I hear that some guy got together with some friends and made some company called Danger, Inc, or something to try to partially address that. Afaic, they did a damn good job and I'm glad that they're out there. And afaic, they deserve some of the credit for the return of the "netbook", something that means a great deal to me.
And ya know what? People just don't listen. Especially the annoying lusers who you are most likely to have trying to reach you at the worst time. Once they know that you have a cell, they demand the number. Then the firm gives it to them. Then they call you all the goddamn time whether they've been told not to or not. And since the calls are routed through a pbx, there's no way to tell from the caller id if it's some annoying luser or somebody you should actually talk to until you answer the call and then it's too late.
A pager provides a narrow bandwidth channel for people to send only a small, simple message. Enough for genuine problems, not enough to waste anywhere near as much time. Cells don't even come close to doing that.
BSG got multiple seasons because it wasn't made under contract to a company that hated the show from the very first episode and did their damnedest to kill it.
Tell me, when was the premiere of Firefly shown? What was the time slot for Firefly? When were the last two episodes aired? The eps that cost a bucket of money and that pretty much everybody outside FOX and the time and since say are amazing?
All of the above are trick questions. And anybody who knows anything about Firefly understands that they did an astounding thing even lasting as long and telling as complex stories as they did.
Fox never wanted Firefly to be what Whedon wanted it to be. They were fighting from day one.
Oh, and by the way, did you catch the tribute shot to Firefly in the first part of the first ep of BSG? It was there because the BSG production crew was and is well aware that they could never have done BSG without a whole range of techniques and approaches that Firefly did before them.
Howsabout this, you go out, you create, find financing for, and get shot and aired a better show than Firefly. Then you come back and tell us how easy it all is. Until then, bugger off.
A cell phone is basically a consumer device. A pager was fundamentally a business device. The differences were legion. What I miss most is having a service where the clients were given the number of a human-staffed service and those operators then keyed in the message. Clients were also told that vague messages would get slower responses than specific ones. If they wanted my attention at 9:00 p.m. on a busy night then a "call us" message would leave then sh*t out of luck. They wanted attention, they had to manage to describe coherently and specifically why they needed my attention to an operator who knew neither of us and knew less about computers than the average modern grandma.
"I need him" "Is that what I should write, sir?" "Um, uh, um, no. Say, um, that, um, it's important." "So I should say 'call, it's important?'" "Um, no, um . .."
It took only a few iterations to train clients to articulate the issue *before* hitting my number on speeddial. "The archive server is down." "Stories sent to blues are getting bounced."
Anybody who has done consulting will understand that this completely changed the dynamic. Among other things, this requirement to specify the problem got rid of a huge percent of the normal degree of blame game b.s. afterwards. It also taught clients that they had to reign in their panic if they wanted me to call. And sometimes by forcing them to define the problem, that act alone got them to fix the frackin' problem themselves and not waste my time at all. When I *did* get a page I could take a few minutes and think through the message and gather my thoughts about my response before having to be on the phone with them.
I'm not a consultant anymore but, gawd, if I were, I just don't know how I would do it without that glorious gatekeeper, the pager.
That's what I thought at first too. Watch the video again. Afaict, he said that a diesel engine was 20dB quieter when installed in the AirPod than the same engine in a normal vehicle. Which, frankly, just reenforces my point, that he's obviously defensive about how noisy his vehicle is. Noise was the only subject where the reporter was obviously concerned and the designer obviously uncomfortable and defensive. To me this fairly reeks of there being a problem with this.
Speaking as a full time Portlander, I emphatically disagree. The hills here might be a problem. The speed? You would just have to put some thought into which streets to use. Thought that any of the many folks already buying vehicles at ecomotion is engaging in already. I live in inner southeast, where traffic calming measures can be found on about thirty percent of streets and where traffic is generally pretty light. Would this work on Macadam or MLK? Probably not.
Today.
