If that sort of trademark infringement is valid, then one should be highly fearful that Kontour might (through causing too much CPU utilization, disk thrashing, whatever) cause the cooling system of a computer to be inadequate, just like the cooling system of the early Contour exhibited inadequacy handling the demands of cooling an idling Duratec V-6 in typical US summer conditions.
People operating computers in environments other than coldrooms, overclockers, and owners of multiprocessor systems are particularly cautioned.
On the other hand, people who are capable of telling the difference between a car and a software application are encouraged to use Kontour, taking advantage of its superior price-performance.
In the South, a Yankee is anyone from anywhere else in the US.
Outside the Northeast (and the South), a Yankee is anyone from the Northeast.
Within the Northeast, a Yankee is anyone from the region between Boston and New York City, inclusive.
Despite the fact that I now live in Texas, I don't like the Southern definition. It is inadequate in that it ignores states like Idaho and Montana, and to a lesser extent New Hampshire, which border Canada, but have a lot more in common with most of the South than they do, say, Connecticut or Rhode Island.
Incidentally, based on the narrowest definition, "crazy" isn't a bad choice -- Massachusetts drivers, in particular, are notoriously intemperate. Driving tip #1: that space between the yellow line and the left-hand Jersey wall is NOT a passing lane, despite what Sen. Ted Kennedy's (a famous bad driver from Mass.) constituents might think!
Any other parents who have found a good solution for this?
The following solutions are good security practices, regardless of whether you have children to snoop on -- you can protect your internal MIS environment (yes, I know it's a household, but it still has MIS needs) from everything from script kiddies to ill-behaved Windows shares -- especially if you connect via broadband (Cable, DSL, etc.).
Every machine in your house should be sitting on a private network, with a box functioning as a firewall sitting between them and the 'net. Block all web traffic (there's only a half-dozen or so ports) from masquerading directly, and force them through a caching proxy. Then, you can simply inspect the proxy caches/logs to handle this issue; your surfing performance in general will improve as a result of doing the caching regardless of your interest in the logs.
You should also have your firewall log all the masqueraded connections -- again, this is a security measure regardless of whether you want to see if your kid is spending too much time playing EverQuest; it also will protect you from any trojaned apps that may be trying to "phone home" (you see a strange connection in the logs, and block the port).
Good security practices aren't hard, but they do take work. And there's no reason to think that you shouldn't be as/more careful at home (with stuff that's actually yours) as/than you are around the office.
Actually, I've seen a demo of this very thing (probably a much earlier, less refined version, but still...) from a CD the Altavista guys were passing out at DECUS meetings (and possibly Comdex '96 as well) more than 4 years ago (IIRC, the demo explicitly EXPIRED at the end of February '97).
Also, realize what it is and is not designed to do: it isn't a spying tool (you can preclude it client-side from scanning certain directories), it's a productivity tool. Example -- this is employee Bob's train of thought:
Hmm. I don't seem to have the minutes of that meeting I attended last week. Let's check the network... searching for everything containing my name... ah, yes, Carol has a copy right there on her hard drive! Too bad the boss actively blocked it from scanning his Performance_Reviews folder, I might've found out what kind of raise I'm getting next week. Oh, well, it makes me more productive, not more intrusive.
A few years ago, back in the era of the "Microsoft-Digital Alliance," a lot was made of the plans for OpenVMS to be the top-end of the migration path for people deploying Windows NT; if you needed to run something that resembled NT on "big iron," the goal was that you would migrate to OpenVMS on that hardware and be assured of compatibility with data, interfaces, etc.
Now that Digital, the Alliance, and OpenVMS are all historical footnotes, is there a similar (successor) plan -- using, for instance, Compaq's "big iron" (the wildfire boxes in particular) and Tru64 Unix in place of OpenVMS?
It's painfully easy for Dell, Compaq, etc. to negotiate OEM licenses with Mattel, et al., to bundle a censorware product on their PCs at an oh-so-cheap price. Meanwhile, all of the little PC vendors in places like Beltline in Carrollton and N. Central Expwy. in Richardson would have to pay substantially higher prices for the censorware, driving up the prices of their PCs, and making the mass-produced hardware more competetive.
Don't be surprised if the AOL story that Garcia cited is nothing more than a red herring, and he's just shilling for Compaq (or maybe Dell, but it is less likely).
Now, just like the window-peeping scene in The Rescuers and the phallic mushrooms in The Little Mermaid, we have to be on the lookout for some guy named Guido showing everyone his Python in all the forthcoming Disney cartoons -- just what every expectant father wants to hear!
