In an ideal world with ideal management philosophies, unions aren't necessary. Employers constantly strive to have the best work force -- good policies, active employee development, sound management.
In the real world, management is avarcious and mendacious towards its work force and instead seeks to exploit it at every opportunity for their own gain.
I'm not sure that tech unions would be all bad. Yes, unions have some inherent problems, but in some cases they actually seem to be valuable. I've spent a fair amount of time working directly with union commercial electricians (IBEW) and the union gives them perks and benefits I don't have as a long-term management employee. The union also does a lot to ensure that the people in it are actually able to do what they claim to be able to do (ie, work with and install electrical systems).
I'd see a tech union able to (a) help employees find work, (b) mitigate crazy, death-march type tech projects by requring pay for extra work, and (c) provide talented people that are what they claim (no paper MCSEs, thanks), all while ensuring that wages and benefits are fair.
We tech workers had these kinds of benefits in the 90s due to demand and previously due primarily to the scarcity of talent to do a complicated job. Now that jobs are scarce, talent isn't and we're competing against phonies for jobs where we're required to work after hours or extra hours with no pay, a union doesn't seem to bad anymore..
Who needs banks? Since you'll work for them, they'll just keep an account for you at the company store, which will be always just slightly negative in balance.
I think the previous poster meant vaporware as things that exist only at the design-sketch level but are talked about as if an actual functioning prototype existed and there were actual manufacturing and distribution plans.
Think of the Western Electric Videophone we all saw in "How Does The Phone System Work" films in elementary school (for me, circa 1977). They showed it actually working in the film, meaning they built a few that actually worked. You couldn't buy it and I'm sure that if you asked if it would be available in the next year Bell System people would have said "No".
You'd call this vaporware, but I think the previous poster wouldn't since it was actually designed, tested, built and demonstrated. You just couldn't buy one.
With software the line blurs a little or a lot because I can write 10 lines of code that prints the startup banner to a new game/kernel/application and call it a "an early prototype" and demo it and but never have any plans to finish/sell a final version. It fits both definitions of vaporware to an extent, since, well, there is a "thing" that does "something" but at the same time it doesn't *really* exist and there are no plans to finish it.
I forget, but if Gutenberg printed any bibles in German he was committing heresy and could have been burned at the stake.
The copies I've seen indicate that the original bibles were in latin, which wouldn't have been as much of a problem, although it suggests a heresy by promiting a personal relationship with God.
Sure, I pulled 'em out of my ass. But it doesn't change the fact that upgrading the entire box @ $1200 is going to happen less often than apple wants and with far less predictability and reliability. They're not immune from the same experience that x86 vendors are having -- nobody's buying an upgrade because their 3 year old PIII still runs new games.
Making available simple hardware upgrades for a couple of years @ $299 a shot may delay the wholesale upgrade by a year but would also give Apple an opportunity to collect some money on a more reliable basis that someone else gets now.
IMHO I would think that three would be the magic number of serial copies. One would be to Tivo, the second would be Tivo->DVD recordable, and the third might be DVD-R->Computer or something.
Now this is pretty restrictive, but based upon how I actually live my life and record TV, I wouldn't have a huge problem with it, especially if it meant direct digital copying at 4x or something instead of real-time analog copying.
I'd be happier with unlimited copies, even if I was forced to accept a low-end (like Tivo basic quality) encoding with some artifacting.
Usually such a CPU upgrade product has been relegated to / endeavoured by third parties.
So let's say that 20% of the machines are upgraded with new CPUs. Of the 80% that aren't upgraded to new CPUs, half would be upgraded if their owners felt they were getting a part officially supported by Apple.
So 50% (less 10% who steal/make/hack their own) of the machine's base would, if Apple supplied a CPU upgraed, would buy upgrades if they were available. Sounds like a reason to make upgrades, rather than let someone else get all that money.
Fabbing is non-factor, just have a supply of CPU modules in varying speeds -- they already have this *now* with the existing product lineups.
It would seem half-clever if they could make major components (CPU or display or HDD) consumer-upgradable in some fashion-friendly way that would result in some cash flow.