But it's worth remembering that vehicles like this may become far more viable if local governments decide to accommodate them by ensuring rights of way that they can use from one end of town to another. And given that our new mayor is our former traffic commissioner and an active bike commuter, and that Portland's government is well aware that it is economically important to us to keep being a leading edge city for transit measures, we could well see, say, se 17th, converted to a lower speed street. Or ne 15th declared only for low speed or mass transit vehicles. Or any number of variants.
I'm not going to subject/. to dozens of Portland-specific options. I just want to make the point that instead of asking if such vehicles can sufficiently adapt to our roads, we may want to ask about the likelihood that our roads will be adapted to such vehicles. Given that traffic calming, HOV lanes, pedestrian malls, dedicated rights of way for mass transit, and a slew of other repurposings of streets have been happening all across America, let's remember that the current nature of our streets is neither immutable nor necessarily the best choice for the public interest. Among other things, such dedicated rights of way would address, at least partially, the concern that low-speed, environmentally sound vehicles aren't as suited to a crash with huge, heavy petrochemical-burning monstrosities like Hummers.
- It doesn't require huge amounts of scarce/toxic materials for the energy storage device. - It doesn't need to convert electrical power to mechanical. Turn the valve and mechanical power is right there. - If strong enough materials are used, the storage means should be lighter per joule stored.
Otoh, everybody has a source of as much electricity as they want already in their homes while most folks would need to use that electricity or some form of carbon fuels to get compressed air.
I dunno about you, but in the first video I heard a very definite "jackhammer" sound. Not only that, the engineer was obviously defensive when asked about noise. "no, really, it's not loud, it only seems that way; it's different! People just need to learn to get used to it."
You might be surprised what the promise of the right political plum can do, even to a longtime sartorial nebbish. Though, admittedly, attempts to clean up Stanley Aronowitz never quite took.
Bruce Sterling has some, let's say, Texan attitudes but overall he's proven himself to have a better grasp of an amazing range of technological issues for a hell of a long time now than just about anybody. The idea of a CTO who not only wrote both Heavy Weather AND Worldchanging, AND has been active in actual meatspace political organizing and organizational activities sure as hell appeals to me.
The more I think about this the more I like it. BRUCE STERLING FOR CTO! F*ck; I may just go out and register the domain.
And his first responsibility will be to personally do diagnostics on all front line sensor systems in Falluja and Afghani areas most contested by the Taliban.
Actually, that sounds like a great idea. For a deputy secretary post with some public relations responsibilities. Linus Torvalds has always made it clear, afaict, that he really doesn't want to be bothered with much of how the world works or why, just like many good programmers I've known. You're right, he's turned out to be a brilliant project leader. But it seems to me that much of how he's done that is by having the discipline to remember what does and does not appropriately get addressed by him.
He's spent over a decade now getting extremely good at herding cats. He might be wonderful in partnership with Al Gore who, contrary to the bullshit jokes I still see around here, was doing quite well at his IT initiatives during the Clinton years. But as CTO? I not only doubt that he knows enough, I simply don't think that he's tempermentally suited to the job.
Our two presidents who came closest to "knowing everything" were Jefferson and Clinton. That's part of why they made a hash of so many things. Lincoln came in openly clueless on many issues and, after starting out with a year or so of massive screwups, got very wise and very smart, very, very fast.
Yup, Washington culture has been a disaster for IT issues. Even going beyond the broader policy issues of visas and crypto, every federal-run IT project I'm aware of has been a disaster. Where would I have a CTO start? With everyfuckingthing possible about OUR PATENT SYSTEM.
Back when I got mine, you could do your research just fine by getting your ass to any federal depository library and just putting in your time or, like me, heading off to D.C. and just going through plain old paper copies of patents in cardboard boxes (called "shoes" as it happens). It was low tech and unglamourous. Just like paper ballots. And just like those ballots, it worked. Since then we've had decades of b.s. and staggering amounts of government money has been blown. Oh, and btw, the typical cost of getting a patent, which in my day was about three thousand dollars, has risen to over twenty. You wonder why large corporations now file almost all the patent applications? That answers your question right there.