MOO;IANAL.
Their Revenue Model Might Not Suck as Much If...
on
Bad News from Yahoo
·
· Score: 1
They could figure out how to un-fsck the Yahoo! mail accounts of a lot of us who have had Yahoo! mail accounts for years: Sometime in late August or early September, the Yahoo! mail accounts for a number of longtime users went BLAAAAT!, mine included. And their customer service people have been totally unresponsive. So they wonder why, for instance, they might have a hard time selling things like the premium features on their mail? Because those of us in their target market (people nearing mail quotas where we might consider PAYING for more space) CAN NO LONGER ACCESS OUR Yahoo! MAIL IN THE FIRST PLACE. Dah!?!!
It wouldn't surprise me if this were the case across the board, not just within mail: they've gotten so big, there is no individual accountability/culpability/contact within customer service... and therefore a lot of people/companies who they could be selling services to have become nothing but an eroded market.
So yes, banner ad revenues are part of the story -- but they may not be the WHOLE story.
Consider the following: O'Reilly has a fairly large investment in "second-sale" products based on what they're calling the LAMP: Linux + Apache + mySQL + Perl. A lot of their revenue model is based on promoting this: conferences, books, etc. They are far-and-away the market leader in this sector (Who doesn't own the Camel book?).
The software side of the house was making "first sale" dollars (nowhere near as lucrative) off of a webserver that directly competed with the LAMP model: it ran on Windows, competed directly with Apache, didn't talk directly to mySQL, and supported ColdFusion/Java/ASP much more readily than Perl. In other words, it was basically the same thing as Ford selling a car that takes Chrysler parts: they'd get the up-front money, but all of the follow-on dollars were just-as-to-more likely to go to their competitors than themselves.
So, this makes very good sense from a business perspective. In Tim's own words, "it's not a strong strategic fit with our other efforts." I'm actually surprised that it didn't happen a couple years ago, for instance when the Eagle book came out.
To paraphrase what people kept telling the elder George Bush as his post-Gulf War popularity lead slid into an election loss, the above message should be tatooed (rapidly) on the inside of every West Coast VC's eyelids!
It's simple, really -- the VCs are there, they want their money close to them, the start-ups wind up there (Silicon Valley). This drives up the density, which drives up housing costs, power demands, and all the other drains on local culture and infrastructure... leading to what I like to refer to as the "Hong Kong-ification of the Peninsula". I've railed in the past about this, I've railed about how one nasty earthquake could send the industry into a REAL tailspin, I've railed about the labor costs in the Valley, but now, perhaps, the brownouts are vindicating my earlier observations; couple this with the current capital crisis, and maybe, just MAYBE, somebody may get wise: Milwaukee is a "Great Place by a Great Lake" and AltaVista needs to conserve money by cutting labor costs, so why shouldn't AltaVista up and move to Milwaukee? Similarly, Excite could move to Omaha, VA to Lansing, etc., and all of a sudden both Silicon Valley and the companies that "used to be there" would both be a lot better off.
Of course, all of this is predicated on an even larger assumption: that the VCs would actually be willing to believe that the people running the companies they invested in knew what they were doing!
it used to be the policy of the U.S. government to keep content producers and carriers separate.
The operative words here are used to be. Think about it: The mouse (content producer) has owned ABC (carrier) for what, going on six years now? Viacom (CBS and MTV's current parent) has been both (syndicated programming content production AND cable networks) for a couple decades. Murdoch's News Corp./Fox is all over the map as well, from movie studios to TV broadcasting. Ironically, the thing that had the FCC the most worried was AOL acquiring the head ends of half the country's cable modems, when cable-based broadband figures to be a bit player in that industry (vs. 3G wireless and various DSLs) within the next few years.
Now, the thing that has me more worried is the thought of AOL taking a lot of Time Warner's current web content (Money.com, Fortune.com, CNN.com as three examples) and improving their revenue basis by making them subscriber-only services: you'd have to be an AOL member (at $9.95/mo. of course) to access the content. Don't think it couldn't happen; Yahoo's stock drop yesterday is indicative of the sorry state of the advertiser-supported web today.
What kind of bureaucrat-driven, masochistic engineering compromise is it to run the system on a JVM on top of Linux? Any gains you make in stability you get from Linux you give right back double by using the JVM on top of it.
