The high desert around Hermiston also happens to be the home of one of the nation's largest stockpiles of Cold War-era chemical weapons. Under federal guidelines, local government officials were required to devise an emergency evacuation plan for the accidental release of nerve and mustard agents.
This would not have happened if not for the weapons incinerator in Hermiston. For anything other than emergency alerts, there just wasn't demand. So don't go thinking your podunk town in Iowa will have a wifi cloud this time next year...unless you get lucky like us "Oreganians" and get force-fed the risk of a chem/bioweapon catastrophe extravaganza!
Likewise, Unwire Portland wouldn't happen except for the fact that they are structuring it so that only large players can provide service on the network == profit. The $40 million up front cost keeps local providers out. It's not yet known whether it will be a "walled garden" with access only to regional websites, or a "drinking fountain" with trickle-speed Internet-wide access. Public benefit also has too small a value in the RFP, IMHO. The city's main stated reason is to save money on parking meters that currently use batch credit card processing over a cellular link -- Visa changed the rules so that such transactions are flagged "card not present" and subject to higher fees. It's an interesting proposal, to be sure, but...
I just haven't seen a municipal wifi plan yet with a model that strikes me as egalitarian and sustainable. Maybe a reader here can point me in the right direction...
"Personally, while I consume my fair share, I'm still only primarily interested in them from an academic perspective, as resources of human sociability in online space"
Sure buddy...just like how I'm not a cocaine user--I'm just really obsessed with the way it smells. In fact, it's so subtle that it's hard to smell unless you smell it through a straw. And I keep forgetting how it smells and needing to refresh my memory...for days on end.
"Well, I've done the math. I think it's a modest number if you could sell a couple thousand, when you look at snowmobiles and quads and those things -- not cars," says Norris. "That's a big market. But if we sold say a couple thousand, $50,000 a piece, that's a billion dollars." [emphasis added]
2*10^3 * 5*10^4 = 10*10^7 = 100,000,000 != a billion
And this guy, Woody Norris, is the chief inventor? "Self-taught"?
I'd rather ride the bus. Or a flying car created by Woody from Cheers.
If you buy from BatMax (na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, BATMAX!) you are getting ripped off. I've got my own nanotechnology battery extender, and it was easy to make!
Ingredients: -200 grit sandpaper (made with natural stone) -aluminum foil (made of "nano-molecules" of Al) -glue stick (the kind astronauts use in the office)
Instructions: 1. Slap all that crap together however you like. 2. Apply to battery. 3. Brag your ass off!
I'm getting 80-100 more hours out of my cellphone battery, easy. I put my homemade stickers on BOTH sides of my battery for uber performance.
As part of a company whose services include providing custom applications, I rankle at the article's implication that custom software is rarely worth it. This over-broad conlusion is simply wrong.
Granted, if you run on a cookie-cutter business model, you can use COTS for everything you do. But if you're going to do anything innovative business-wise, well-implemented custom software can be crucial to your success.
The author seems to want to scare people away from custom software by citing the flushing of millions of dollars by corporations on poorly-executed projects. Admittedly, at that scale, you'd better be clear on where you're going and how you plan to get there. Custom software generally provides better value the smaller it is, and the more specific it is to a clearly-defined business problem.
At smaller scales (i.e., not funded by multi-million dollar corporations), custom software can and usually does succeed. It can also succeed at larger scales, and has...the article just doesn't cover the success stories.
Furthermore, if you are a funder of custom software development, making sure you own the code that is produced for you means that your investment can be salvaged when the developer blows chunks. Open Source platforms tend to fit well with this model of vendor freedom.
Prior to the advent of ubiquitous spell-checking, I found it effective to read my own work backwards in a search for typos.
Even a sentence at a time, reading backwards would dissociate me from the content enough that I would catch things I missed having read it forward several times...
We ought to have a showdown of the most-embarrassing Teen Beat photo spreads ever: a grand competition of cheesy photos to end all such grand competitions. We can call it...
I'd really like to see more work along the lines of Columbia Newsblaster. I find that it presents more valuable information in a better format than Google News. If only it were updated more than once per day at best...
