you will contain to smell worse daily until a family of skunks moves in with you.
Well it's offtopic and probably a bit of broken glass set just for barefoot hippies like me to step on but here's my answer for anyone who cares.. I pick my color schemes based on the desired mood of the web site and I try to make sure text and link colors contrast well with the background and usually use lighter tones of the link color for alink/vlink colors. In general it's a good idea not to use background images unless they actually improve the page somehow and if you do it's good to put all text inside tables w/ proper flat color backgrounds. It's also good to pick colors that aren't obnoxious because you don't want it to annoy people usually. Otherwise it just gives people a headache. For the same reason I almost never include links directly in text the way Slashdot does but rather include the links in some nearby easy to see spot such as the side or bottom of the page or at the end of the paragraph.
Slashdot Mirror
Are there any object oriented databases that work with PHP? SQL is good for some things but sometimes objects are easier to work with.
Tried it.. some interviews.. second interviews even.. all seem to go well but then none of them ever hire me. I have no idea why. I am very experienced in Linux and programming but I don't seem to get any decent jobs. I don't even ask for a lot of money or extras so I don't know what the problem is. The unemployment rate here is claimed to be the lowest in the U.S. but the best tech job I can get pays like $8/hr.. the pizza guy makes $10/hr here. Really frustrates me. I'd really like a contract job by some company for web sites or something so I had my free time to write OSS software but so far I haven't found such a job. My current favorite language is PHP. I love it because it makes developing complex web sites so easy. No nasty hoops to dance through like with C or Perl, though those languages are of course better for some specific tasks. :)
The problem with fighting this battle is that it is a moral issue. To many people copying intellectual property is stealing. To many other people, most of which are probably tech-savvy youth, the old hacker cry of 'information is meant to be free' has became reality and to them it is wrong to obstruct the free flow of information. Here you have the two sides pushing at each other to kill the evil in what is a classic religious war. As most people will agree you can be Catholic or Jewish and neither makes you really an evil person yet people have fought and killed each other over this mere point of idealism. nobody even wins such a war, everyone losses. Today the information as property group has the most power and they can cause a great deal of pain to the information as freedom group but they can not completely stamp it out. All they can do is create martyrs in a group that is composed of the majority of youth today. This group will grow up and when they do they will have money and political power and then they'll strike back against what they see as the evil oppressors and then you can expect intellectual property laws weakened so much it may not even exist anymore. All those who've built their business on a model of control will be sent into shock and many will doubtless loss their shirt or worse. I think many artists would do well to look at where their real revenue comes from, the fans, and feed that frenzy. If free software can make a multi-billion dollar industry I'm quite sure free music, movies, etc can do the same. It'd probably be even more successful as these are more accessible forms of art so the user base is much wider in general. The artist would get to keep their only money rather than some huge media company. The change is coming so everyone involved should decide which side of the whip they want to be on. Youth always bring changes and often art has been involved. I hope nobody misses out on this cultural shift.
It appears the local power company here in Miami gives free electricity to electric car owners. I've gone over and played with their pumps (or whatever you call them) and they have no keys or access number or anything you need to make them start. Also they leave the electric cars unlocked on their lot and you can get in and try them out. It isn't like you could steal one anyway, they look so funky retarded the first cop would spot you, but hey it's fun to check em out. I think it'd be awesome to put up publicly funded stations at all rest stops and such that gave free charges to electric car owners and the stations were powered from solar/wind/whatever power so the only cost would be upkeep of the stations. Sure as hell beats these gasoline prices. I know a lot of people talking about how they'd change right now with gas prices so high. Any car makers listening? This is the time to push these babies to the public.
Does anyone have suggestions on books that teach writing compiler compilers? I'm working on one that can parse/compile/execute anything from C++ to LISP to XML but as I've had no formal training in the subject and wasn't allowed to check out the one book I ever found that was good (and out of print, arghh) I'm mostly making it up as I go along and teaching myself from my own errors which is of course a very slow method. :)
*nods* If the reasons given are anywhere near correct I don't think having a limited number of TLD's has worked. A good many companies will register at least the top three .com .net and .org for their trademarks and often more these days. I also highly doubt that computing power for handling the list of TLD's would be a problem these days if the system was programmed correctly. I think a lot of the problem is companies refusal to use the system as it was designed to be used and the publics inability to grasp addresses outside the www.anything.tld format. Most non-technical people I know don't even understand what makes a domain name a name and just use the Internet by clicking links. Maybe the web itself is usurping the role domain names once played?