This sounds like the sort of design choices driven by the sort of thinking that goes, "Let's see who our strategic partners are and that will dictate our platform choices to our engineers." I noticed Sun's name mentioned in the Dodge release -- a pretty good indication that the Mountain View marketing machine stormed their way into the engineering castle early on in this project's lifecycle.
When you sang of "prosthetic foreheads on their real heads" in the song "We Want a Rock", did you specifically have people dressed as Klingons in mind?
MOO;IANAL.
Is Kotkin Living in a Parallel Universe?
on
The New Geography
·
· Score: 2
Last time I checked, the IT industry was giving a lot of traditional Rustbelt cities a new lease on life -- consider what it has done for Philadelphia, Columbus, and Pittsburgh, for example. And then there is the list of cities that were doing fine before, and are now blossoming -- in spite of anyone being able to call them "Nerdvanas" -- Atlanta, San Antonio, Baltimore just to name a few.
Yes, moving away from heavy manufacturing and raw materials production is freeing up a lot of the old geographic ties... but if you look at what it's causing, it isn't the formation of "Nerdistans," but rather the overt expression of long-held preferences: people flocking to states like Texas, Washington, and Florida, for example, to take advantage of mild climates and low taxes. If cities like Flint, Michigan want to know why their populations are getting smaller and less affluent, perhaps I could suggest some introspection; why are people who can afford to move somewhere else doing so? Kotkin's thesis is the intellectual analog of your wife leaving you and you blaming it on the construction of a new mall nearby.
As someone who used to be involved with producing a plugin for a particular alternate image file format, I can honestly say there are several issues associated with trying to produce and maintain plugins for multiple platforms -- not the least of which is maintainability and keeping them all current. Add to that the hardware costs of releasing a binary for linux-libc6-strongARM and every other os/hardware combination you can come up with, and you wind up with exactly the same cost-benefit analysis situation you do when producing any other proprietary software. We were among the best in terms of cross-platform support at our peak (fall '96), with:
Win 3.1
Win 95/NT
Mac 68k
Mac PPC
Sparc Solaris 2.4
Digital Unix 3.2
all as supported platforms, but invariably there'd either be somebody grumbling about the fact that the "latest" version wasn't out for Solaris yet (hey, at least we had one), or "can you make one for Irix?" or whatever; the fact remains, most plugins are made by small companies who are doing the best they can with the resources they have to support the most people.
Don't chime in about open-sourcing the codec either: compression codecs are exactly one of the r&d-intensive products for which retaining closed-source is the only viable revenue model that ESR talks about in "The Magic Cauldron." If the only thing you have of value is your algorithm, you really can't distribute source that everyone can implement.
The point is, there is no good solution: if you are building a site that contains essential content, don't use non-standard technologies (I'd argue this includes Java applets). Conversely, if you're not using the same technology as 80% of the people out there, and I too am in that outer 20%, prepare to fall victim to the 80-20 rule when vendors of everything, including browser plugins, do cost-benefit analysis.
Hehe you get involved in one little book project and suddenly find yourself interesting.
Seriously, though, I love to make myself available to user groups when travelling, like I did when I came down here to Dallas in May for a friend's wedding (the fact that I found a job here and wound up moving back is another story). I suspect most authors, open-source-project-leaders, et al have similar attitudes: catch me when I happen to be in Pennsylvania (or wherever), and I'd love to give a presentation.
OF course, that makes it incumbent upon us (as potential speakers) to publicize our travel plans, a la Randal Schwartz -- something I'm guilty of neglecting myself, and I should probably get around to updating. Taking it a step further though, that makes for a lot of work on the part of the program chair of a user group: you still have to wade through all of the homepages of each potential speaker until you find one who will happen to be in the neighborhood. Perhaps someone would like to undertake building a "Random Sightings" website where people who wouldn't mind giving talks while travelling could enter their travel info into a database (and prog chairs could subsequently browse the same)?
This is a beautifully illustrative example of why it pays to observe important caveats, like: Don't trust a statistic that's published without its methodology. Good science is grounded on being reproducible -- the core of which is telling you how they did it. Simply saying "Based on the latest figures from IDC" doesn't tell you what the collection methodology was, or allow you to judge whether that methodology was or was not accurate.
Of course, those of us in the community can look around us and see that their numbers were wrong -- which makes this problem even worse: the site it came from is targeted to the "manage by magazine" crowd, which makes their complete omission of Slackware and Debian, and their gross underestimation of Mandrake's US installations, substantially more dangerous, since they are misinforming already grossly-underinformed decision makers.