Yes, I know that any iMac is Geek Upgradable, but what if there was a blue blob that was a CPU card that could be swapped for the new chartreuse CPU card; the display could be something that starts out small but has a larger cousin you can swap in, the HDD could be an external item that could be pulled out, and so on.
That the components are external and visible would be further motivation, as you'd want your imac to display all the newest stripes...
I always thought that the German 'u' transliterated as an "oo" sound to most Americans, while:U would most likely transliterate into something with more of an American e sound.
Although if that was true, we wouldn't call it Munich, we'd call Moernchen.
Re:Maybe if teachers worked with technology instea
on
Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 2
of bashing the technology and blaming it for them being terrible and boring with their lectures they'd be fine.
Look, technology is good, WiFi is good, a smart teacher would use WiFi and the fact that all the students have laptops and AIM to their advantage, to get the students communicating better with each other through AIM, and to talk about the class.
The teacher could even bring his own laptop, add their AIM screen names to his AIM account, and talk to students via AIM.
Wow. $100k+ worth of technology to enable a group of people sitting in the same room to communicate with each other! Why didn't they think of this before? We wouldn't have to bother with such pesky things as talking, taking turns or other aspects of organized civil behavior.
I experienced several lecturers that were dead boring, but my friends who are professors and are good at and want to teach say that the problem isn't so much with them -- although they acknowledge their own academic tendency to run on about tertiary issues -- but with institutions of higher learning that are more interested in being research engines.
Professors that spend a lot of time making interesting lectures don't do as much research, don't get grants, don't advance, and don't get resources. Unversities spend their money building lavish facilities for research and money-making activities, not hiring undergrad instructors. They cram hundreds of students into lecture halls that resemble large movie theaters -- and we wonder why the lecture seems boring or there's little student interaction?
And then the Universities claim they *need* to get research dollars since its what gives them prestige and status, that means more tax dollars and alumni contributions. Political correctness demands they admit thousands of unprepared or incapable students who require two years of essentially remedial instruction (cf crowded, boring lecture halls), draining resources for small-class professor-class interaction.
I think that many academics are low tech and some revel in being so, but being pissed off at the University for spending money to enable students to nullify what little classroom experience they can deliver isn't at all surprising. It's simple, easy and dead wrong to lay all the blame on professors. I won't even start on the spoiled, ignorant students and their massively misplaced sense of entitlement...
We use SPEWS RBL and it takes out about 40% of the incoming as SPAM on a non-business day (holiday, weekend) and about 20% on a business day. This is on a site that gets a moderate amount of incoming email, about 8-10k messages per day.
We've had two collateral complaints, one from a vendor and one from a client.
The vendor I understand; they're a marketing concern and they have been dipping their toes in "direct email marketing" (highbrow spam?), but they do it from their business netblocks.
The client suprised me; a household name in the home products business -- you'd all recognize their name. But they're one of those "smart" businesses that buys low-budget ISP service, takes whatever 'free'/28 the ISP gives them and NATs everything to that block. Surprise, surprise, Joe Spammer had that/28 (or the/24 that contains it) so they're getting nailed as spammers. What I don't get is why someone wouldn't fix this! Get a different/28, get de-listed from SPEWS, do something.
But other than those two, I have gotten zero complaints. It's an imperfect tool (I still get a dozen or so per day), but easy to implement and as long as the people making the list are active and flexible, a valuable one.
Re:WOPR? David Lightman.
on
Kevin Free
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· Score: 2
There were HDDs for Apple ][ computers in that timeframe (using the seldom-used DOS 3.3 volume parameter, since DOS 3.3 lacked hierarchical directories).
Is it wholly unlikely that the C64 had something like that?
I'd agree on the parallel port complaint, but a lot of stuff out there that won't be going away for years still uses serial ports. I'm not a programmer, but I'd wager that good ol RS232 is a simpler interface to work with than USB and probably more robust over longer runs. I don't think something like this was designed for replacing your desktop.