Y'all around here know that I'm passionate about many tech issues. High speed rail. LEDs. Construction techniques. Netbooks. Human advancement into space. I would be delighted to see a competent move by the government to address any of those. But first, let's fix the one basic component of the federal government that's supposed to determine who controls ALL of those technologies.
I apologize for "yelling", but this issue is utterly essential and/. never addresses it whatsoever.
Yes, afaik, it is illegal. These folks are running a business that is fundamentally dependent on, in effect, theft of services from whomever's land they put their signs on. Looks like their entire business model works only if they can continue to keep their cost of advertising lower than is true for those of us who, ya know, actually pay for it.
In effect, they're spammers who've learned how to move their campaign to meatspace.
From the looks of it, yes. Go for it. According to TFA, which seems pretty credible to me, they don't pay to use the space. They don't even get permission, evidently. And it looks like they make a good deal of their money from data harvesting of a kind that's just a bit hinky anyway. Afaic, you're doing a public service by taking a chance to reduce the amount of mass-produced advertising that your fellow citizens are subjected to.
I just wanted to let you know that I've emailed your post above to three people now. Yes, you nailed it. What we were talking about is cowardice. Thank you for putting it so clearly and evocatively.
If you haven't already, anybody who expects to have any clue about this at all should watch the Paul Stamets video of his presentation to the TED conference about fungi. And then buy and read Mycelium Running his overview book on the commercial and process implications of fungi. If you have any understanding of process engineering at all it will blow your mind.
The fungus in TFA is one of thousands that are only now being discovered and anybody who has done as I suggest above isn't likely to be terribly surprised at this news.
I know that I seem like I'm exaggerating, but effective exploitation of fungus-based techniques and technology may eventually be looked upon as more important than the development of the microchip. Seriously. And unlike microchips, fungus-based systems are done every day of the year in the basements of homebrewers, many of the/.ers.
IOW, if you find this stuff interesting, you can probably join the race to develop this stuff by the end of November. Which makes me glad that I live in Portland, home of tons of biotech companies and more beermaking experts then you can shake a bottleopener at.
Having not only RTFA but also gone online and read a few more, it looks to me like:
- The research team emphasized that this is a long way from being a useful commercial process. - OTOH, there are already patents for using this fungus as a pest control means so infrastructure and techniques already exist for commercializing it, though for different optimized properties. - And, lastly, we're starting to see a Moore's law-ish speed of development of microorganisms. Which makes sense. Generations are measured in hours, so iterative improvement is incredibly fast. Computerized systems for testing and selection are themselves subject to Moore's Law. (Just look at what has happened to the price, speed, and complexity of gene sequencers.) And this is the kind of thing where human wave approaches *can* work, which makes the current massive levels of funding an effective multiplier.
So while I am not a biologist (IANAB), it seems to me that we should actually be *more* optimistic than a field researcher can allow themselves to be when speaking to the press of the long-term consequences of a major discovery. In short, I would say commercialization in three years or even less.
I would guess that they're counting on the protection of law that, even now, does still apply for rich organizations with rich friends. After all, it's not like somebody else can go out, use the footage, and just claim that they generated their own the day before down at the beach. Frankly, it looks to me like you're all arguing about a problem that would only seem like a problem to you. The revenue from this isn't going to come from pirate radio or modern equivalent, especially since it will be HD content anyway. It will be from selling that content for data and through licensing systems like Corbis for things like television shows, movies, and other folks who couldn't care less about being able to "steal" the data since possession of a physical copy doesn't help them at all to make money from it themselves.
In short, I very much doubt that they need to focus on technological security. They need to focus on paying for the right law firm, giving the right contributions to legislators, and having a good contractor searching for copyright violators.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear that some guy got together with some friends and made some company called Danger, Inc, or something to try to partially address that. Afaic, they did a damn good job and I'm glad that they're out there. And afaic, they deserve some of the credit for the return of the "netbook", something that means a great deal to me.
Thanks.