For people without access to computers and the internet, this is the equivalent of a poll tax as it hinders a "non-connected" person's access to these online petitions.
I disagree. Remember, a petition is essentially a unidirectional instrument -- if you want the thing to appear on the ballot, you sign. Consequently, the sponsors of such petitions have substantial impetus to make signing accessible to the "non-connected": I would expect to see such petitions accompanied by the traditional, stand-at-the-grocery-store-entrance canvassers with paper equivlaents, and possibly, for the better-funded measures, electronic kiosks.
Oh, believe me, we aren't talking about voting at all: you'd get an entirely different response out of me if we were (I am a HARSH critic of electronic, or even mechanical, voting mechanisms because of the absense of a physical audit trail... I'm pretty picky about such things: my father-in-law is one of the world's leading experts on election fraud, and the unauditability of mechanical voting mechanisms is dinner-table fodder in our household. *smirk*). This is simply talking about the signature-gathering phase of the elections process, whereby most things get onto the ballot; even when, in the pre-public-internet era, I ran for city council (something I don't discuss often, for good reason *grin*), I had to gather forty signatures of registered voters within the city in order to declare myself a candidate....
What I was saying was that if people passed a measure in an election that made it onto the ballot as the result of a fraudulent electronic-signature drive, then realistically, the outcome of that referendum was the logical equivalent of a victory for a write-in candidate: a popular mandate for something that didn't "officially" make it onto the ballot in the first place.
Most people are stupid and not educated/well thought out enough to be involved in law making. I'm not trolling; even the Framers agreed. Thats why we have an electoral vote instead of a direct vote. Don't belive me? Ask your HS social studies teacher.
That may have been a Hamiltonian sensibility, but the trend constitutionally, since its enaction, has been placing more and more responsibility in the hands of the people. That's why we've had amendments providing for direct election of senators, expanded suffrage, etc. And on a state level, we've had the "Oregon System" adopted by several states -- referenda, recall elections, etc. -- this is just discussing a way of conducting a ballot initiative electronically, not the actual voting. In fact, as I prepare to leave Connecticut and return to Texas, I feel compelled to comment that one of the things I found most politically dissatisfying (there have been several) about Connecticut was its utter and total lack of Oregon System reforms -- which it appears is not atypical of states on the East Coast.
In other words, Voting+Digital Signatures=Voting fraud lawsuits....
Careful, don't confuse the process... the signature-based initiatives only get a measure to appear on the ballot -- it still has to be passed in a regular election. I think a court would have a hard time throwing out a law passed by voters in a referendum on the grounds that its appearance on the ballot was fraudulent, since at that point it is still the electoral equivalent of a write-in victory; this is particularly true in states where the legislature can turn around and place measures on the ballot themselves as a way of avoiding politically uncomfortable decisions.
And, FWIW, Delaware is getting along just fine, thank you.
As is Oregon. The only economic problems lately have been the closing of timber and pulp mills....
Only partly true. Oregon is doing OK now, largely because of corporate income tax from companies like Intel, but 10 years ago, when measure 5 first passed (measure 5 was Oregon's property tax ceiling) Oregon was in a world of hurt. And they still have one of the most confiscatory income taxes in the country.
Personally, I prefer sales tax to state income tax for several reasons. First, it's a tax on consumption, so everyone -- tourists or residents, rich or poor, pay it in the same fashion. Secondly, it incentivizes not spending your money (investing, savings, etc.) -- whereas if you go to invest money that's had income tax taken out, there goes a chunk of your principal off the top. And third, collecting sales taxes is a lot less expensive from an operational perspective -- compare the outlays vs. dollars returned of the revenue departments of the four states (New Hampshire doesn't count, it has neither) that have no sales tax but do have income tax with those of the nine states which have sales tax but no income tax.
a bunch of old, wrinkly, smelly violent fremen hosuekeepers are on their way now to help out the network admins.
So now we know the truth behind last week's attack: once Slashdot moved into the new Exodus facility, they found out that the Harkonnen had left behind a few hunter-seekers to cause havoc.... I wonder how long before the Baron gets to learn the hard way that one of Kurt's teeth has been replaced with a cyanide gas capsule?
Turns out Klamath and Willamette are rivers in Oregon... since Intel is largely in Oregon as well, that makes some sense. Besides, those are just codenames anyway (along the same line, IIRC, Katmai is a mountain).