Every night, the system crawls a series of Web sites, downloads articles, groups them together into "clusters" about the same topic, and summarizes each cluster. The end result is a Web page that gives you a sense of what the major stories of the day are, so you don't have to visit the pages of dozens of publications.
Newsblaster is an academic project from the Natural Language Processing group at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science. It is designed to demonstrate the Group's technologies for multidocument summarization, clustering, and text categorization, among others. It is funded under DARPA TIDES and KDD and has been operational online since September 2001.
It might be old news to a lot of you, but I'm amazed at how many uber geeks I've run into who haven't heard of it. It's worth at least a look, if not a prominent bookmarking...
I can remember back in the day when I was a fiend for Tetris on the original Gameboy.
After weeks of playing linked games against my friends at school and spending all my free time training up for said matches, I slid the milk back into the fridge after pouring a glass.
Suddenly, the eggs were a 4x1, condiments were un-Tetris-like 1x1s, and the milk was a 2x2 block.
Before I knew what I was doing, I said, "Wow, a double!" and was planning my next move based on what was left after that.
Sometimes I wish for reality bleed-over from games, because it would make it much easier to clean out the fridge, deal with annoying bosses, score with chicks, etc.:)
I've been a rabid cthugha advocate since the 5.x days in DOS. chtugha-L warms my heart. Couldn't ask for a nicer author, either. Since the first time I saw Zaph's ethereal image fading to black behind a bumping waveform, with a bottle of Wild Turkey in hand, I knew I had to meet the guy (net-wise, at least). I've chatted with zaph a few times, and he's been unfailingly very cool. (smooooooch, smoooooch, how about that cthugha98 source, Zaph?:) ) It's always nice when authors of software I like respond to my moronic queries.:)
Slashdot Mirror
How much more obvious could the next step be?
The high desert around Hermiston also happens to be the home of one of the nation's largest stockpiles of Cold War-era chemical weapons. Under federal guidelines, local government officials were required to devise an emergency evacuation plan for the accidental release of nerve and mustard agents.
This would not have happened if not for the weapons incinerator in Hermiston. For anything other than emergency alerts, there just wasn't demand. So don't go thinking your podunk town in Iowa will have a wifi cloud this time next year...unless you get lucky like us "Oreganians" and get force-fed the risk of a chem/bioweapon catastrophe extravaganza!
Likewise, Unwire Portland wouldn't happen except for the fact that they are structuring it so that only large players can provide service on the network == profit. The $40 million up front cost keeps local providers out. It's not yet known whether it will be a "walled garden" with access only to regional websites, or a "drinking fountain" with trickle-speed Internet-wide access. Public benefit also has too small a value in the RFP, IMHO. The city's main stated reason is to save money on parking meters that currently use batch credit card processing over a cellular link -- Visa changed the rules so that such transactions are flagged "card not present" and subject to higher fees. It's an interesting proposal, to be sure, but...
I just haven't seen a municipal wifi plan yet with a model that strikes me as egalitarian and sustainable. Maybe a reader here can point me in the right direction...
Will
This is an unbelievably late first post, if not...
Mod parent up, please.
Will
...is not just a river in egypt:
"Personally, while I consume my fair share, I'm still only primarily interested in them from an academic perspective, as resources of human sociability in online space"
Sure buddy...just like how I'm not a cocaine user--I'm just really obsessed with the way it smells. In fact, it's so subtle that it's hard to smell unless you smell it through a straw. And I keep forgetting how it smells and needing to refresh my memory...for days on end.
"Well, I've done the math. I think it's a modest number if you could sell a couple thousand, when you look at snowmobiles and quads and those things -- not cars," says Norris. "That's a big market. But if we sold say a couple thousand, $50,000 a piece, that's a billion dollars." [emphasis added]
2*10^3 * 5*10^4 = 10*10^7 = 100,000,000 != a billion
And this guy, Woody Norris, is the chief inventor? "Self-taught"?
I'd rather ride the bus. Or a flying car created by Woody from Cheers.
Which news site is infactuated with google?
Oh well, maybe with time the correct answer will come up...
Doh! Typo in my subject.
I guess I "Roll-Your-Pwnd" myself. =\
If you buy from BatMax (na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, BATMAX!) you are getting ripped off. I've got my own nanotechnology battery extender, and it was easy to make!
