I don't understand where the monopoly-defenders are coming from on this issue.
For starters, the local government most certainly has the right to ask for this, since cable companies work for the interests of the municipality, which is why they were originally granted local monopolies. Especially in the absence of an FCC ruling, I'm glad to see that there are leading-edge communities trying to define the new era before it gets built at the pleasure of the corporations.
And make no mistake -- AT&T would love to have this monopoly. Not only would they own the only big pipe to your house, you would have no choice but to use their designated ISP/portal. You would be limited as a consumer to choosing what's already connected to your house -- or who's built into your neighborhood. This is the dream of the new "content monopolies" -- own the pipe, own the website, own the music, own the TV shows. No thanks!
I want the pipeline provider to be a utility, and the content providers to be in lively competition. This is exactly what phone service is like (yes, Aaron...), and this is exactly what cable should be like too -- at least the data portion.
Lots of people don't realize how incestuous the phone industry is, in secret. Go to telco A and say "I want a T1 to Fargo", and telco A says sure! But maybe telco A doesn't actually own a land line to Fargo. No problem -- they strike a wholesale deal with telco B, who does, and sell you that T1 just as if it were their own. Telcos are flexible like this only because they don't sell you content. It has nothing to do with infrastructure issues or who pays for what -- because the lease fees cover it in the end.
The only reason somebody like AT&T wants a monopoly on cable, when they don't on phones, is because they want to sell you their content. Or, put more correctly, they want to sell you to advertisers just like a TV station or other mass medium. The debate being sidetracked by equipment issues is good for them because it obscures the content angle. The content angle -- selling audiences -- is how they expect to win the lottery when the dust settles. Don't let them lock in audiences given them in a monopoly phase when they offer no benefit in return! Don't let them give you 500 cable channels -- that they all own (see, that's another thing they're trying to circumvent). Make 'em compete with the rest.
Of course, there is a Devil's Advocate position here. Cable monopolies are GOOD for DSL! If there's a monopoly like AT&T wants, then the reduced incentive to build a new cable plant will increase the incentive to build DSL access onto the existing phone network -- which is already regulatorily welcoming. (Since I side with DSL over cable, I like this, but that's just me.)
>Unfortunately it seems that the SETI@home team should've done a bit >more testing before starting the project.
A completely unfair assessment. You're assuming, like a lot of posts I've seen on this topic, that the SETI@HOME project is intended to a) provide amusement and b) give Joe Random Hacker a lottery slot at immortality. WRONG.
The purpose of the project is to analyze the data, perhaps to get lucky and find evidence of intelligent life. So far, the project seems to be fulfilling the scientific requirements just fine. The clients aren't fscking up people's machines; if they fail, the worst outcome seems to be that a person doesn't get credit for the packet they let their spare CPU cycles analyze. And, dear dear, some packets are getting analyzed by more than one person! (Last I heard, before acceptance, most scientific experiments are repeated numerous times by different people. Oh, the unfair drudgery.)
Meanwhile, they are fixing reported problems, probably in the order of priority: scientific requirements first, team ranking silliness last.
That's more or less true (I had been on the net for years, knowing its potential, but even I was bowled over the first time I "surfed" [a new and jocular term then] using just Cello).
But that wasn't what the award was about. For one thing, Mosaic was a one-shop project coming out of the UofI/NCSA, not a collaborative net effort. Mosaic didn't need the net to exist; indeed, the main use of browsers today is becoming access to intRAnet applications. Linux, on the other hand, could not have been built without the net.
This prize wasn't even a juried award, really, it seems to me: not one with competitors -- it was more an honorary award (like a Lifetime Achievement Oscar), to recognize the impact that Linux has had in the world of computer art -- and as they suggest, to spark a discussion whether source code can be considered art.
Why do you feel this need to have everything explainable in terms of physical laws?
Consider the role of the consumer in a modern industrialized, commercialized society. Your sole purpose is to power the economy; your needs are met only insofar as you are able to keep the machines (of commerce) running. The society builds an illusion of a reasonably happy, fulfilled life around this mechanical relationship of dependence; for many people, that is exactly all they ever need.
For others, though, there is a sense that this is all deeply and forbiddingly wrong.
The Matrix actually taps into some themes that seem to arise at/. every day... and in that way, Katz is right: this is truly a geek movie. It takes a geek (or an artist, or other nonconformist) to be the kind of outsider who views society in this way.