And ya know what? People just don't listen. Especially the annoying lusers who you are most likely to have trying to reach you at the worst time. Once they know that you have a cell, they demand the number. Then the firm gives it to them. Then they call you all the goddamn time whether they've been told not to or not. And since the calls are routed through a pbx, there's no way to tell from the caller id if it's some annoying luser or somebody you should actually talk to until you answer the call and then it's too late.
A pager provides a narrow bandwidth channel for people to send only a small, simple message. Enough for genuine problems, not enough to waste anywhere near as much time. Cells don't even come close to doing that.
Ah, but Dirk *did* wear his mustache while walking past two Cylons.
In an ep of The A-Team.
Best break of the fourth wall I've ever seen. I damn near fell out of my chair.
BSG got multiple seasons because it wasn't made under contract to a company that hated the show from the very first episode and did their damnedest to kill it.
Tell me, when was the premiere of Firefly shown?
What was the time slot for Firefly?
When were the last two episodes aired? The eps that cost a bucket of money and that pretty much everybody outside FOX and the time and since say are amazing?
All of the above are trick questions. And anybody who knows anything about Firefly understands that they did an astounding thing even lasting as long and telling as complex stories as they did.
Fox never wanted Firefly to be what Whedon wanted it to be. They were fighting from day one.
Oh, and by the way, did you catch the tribute shot to Firefly in the first part of the first ep of BSG? It was there because the BSG production crew was and is well aware that they could never have done BSG without a whole range of techniques and approaches that Firefly did before them.
Howsabout this, you go out, you create, find financing for, and get shot and aired a better show than Firefly. Then you come back and tell us how easy it all is. Until then, bugger off.
A cell phone is basically a consumer device. A pager was fundamentally a business device. The differences were legion. What I miss most is having a service where the clients were given the number of a human-staffed service and those operators then keyed in the message. Clients were also told that vague messages would get slower responses than specific ones. If they wanted my attention at 9:00 p.m. on a busy night then a "call us" message would leave then sh*t out of luck. They wanted attention, they had to manage to describe coherently and specifically why they needed my attention to an operator who knew neither of us and knew less about computers than the average modern grandma.
"I need him" ."
"Is that what I should write, sir?"
"Um, uh, um, no. Say, um, that, um, it's important."
"So I should say 'call, it's important?'"
"Um, no, um . .
It took only a few iterations to train clients to articulate the issue *before* hitting my number on speeddial.
"The archive server is down."
"Stories sent to blues are getting bounced."
Anybody who has done consulting will understand that this completely changed the dynamic. Among other things, this requirement to specify the problem got rid of a huge percent of the normal degree of blame game b.s. afterwards. It also taught clients that they had to reign in their panic if they wanted me to call. And sometimes by forcing them to define the problem, that act alone got them to fix the frackin' problem themselves and not waste my time at all. When I *did* get a page I could take a few minutes and think through the message and gather my thoughts about my response before having to be on the phone with them.
I'm not a consultant anymore but, gawd, if I were, I just don't know how I would do it without that glorious gatekeeper, the pager.
That's what I thought at first too. Watch the video again. Afaict, he said that a diesel engine was 20dB quieter when installed in the AirPod than the same engine in a normal vehicle. Which, frankly, just reenforces my point, that he's obviously defensive about how noisy his vehicle is. Noise was the only subject where the reporter was obviously concerned and the designer obviously uncomfortable and defensive. To me this fairly reeks of there being a problem with this.
Speaking as a full time Portlander, I emphatically disagree. The hills here might be a problem. The speed? You would just have to put some thought into which streets to use. Thought that any of the many folks already buying vehicles at ecomotion is engaging in already. I live in inner southeast, where traffic calming measures can be found on about thirty percent of streets and where traffic is generally pretty light. Would this work on Macadam or MLK? Probably not.
Today.
But it's worth remembering that vehicles like this may become far more viable if local governments decide to accommodate them by ensuring rights of way that they can use from one end of town to another. And given that our new mayor is our former traffic commissioner and an active bike commuter, and that Portland's government is well aware that it is economically important to us to keep being a leading edge city for transit measures, we could well see, say, se 17th, converted to a lower speed street. Or ne 15th declared only for low speed or mass transit vehicles. Or any number of variants.