I've heard a several people complain about this CD being uncopyable, but my copy ripped just fine. My copy has a bonus Quicktime video of a song that escapes me from "The Donnas Turn 21" which they were nice enough to include with a high quality stereo soundtrack that I ripped as well.
Given what I've read about copy protection techniques generally resulting in a CD that's totally unusable on computers, it seems odd to me that they would release a "normal" CD with bonus material (there's also a screen saver and some other Flash BS) that *requires* a computer as well as a broken, DRM'd version. My version isn't any special edition or anything (that I can see).
But then I also think there's probably a lot of discs getting labled as DRM'd that somebody was too clueless to RIP or was just a bad pressing as another poster mentioned.
On my last trip through bestbuy I was suprised at the quantity and cheapness of DVD players and the paucity of plain CD players. I wonder how long it will be before some material is released as an audio-only DVD -- maybe some still material or something for video -- but only playable as a DVD on a DVD player.
Yes, I know it's not *good* DRM, but better than what they have now. And that way they won't get dinged for releasing a "broken" CD, since its not a CD at all...
I agree that a live video feed from space would be a cool channel, but we almost have that now with the NASA channel whenever there's a mission. Half the time it seems to be just a camera pointed at the earth.
What I'd like to see, and I'll bet this would even have a profit available, would be a 'reality' channel which showed only the security cameras from really bad neighborhoods (convenience stores, etc). Ideally the places with the highest crime rates or other activity indicators would determine the camera choices.
I lived in an apartment building that had a camera pointed at the front door you could get on an unused cable channel. When we had parties we used to put the TV to that channel with the sound off; there was almost always some amusing people/events happening, especially on weekends.
Even now the Minneapolis cable system shows the "freeway channel" -- a feed from the state highway department that shows a rotation of all the metro area freeway cameras. The rotation is nice if you actually care about the general traffic patterns or want a weather sampler, but it'd be nice if there was a way to pick a specific camera or 'hold' on one that came up.
The answer is probably found by following the money. I always thought that Google as a business was focused on selling its search technology to other businesses. Making search technolgies that can search 'the web' well, while a rewarding and complex problem, is largely a 'solved' technolgy problem.
Making search technologies that can intelligently solve much more complicated search problems (eg, finding pictures, finding shopping items, etc) is a far more complex problem with huge potential payouts as a technology.
The portal is just a convenient way to aggregate the public testing of their technologies..
This is not necessary. A new protocol is probably a better idea. Why increase the complexity of implementing a IMAP client/server for everyone?
Assuming there was a new IMAP server available that was capable of performing tasks like busy searches and handling some of the groupware data (which is almost always calendaring data as well), why would having that ability make implementing it any more complex?
No one would force you to *use* the groupware aspects (which would be nothing more than a set of IMAP boxen the IMAP server could peer into), and I'd guess that even a package like this could be built with some kind of --no-groupware switch to leave you with whatever the current mail-only standard was.
A new protocol is a new protocol -- new daemons, security changes, system directories, ad nauseum. So much of what will get done and the interaction between client and server is just the kind of thing that IMAP does now. The only thing IMAP doesn't do now is calendar searches and mailbox parsing (eg, to present ~/mail/calendar in some human readable but locally parseable format).
You'd still need a mechanism for handling extra-machine functionality (eg, user@a searching user@b's calendar) which might be SMTP between boxen to an IMAP-handled box. LDAP could be the directory server.
Most of those issues will go away shortly. Alot of work on calender is being done in many groups. I'd say wait 6 months before making that accessment. [about calendaring going to the web]
Somebody may do something really interesting on the client, but then the answer becomes "What client?" Win32 is the obvious answer for installed base, but Linux is a result for a lot of open-source projects, but then there's Mac OS/OS X...anyway, the soup gets thick quickly. A web client reaches all users with far less development than a standalone client, with far quicker rollout and simpler updates. OWA, Horde, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc have all demonstrated that you can do it on the web with a high ROI.
Don't get me wrong, I personally prefer a web-based client, but how many people under 25 on the web ever use anything *but* a web client for ANY email? Ask yourself what they'll expect let alone tolerate...