And Pentium was their 5th generation chip, so it follows a standard branding formula -- take something descriptive, and add a futuristic, newspeak ending:
pent (5) + ium = pentium.
And so it came to pass that someone at Intel probably went back to the well, and came up with these lines of thought:
"Hey we have two new chips. Compared to the Pentium, we want to convey the image that one is a God and the other a vegetable...."
Zeus - us + X - Z + on = Xeon
Celery - y + on = Celeron
And then they had their 6th generation chip to contend with. Rather than name it Sexium ("It renders pr0n sites REALLY fast") they needed to jazz it up. So when they went to talk about it one of the marketroids probably asked his kid:
"It an -ium"
Not to be outdone, of course, our friends in San Jose or Dallas or wherever their headquarters is this week faced a similar problem wanting names for the chips after their K6. So they wanted something to indicate how fast the new chip runs:
Athlete -ete + on = Athlon
Then, they discovered, however, that their trusted business model of low-cost chips had started to leak away. "Quick, get something to keep this fluid from escaping!"
Durex -ex + on = Duron
And we are where we are today. At least hypothetically.... So what's next? Maybe our friends in Phoenix will unveil a stripped-down G4, and call it "McPPC" -- playing on the whole "tasty and inexpensive" identification. Or someone will come out with a low-power mobile chip called the "Volxon" (Volks -ks + x + on).
Slashdot Mirror
People operating computers in environments other than coldrooms, overclockers, and owners of multiprocessor systems are particularly cautioned.
On the other hand, people who are capable of telling the difference between a car and a software application are encouraged to use Kontour, taking advantage of its superior price-performance.
MOO;IANAL.
In the South, a Yankee is anyone from anywhere else in the US.
Outside the Northeast (and the South), a Yankee is anyone from the Northeast.
Within the Northeast, a Yankee is anyone from the region between Boston and New York City, inclusive.
Despite the fact that I now live in Texas, I don't like the Southern definition. It is inadequate in that it ignores states like Idaho and Montana, and to a lesser extent New Hampshire, which border Canada, but have a lot more in common with most of the South than they do, say, Connecticut or Rhode Island.
Incidentally, based on the narrowest definition, "crazy" isn't a bad choice -- Massachusetts drivers, in particular, are notoriously intemperate. Driving tip #1: that space between the yellow line and the left-hand Jersey wall is NOT a passing lane, despite what Sen. Ted Kennedy's (a famous bad driver from Mass.) constituents might think!
MOO;IANAL.
Any other parents who have found a good solution for this?
The following solutions are good security practices, regardless of whether you have children to snoop on -- you can protect your internal MIS environment (yes, I know it's a household, but it still has MIS needs) from everything from script kiddies to ill-behaved Windows shares -- especially if you connect via broadband (Cable, DSL, etc.).
Every machine in your house should be sitting on a private network, with a box functioning as a firewall sitting between them and the 'net. Block all web traffic (there's only a half-dozen or so ports) from masquerading directly, and force them through a caching proxy. Then, you can simply inspect the proxy caches/logs to handle this issue; your surfing performance in general will improve as a result of doing the caching regardless of your interest in the logs.
You should also have your firewall log all the masqueraded connections -- again, this is a security measure regardless of whether you want to see if your kid is spending too much time playing EverQuest; it also will protect you from any trojaned apps that may be trying to "phone home" (you see a strange connection in the logs, and block the port).
Good security practices aren't hard, but they do take work. And there's no reason to think that you shouldn't be as/more careful at home (with stuff that's actually yours) as/than you are around the office.
MOO;IANAL.
Actually, I've seen a demo of this very thing (probably a much earlier, less refined version, but still...) from a CD the Altavista guys were passing out at DECUS meetings (and possibly Comdex '96 as well) more than 4 years ago (IIRC, the demo explicitly EXPIRED at the end of February '97).
Also, realize what it is and is not designed to do: it isn't a spying tool (you can preclude it client-side from scanning certain directories), it's a productivity tool. Example -- this is employee Bob's train of thought:
MOO;IANAL.
Now that Digital, the Alliance, and OpenVMS are all historical footnotes, is there a similar (successor) plan -- using, for instance, Compaq's "big iron" (the wildfire boxes in particular) and Tru64 Unix in place of OpenVMS?
MOO;IANAL.
It's painfully easy for Dell, Compaq, etc. to negotiate OEM licenses with Mattel, et al., to bundle a censorware product on their PCs at an oh-so-cheap price. Meanwhile, all of the little PC vendors in places like Beltline in Carrollton and N. Central Expwy. in Richardson would have to pay substantially higher prices for the censorware, driving up the prices of their PCs, and making the mass-produced hardware more competetive.
