I'm going to go against the/. consensus here I think..
I just don't see the first cartoon as being defensible by the PA people. Sure, the parody of American Magee was interesting, and defensible, but bringing in the Strawberry Shortcake character did seems a little bit off. In fact... it just didn't make any sense. What were they saying about Strawberry shortcake? Nothing, it was just a random sexualization of that character.
In sum, the first cartoon, I have no problem with the greetings people wanting it pulled, I think that was fine.
This one on the other hand is a zinger and a well-aimed one too =)
That's "cover your ass"... UPenn is the party "at fault" in the eyes of DARPA (I'm speculating of course) because they are the ones who farmed out the work to a rowdy anti-war Canadian. So what happens at UPenn when the canuck mouths off to the press? All too predictable. Think about it.
- UPenn wants to keep getting government money - UPenn just lost $2.1 mil... that's a lot! - UPenn decides to totally overreact so that they can go back to the government later and say they had no idea, they would never condone such a thing, etc., etc. etc.
In other words, UPenn pulls a CYA. They don't want anything to do with Theo anymore. They pull extreme prejudice in cutting him off just to prove to the Feds how much they were shocked, shocked, to find that Theo de Raat was so outspoken (please...)
So, yeah, sure, blame the DARPA, but blame UPenn for being deliberately ungraceful in order to curry DARPA favour.
After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When they heard "light that is reflected from a medium with an index," they didn't know that it meant a material such as water.
The bottom line: Please anyone who can help us in Ghana legally tap from the GIGA offshore, I would be indeed very happy. The truth is a lot of us want to go back to Ghana to help, but the current conditions it makes life very tough for us all these excellent talents but NO INFRASTRUCTURE!!!
Yeah... I talk about the gigabit pipe in another post. People who know people, please push them to free it up.
Obviously I'm really into the whole situation of IT in Africa (they call it ICT.. the C is for communications). Here are some links for you to look at. A lot of them are really oriented towards WiFi too since I think that's the "last best hope" for the internet in Africa
You probably haven't heard about it, but there's a fat pipe running down the coast of Africa with 20Gbps (yes, that's GIGA) of capacity. I've been following this story, and it's being wasted.
The max capacity of the cable is 120Gbps. It cost 0.65 billion to build and was a monumental sign of pan-african development 6 years ago when they bought it. Now it's finally in place.
It's being wasted! It's a fat pipe, it's got something like 20x the bandwidth previously available in Africa (seriously...) but despite the obvious -- to me -- benefits to start using it Right Now, instead nothing seems to be happening.
Analysis: "...the benefits of this new capacity will not be unleashed on the national business environment"
The state telcoms in all these countries that control the access... they are just going to sit on their hands because they have no vested interest. It's not on their radar screen to do anything with this cable, or to start selling access to regular people, like Guido. Instead, they are all slowly or quickly going out of business and dragging the market down with them. Installing the cable was only half of it. The other half is freeing the bandwidth.
simon
::: Check out rural wireless 802.11 on the wireless-longhaul@openict.net mailing list. subscribe or check out the project page:::
It just happens that I know Guido. I hope he doesn't mind if I talk about him and what I think about his situation. I want to say these things about him.
First, he WANTS to be in Ghana. This is a personal decision on his part, it's his home, it's where he grew up. So it's not like he's stranded there, you know, he went to university in the states and could easily be pulling in 100K if he were there, but he voluntarily returned to africa.
The biggest problem for him in Ghana is that his talent simply isn't recognized. The people who hire in Ghana aren't talented enough themselves to recognize a quality programmer. Most of the western companies that drop in shops in a place like that ship their own talent in as well, and they're not going to be looking for a top-notch coder/ sysadmin / webdesigner / all around talent to be found in-country. So getting a job that's worthy of his talent at all is tough.
Pay? The cost of living in Ghana is dirt-cheap compared to where I am (canada). I think that he would probably be well off at 10K a year (not a month!) and would be above average at half that. Think about that for a minute, if you're looking to hire a web developer he could be doing the work for 1/5 the price.