All the groupware products seem to rely on some proprietary protocol between the client and the server for their native, feature-rich behavior.
I'd like to see the IMAP protocol expanded so that it could perform most of these tasks. Outlook and Exchange are most of the way there, except for the ability to use your calendar or do things like busy searches.
An expanded IMAP protocol (if it was open) would allow for non-"rich" clients to still work and participate meaningfully; calendar should be a folder that displays appointments in a human-readable format, with the idea that a 'rich' client would parse it into whatever GUI or textmode the user wanted.
We'd end up at a place where, instead of having to buy and use one client and one server product, it'd be possible to mix-match based upon what you wanted.
Unfortunately I think that the whole groupware trend is headed to the web and no one wants to invest in a whole lot of client-side technologies.
What should have been done
on
802.11 RF Amp
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· Score: 2
Since 11Mbps is a tasty target, it's hardly surprising that people will be gunning for maxing out what 802.11 will do.
Maybe the better thing to have done, rather than come out with a single wireless protocol would be to have two; one that would do 50Mbps but at a range of no more than 50m, and another good for 50 miles but at no more than 250Kbps, with a large number of channels.
The former would be great for offices or other places that need high bandwidth, but the distance limitation would have kept it from being so popular as a last-mile. The latter would be awesome for linking buildings or other long-range applications, but a large channel count and low bandwidth would keep people from trying to replace T1s between buildings..
Richard Thompson has been selling unavailable-anywhere live material, sold directly by the artist either mail order or at shows. It's not downloads, but its not copy-protected CDs, either.
They're actually "professional quality" CDs with real liner notes, photos and a quality production job. Unfortunately they're not whole shows, but "best of" of specific tours.
If I was a performed, I'd be inclined to do something like this. I'd discourage taping at the show, but I'd sell every show I did in a complete a format as was possible with as good a quality of audio as was possible.
My guess is that most artists (other than Titney and other fake entertainment industry creations) could do this and make money. Real fans would likely buy them at the right price -- guaranteed quality, decent liner notes, support-my-artist mentality.
As long as the sales cover the major up-front production cost, they should even make a buck on it, since the sound system and the show are pretty much paid for by the tickets to the show to begin with. Electronic distribution greatly lowers their upfront cost, but limits to some the value due to lack of liner notes, silkscreened CDs, etc, but would make selling every show more financially viable.
It is kind of confusing. I initially read Philips to mean generically a mega-consumer electronics company and producing the technology at a price no one would buy. "We'll make an MPEG-4 device, but we'll make one, it'll cost $2000, no one will buy it and the standard will wither."
Then I thought that maybe he meant Philips specifically, meaning that they have rights to the patents and will produce something in such numbers at such low price points that the royalty value is essentially zero. "We'll make so many of them so cheaply that the only people making any money off it are the $10 a day assembly workers in Malaysia."
Either way, I guess the sentiment is that the technology products need to be salable at a "prestige" price point long enough that the royalty value of the patents provides a profitable return on research investment.
And he's not a dumbass, either. He's found his choices are (1) put up with the messages, (2) change phone numbers, or (3) disable text messaging (carrier phenomenon). 1 and 3 are free, 2 costs money (albeit not much).
Why (4) get Yahoo! to! stop! it! please! isn't an option boils down to "they don't listen". It's one of those scary companies where there's no apparent way to actually *contact* anyone who can do something about this. There's no there, there so to speak.
He has said that the wireless carrier was particularly unhelpful, which doesn't surprise me. I had a problem for a while when I got my first cellular with getting FAX calls. They offered to *sell* me caller ID (an expensive option on a limited range of AMPS equipment), but wouldn't do anything about tracking down who it was.
I'm frankly surprised that there isn't more phone spam (how hard is it to figure out that all of a carrier's cell numbers are in NXX-5xx-xxxx?) or that message services don't build in a failsafe way to stop them, like adding a user-specfic hash code to every message and then have a web page where you can go, enter that hash, and disable that phone number's messaging.