I'm not going to subject /. to dozens of Portland-specific options. I just want to make the point that instead of asking if such vehicles can sufficiently adapt to our roads, we may want to ask about the likelihood that our roads will be adapted to such vehicles. Given that traffic calming, HOV lanes, pedestrian malls, dedicated rights of way for mass transit, and a slew of other repurposings of streets have been happening all across America, let's remember that the current nature of our streets is neither immutable nor necessarily the best choice for the public interest. Among other things, such dedicated rights of way would address, at least partially, the concern that low-speed, environmentally sound vehicles aren't as suited to a crash with huge, heavy petrochemical-burning monstrosities like Hummers.
- It doesn't require huge amounts of scarce/toxic materials for the energy storage device.
- It doesn't need to convert electrical power to mechanical. Turn the valve and mechanical power is right there.
- If strong enough materials are used, the storage means should be lighter per joule stored.
Otoh, everybody has a source of as much electricity as they want already in their homes while most folks would need to use that electricity or some form of carbon fuels to get compressed air.
I dunno about you, but in the first video I heard a very definite "jackhammer" sound. Not only that, the engineer was obviously defensive when asked about noise. "no, really, it's not loud, it only seems that way; it's different! People just need to learn to get used to it."
Yeah, it's got a noise problem.
You might be surprised what the promise of the right political plum can do, even to a longtime sartorial nebbish. Though, admittedly, attempts to clean up Stanley Aronowitz never quite took.
Bruce Sterling has some, let's say, Texan attitudes but overall he's proven himself to have a better grasp of an amazing range of technological issues for a hell of a long time now than just about anybody. The idea of a CTO who not only wrote both Heavy Weather AND Worldchanging, AND has been active in actual meatspace political organizing and organizational activities sure as hell appeals to me.
The more I think about this the more I like it. BRUCE STERLING FOR CTO!
F*ck; I may just go out and register the domain.
I think it should be Bill Gates :)
And his first responsibility will be to personally do diagnostics on all front line sensor systems in Falluja and Afghani areas most contested by the Taliban.
Actually, that sounds like a great idea. For a deputy secretary post with some public relations responsibilities.
Linus Torvalds has always made it clear, afaict, that he really doesn't want to be bothered with much of how the world works or why, just like many good programmers I've known. You're right, he's turned out to be a brilliant project leader. But it seems to me that much of how he's done that is by having the discipline to remember what does and does not appropriately get addressed by him.
He's spent over a decade now getting extremely good at herding cats. He might be wonderful in partnership with Al Gore who, contrary to the bullshit jokes I still see around here, was doing quite well at his IT initiatives during the Clinton years. But as CTO? I not only doubt that he knows enough, I simply don't think that he's tempermentally suited to the job.
Our two presidents who came closest to "knowing everything" were Jefferson and Clinton. That's part of why they made a hash of so many things. Lincoln came in openly clueless on many issues and, after starting out with a year or so of massive screwups, got very wise and very smart, very, very fast.
Yup, Washington culture has been a disaster for IT issues. Even going beyond the broader policy issues of visas and crypto, every federal-run IT project I'm aware of has been a disaster. Where would I have a CTO start? With everyfuckingthing possible about OUR PATENT SYSTEM.
Back when I got mine, you could do your research just fine by getting your ass to any federal depository library and just putting in your time or, like me, heading off to D.C. and just going through plain old paper copies of patents in cardboard boxes (called "shoes" as it happens). It was low tech and unglamourous. Just like paper ballots. And just like those ballots, it worked. Since then we've had decades of b.s. and staggering amounts of government money has been blown. Oh, and btw, the typical cost of getting a patent, which in my day was about three thousand dollars, has risen to over twenty. You wonder why large corporations now file almost all the patent applications? That answers your question right there.