You are obviously thinking of the 1990 reprint edition -- but _Hero with a Thousand Faces_ was originally published in 1949. George Lucas is unquestionably one of the most important of his students (in the broad sense of the term); if you can't see Campbell's work in _Star Wars_ you're fooling yourself. There's hardly a mention of Campbell in the media that doesn't bring in Lucas and the SW series.
I don't want to diminish Lucas's gift, since he is perhaps the most eloquent of modern mythmakers (the flaws of his films lie elsewhere); but many great artists have been strongly influenced by philosophical works, and this is simply a modern example. A half-century ago, it was _The Golden Bough_.
At one point, that would have been "Western Hemisphere exploration... why?"
Most initial exploration (Columbus, Magellan, Lewis & Clark) has been underwritten by governments who foresaw the day when the benefits would outweigh the costs. It's an investment in our future -- in this case, mankind's future. I believe that if we wish to ensure the survival of the human race it is essential to expand beyond one planet (and eventually, one solar system).
The economic arguments are also persuasive, although the return-on-investment ratios are horrible to start and only get better a long, long time down the road. Mars and the asteroids have metals and minerals that human civilization will eventually require (once conservation, recycling, and substitution run their courses). Mars is an excellent headquarters for exploiting the asteroids.
The technological advances that we will gain by challenging ourselves will also be invaluable. We don't know what those may be, of course, but previous experience shows us that the most important advances aren't random: they are developed in response to a challenging need. Just like a high-jumper only improves by raising the bar, mankind needs to constantly find new challenges.
Finally, Mars will eventually be a cultural outlet for those hemmed in by human society on Earth, which will become increasingly urban, regulated, and lacking in personal space, privacy, and freedom. The first colonists on Mars may be sponsored by one or more governments... or they may be religious refugees, like many of the people who colonized the Americas wearing only the clothes on their back.
One of the best and most varied weblogs I've come across, and updated multiple times daily. He pulls "headlines" from various newsy-fungible sites and follows it with a section of reviewed material, covering everything from anthropology, to pop music, to Linux, to web-design, using pull-quotes to highlight what he found interesting. He surfs Slashdot and points to good stuff here. I probably check out 1/2 of the links, and a good number of the sites end up on my permanent bookmark list. It's all informed by a philosophy grounded strongly in state-of-the-art AI concepts.
As a spelling flame I expect this post to include at least one spelling/grammatical/logical error as a matter of internet physics.
Certainly ideas about liberty are as old as -- at least -- Greek civilization. But the Enlightenment was just as certainly a movement shared by America and England, which marked the beginning of the idea of the individual, as separate from society, country, or God. Just because he didn't mention England in that paragraph doesn't diminish the impact of British ideas -- Hobbes, Locke, etc. -- on the concept of liberty. (American independence, after all, was created by people who thought themselves loyal Brits... up to a point. American law would be a mess today without English common law. On the other hand, in practical democracy, England took a century to catch up with America!) By mentioning the Englightenment at all, Katz implicitly credits England.
Katz is American; it's natural he'll mention American history. Don't take it personally. But I'd take this personally: You seem as ignorant of your own history as you accuse Katz of being.
Oh, yes. It's GENGHIS Khan. Easier to spell correctly if you start it with a "J".
Yeah, the GRiDs used to be quite nice and widely available. I was on a help desk years ago when the GRiD sales droids came by to deliver about 25 laptops for our sales force. They impressed me with the confidence they had, telling me stories about them dropping off file cabinets onto concrete and so on.
What really got my attention was when one guy grabbed a GRiD by the screen -- the screen, mind you, which was open and vertical -- and slammed the computer down on the workbench. Wham!
Didn't even blink.
Then Tandy bought them, there was a giddy few months when they were sellling them in their storefronts, then bam! Tandy gets out of the computer business. And for another ten years it was nigh impossible to find ruggedized laptops for a reasonable price.
For instance, I use my Yahoo e-mail account to check my personal and work e-mail daily. I can't telnet or SMTP myself through the corporate firewall at my current client (good for them, actually) but Yahoo certainly can SMTP to my mail account.
This is ideal for corporate con"slut"ants who move around a lot -- coming from someone who never thought he'd use a freemail system ("I've got three e-mail accounts already! What would I do with it?") this is a big change in attitude.
I do concur with the earlier poster who said the only useful thing to do in 15 minutes is check your e-mail.
Sid Meier's Firaxis Games recently made a deal to develop Civ III for Hasbro-owned Microprose, as explained in this Gamecente r story.