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In an ideal world with ideal management philosophies, unions aren't necessary. Employers constantly strive to have the best work force -- good policies, active employee development, sound management.
In the real world, management is avarcious and mendacious towards its work force and instead seeks to exploit it at every opportunity for their own gain.
I'm not sure that tech unions would be all bad. Yes, unions have some inherent problems, but in some cases they actually seem to be valuable. I've spent a fair amount of time working directly with union commercial electricians (IBEW) and the union gives them perks and benefits I don't have as a long-term management employee. The union also does a lot to ensure that the people in it are actually able to do what they claim to be able to do (ie, work with and install electrical systems).
I'd see a tech union able to (a) help employees find work, (b) mitigate crazy, death-march type tech projects by requring pay for extra work, and (c) provide talented people that are what they claim (no paper MCSEs, thanks), all while ensuring that wages and benefits are fair.
We tech workers had these kinds of benefits in the 90s due to demand and previously due primarily to the scarcity of talent to do a complicated job. Now that jobs are scarce, talent isn't and we're competing against phonies for jobs where we're required to work after hours or extra hours with no pay, a union doesn't seem to bad anymore..
Who needs banks? Since you'll work for them, they'll just keep an account for you at the company store, which will be always just slightly negative in balance.
I think the previous poster meant vaporware as things that exist only at the design-sketch level but are talked about as if an actual functioning prototype existed and there were actual manufacturing and distribution plans.
Think of the Western Electric Videophone we all saw in "How Does The Phone System Work" films in elementary school (for me, circa 1977). They showed it actually working in the film, meaning they built a few that actually worked. You couldn't buy it and I'm sure that if you asked if it would be available in the next year Bell System people would have said "No".
You'd call this vaporware, but I think the previous poster wouldn't since it was actually designed, tested, built and demonstrated. You just couldn't buy one.
With software the line blurs a little or a lot because I can write 10 lines of code that prints the startup banner to a new game/kernel/application and call it a "an early prototype" and demo it and but never have any plans to finish/sell a final version. It fits both definitions of vaporware to an extent, since, well, there is a "thing" that does "something" but at the same time it doesn't *really* exist and there are no plans to finish it.
I forget, but if Gutenberg printed any bibles in German he was committing heresy and could have been burned at the stake.
The copies I've seen indicate that the original bibles were in latin, which wouldn't have been as much of a problem, although it suggests a heresy by promiting a personal relationship with God.
Sure, I pulled 'em out of my ass. But it doesn't change the fact that upgrading the entire box @ $1200 is going to happen less often than apple wants and with far less predictability and reliability. They're not immune from the same experience that x86 vendors are having -- nobody's buying an upgrade because their 3 year old PIII still runs new games.
Making available simple hardware upgrades for a couple of years @ $299 a shot may delay the wholesale upgrade by a year but would also give Apple an opportunity to collect some money on a more reliable basis that someone else gets now.
I don't know what his citizenship status is, but if he's not an American citizen he should be immediately deported after he serves his jail sentence.
IMHO I would think that three would be the magic number of serial copies. One would be to Tivo, the second would be Tivo->DVD recordable, and the third might be DVD-R->Computer or something.
Now this is pretty restrictive, but based upon how I actually live my life and record TV, I wouldn't have a huge problem with it, especially if it meant direct digital copying at 4x or something instead of real-time analog copying.
I'd be happier with unlimited copies, even if I was forced to accept a low-end (like Tivo basic quality) encoding with some artifacting.
Usually such a CPU upgrade product has been relegated to / endeavoured by third parties.
So let's say that 20% of the machines are upgraded with new CPUs. Of the 80% that aren't upgraded to new CPUs, half would be upgraded if their owners felt they were getting a part officially supported by Apple.
So 50% (less 10% who steal/make/hack their own) of the machine's base would, if Apple supplied a CPU upgraed, would buy upgrades if they were available. Sounds like a reason to make upgrades, rather than let someone else get all that money.
Fabbing is non-factor, just have a supply of CPU modules in varying speeds -- they already have this *now* with the existing product lineups.