I don't know of any bands who don't usually have one or two songs at least per CD that I don't care for. Even if the song is good, it doesn't mean I'll like it. Other than those couple bands probably the other 99% of music I like is by bands who aren't quite as good overall but do have a song here and there that I like and I have every right to listen to the songs I like without paying for 10 other songs on the CD that all suck and being forced to listen to those songs every time I play the CD. If you only buy CD's who have only good songs on them then you must have a collection of about three discs.
I'd agree that native versions are always better and I hope everyone bothers companies to release the source to old programs, especially games, so that they can be ported and kept alive. I try to send an email to all my favorite game makers every couple months asking them to release old programs as source but thus far none have done it. I long for the day I can play Commander Keen native in Linux as I sit cleaning up the source code to the same. :) But since many old programs have been lost so that source no longer even exists or the companies refuse to give it away I think there will always be a need for emulators.
What is the reason for limiting the number of TLD's? It seems to me it'd be just as well to allow any organization to register a single TLD as their own. So that a page at IBM might be es.research.ibm and would take people to the Spanish version of IBM's R&D web site. By limiting each organization to a single one it means they can't fight over every single word in the fricken dictionary. They get a tidy little address that actually makes sense and anyone can register any SLD they want under their own TLD without stupid rules about squating and trademarks and such. I don't see any reason why the system couldn't be adjusted to migrate to such a domain name scheme without disabling the current scheme. I'd go as far as to decentralizing the TLD's so that no central authority can keep you from registering whatever you want. Make it so you just point out the list of IP's you want to get TLD's from and then try them in order and whichever is first in your list gets priority. Sure 99% of us would still use some central group but by opening the system up as much as possible it'd make it so that if one domain registar got snotty people could just migrate painlessly. Maybe there are technical reasons why this shouldn't be done. If so I'd love to hear about it.
I'll say first off that I never buy a CD without first having it as MP3's. The reason I usually buy the CD is because I want to make a better rip of my favorite songs and then I pretty much throw the CD away as it's useless to me. Since getting into MP3's my CD buying has gone up about 500%. I highly resent the high price of CD's and the fact that I'm forced to buy a CD that has songs I don't even like on it. CD's tend to get scratched, cracked, lost, stollen, etc. By ripping the discs I can listen to a huge playlist without switching discs or replacing broken discs and if I decide to I can write my favorite songs in any order I choose to a CD-R. I'd have to agree that I'd rather buy tshirts or concert tickets to fund the artists I like than pay for some shitty CD. Also as a programmer, artist, and inventor I hope the day does come when patents and copyrights no longer exist. I don't care if other people want to keep their copyrighted stuff to themself but patents are just wrong. At least the copyrighted stuff can just be replaced for the most part by others. I'd hope more artists would realize that money is not the end but a means. Do you really want to profit from your work or do you want to be happy because of it? Myself I choose to look for my own happiness and making others happy as much as possible.
Exactly the point. Why would anyone want to buy an opensource app besides for support or manuals or some other useful add-on? Why should I give away mine only to have someone else try to sell it back to me? Sure I could always copy whatever additions they made if they were worth the effort but that is a duplication of effort and is silly. At least with GPL'd work if you have a duplication of effort you can try both ways and if one works better choose that way. This is a perfect example, why should they give away Quake source just so that some lameass company can come up and use the code to make a clone called Quaker that adds insane Quakers running around doing nifty things and get to keep it all for themselves. Sure it's great if they want to package it and sell it but they have to give their changes back to the original code owner and anybody he thinks should see it. If they don't want to abide by the codes license then they could always pay a licensing fee to get the code under a different license if id were willing. Stealing GPL'd code is nothing but pirating software. It's like someone offering to share their lunch and you eat what they give you, take the rest, and then beat them up and take their wallet too.