In other words, Microprose owns the trademark, but hired the original developer and his company to do the new version.
Also, the complicated rights situation for the Civilization games is explained (more or less) in this Microprose press release. In a nutshell:
* Microprose keeps the rights to Civilization, Civ, and related trademarks. * Microprose gets Avalon Hill's non-PC-game rights as well. * Activision gets to publish Civilization: CTP under license from Microprose.
So, this will (apparently) be the last game from Activision to use the Civilization name. Rumors had it that one company would get "Civilization" and the other "Civ", but the final three-way settlement (monetary amounts undisclosed) put that to rest. There is only one company who owns Civilization, and that is Microprose. Anybody else is just licensing the trademark from them.
First of all, the main reason for buying the domain name is to keep it out of the hands of the opposition.
But second, it's fairly clever to have someone looking for one thing find exactly the opposite message -- like sometimes happens with various brand names, as we've seen on/. before. Consider the plannedparenthood.* domain squabble (where that name was used for an anti-abortion website). Should anyone actually type in "bushsucks.com" (or "go bush sucks" etc.), instead of getting what they expect, they'll get the pitch.
To be really fiendishly clever, they could direct people coming to those negative URLs to specific targeted pitches designed for people who already dislike the candidate (or other product). Focus groups could tell them what stuff works best for these people, and it's probably not the same rah-rah stuff that would be at the main home page.
AOL in particular has won a couple of court judgements against spammers who've abused their system. In AOL's case, IIRC, they sued for costs of receiving spam. ( news.com article) In other cases ISPs have sued for the costs of having been used to send spam (e.g. all those e-mails sent to abuse@domain).
It's probably legally dicey to enact some kind of after-the-fact fine system, but that's exactly what small-claims court is for.
The news.com article isn't as explicit about it -- merely noting that specific files and location aren't mentioned -- but the letter text posted below makes it clear that this is a preemptive strike intended to make ISPs police their users just in case they start sending streaming digitized Ep I video around.
Now, if that isn't as far from citing a specific violation as possible... I don't know what is.
Or perhaps I should say, the limitations of streaming video.
Apart from bandwidth, which greatly limits quality of both video and audio streams, the biggest problem with streaming video is that, so far, the software guys don't "get it". That is, they don't get why streaming video is a different medium from broadcast video, and exploit that potential. Sure, there's room on the internet for all sorts of niche video-on-demand applications -- such as the Rotary Rocket test article rollout, or an architectural walkthrough on a real estate site -- as well as the TV-to-net shift of stuff like CNN news stories.
But what really would juice the potential of these would be fully controllable video with VCR-like functionality. I don't know how many times I've sat through a Realvideo presentation while talking heads droned on about X when I'm waiting for them to get to Y, or the times I've had a hard time hearing something, or just something neat-o that I'd love to play back again. Real don't have no rewind.
(Another feature that would be terrific is a fast-play feature, like many voicemail systems: twice the replay speed, where the sound isn't mickey-mousey, but engineered to normal tone ranges. Again, a convenience for getting past stuff of little or no interest to you, especially as streaming-video files expand from 3 minutes to 30 or more.)
This box sounds like it has those features, so it's already infinitely more digital in essence than streaming video. Perhaps if people take to it like MP3/Rio momentum, we'll start to see the real on-demand video applications arise.
The privacy concern isn't about my-dejanews e-mail accounts (which are logged, as you note, through sendmail or Exchange or whatever they're using, and would be expected to do so).
This is about clicking on e-mail addresses on a dejanews Usenet post, which would normally be between you and your browser. They redirect this mailto link, presumably to track it. Perhaps they're just counting how often this happens, but one has to wonder why they need the information. Particularly since they don't disclose it -- you have to notice it, and most people wouldn't have any idea that it was different from a normal mailto: link.
Maybe the average/. reader has little need for office-suite applications, but these don't have the generic title "productivity software" for nuttin'. Lots and lots of people spend their entire day in some part of MS Office, and if Linux is ever to have a piece of the desktop market, a competitive office suite will be an absolute requirement for the business case review.
Maybe you're right, that Linux doesn't need to have the desktop -- but from what I hear on/. a lot of the anti-MS carping is about exactly that, the desktop environment and productivity. For what it's worth, I don't think the Linux suites are quite there when it comes to head-to-head comparisons. Yes, they're quite good for personal users and may well be superior for the uses slashdotters put them to, but Word is perfectly tuned to customer requirements and is the standard (good or bad) by which competitors are judged.