Unfortunately there are serious, serious problems with being located in Ghana. Just try to get internet access. Sure, there's an 80Gbps (yes, that's GIGA) pipe running JUST OFF SHORE... the SAT-3/SAFE/WASC line that runs down the western coast of Africa to SA, and then over to india. But can Guido get access to that? Yeah, right! Instead the most reliable internet access is 2Kbps over a VSAT connection at BusyInternet. Anything else is very much intermittent. How can you work in conditions like that?
He'd have to pay $1500 to get his own VSAT (very small aperture terminal) and then $100s a month for a measly 32Kbps or less connection, ironically. Even though the people are poorer there, the bandwidth costs so much more. And could he run VoIP on that and save himself on longdistance? Not without running afoul of Ghana Telecom... not yet.
It's a chicken and an egg problem. I have a lot of respect for Guido for being there and doing what he's doing. He's just a guy who wants to write code.
simon
PS If anyone reading this can push the right people to give up access to the SAT-3 fat pipe, please do...
Close. It's actually Free / Open Source Software. As in Free Software / Open Source Software.
It's an acronym to assuage those people who for some inexplicable reason prefer "free software" over OSS. So we get FOSS. (Aside: Then of course there's FLOSS, Free / Libre / Open Source Software, which is popular amongst those who know some french, because Libre means "freedom" in french.
(AsideAside: french actually has two words for free. One is libre, which means freedom. The other is gratis, which means gratis in english too. As in, beer.))
The slash matters because FOSS isn't to differentiate with non-free OSS.
Personally I just use OSS unless I know that someone from the FSF is listening;-)
I've got a Titanium powerbook with the wider screen, and I love it. The longer aspect ratio just seems so much more natural.
One nit on the article. They don't say whether they were also giving the men the wider screens as well. Does this equalize them when BOTH are using wide screens? Or do they only give them to the women?
Of course there are other countries outside the US that do have a three-party (or more!) system. Take Canada, for example. Here in the Federal elections what we have is five parties now. There's two on the left, the New Democrats, who are national, and the Bloc Quebecois, which is a Quebec separatist party that just happens also to be left-wing. In the centre are the Liberals (capital ell) and on the right there are two parties, the Conservatives and the Reform party.
Now I happen to be incredibly pleased that the right is in total disarray, with the traditionally moderate Conservatives on the brink of going under and the radical Reform party way too right wing for most canadians outside a certain region in the west. That split has effectively made the right wingers ineffectual at the national level. The result is that currently the Liberals enjoy a huge split in their opposition that makes it most unlikely they will lose the next election.
On the other hand, just a decade ago the Conservatives were running the country. Canadians mostly don't "register" for a party (what a weird idea!) and instead vote for the party that they feel reflects their views on issues (wow!). Plus of course the voter turnout here is more like 75% which makes the U.S. Americans look pretty dinterested in voting.
What I'm trying to say is that yeah, having 3+ parties changes the game a lot and can result in split votes and so on. It also results in a lot of people doing "strategic" voting for their second favorite party if they think that will present a bad result.
And that's just the tip of the iceburg. There are voting systems developed now that are much more sophisticated to allow more different views and opposition.
Saying that a third party is impossible or stupid is just FUD. To bring myself back on topic at the last minute, I'll say that Nader would most certainly be on the RIGHT side in the DMCA/RIAA case.
Actually it seems likely that the kind of mass collective action undertaken by Slashdotters would be seen as wrong or illegal. In that case, each individual was doing a very small part. The difference is that in this new scenario, one person could launch such an attack with the touch of a button.
To apply the reverse principle, you see why internet protests are possible. If one person mails a senator a million times, that's mailbombing. But if a million individuals mail theat senator once each... that's progress;-)
It's at very low power because the FCC said to put it at low power.
But your argument is circular... the FCC said to put it at low power because it will interfere. It really doesn't matter if the signal looks like noise or something else, it will still interfere!