Don't be surprised if the AOL story that Garcia cited is nothing more than a red herring, and he's just shilling for Compaq (or maybe Dell, but it is less likely).
MOO;IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
It wouldn't surprise me if this were the case across the board, not just within mail: they've gotten so big, there is no individual accountability/culpability/contact within customer service... and therefore a lot of people/companies who they could be selling services to have become nothing but an eroded market.
So yes, banner ad revenues are part of the story -- but they may not be the WHOLE story.
MOO;IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
The software side of the house was making "first sale" dollars (nowhere near as lucrative) off of a webserver that directly competed with the LAMP model: it ran on Windows, competed directly with Apache, didn't talk directly to mySQL, and supported ColdFusion/Java/ASP much more readily than Perl. In other words, it was basically the same thing as Ford selling a car that takes Chrysler parts: they'd get the up-front money, but all of the follow-on dollars were just-as-to-more likely to go to their competitors than themselves.
So, this makes very good sense from a business perspective. In Tim's own words, "it's not a strong strategic fit with our other efforts." I'm actually surprised that it didn't happen a couple years ago, for instance when the Eagle book came out.
MOO;IANAL.
It's simple, really -- the VCs are there, they want their money close to them, the start-ups wind up there (Silicon Valley). This drives up the density, which drives up housing costs, power demands, and all the other drains on local culture and infrastructure... leading to what I like to refer to as the "Hong Kong-ification of the Peninsula". I've railed in the past about this, I've railed about how one nasty earthquake could send the industry into a REAL tailspin, I've railed about the labor costs in the Valley, but now, perhaps, the brownouts are vindicating my earlier observations; couple this with the current capital crisis, and maybe, just MAYBE, somebody may get wise: Milwaukee is a "Great Place by a Great Lake" and AltaVista needs to conserve money by cutting labor costs, so why shouldn't AltaVista up and move to Milwaukee? Similarly, Excite could move to Omaha, VA to Lansing, etc., and all of a sudden both Silicon Valley and the companies that "used to be there" would both be a lot better off.
Of course, all of this is predicated on an even larger assumption: that the VCs would actually be willing to believe that the people running the companies they invested in knew what they were doing!
MOO;IANAL.
it used to be the policy of the U.S. government to keep content producers and carriers separate.
The operative words here are used to be. Think about it: The mouse (content producer) has owned ABC (carrier) for what, going on six years now? Viacom (CBS and MTV's current parent) has been both (syndicated programming content production AND cable networks) for a couple decades. Murdoch's News Corp./Fox is all over the map as well, from movie studios to TV broadcasting. Ironically, the thing that had the FCC the most worried was AOL acquiring the head ends of half the country's cable modems, when cable-based broadband figures to be a bit player in that industry (vs. 3G wireless and various DSLs) within the next few years.
Now, the thing that has me more worried is the thought of AOL taking a lot of Time Warner's current web content (Money.com, Fortune.com, CNN.com as three examples) and improving their revenue basis by making them subscriber-only services: you'd have to be an AOL member (at $9.95/mo. of course) to access the content. Don't think it couldn't happen; Yahoo's stock drop yesterday is indicative of the sorry state of the advertiser-supported web today.
MOO;IANAL.
This sounds like the sort of design choices driven by the sort of thinking that goes, "Let's see who our strategic partners are and that will dictate our platform choices to our engineers." I noticed Sun's name mentioned in the Dodge release -- a pretty good indication that the Mountain View marketing machine stormed their way into the engineering castle early on in this project's lifecycle.
MOO;IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
Yes, moving away from heavy manufacturing and raw materials production is freeing up a lot of the old geographic ties... but if you look at what it's causing, it isn't the formation of "Nerdistans," but rather the overt expression of long-held preferences: people flocking to states like Texas, Washington, and Florida, for example, to take advantage of mild climates and low taxes. If cities like Flint, Michigan want to know why their populations are getting smaller and less affluent, perhaps I could suggest some introspection; why are people who can afford to move somewhere else doing so? Kotkin's thesis is the intellectual analog of your wife leaving you and you blaming it on the construction of a new mall nearby.
MOO;IANAL.