Or maybe an upgradable iMac?
It would seem half-clever if they could make major components (CPU or display or HDD) consumer-upgradable in some fashion-friendly way that would result in some cash flow.
Yes, I know that any iMac is Geek Upgradable, but what if there was a blue blob that was a CPU card that could be swapped for the new chartreuse CPU card; the display could be something that starts out small but has a larger cousin you can swap in, the HDD could be an external item that could be pulled out, and so on.
That the components are external and visible would be further motivation, as you'd want your imac to display all the newest stripes...
I always thought that the German 'u' transliterated as an "oo" sound to most Americans, while :U would most likely transliterate into something with more of an American e sound.
Although if that was true, we wouldn't call it Munich, we'd call Moernchen.
of bashing the technology and blaming it for them being terrible and boring with their lectures they'd be fine.
Look, technology is good, WiFi is good, a smart teacher would use WiFi and the fact that all the students have laptops and AIM to their advantage, to get the students communicating better with each other through AIM, and to talk about the class.
The teacher could even bring his own laptop, add their AIM screen names to his AIM account, and talk to students via AIM.
Wow. $100k+ worth of technology to enable a group of people sitting in the same room to communicate with each other! Why didn't they think of this before? We wouldn't have to bother with such pesky things as talking, taking turns or other aspects of organized civil behavior.
I experienced several lecturers that were dead boring, but my friends who are professors and are good at and want to teach say that the problem isn't so much with them -- although they acknowledge their own academic tendency to run on about tertiary issues -- but with institutions of higher learning that are more interested in being research engines.
Professors that spend a lot of time making interesting lectures don't do as much research, don't get grants, don't advance, and don't get resources. Unversities spend their money building lavish facilities for research and money-making activities, not hiring undergrad instructors. They cram hundreds of students into lecture halls that resemble large movie theaters -- and we wonder why the lecture seems boring or there's little student interaction?
And then the Universities claim they *need* to get research dollars since its what gives them prestige and status, that means more tax dollars and alumni contributions. Political correctness demands they admit thousands of unprepared or incapable students who require two years of essentially remedial instruction (cf crowded, boring lecture halls), draining resources for small-class professor-class interaction.
I think that many academics are low tech and some revel in being so, but being pissed off at the University for spending money to enable students to nullify what little classroom experience they can deliver isn't at all surprising. It's simple, easy and dead wrong to lay all the blame on professors. I won't even start on the spoiled, ignorant students and their massively misplaced sense of entitlement...
We use SPEWS RBL and it takes out about 40% of the incoming as SPAM on a non-business day (holiday, weekend) and about 20% on a business day. This is on a site that gets a moderate amount of incoming email, about 8-10k messages per day.
/28 the ISP gives them and NATs everything to that block. Surprise, surprise, Joe Spammer had that /28 (or the /24 that contains it) so they're getting nailed as spammers. What I don't get is why someone wouldn't fix this! Get a different /28, get de-listed from SPEWS, do something.
We've had two collateral complaints, one from a vendor and one from a client.
The vendor I understand; they're a marketing concern and they have been dipping their toes in "direct email marketing" (highbrow spam?), but they do it from their business netblocks.
The client suprised me; a household name in the home products business -- you'd all recognize their name. But they're one of those "smart" businesses that buys low-budget ISP service, takes whatever 'free'
But other than those two, I have gotten zero complaints. It's an imperfect tool (I still get a dozen or so per day), but easy to implement and as long as the people making the list are active and flexible, a valuable one.
There were HDDs for Apple ][ computers in that timeframe (using the seldom-used DOS 3.3 volume parameter, since DOS 3.3 lacked hierarchical directories).
Is it wholly unlikely that the C64 had something like that?
I'd agree on the parallel port complaint, but a lot of stuff out there that won't be going away for years still uses serial ports. I'm not a programmer, but I'd wager that good ol RS232 is a simpler interface to work with than USB and probably more robust over longer runs. I don't think something like this was designed for replacing your desktop.