(and since it's ultra-wideband, it will interfere will a lot of different signals)
This is not a WiFi replacement, it's a cable replacement (like Firewire). UWB cannot be used at range, at least partly because it uses very very low power so as not to interfere with the large number of other devices using the variety of frequencies that it covers (which is a huge swathe).
There is some mention by an Intel person that this might become a part of the Bluetooth standard though.
Gotta say that I worked at a data mining company for aq while. Kind of scary what they know or want to know about people. Is this ethical?
That reminds me of a story about a FOAF that works in the data mining group for a big bank. They wanted to figure out what single trait was most likely to indicate a good credit card customer. Keep in mind that good credit card customers pay late but always pay. That's how the banks make money on the interest rates. The data mining tool told them that the single best indicator was whether the customer owned cats.
The Wifi revolution is not about money. It's not about changing business models and new ways of selling stuff etc. It's about a fundamental infrastructure change. Trying to map the dot com bubble onto Wifi doesn't make any sense... people might think it will make a difference if there's overinvestment or whatever but that's all water under the bridge for people who really grok what wireless data means at commodity prices. The real revolution will happen anyway, as the shape of the network changes (and becomes more decentralized).
I'm just wondering... I mean, one good april fools joke is fine, two is cool, three's getting a little tired... four's a crowd. There must be some serious news out there, and I'd rather not have to sift myself through other less reliable sources (the register, various blogs, news.com.com.com (shiver)) to get my daily fix.
... usually caused by SCSI chain problems (lets be more precise...)... who can forget the sheer dread of a SCSI chain failure. which device isn't working? those connectors were physically painful to mess with after a while... the cables sometimes didn't work, gotta keep swapping cables and restarting to see what happens... people put bad cables back on the rack...
To be more to the point -- this is NOT Gnutella. The Gnutella developers are not happy about the so-called "Gnutella" 2 since it goes against their wishes in many ways. Basically this one individual hijacked the name to push his own ideas.
From the last story it's pretty damned clear that "Gnutella" 2 is not going to be a particularly helpful or effective protocol. As someone who uses the real Gnutella (sometimes even for perfectly legit purposes) and thinks it works, I'll stick to the real Gnutella. It keeps getting better...
The first thing is use the bugzilla helper it will help you create a good bug that includes: what you did, what you thought should happen, and what happened instead. It will also include what your platform is.
Duplicate bug reports are discouraged on bugzilla but they are useful. They give the developers an idea of how many people are seeing a given bug. This is especially important for triage, deciding which bug to fix first. Even better, is to find the relevant bug that's already open on the issue, and to add your bug report to that one (give all the details). That will save the developers a bit of time and provide useful contextual information that can help narrow down (or expand) the focus for a bug.
Basically, no limitations. With CG you can set up the shot you want, the setting you want, the people you want, without any need for those things to actually exist.
I agree, it shouldn't be done just because it's cool. For example, I think Shrek was far more impressive than FF because it worked as a film in it's own right -- the technology was secondary to the story.
... actually I stopped reading when he started complaining about the lack of keyboard support in OS X. This person apparently has not spent enough time on the platform to learn about full keyboard access. His ramblings about ALT keys and so on leave me thinking... what? I'm trusting this person to tell me what a useable system is? When he apparently hasn't used OS X for more than a day or two? When his main reason for liking Windows is that he's used to it? No thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to go against the /. consensus here I think..
... it just didn't make any sense. What were they saying about Strawberry shortcake? Nothing, it was just a random sexualization of that character.
I just don't see the first cartoon as being defensible by the PA people. Sure, the parody of American Magee was interesting, and defensible, but bringing in the Strawberry Shortcake character did seems a little bit off. In fact
In sum, the first cartoon, I have no problem with the greetings people wanting it pulled, I think that was fine.
This one on the other hand is a zinger and a well-aimed one too =)
simon
That's "cover your ass" ... UPenn is the party "at fault" in the eyes of DARPA (I'm speculating of course) because they are the ones who farmed out the work to a rowdy anti-war Canadian. So what happens at UPenn when the canuck mouths off to the press? All too predictable. Think about it.