In short, this issue is not going away any time soon.
The Littleton massacre was a tragedy, certainly. Thirteen people lost their lives unnecessarily. But two more lost their lives unnecessarily as well. They crossed a terrible line, and nobody's suggesting they were not responsible for that. But we can demonize them, and deal with school shootings after the fact... or we can start looking at the root causes.
Nobody taught these kids how to handle the rejection and harrassment that was dealt them. (I read the "Power Slave" page by a Columbine student, documenting cases of gratuitous harrassment of the killers.) Even if you can't find an ounce of sympathy for these guilty parties, think hard about the subjects of the Katz article.... the other 999,998 geeks in our high schools. None of them is guilty of murder, but they, too, are victims of harrassment, ostracism, and stereotyping.
Katz is warning against turning the geek "profile" into a prescription for further alienation and ultimately, more tragedies.
First, I'm touched by much of this article. I recognize all these adolescent voices in myself 20 years ago...
Second, I'm appalled to hear that this tragic incident in Colorado has, apparently, led to more, not less, marginalizing and ostracizing of today's misfits... of which, in each generation, there are many.
The bad news is that this tragedy has got the talking heads jumping on all the wrong "solutions" in the hope of appearing concerned and serious (rather than merely exploitative). Ban guns. No, make teachers wear them. Ban trench coats. Ban Quake. Run Net Nanny. Throw the misfits into counseling. Throw the misfits out of school. Throw the misfits in jail, just in case. See, if you're a misfit... if you don't fit in... it's your fault. You're different. Perhaps you're disturbed. You've got a problem, and we can solve it by making you conform.
The good news -- as Bill Maher pointed out the other night -- is that high school is not the map of adult life that many believe it to be. The jocks will end up selling cars, and the geeks will end up building the systems that run the robots that make the cars. Bill Gates. Linus Torvalds. John Carmack. Thresh. There's life out there, kids.
If only all geeks, nerds, and misfits knew this simple truth: for too many people, high school is the high point of their entire lives. How sad!
Conformity is not the answer. Why join the masses in their hagiographic awe of the vapid period that is high school? But we need to work on treating depression and isolation in our young people. It would be neat if this incident led to all the halfwit jerks in high schools across our great land realizing what their harassment has done and stopping it... but there's always next year's class, and this will be forgotten. Rejection and social pressure are normal parts of adolescence; dealing with it is something we don't often teach kids. And individual misfits often bear the brunt of several insecure, mainstream teenagers' harassment.
If only I'd known that life would get better! If only I'd known how insecure my tormentors were! If only I'd known how to build my own self-esteem through personal challenge and risk-taking! Instead, I struggled with inner pain for another twenty years. I can never get back those lost days. But maybe, maybe we can keep some other kids from ending their lives, or from becoming killers.
Coates occasionally says sensible things, but any geek should stay away from his answer column, where he weekly tells people to reinstall this or that Winwhateverware. He's a Mac user who started out doing computer reporting by bragging about how neat it was to keep AOL running all the time on one's desktop -- conveniently forgetting that he was a Tribune reporter who got a free account, while at that time, most AOL users would have paid about $500/month for the same privilege.
The guy also suggesting stopping spam by politely writing to the spammer and asking him to desist. (He also gave a clueless definition of the origin of the term "spam".) I enlightened him with the URLs of several spam-fighting pages, asking why he hadn't done a simple web search on spam-fighting technique, and he brushed me off. The man simply doesn't care that people have already solved some of these questions... he seems to get his advice from mailing lists and asking individuals who may be as or more clueless than he.
It's not hot, but it's not "fusion" either, at least not as I understand it. There continues to be disagreement -- deep disagreement -- about what actually occurs in so-called cold-fusion reactions, but while I'm convinced there is something there, I'm far from convinced that it's anything other than a poorly understood chemical reaction.
"Cold fusion" research is mainly conducted in physics labs off the beaten path -- the mainstream boys won't touch it. Until somebody can fully explain it and create consistently duplicatable experiments, it'll remain an oddity.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand where the monopoly-defenders are coming from on this issue.
...), and this is exactly what cable should be like too -- at least the data portion.
For starters, the local government most certainly has the right to ask for this, since cable companies work for the interests of the municipality, which is why they were originally granted local monopolies. Especially in the absence of an FCC ruling, I'm glad to see that there are leading-edge communities trying to define the new era before it gets built at the pleasure of the corporations.