I've heard a several people complain about this CD being uncopyable, but my copy ripped just fine. My copy has a bonus Quicktime video of a song that escapes me from "The Donnas Turn 21" which they were nice enough to include with a high quality stereo soundtrack that I ripped as well.
Given what I've read about copy protection techniques generally resulting in a CD that's totally unusable on computers, it seems odd to me that they would release a "normal" CD with bonus material (there's also a screen saver and some other Flash BS) that *requires* a computer as well as a broken, DRM'd version. My version isn't any special edition or anything (that I can see).
But then I also think there's probably a lot of discs getting labled as DRM'd that somebody was too clueless to RIP or was just a bad pressing as another poster mentioned.
On my last trip through bestbuy I was suprised at the quantity and cheapness of DVD players and the paucity of plain CD players. I wonder how long it will be before some material is released as an audio-only DVD -- maybe some still material or something for video -- but only playable as a DVD on a DVD player.
Yes, I know it's not *good* DRM, but better than what they have now. And that way they won't get dinged for releasing a "broken" CD, since its not a CD at all...
I agree that a live video feed from space would be a cool channel, but we almost have that now with the NASA channel whenever there's a mission. Half the time it seems to be just a camera pointed at the earth.
What I'd like to see, and I'll bet this would even have a profit available, would be a 'reality' channel which showed only the security cameras from really bad neighborhoods (convenience stores, etc). Ideally the places with the highest crime rates or other activity indicators would determine the camera choices.
I lived in an apartment building that had a camera pointed at the front door you could get on an unused cable channel. When we had parties we used to put the TV to that channel with the sound off; there was almost always some amusing people/events happening, especially on weekends.
Even now the Minneapolis cable system shows the "freeway channel" -- a feed from the state highway department that shows a rotation of all the metro area freeway cameras. The rotation is nice if you actually care about the general traffic patterns or want a weather sampler, but it'd be nice if there was a way to pick a specific camera or 'hold' on one that came up.
The answer is probably found by following the money. I always thought that Google as a business was focused on selling its search technology to other businesses. Making search technolgies that can search 'the web' well, while a rewarding and complex problem, is largely a 'solved' technolgy problem.
Making search technologies that can intelligently solve much more complicated search problems (eg, finding pictures, finding shopping items, etc) is a far more complex problem with huge potential payouts as a technology.
The portal is just a convenient way to aggregate the public testing of their technologies..
This is not necessary. A new protocol is probably a better idea. Why increase the complexity of implementing a IMAP client/server for everyone?
Assuming there was a new IMAP server available that was capable of performing tasks like busy searches and handling some of the groupware data (which is almost always calendaring data as well), why would having that ability make implementing it any more complex?
No one would force you to *use* the groupware aspects (which would be nothing more than a set of IMAP boxen the IMAP server could peer into), and I'd guess that even a package like this could be built with some kind of --no-groupware switch to leave you with whatever the current mail-only standard was.
A new protocol is a new protocol -- new daemons, security changes, system directories, ad nauseum. So much of what will get done and the interaction between client and server is just the kind of thing that IMAP does now. The only thing IMAP doesn't do now is calendar searches and mailbox parsing (eg, to present ~/mail/calendar in some human readable but locally parseable format).
You'd still need a mechanism for handling extra-machine functionality (eg, user@a searching user@b's calendar) which might be SMTP between boxen to an IMAP-handled box. LDAP could be the directory server.
Most of those issues will go away shortly. Alot of work on calender is being done in many groups. I'd say wait 6 months before making that accessment. [about calendaring going to the web]
Somebody may do something really interesting on the client, but then the answer becomes "What client?" Win32 is the obvious answer for installed base, but Linux is a result for a lot of open-source projects, but then there's Mac OS/OS X...anyway, the soup gets thick quickly. A web client reaches all users with far less development than a standalone client, with far quicker rollout and simpler updates. OWA, Horde, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc have all demonstrated that you can do it on the web with a high ROI.
Don't get me wrong, I personally prefer a web-based client, but how many people under 25 on the web ever use anything *but* a web client for ANY email? Ask yourself what they'll expect let alone tolerate...