... that's a lot!
...)
- UPenn wants to keep getting government money
- UPenn just lost $2.1 mil
- UPenn decides to totally overreact so that they can go back to the government later and say they had no idea, they would never condone such a thing, etc., etc. etc.
In other words, UPenn pulls a CYA. They don't want anything to do with Theo anymore. They pull extreme prejudice in cutting him off just to prove to the Feds how much they were shocked, shocked, to find that Theo de Raat was so outspoken (please
So, yeah, sure, blame the DARPA, but blame UPenn for being deliberately ungraceful in order to curry DARPA favour.
simon
Richard Feynman might agree:
simon
They've landed the cable in Ghana at least ... so yeah, it's in a junction box, same situation as you have.
The bottom line: Please anyone who can help us in Ghana legally tap from the GIGA offshore, I would be indeed very happy. The truth is a lot of us want to go back to Ghana to help, but the current conditions it makes life very tough for us all these excellent talents but NO INFRASTRUCTURE!!!
... I talk about the gigabit pipe in another post. People who know people, please push them to free it up.
...
Yeah
I'd mod you up but I already posted
simon
Obviously I'm really into the whole situation of IT in Africa (they call it ICT .. the C is for communications). Here are some links for you to look at. A lot of them are really oriented towards WiFi too since I think that's the "last best hope" for the internet in Africa
... but this much more story and pictures about another project:
... but they have a WiFi based VoIP long-distance system that doesn't even need electrical grid to work.
... the Digital Plains of India.
Weblogs:
riptari filter
m u l t i p l i c i t y
R Alden
News
Balancing Act: Africa This looks dense but it's the BEST news source about ICT in africa and getting better all the time. Very reliable too.
Shameless plug
I wrote about using the open source model for (ICT) development here and some other stuff from here.
Stories
Laos
You've already heard about that
Pictures, stories, of setting up the real thing in Bhutan a country you've maybe never even heard of
I'll leave you with one that's going on right now
simon
You probably haven't heard about it, but there's a fat pipe running down the coast of Africa with 20Gbps (yes, that's GIGA) of capacity. I've been following this story, and it's being wasted.
... they are just going to sit on their hands because they have no vested interest. It's not on their radar screen to do anything with this cable, or to start selling access to regular people, like Guido. Instead, they are all slowly or quickly going out of business and dragging the market down with them. Installing the cable was only half of it. The other half is freeing the bandwidth.
:::
Home Page
Map
The max capacity of the cable is 120Gbps. It cost 0.65 billion to build and was a monumental sign of pan-african development 6 years ago when they bought it. Now it's finally in place.
technical
It's being wasted! It's a fat pipe, it's got something like 20x the bandwidth previously available in Africa (seriously...) but despite the obvious -- to me -- benefits to start using it Right Now, instead nothing seems to be happening.
Analysis: "...the benefits of this new capacity will not be unleashed on the national business environment"
The state telcoms in all these countries that control the access
simon
::: Check out rural wireless 802.11 on the wireless-longhaul@openict.net mailing list. subscribe or check out the project page
It just happens that I know Guido. I hope he doesn't mind if I talk about him and what I think about his situation. I want to say these things about him.
... the SAT-3/SAFE/WASC line that runs down the western coast of Africa to SA, and then over to india. But can Guido get access to that? Yeah, right! Instead the most reliable internet access is 2Kbps over a VSAT connection at BusyInternet. Anything else is very much intermittent. How can you work in conditions like that?
... not yet.
First, he WANTS to be in Ghana. This is a personal decision on his part, it's his home, it's where he grew up. So it's not like he's stranded there, you know, he went to university in the states and could easily be pulling in 100K if he were there, but he voluntarily returned to africa.