And make no mistake -- AT&T would love to have this monopoly. Not only would they own the only big pipe to your house, you would have no choice but to use their designated ISP/portal. You would be limited as a consumer to choosing what's already connected to your house -- or who's built into your neighborhood. This is the dream of the new "content monopolies" -- own the pipe, own the website, own the music, own the TV shows. No thanks!
I want the pipeline provider to be a utility, and the content providers to be in lively competition. This is exactly what phone service is like (yes, Aaron
Lots of people don't realize how incestuous the phone industry is, in secret. Go to telco A and say "I want a T1 to Fargo", and telco A says sure! But maybe telco A doesn't actually own a land line to Fargo. No problem -- they strike a wholesale deal with telco B, who does, and sell you that T1 just as if it were their own. Telcos are flexible like this only because they don't sell you content. It has nothing to do with infrastructure issues or who pays for what -- because the lease fees cover it in the end.
The only reason somebody like AT&T wants a monopoly on cable, when they don't on phones, is because they want to sell you their content. Or, put more correctly, they want to sell you to advertisers just like a TV station or other mass medium. The debate being sidetracked by equipment issues is good for them because it obscures the content angle. The content angle -- selling audiences -- is how they expect to win the lottery when the dust settles. Don't let them lock in audiences given them in a monopoly phase when they offer no benefit in return! Don't let them give you 500 cable channels -- that they all own (see, that's another thing they're trying to circumvent). Make 'em compete with the rest.
Of course, there is a Devil's Advocate position here. Cable monopolies are GOOD for DSL! If there's a monopoly like AT&T wants, then the reduced incentive to build a new cable plant will increase the incentive to build DSL access onto the existing phone network -- which is already regulatorily welcoming. (Since I side with DSL over cable, I like this, but that's just me.)
>Unfortunately it seems that the SETI@home team should've done a bit
>more testing before starting the project.
A completely unfair assessment. You're assuming, like a lot of posts I've seen on this topic, that the SETI@HOME project is intended to a) provide amusement and b) give Joe Random Hacker a lottery slot at immortality. WRONG.
The purpose of the project is to analyze the data, perhaps to get lucky and find evidence of intelligent life. So far, the project seems to be fulfilling the scientific requirements just fine. The clients aren't fscking up people's machines; if they fail, the worst outcome seems to be that a person doesn't get credit for the packet they let their spare CPU cycles analyze. And, dear dear, some packets are getting analyzed by more than one person! (Last I heard, before acceptance, most scientific experiments are repeated numerous times by different people. Oh, the unfair drudgery.)
Meanwhile, they are fixing reported problems, probably in the order of priority: scientific requirements first, team ranking silliness last.
If I may be permitted an opinion here: BIG WHOOP.
Get a grip, people!
Repeat, this is not a collaborative computing project. This is a scientific project that uses collaborative computing.
The point is to analyze the data, not "let as many people help as want".
McDonald's went to cardboard containers for their burgers a few years ago.
That's more or less true (I had been on the net for years, knowing its potential, but even I was bowled over the first time I "surfed" [a new and jocular term then] using just Cello).
But that wasn't what the award was about. For one thing, Mosaic was a one-shop project coming out of the UofI/NCSA, not a collaborative net effort. Mosaic didn't need the net to exist; indeed, the main use of browsers today is becoming access to intRAnet applications. Linux, on the other hand, could not have been built without the net.
This prize wasn't even a juried award, really, it seems to me: not one with competitors -- it was more an honorary award (like a Lifetime Achievement Oscar), to recognize the impact that Linux has had in the world of computer art -- and as they suggest, to spark a discussion whether source code can be considered art.
Why do you feel this need to have everything explainable in terms of physical laws?
/. every day ... and in that way, Katz is right: this is truly a geek movie. It takes a geek (or an artist, or other nonconformist) to be the kind of outsider who views society in this way.
Consider the role of the consumer in a modern industrialized, commercialized society. Your sole purpose is to power the economy; your needs are met only insofar as you are able to keep the machines (of commerce) running. The society builds an illusion of a reasonably happy, fulfilled life around this mechanical relationship of dependence; for many people, that is exactly all they ever need.
For others, though, there is a sense that this is all deeply and forbiddingly wrong.