Stop and consider it. Which has the most assimilating power? For years Microsoft has been our Borg but we created a postive assimilating army to fight back and we call it Linux. Microsoft is only a company but Linux is a viral culture. Trying to stop Linux is like trying to stamp out a the Bible. Pretty damn unlikely right? When the two combine Linux will eventually be the part that shines through. It might actually help our cause if we gave Microsoft a 4% share of all the major Linux companies. Enough to benefit from the profit without being enough to give them control. When they see profit coming from it they'd be foolish to make any attacks and foolish not to grow their own market share by making their apps Linux compatible.
If it was me making the choice as to what M$ was going to have to do to avoid being broken up I'd force them to release all their source code under a true opensource license (ie it must get the approval just as any other OSS license has to) and preferably either under GPL or BSD. GPL might be best in this case as it'd help keep fragmentation down but it isn't needed as once the source was open anyone could make things compatible. Releasing only Windows allows them to simply rename the product. Releasing only the OS allows them to simply recatagorize large chunks of the code. We have seen companies prosper with all OSS'd code so there is no reason M$ couldn't. They have a large R&D labs and could turn out an amazing amount of wonderful code if they were just taken and shoved into the light kicking and screaming. They'd probably come out stronger as it'd force them to make prices more affordable and fix their support (which honestly sucks) -- they already charge enough for their support to make a large profit off of it if they tried. The new commercial could be, "Where do you want to go today, call us and we'll show you how." M$ almost missed the Internet, will they miss opensource? Linux may catch up some with Windows it's true but Windows would also catch up with Linux. Imagine tomorrows students having such a wide list of OSS OS's to study from. It can't do anything but make tomorrow's computing better.
The answer to that is to stop avoiding alternate fuels and electric cars and such. Car makers have been foolish to stay with only one fuel type as it lets control out of their own hands. The consumer has been foolish for not forcing car makers to give us more choices. Luckily many solutions already exist and hopefully some executives someplace will get some nerve and change the balance of power. Choice is always power.
Rather than just highlight PC's I think it's important that companies do their best to push their employees (and families) educations in all areas. IMO an intelligent company will see that they can create a thriving culture where they educate and build trust with the public and that public will have more money to spend and be more likely to buy from that company. Currently most companies (and governments) try to keep control by playing off poor education and marketing hype and while this does work it slowly shrinks the possible income whereas the education way will build it. I see Linux companies playing in this feild though perhaps they don't fully see it. Because they educate their customers they raise the general level of education which in turn will create both more free software developers and consumers with more money to spend thus creating a rising tide of income. People who think tech stocks are overpriced only look at them in dollars and forget that good tech companies will seemingly cause money to grow on trees because they educate and when they educate the world has more resources. The day of counting raw materials as out most precious asset are past, information and knowledge is what will make our society strong and wealthy. If I were Bill Gates or someone else with money to burn I'd move into very poor regions with low education and provide adequate housing and food and education. Sure the initial investment is high but the growth would be exponential and would benefit not only that community and that company but the world in general. Want to make the world a better place? Take some children and teach them.
I think that innovators tend to be counterculture in nature which is why many in science (especially theory), philosophy, and technology have been somewhat of a subversive nature throughout history. It isn't that drugs and geeks have to go together but that they just tend to as long as drugs are also counterculture which of course the drug war keeps going. Also I think drugs can be used to help boost creativity and relaxation for overworked geeks trying to keep up. Geeks are artists and art has often been linked with creativity and drugs. I myself have learned to psych myself up which causes various natural drugs to be produced and also now and then drink alcohol or Pepsi to boost myself. Sleep deprivation does a good job of boosting creativity too. When I'm stuck I go without sleep for a week or so and it comes to me how to do something.
With Jabber's flexibility I see it merging what ICQ, Napster, and Usenet do all into one. I expect to see J loops (web circles, newsgroups kinda thing) pop up along w/ an add-on protocol to support them. The basic idea is that the time of every message on the whole freaking Usenet being piped to all those servers is past and that centralizing them to a couple main servers that are logically connected is better. Then users would add the loops they want to their ICQ list and would get a list of messages and waiting file transfers, contact, urls, etc they could either choose to get or ignore until they expired. Since files would be stored and transfered as binary that'd be quicker and save hdd space and since the system would be built on XML searches could be far more powerful. Since each loop is somewhat self contained it'd be easier to moderate messages. The XML would let the moderator choose to either delete the message or tag a SPAM rating depending on how spammy it was and their policy for the group. It'd be possible to even set up a peer review system like Slashdot has.