Y'all around here know that I'm passionate about many tech issues. High speed rail. LEDs. Construction techniques. Netbooks. Human advancement into space. I would be delighted to see a competent move by the government to address any of those. But first, let's fix the one basic component of the federal government that's supposed to determine who controls ALL of those technologies.
I apologize for "yelling", but this issue is utterly essential and /. never addresses it whatsoever.
That said, maybe /. should start a dating site. :P
Userfriendly got there first.
Yes, afaik, it is illegal. These folks are running a business that is fundamentally dependent on, in effect, theft of services from whomever's land they put their signs on. Looks like their entire business model works only if they can continue to keep their cost of advertising lower than is true for those of us who, ya know, actually pay for it.
In effect, they're spammers who've learned how to move their campaign to meatspace.
Charming.
From the looks of it, yes. Go for it. According to TFA, which seems pretty credible to me, they don't pay to use the space. They don't even get permission, evidently. And it looks like they make a good deal of their money from data harvesting of a kind that's just a bit hinky anyway. Afaic, you're doing a public service by taking a chance to reduce the amount of mass-produced advertising that your fellow citizens are subjected to.
No. He's just aware of the special secret underwear supplier for commando teams.
Yeah, there's something suspicious about all those fish being down there in the dark. I'll bet that they're hiding secret refuges for terrorists!
I hereby vote that Tom Ridge be immediately be put into a wetsuit and dropped into the Marianas Trench to investigate.
I just wanted to let you know that I've emailed your post above to three people now. Yes, you nailed it. What we were talking about is cowardice. Thank you for putting it so clearly and evocatively.
If you haven't already, anybody who expects to have any clue about this at all should watch the Paul Stamets video of his presentation to the TED conference about fungi. And then buy and read Mycelium Running his overview book on the commercial and process implications of fungi. If you have any understanding of process engineering at all it will blow your mind.
The fungus in TFA is one of thousands that are only now being discovered and anybody who has done as I suggest above isn't likely to be terribly surprised at this news.
I know that I seem like I'm exaggerating, but effective exploitation of fungus-based techniques and technology may eventually be looked upon as more important than the development of the microchip. Seriously. And unlike microchips, fungus-based systems are done every day of the year in the basements of homebrewers, many of the /.ers.
IOW, if you find this stuff interesting, you can probably join the race to develop this stuff by the end of November. Which makes me glad that I live in Portland, home of tons of biotech companies and more beermaking experts then you can shake a bottleopener at.
Hell. yeah.
Having not only RTFA but also gone online and read a few more, it looks to me like:
- The research team emphasized that this is a long way from being a useful commercial process.
- OTOH, there are already patents for using this fungus as a pest control means so infrastructure and techniques already exist for commercializing it, though for different optimized properties.
- And, lastly, we're starting to see a Moore's law-ish speed of development of microorganisms. Which makes sense. Generations are measured in hours, so iterative improvement is incredibly fast. Computerized systems for testing and selection are themselves subject to Moore's Law. (Just look at what has happened to the price, speed, and complexity of gene sequencers.) And this is the kind of thing where human wave approaches *can* work, which makes the current massive levels of funding an effective multiplier.
So while I am not a biologist (IANAB), it seems to me that we should actually be *more* optimistic than a field researcher can allow themselves to be when speaking to the press of the long-term consequences of a major discovery. In short, I would say commercialization in three years or even less.
It currently points back to this thred.
I would guess that they're counting on the protection of law that, even now, does still apply for rich organizations with rich friends. After all, it's not like somebody else can go out, use the footage, and just claim that they generated their own the day before down at the beach.
Frankly, it looks to me like you're all arguing about a problem that would only seem like a problem to you. The revenue from this isn't going to come from pirate radio or modern equivalent, especially since it will be HD content anyway. It will be from selling that content for data and through licensing systems like Corbis for things like television shows, movies, and other folks who couldn't care less about being able to "steal" the data since possession of a physical copy doesn't help them at all to make money from it themselves.
In short, I very much doubt that they need to focus on technological security. They need to focus on paying for the right law firm, giving the right contributions to legislators, and having a good contractor searching for copyright violators.