The biggest problem for him in Ghana is that his talent simply isn't recognized. The people who hire in Ghana aren't talented enough themselves to recognize a quality programmer. Most of the western companies that drop in shops in a place like that ship their own talent in as well, and they're not going to be looking for a top-notch coder/ sysadmin / webdesigner / all around talent to be found in-country. So getting a job that's worthy of his talent at all is tough.
Pay? The cost of living in Ghana is dirt-cheap compared to where I am (canada). I think that he would probably be well off at 10K a year (not a month!) and would be above average at half that. Think about that for a minute, if you're looking to hire a web developer he could be doing the work for 1/5 the price.
Unfortunately there are serious, serious problems with being located in Ghana. Just try to get internet access. Sure, there's an 80Gbps (yes, that's GIGA) pipe running JUST OFF SHORE
He'd have to pay $1500 to get his own VSAT (very small aperture terminal) and then $100s a month for a measly 32Kbps or less connection, ironically. Even though the people are poorer there, the bandwidth costs so much more. And could he run VoIP on that and save himself on longdistance? Not without running afoul of Ghana Telecom
It's a chicken and an egg problem. I have a lot of respect for Guido for being there and doing what he's doing. He's just a guy who wants to write code.
simon
PS If anyone reading this can push the right people to give up access to the SAT-3 fat pipe, please do...
Close. It's actually Free / Open Source Software. As in Free Software / Open Source Software.
;-)
It's an acronym to assuage those people who for some inexplicable reason prefer "free software" over OSS. So we get FOSS. (Aside: Then of course there's FLOSS, Free / Libre / Open Source Software, which is popular amongst those who know some french, because Libre means "freedom" in french.
(AsideAside: french actually has two words for free. One is libre, which means freedom. The other is gratis, which means gratis in english too. As in, beer.))
The slash matters because FOSS isn't to differentiate with non-free OSS.
Personally I just use OSS unless I know that someone from the FSF is listening
simon
I've got a Titanium powerbook with the wider screen, and I love it. The longer aspect ratio just seems so much more natural.
One nit on the article. They don't say whether they were also giving the men the wider screens as well. Does this equalize them when BOTH are using wide screens? Or do they only give them to the women?
Inquiring minds...
simon
Of course there are other countries outside the US that do have a three-party (or more!) system. Take Canada, for example. Here in the Federal elections what we have is five parties now. There's two on the left, the New Democrats, who are national, and the Bloc Quebecois, which is a Quebec separatist party that just happens also to be left-wing. In the centre are the Liberals (capital ell) and on the right there are two parties, the Conservatives and the Reform party.
Now I happen to be incredibly pleased that the right is in total disarray, with the traditionally moderate Conservatives on the brink of going under and the radical Reform party way too right wing for most canadians outside a certain region in the west. That split has effectively made the right wingers ineffectual at the national level. The result is that currently the Liberals enjoy a huge split in their opposition that makes it most unlikely they will lose the next election.
On the other hand, just a decade ago the Conservatives were running the country. Canadians mostly don't "register" for a party (what a weird idea!) and instead vote for the party that they feel reflects their views on issues (wow!). Plus of course the voter turnout here is more like 75% which makes the U.S. Americans look pretty dinterested in voting.
What I'm trying to say is that yeah, having 3+ parties changes the game a lot and can result in split votes and so on. It also results in a lot of people doing "strategic" voting for their second favorite party if they think that will present a bad result.
And that's just the tip of the iceburg. There are voting systems developed now that are much more sophisticated to allow more different views and opposition.
Saying that a third party is impossible or stupid is just FUD. To bring myself back on topic at the last minute, I'll say that Nader would most certainly be on the RIGHT side in the DMCA/RIAA case.
simon
Actually it seems likely that the kind of mass collective action undertaken by Slashdotters would be seen as wrong or illegal. In that case, each individual was doing a very small part. The difference is that in this new scenario, one person could launch such an attack with the touch of a button.
;-)
To apply the reverse principle, you see why internet protests are possible. If one person mails a senator a million times, that's mailbombing. But if a million individuals mail theat senator once each... that's progress
simon
It's at very low power because the FCC said to put it at low power.