The Matrix actually taps into some themes that seem to arise at
You are obviously thinking of the 1990 reprint edition -- but _Hero with a Thousand Faces_ was originally published in 1949. George Lucas is unquestionably one of the most important of his students (in the broad sense of the term); if you can't see Campbell's work in _Star Wars_ you're fooling yourself. There's hardly a mention of Campbell in the media that doesn't bring in Lucas and the SW series.
I don't want to diminish Lucas's gift, since he is perhaps the most eloquent of modern mythmakers (the flaws of his films lie elsewhere); but many great artists have been strongly influenced by philosophical works, and this is simply a modern example. A half-century ago, it was _The Golden Bough_.
At one point, that would have been "Western Hemisphere exploration ... why?"
... or they may be religious refugees, like many of the people who colonized the Americas wearing only the clothes on their back.
Most initial exploration (Columbus, Magellan, Lewis & Clark) has been underwritten by governments who foresaw the day when the benefits would outweigh the costs. It's an investment in our future -- in this case, mankind's future. I believe that if we wish to ensure the survival of the human race it is essential to expand beyond one planet (and eventually, one solar system).
The economic arguments are also persuasive, although the return-on-investment ratios are horrible to start and only get better a long, long time down the road. Mars and the asteroids have metals and minerals that human civilization will eventually require (once conservation, recycling, and substitution run their courses). Mars is an excellent headquarters for exploiting the asteroids.
The technological advances that we will gain by challenging ourselves will also be invaluable. We don't know what those may be, of course, but previous experience shows us that the most important advances aren't random: they are developed in response to a challenging need. Just like a high-jumper only improves by raising the bar, mankind needs to constantly find new challenges.
Finally, Mars will eventually be a cultural outlet for those hemmed in by human society on Earth, which will become increasingly urban, regulated, and lacking in personal space, privacy, and freedom. The first colonists on Mars may be sponsored by one or more governments
More information may be found at the Mars Society website.
One of the best and most varied weblogs I've come across, and updated multiple times daily. He pulls "headlines" from various newsy-fungible sites and follows it with a section of reviewed material, covering everything from anthropology, to pop music, to Linux, to web-design, using pull-quotes to highlight what he found interesting. He surfs Slashdot and points to good stuff here. I probably check out 1/2 of the links, and a good number of the sites end up on my permanent bookmark list. It's all informed by a philosophy grounded strongly in state-of-the-art AI concepts.
Robot Wisdom Weblog
As a spelling flame I expect this post to include at least one spelling/grammatical/logical error as a matter of internet physics.
... up to a point. American law would be a mess today without English common law. On the other hand, in practical democracy, England took a century to catch up with America!) By mentioning the Englightenment at all, Katz implicitly credits England.
Certainly ideas about liberty are as old as -- at least -- Greek civilization. But the Enlightenment was just as certainly a movement shared by America and England, which marked the beginning of the idea of the individual, as separate from society, country, or God. Just because he didn't mention England in that paragraph doesn't diminish the impact of British ideas -- Hobbes, Locke, etc. -- on the concept of liberty. (American independence, after all, was created by people who thought themselves loyal Brits
Katz is American; it's natural he'll mention American history. Don't take it personally. But I'd take this personally: You seem as ignorant of your own history as you accuse Katz of being.
Oh, yes. It's GENGHIS Khan. Easier to spell correctly if you start it with a "J".
Yeah, the GRiDs used to be quite nice and widely available. I was on a help desk years ago when the GRiD sales droids came by to deliver about 25 laptops for our sales force. They impressed me with the confidence they had, telling me stories about them dropping off file cabinets onto concrete and so on.
What really got my attention was when one guy grabbed a GRiD by the screen -- the screen, mind you, which was open and vertical -- and slammed the computer down on the workbench. Wham!
Didn't even blink.
Then Tandy bought them, there was a giddy few months when they were sellling them in their storefronts, then bam! Tandy gets out of the computer business. And for another ten years it was nigh impossible to find ruggedized laptops for a reasonable price.
Kids today do not "ooh" about the internet. Kids today show their parents how to use the internet.
The parents are the ones making those "ooooh" sounds you're hearing!
For instance, I use my Yahoo e-mail account to check my personal and work e-mail daily. I can't telnet or SMTP myself through the corporate firewall at my current client (good for them, actually) but Yahoo certainly can SMTP to my mail account.
This is ideal for corporate con"slut"ants who move around a lot -- coming from someone who never thought he'd use a freemail system ("I've got three e-mail accounts already! What would I do with it?") this is a big change in attitude.