As someone who used to be involved with producing a plugin for a particular alternate image file format, I can honestly say there are several issues associated with trying to produce and maintain plugins for multiple platforms -- not the least of which is maintainability and keeping them all current. Add to that the hardware costs of releasing a binary for linux-libc6-strongARM and every other os/hardware combination you can come up with, and you wind up with exactly the same cost-benefit analysis situation you do when producing any other proprietary software. We were among the best in terms of cross-platform support at our peak (fall '96), with:
- Win 3.1
- Win 95/NT
- Mac 68k
- Mac PPC
- Sparc Solaris 2.4
- Digital Unix 3.2
all as supported platforms, but invariably there'd either be somebody grumbling about the fact that the "latest" version wasn't out for Solaris yet (hey, at least we had one), or "can you make one for Irix?" or whatever; the fact remains, most plugins are made by small companies who are doing the best they can with the resources they have to support the most people.Don't chime in about open-sourcing the codec either: compression codecs are exactly one of the r&d-intensive products for which retaining closed-source is the only viable revenue model that ESR talks about in "The Magic Cauldron." If the only thing you have of value is your algorithm, you really can't distribute source that everyone can implement.
The point is, there is no good solution: if you are building a site that contains essential content, don't use non-standard technologies (I'd argue this includes Java applets). Conversely, if you're not using the same technology as 80% of the people out there, and I too am in that outer 20%, prepare to fall victim to the 80-20 rule when vendors of everything, including browser plugins, do cost-benefit analysis.
MOO;IANAL.
Hehe you get involved in one little book project and suddenly find yourself interesting.
Seriously, though, I love to make myself available to user groups when travelling, like I did when I came down here to Dallas in May for a friend's wedding (the fact that I found a job here and wound up moving back is another story). I suspect most authors, open-source-project-leaders, et al have similar attitudes: catch me when I happen to be in Pennsylvania (or wherever), and I'd love to give a presentation.
OF course, that makes it incumbent upon us (as potential speakers) to publicize our travel plans, a la Randal Schwartz -- something I'm guilty of neglecting myself, and I should probably get around to updating. Taking it a step further though, that makes for a lot of work on the part of the program chair of a user group: you still have to wade through all of the homepages of each potential speaker until you find one who will happen to be in the neighborhood. Perhaps someone would like to undertake building a "Random Sightings" website where people who wouldn't mind giving talks while travelling could enter their travel info into a database (and prog chairs could subsequently browse the same)?
MOO;IANAL.
This is a beautifully illustrative example of why it pays to observe important caveats, like: Don't trust a statistic that's published without its methodology. Good science is grounded on being reproducible -- the core of which is telling you how they did it. Simply saying "Based on the latest figures from IDC" doesn't tell you what the collection methodology was, or allow you to judge whether that methodology was or was not accurate.
Of course, those of us in the community can look around us and see that their numbers were wrong -- which makes this problem even worse: the site it came from is targeted to the "manage by magazine" crowd, which makes their complete omission of Slackware and Debian, and their gross underestimation of Mandrake's US installations, substantially more dangerous, since they are misinforming already grossly-underinformed decision makers.
MOO;IANAL.
For people without access to computers and the internet, this is the equivalent of a poll tax as it hinders a "non-connected" person's access to these online petitions.
I disagree. Remember, a petition is essentially a unidirectional instrument -- if you want the thing to appear on the ballot, you sign. Consequently, the sponsors of such petitions have substantial impetus to make signing accessible to the "non-connected": I would expect to see such petitions accompanied by the traditional, stand-at-the-grocery-store-entrance canvassers with paper equivlaents, and possibly, for the better-funded measures, electronic kiosks.
MOO;IANAL.
Voting using Digital Signatures...
Oh, believe me, we aren't talking about voting at all: you'd get an entirely different response out of me if we were (I am a HARSH critic of electronic, or even mechanical, voting mechanisms because of the absense of a physical audit trail... I'm pretty picky about such things: my father-in-law is one of the world's leading experts on election fraud, and the unauditability of mechanical voting mechanisms is dinner-table fodder in our household. *smirk*). This is simply talking about the signature-gathering phase of the elections process, whereby most things get onto the ballot; even when, in the pre-public-internet era, I ran for city council (something I don't discuss often, for good reason *grin*), I had to gather forty signatures of registered voters within the city in order to declare myself a candidate....
What I was saying was that if people passed a measure in an election that made it onto the ballot as the result of a fraudulent electronic-signature drive, then realistically, the outcome of that referendum was the logical equivalent of a victory for a write-in candidate: a popular mandate for something that didn't "officially" make it onto the ballot in the first place.