All the groupware products seem to rely on some proprietary protocol between the client and the server for their native, feature-rich behavior.
I'd like to see the IMAP protocol expanded so that it could perform most of these tasks. Outlook and Exchange are most of the way there, except for the ability to use your calendar or do things like busy searches.
An expanded IMAP protocol (if it was open) would allow for non-"rich" clients to still work and participate meaningfully; calendar should be a folder that displays appointments in a human-readable format, with the idea that a 'rich' client would parse it into whatever GUI or textmode the user wanted.
We'd end up at a place where, instead of having to buy and use one client and one server product, it'd be possible to mix-match based upon what you wanted.
Unfortunately I think that the whole groupware trend is headed to the web and no one wants to invest in a whole lot of client-side technologies.
Since 11Mbps is a tasty target, it's hardly surprising that people will be gunning for maxing out what 802.11 will do.
Maybe the better thing to have done, rather than come out with a single wireless protocol would be to have two; one that would do 50Mbps but at a range of no more than 50m, and another good for 50 miles but at no more than 250Kbps, with a large number of channels.
The former would be great for offices or other places that need high bandwidth, but the distance limitation would have kept it from being so popular as a last-mile. The latter would be awesome for linking buildings or other long-range applications, but a large channel count and low bandwidth would keep people from trying to replace T1s between buildings..
Richard Thompson has been selling unavailable-anywhere live material, sold directly by the artist either mail order or at shows. It's not downloads, but its not copy-protected CDs, either.
They're actually "professional quality" CDs with real liner notes, photos and a quality production job. Unfortunately they're not whole shows, but "best of" of specific tours.
If I was a performed, I'd be inclined to do something like this. I'd discourage taping at the show, but I'd sell every show I did in a complete a format as was possible with as good a quality of audio as was possible.
My guess is that most artists (other than Titney and other fake entertainment industry creations) could do this and make money. Real fans would likely buy them at the right price -- guaranteed quality, decent liner notes, support-my-artist mentality.
As long as the sales cover the major up-front production cost, they should even make a buck on it, since the sound system and the show are pretty much paid for by the tickets to the show to begin with. Electronic distribution greatly lowers their upfront cost, but limits to some the value due to lack of liner notes, silkscreened CDs, etc, but would make selling every show more financially viable.
It is kind of confusing. I initially read Philips to mean generically a mega-consumer electronics company and producing the technology at a price no one would buy. "We'll make an MPEG-4 device, but we'll make one, it'll cost $2000, no one will buy it and the standard will wither."
Then I thought that maybe he meant Philips specifically, meaning that they have rights to the patents and will produce something in such numbers at such low price points that the royalty value is essentially zero. "We'll make so many of them so cheaply that the only people making any money off it are the $10 a day assembly workers in Malaysia."
Either way, I guess the sentiment is that the technology products need to be salable at a "prestige" price point long enough that the royalty value of the patents provides a profitable return on research investment.
Ick. I refuse to run that spyware, I'd love some of those messages..
And he's not a dumbass, either. He's found his choices are (1) put up with the messages, (2) change phone numbers, or (3) disable text messaging (carrier phenomenon). 1 and 3 are free, 2 costs money (albeit not much).
Why (4) get Yahoo! to! stop! it! please! isn't an option boils down to "they don't listen". It's one of those scary companies where there's no apparent way to actually *contact* anyone who can do something about this. There's no there, there so to speak.
He has said that the wireless carrier was particularly unhelpful, which doesn't surprise me. I had a problem for a while when I got my first cellular with getting FAX calls. They offered to *sell* me caller ID (an expensive option on a limited range of AMPS equipment), but wouldn't do anything about tracking down who it was.
I'm frankly surprised that there isn't more phone spam (how hard is it to figure out that all of a carrier's cell numbers are in NXX-5xx-xxxx?) or that message services don't build in a failsafe way to stop them, like adding a user-specfic hash code to every message and then have a web page where you can go, enter that hash, and disable that phone number's messaging.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune said they looked like the Asparagus from Veggie Tales.