I do concur with the earlier poster who said the only useful thing to do in 15 minutes is check your e-mail.
Sid Meier's Firaxis Games recently made a deal to develop Civ III for Hasbro-owned Microprose, as explained in this Gamecente r story.
In other words, Microprose owns the trademark, but hired the original developer and his company to do the new version.
Also, the complicated rights situation for the Civilization games is explained (more or less) in this Microprose press release. In a nutshell:
* Microprose keeps the rights to Civilization, Civ, and related trademarks.
* Microprose gets Avalon Hill's non-PC-game rights as well.
* Activision gets to publish Civilization: CTP under license from Microprose.
So, this will (apparently) be the last game from Activision to use the Civilization name. Rumors had it that one company would get "Civilization" and the other "Civ", but the final three-way settlement (monetary amounts undisclosed) put that to rest. There is only one company who owns Civilization, and that is Microprose. Anybody else is just licensing the trademark from them.
Of course it is.
/. before. Consider the plannedparenthood.* domain squabble (where that name was used for an anti-abortion website). Should anyone actually type in "bushsucks.com" (or "go bush sucks" etc.), instead of getting what they expect, they'll get the pitch.
First of all, the main reason for buying the domain name is to keep it out of the hands of the opposition.
But second, it's fairly clever to have someone looking for one thing find exactly the opposite message -- like sometimes happens with various brand names, as we've seen on
To be really fiendishly clever, they could direct people coming to those negative URLs to specific targeted pitches designed for people who already dislike the candidate (or other product). Focus groups could tell them what stuff works best for these people, and it's probably not the same rah-rah stuff that would be at the main home page.
AOL in particular has won a couple of court judgements against spammers who've abused their system. In AOL's case, IIRC, they sued for costs of receiving spam. ( news.com article) In other cases ISPs have sued for the costs of having been used to send spam (e.g. all those e-mails sent to abuse@domain).
It's probably legally dicey to enact some kind of after-the-fact fine system, but that's exactly what small-claims court is for.
The news.com article isn't as explicit about it -- merely noting that specific files and location aren't mentioned -- but the letter text posted below makes it clear that this is a preemptive strike intended to make ISPs police their users just in case they start sending streaming digitized Ep I video around.
... I don't know what is.
Now, if that isn't as far from citing a specific violation as possible
Or perhaps I should say, the limitations of streaming video.
Apart from bandwidth, which greatly limits quality of both video and audio streams, the biggest problem with streaming video is that, so far, the software guys don't "get it". That is, they don't get why streaming video is a different medium from broadcast video, and exploit that potential. Sure, there's room on the internet for all sorts of niche video-on-demand applications -- such as the Rotary Rocket test article rollout, or an architectural walkthrough on a real estate site -- as well as the TV-to-net shift of stuff like CNN news stories.
But what really would juice the potential of these would be fully controllable video with VCR-like functionality. I don't know how many times I've sat through a Realvideo presentation while talking heads droned on about X when I'm waiting for them to get to Y, or the times I've had a hard time hearing something, or just something neat-o that I'd love to play back again. Real don't have no rewind.
(Another feature that would be terrific is a fast-play feature, like many voicemail systems: twice the replay speed, where the sound isn't mickey-mousey, but engineered to normal tone ranges. Again, a convenience for getting past stuff of little or no interest to you, especially as streaming-video files expand from 3 minutes to 30 or more.)
This box sounds like it has those features, so it's already infinitely more digital in essence than streaming video. Perhaps if people take to it like MP3/Rio momentum, we'll start to see the real on-demand video applications arise.
The privacy concern isn't about my-dejanews e-mail accounts (which are logged, as you note, through sendmail or Exchange or whatever they're using, and would be expected to do so).
This is about clicking on e-mail addresses on a dejanews Usenet post, which would normally be between you and your browser. They redirect this mailto link, presumably to track it. Perhaps they're just counting how often this happens, but one has to wonder why they need the information. Particularly since they don't disclose it -- you have to notice it, and most people wouldn't have any idea that it was different from a normal mailto: link.
(just an expression, ok?)
/. reader has little need for office-suite applications, but these don't have the generic title "productivity software" for nuttin'. Lots and lots of people spend their entire day in some part of MS Office, and if Linux is ever to have a piece of the desktop market, a competitive office suite will be an absolute requirement for the business case review.