Ingredients:
-200 grit sandpaper (made with natural stone)
-aluminum foil (made of "nano-molecules" of Al)
-glue stick (the kind astronauts use in the office)
Instructions:
1. Slap all that crap together however you like.
2. Apply to battery.
3. Brag your ass off!
I'm getting 80-100 more hours out of my cellphone battery, easy. I put my homemade stickers on BOTH sides of my battery for uber performance.
Extending the analogy...
If you buy and smoke some marijauna, odds are that both your cache and your cookies will be either depleted or gone.
As part of a company whose services include providing custom applications, I rankle at the article's implication that custom software is rarely worth it. This over-broad conlusion is simply wrong.
Granted, if you run on a cookie-cutter business model, you can use COTS for everything you do. But if you're going to do anything innovative business-wise, well-implemented custom software can be crucial to your success.
The author seems to want to scare people away from custom software by citing the flushing of millions of dollars by corporations on poorly-executed projects. Admittedly, at that scale, you'd better be clear on where you're going and how you plan to get there. Custom software generally provides better value the smaller it is, and the more specific it is to a clearly-defined business problem.
At smaller scales (i.e., not funded by multi-million dollar corporations), custom software can and usually does succeed. It can also succeed at larger scales, and has...the article just doesn't cover the success stories.
Furthermore, if you are a funder of custom software development, making sure you own the code that is produced for you means that your investment can be salvaged when the developer blows chunks. Open Source platforms tend to fit well with this model of vendor freedom.
Prior to the advent of ubiquitous spell-checking, I found it effective to read my own work backwards in a search for typos.
Even a sentence at a time, reading backwards would dissociate me from the content enough that I would catch things I missed having read it forward several times...
I'm pretty sure the above poster meant to refer to ThinkSecret, the technology spoiler site, instead of ThinkGeek, which sells nifty toys for geeks...
We ought to have a showdown of the most-embarrassing Teen Beat photo spreads ever: a grand competition of cheesy photos to end all such grand competitions. We can call it...
...wait for it...
The Teen Beat-Off
(I apologize for that, really I do. No, I don't.)
I'd really like to see more work along the lines of Columbia Newsblaster. I find that it presents more valuable information in a better format than Google News. If only it were updated more than once per day at best...
From their FAQ:
Every night, the system crawls a series of Web sites, downloads articles, groups them together into "clusters" about the same topic, and summarizes each cluster. The end result is a Web page that gives you a sense of what the major stories of the day are, so you don't have to visit the pages of dozens of publications.
Newsblaster is an academic project from the Natural Language Processing group at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science. It is designed to demonstrate the Group's technologies for multidocument summarization, clustering, and text categorization, among others. It is funded under DARPA TIDES and KDD and has been operational online since September 2001.
It might be old news to a lot of you, but I'm amazed at how many uber geeks I've run into who haven't heard of it. It's worth at least a look, if not a prominent bookmarking...
I'm not fat, I'm differently-waistlined!
And I'm bucking the trend by sleeping a LOT...
I can remember back in the day when I was a fiend for Tetris on the original Gameboy.
:)
After weeks of playing linked games against my friends at school and spending all my free time training up for said matches, I slid the milk back into the fridge after pouring a glass.
Suddenly, the eggs were a 4x1, condiments were un-Tetris-like 1x1s, and the milk was a 2x2 block.
Before I knew what I was doing, I said, "Wow, a double!" and was planning my next move based on what was left after that.
Sometimes I wish for reality bleed-over from games, because it would make it much easier to clean out the fridge, deal with annoying bosses, score with chicks, etc.
I'll fourth it.
I've been a rabid cthugha advocate since the 5.x days in DOS. chtugha-L warms my heart. Couldn't ask for a nicer author, either. Since the first time I saw Zaph's ethereal image fading to black behind a bumping waveform, with a bottle of Wild Turkey in hand, I knew I had to meet the guy (net-wise, at least). I've chatted with zaph a few times, and he's been unfailingly very cool. (smooooooch, smoooooch, how about that cthugha98 source, Zaph? :) ) It's always nice when authors of software I like respond to my moronic queries. :)
Cthugha. Better than TV. On par with sex.
Will Illingworth