A group of us has been considering either lobbying various small/poor countries to set us up as a non-profit body that controls bandwidth issues as well as intellectual property issues for the country with total control over all such issues. For allowing us to make their country into a data haven they would get a percentage of the profits from us leasing the bandwidth to various organizations for net servers etc as well as the fact they'd be pushed into the information economy. For anyone who has watched small or 3rd world countries the past few years there has been a trend where they are trying to jump right over industrial into information. Singapore and Malaysia would be good examples. Look at all the countries who just let any shmuck company control their tld's! We get what we want which is freedom and they get what they want which is power and prosperity. If that couldn't be arranged we've considered the possibility of a floating data haven if we could buy an old aircraft carrier or something like that and set it up as a huge network serving platform out in international waters. By creating such a data haven we'd 1. make it so we were sure to have access to the data and 2. apply pressure to various governments around the world to lossen their laws. Look at how the U.S. is finally starting to allow encryption export, largely because so many foreign firms already had that freedom and American firms were suffering.
Nobody I've wrote to ever responds or does anything useful either. I fear this is one of these discrimination issues that won't change until a younger generation that grew up online with many multinational friends begins taking office. The old guard is to afraid to risk not being elected again by the masses who actually believe foreign workers take jobs. This is America people, anyone who isn't a criminal should be able to come here and make a decent life for themself. Without a ton of useless paperwork! Discrimination of place of birth is no better than any other form. People can no more help where they are born than their skin color or gender. Does the fact they can't vote mean we can use them as we wish to keep or throw away on whim? Nice of us to give corporations these free slaves.
Someone at Loki told me they were working towards a FF8 port to Linux. How far along they might be I don't know but since it just hit Windows I hope to see a Linux version to appear soon. :)
I work w/ AI and computer language theory both as hobbies and see no reason why code can't be evolved. True, it'd take some effort to do it well but the main point is the more you ran the compiler the better it'd get as it'd learn more and more tricks. First I assume it'd jsut compile a base version.. the same version any old compiler would give you.. then it'd begin trying various optimizations and as it went it'd learn what works best in certain situations and even begin to make it's own optimization combos. After it gained enough experience it could do the job far faster than any human. I've played with this some, mostly in running interp'd languages of my own design and it seems to work fairly well. I've also wondered if you couldn't create something similar for file compression. Might be interesting to see what you get.
Remember back to like '94 or '95 when we had the sudden popularity of scratch n' sniff web sites. Well now, it's back! Just think.. Microsoft will create a special button on the M$ ScentMouse(tm) that allows you to scratch ad banners. Upon installation you get the smell of money.. your money joining all the rest in Bill Gates pocket.
How about the smell of fear coming from those fat cats trying to delegalize MP3's and DeCSS. We can invent a scent compression technology and then let all their lawyer come screaming at us that they invented the ability to smell. Napster gets a smell-that-tune feature. I'm afraid to imagine Weird Al's remake of Sixpence None the Richer's 'Love Me' song as 'Smell Me.'
How bout a chain letter or web site that checks you for BO and then instructs you on how to get rid of it. If you get rid of the BO and pass on the email/link you're love will finally go out with you, but if you don't you will contain to smell worse daily until a family of skunks moves in with you.
Well it's offtopic and probably a bit of broken glass set just for barefoot hippies like me to step on but here's my answer for anyone who cares.. I pick my color schemes based on the desired mood of the web site and I try to make sure text and link colors contrast well with the background and usually use lighter tones of the link color for alink/vlink colors. In general it's a good idea not to use background images unless they actually improve the page somehow and if you do it's good to put all text inside tables w/ proper flat color backgrounds. It's also good to pick colors that aren't obnoxious because you don't want it to annoy people usually. Otherwise it just gives people a headache. For the same reason I almost never include links directly in text the way Slashdot does but rather include the links in some nearby easy to see spot such as the side or bottom of the page or at the end of the paragraph.