/. a lot of the anti-MS carping is about exactly that, the desktop environment and productivity. For what it's worth, I don't think the Linux suites are quite there when it comes to head-to-head comparisons. Yes, they're quite good for personal users and may well be superior for the uses slashdotters put them to, but Word is perfectly tuned to customer requirements and is the standard (good or bad) by which competitors are judged.
Maybe the average
Maybe you're right, that Linux doesn't need to have the desktop -- but from what I hear on
In short, this issue is not going away any time soon.
The Littleton massacre was a tragedy, certainly. Thirteen people lost their lives unnecessarily. But two more lost their lives unnecessarily as well. They crossed a terrible line, and nobody's suggesting they were not responsible for that. But we can demonize them, and deal with school shootings after the fact ... or we can start looking at the root causes.
.... the other 999,998 geeks in our high schools. None of them is guilty of murder, but they, too, are victims of harrassment, ostracism, and stereotyping.
Nobody taught these kids how to handle the rejection and harrassment that was dealt them. (I read the "Power Slave" page by a Columbine student, documenting cases of gratuitous harrassment of the killers.) Even if you can't find an ounce of sympathy for these guilty parties, think hard about the subjects of the Katz article
Katz is warning against turning the geek "profile" into a prescription for further alienation and ultimately, more tragedies.
First, I'm touched by much of this article. I recognize all these adolescent voices in myself 20 years ago ...
... of which, in each generation, there are many.
... if you don't fit in ... it's your fault. You're different. Perhaps you're disturbed. You've got a problem, and we can solve it by making you conform.
... but there's always next year's class, and this will be forgotten. Rejection and social pressure are normal parts of adolescence; dealing with it is something we don't often teach kids. And individual misfits often bear the brunt of several insecure, mainstream teenagers' harassment.
Second, I'm appalled to hear that this tragic incident in Colorado has, apparently, led to more, not less, marginalizing and ostracizing of today's misfits
The bad news is that this tragedy has got the talking heads jumping on all the wrong "solutions" in the hope of appearing concerned and serious (rather than merely exploitative). Ban guns. No, make teachers wear them. Ban trench coats. Ban Quake. Run Net Nanny. Throw the misfits into counseling. Throw the misfits out of school. Throw the misfits in jail, just in case. See, if you're a misfit
The good news -- as Bill Maher pointed out the other night -- is that high school is not the map of adult life that many believe it to be. The jocks will end up selling cars, and the geeks will end up building the systems that run the robots that make the cars. Bill Gates. Linus Torvalds. John Carmack. Thresh. There's life out there, kids.
If only all geeks, nerds, and misfits knew this simple truth: for too many people, high school is the high point of their entire lives. How sad!
Conformity is not the answer. Why join the masses in their hagiographic awe of the vapid period that is high school? But we need to work on treating depression and isolation in our young people. It would be neat if this incident led to all the halfwit jerks in high schools across our great land realizing what their harassment has done and stopping it
If only I'd known that life would get better! If only I'd known how insecure my tormentors were! If only I'd known how to build my own self-esteem through personal challenge and risk-taking! Instead, I struggled with inner pain for another twenty years. I can never get back those lost days. But maybe, maybe we can keep some other kids from ending their lives, or from becoming killers.
True dat.
... he seems to get his advice from mailing lists and asking individuals who may be as or more clueless than he.
Coates occasionally says sensible things, but any geek should stay away from his answer column, where he weekly tells people to reinstall this or that Winwhateverware. He's a Mac user who started out doing computer reporting by bragging about how neat it was to keep AOL running all the time on one's desktop -- conveniently forgetting that he was a Tribune reporter who got a free account, while at that time, most AOL users would have paid about $500/month for the same privilege.
The guy also suggesting stopping spam by politely writing to the spammer and asking him to desist. (He also gave a clueless definition of the origin of the term "spam".) I enlightened him with the URLs of several spam-fighting pages, asking why he hadn't done a simple web search on spam-fighting technique, and he brushed me off. The man simply doesn't care that people have already solved some of these questions
Here it is: jcoates@tribune.com
It's not hot, but it's not "fusion" either, at least not as I understand it. There continues to be disagreement -- deep disagreement -- about what actually occurs in so-called cold-fusion reactions, but while I'm convinced there is something there, I'm far from convinced that it's anything other than a poorly understood chemical reaction.
"Cold fusion" research is mainly conducted in physics labs off the beaten path -- the mainstream boys won't touch it. Until somebody can fully explain it and create consistently duplicatable experiments, it'll remain an oddity.