... the FCC said to put it at low power because it will interfere. It really doesn't matter if the signal looks like noise or something else, it will still interfere!
But your argument is circular
(and since it's ultra-wideband, it will interfere will a lot of different signals)
simon
This is not a WiFi replacement, it's a cable replacement (like Firewire). UWB cannot be used at range, at least partly because it uses very very low power so as not to interfere with the large number of other devices using the variety of frequencies that it covers (which is a huge swathe).
There is some mention by an Intel person that this might become a part of the Bluetooth standard though.
simon
Gotta say that I worked at a data mining company for aq while. Kind of scary what they know or want to know about people. Is this ethical?
That reminds me of a story about a FOAF that works in the data mining group for a big bank. They wanted to figure out what single trait was most likely to indicate a good credit card customer. Keep in mind that good credit card customers pay late but always pay. That's how the banks make money on the interest rates. The data mining tool told them that the single best indicator was whether the customer owned cats.
simon
The Wifi revolution is not about money. It's not about changing business models and new ways of selling stuff etc. It's about a fundamental infrastructure change. Trying to map the dot com bubble onto Wifi doesn't make any sense ... people might think it will make a difference if there's overinvestment or whatever but that's all water under the bridge for people who really grok what wireless data means at commodity prices. The real revolution will happen anyway, as the shape of the network changes (and becomes more decentralized).
simon
I'm just wondering ... I mean, one good april fools joke is fine, two is cool, three's getting a little tired ... four's a crowd. There must be some serious news out there, and I'd rather not have to sift myself through other less reliable sources (the register, various blogs, news.com.com.com (shiver)) to get my daily fix.
Sheesh
simon
... usually caused by SCSI chain problems (lets be more precise ...) ... who can forget the sheer dread of a SCSI chain failure. which device isn't working? those connectors were physically painful to mess with after a while... the cables sometimes didn't work, gotta keep swapping cables and restarting to see what happens ... people put bad cables back on the rack ...
yup, those were the bad old days
bondi blue forever!
simon
?? I'm guessing the answer is no.
simon
"original Gnutella"
better to call it the real Gnutella. "Gnutella" 2 isn't.
To be more to the point -- this is NOT Gnutella. The Gnutella developers are not happy about the so-called "Gnutella" 2 since it goes against their wishes in many ways. Basically this one individual hijacked the name to push his own ideas.
...
From the last story it's pretty damned clear that "Gnutella" 2 is not going to be a particularly helpful or effective protocol. As someone who uses the real Gnutella (sometimes even for perfectly legit purposes) and thinks it works, I'll stick to the real Gnutella. It keeps getting better
simon
Get your ohphoneX right here. It doesn't have video (yet) but it works. I used it the other day to talk to a buddy in san jose from canada.
simon
The first thing is use the bugzilla helper it will help you create a good bug that includes: what you did, what you thought should happen, and what happened instead. It will also include what your platform is.
Duplicate bug reports are discouraged on bugzilla but they are useful. They give the developers an idea of how many people are seeing a given bug. This is especially important for triage, deciding which bug to fix first. Even better, is to find the relevant bug that's already open on the issue, and to add your bug report to that one (give all the details). That will save the developers a bit of time and provide useful contextual information that can help narrow down (or expand) the focus for a bug.
simon
Basically, no limitations. With CG you can set up the shot you want, the setting you want, the people you want, without any need for those things to actually exist.
I agree, it shouldn't be done just because it's cool. For example, I think Shrek was far more impressive than FF because it worked as a film in it's own right -- the technology was secondary to the story.
simon
... actually I stopped reading when he started complaining about the lack of keyboard support in OS X. This person apparently has not spent enough time on the platform to learn about full keyboard access. His ramblings about ALT keys and so on leave me thinking ... what? I'm trusting this person to tell me what a useable system is? When he apparently hasn't used OS X for more than a day or two? When his main reason for liking Windows is that he's used to it? No thanks.
simon