MOO;IANAL.
Most people are stupid and not educated/well thought out enough to be involved in law making. I'm not trolling; even the Framers agreed. Thats why we have an electoral vote instead of a direct vote. Don't belive me? Ask your HS social studies teacher.
That may have been a Hamiltonian sensibility, but the trend constitutionally, since its enaction, has been placing more and more responsibility in the hands of the people. That's why we've had amendments providing for direct election of senators, expanded suffrage, etc. And on a state level, we've had the "Oregon System" adopted by several states -- referenda, recall elections, etc. -- this is just discussing a way of conducting a ballot initiative electronically, not the actual voting. In fact, as I prepare to leave Connecticut and return to Texas, I feel compelled to comment that one of the things I found most politically dissatisfying (there have been several) about Connecticut was its utter and total lack of Oregon System reforms -- which it appears is not atypical of states on the East Coast.
MOO;IANAL.
In other words, Voting+Digital Signatures=Voting fraud lawsuits....
Careful, don't confuse the process... the signature-based initiatives only get a measure to appear on the ballot -- it still has to be passed in a regular election. I think a court would have a hard time throwing out a law passed by voters in a referendum on the grounds that its appearance on the ballot was fraudulent, since at that point it is still the electoral equivalent of a write-in victory; this is particularly true in states where the legislature can turn around and place measures on the ballot themselves as a way of avoiding politically uncomfortable decisions.
MOO;IANAL.
And, FWIW, Delaware is getting along just fine, thank you.
As is Oregon. The only economic problems lately have been the closing of timber and pulp mills....
Only partly true. Oregon is doing OK now, largely because of corporate income tax from companies like Intel, but 10 years ago, when measure 5 first passed (measure 5 was Oregon's property tax ceiling) Oregon was in a world of hurt. And they still have one of the most confiscatory income taxes in the country.
Personally, I prefer sales tax to state income tax for several reasons. First, it's a tax on consumption, so everyone -- tourists or residents, rich or poor, pay it in the same fashion. Secondly, it incentivizes not spending your money (investing, savings, etc.) -- whereas if you go to invest money that's had income tax taken out, there goes a chunk of your principal off the top. And third, collecting sales taxes is a lot less expensive from an operational perspective -- compare the outlays vs. dollars returned of the revenue departments of the four states (New Hampshire doesn't count, it has neither) that have no sales tax but do have income tax with those of the nine states which have sales tax but no income tax.
My opinion only, IANAL.
a bunch of old, wrinkly, smelly violent fremen hosuekeepers are on their way now to help out the network admins.
So now we know the truth behind last week's attack: once Slashdot moved into the new Exodus facility, they found out that the Harkonnen had left behind a few hunter-seekers to cause havoc.... I wonder how long before the Baron gets to learn the hard way that one of Kurt's teeth has been replaced with a cyanide gas capsule?
My opinion only, IANAL.
Turns out Klamath and Willamette are rivers in Oregon... since Intel is largely in Oregon as well, that makes some sense. Besides, those are just codenames anyway (along the same line, IIRC, Katmai is a mountain).
And Pentium was their 5th generation chip, so it follows a standard branding formula -- take something descriptive, and add a futuristic, newspeak ending:
pent (5) + ium = pentium.
And so it came to pass that someone at Intel probably went back to the well, and came up with these lines of thought:
"Hey we have two new chips. Compared to the Pentium, we want to convey the image that one is a God and the other a vegetable...."
Zeus - us + X - Z + on = Xeon
Celery - y + on = Celeron
And then they had their 6th generation chip to contend with. Rather than name it Sexium ("It renders pr0n sites REALLY fast") they needed to jazz it up. So when they went to talk about it one of the marketroids probably asked his kid:
"It an -ium"
Not to be outdone, of course, our friends in San Jose or Dallas or wherever their headquarters is this week faced a similar problem wanting names for the chips after their K6. So they wanted something to indicate how fast the new chip runs:
Athlete -ete + on = Athlon
Then, they discovered, however, that their trusted business model of low-cost chips had started to leak away. "Quick, get something to keep this fluid from escaping!"
Durex -ex + on = Duron
And we are where we are today. At least hypothetically.... So what's next? Maybe our friends in Phoenix will unveil a stripped-down G4, and call it "McPPC" -- playing on the whole "tasty and inexpensive" identification. Or someone will come out with a low-power mobile chip called the "Volxon" (Volks -ks + x + on).
My opinion only, IANAL.