A post is just a post, but a post with a reply is a thread!
I think the reason they added the text-to-speech to TE-II was to give some sort of accessibility of the online world (such as it was at the time) to the visually impaired.
I remember quite fondly, however, using the text-to-speech for less lofty goals. Prank calls come to mind. A friend and I wrote a "is your refrigerator running" program complete with 4 (count 'em, 4) menu options to select from when the person on the other end answered. I can still remember exactly how it sounded, especially with the "har-har, bye-bye" at the end. Heh...
I was going through some old stuff the other day and came across a copy of the Texas Instruments Terminal Emulator II Protocol Manual. I was obsessed with owning it even though I had no RS-232 stuff, as I said before. TI offered a free (or dirt cheap, I forget which) copy if you wrote and requested it. I begged my mother to do it, and she did. She was swell (still is, actually). Now I'm starting to wish I hadn't sold all my TI stuff at a tag sale years ago.
The TI-99/4A certainly would say swears! What you needed for true text-to-speech was the Terminal Emulator II cartridge. Plain, boring ol' TI Extended BASIC wouldn't swear unless you worked some magic (which I did once, and my mom yelled at me). Why TI decided to put its text-to-speech capabilities into a terminal emulator, I'm not quite sure. All I know is I owned the cartridge just for its speech capabilities, as anything RS-232 based was expensive as hell back then, and I was a 12-year-old with no job. $100 might as well have been $1,000,000.
Yes, I use X10! I have a clunky-ass application I wrote that uses several modems to dial out. Sometimes these modems lose their freakin' minds and no amount of prodding from the serial port will help - they simply have to be power-cycled. So I set up a perl script that monitors the log files for errors from this program. If it sees too many errors in a row, it fires off a command to the appropriate X10 module for the modem that lost its mind, and also resets the software. A Firecracker module provides the computer-to-X10 interface. Yes, this is very clunky, but it works exceedingly well.
Oh, and yes, I know X10 offers zero security. I rely purely on security through obscurity in this case. I know that's not great, but hey, if someone starts screwing with my X10 stuff, I'll just ditch it and find a better solution.
I hate coming into a discussion this late, 'cause chances are nobody's going to read this far down in the comments anyway. But here I go...
Katz, as usual, is missing the point. He's right when he says that the average consumer doesn't care about P2P and isn't really affected by it. P2P is an underlying technology that will provide the building blocks that will allow some truly kick-ass applications to be built. Joe Average may not have cared about the invention of plastic and probably doesn't know the first thing about polymer science, but Joe's life sure is made easier due to all that cool plastic shit he owns! People can, and hopefully will, develop applications that use P2P technology, but hide it behind an intuitive, easy-to-use user interface and that perform a useful function. Napster became popular not because it was a type of P2P technology, but because it was easy to install and use and because it did something people wanted to do - it located and obtained music. All the Napster clones, wannabes, lookalikes, etc. have all failed to become immensely popular because they either didn't do anything particularly useful or were too difficult for the casual user to figure out.
Katz also makes another mistake - he doesn't look far enough into the future. P2P may not appeal to today's consumers, but it appeals to their kids. I'll bet P2P will have a much greater impact on the way people share information by the time today's teenagers, who grew up on the web and Napster, reach the age of their parents.
When I was in the market for affordable-but-kickass home theater, I chose the Kenwood HTB-503 "Home Theater in a Box." As its name implies, it's a big honkin' box containing everything you need for a basic home theater setup - two front left/right speakers, shielded center channel speaker, two rear surround speakers, powered subwoofer, and receiver/amplifier. The speakers sound great (although some people complain about the center channel being "muddy" - just replace it if you don't like it). Audio power is 100 watts per channel, which is way more than enough to r0x0r the house.
The receiver/amplifier is very slick. It's got all the essentials - audio/video switching (with lots of inputs for all your crazy-ass components), S-video capability on all video inputs, two digital-capable audio inputs, each with coaxial and optical inputs. Supported audio formats are stereo, 3-stereo (two stereo channels plus a center channel), Dolby Pro Logic, Dolby Digital 5.1, and DTS.
The only complaint I have with this unit is the remote - it sucks ass. I don't know what those Kenwood engineers were thinking when they designed this piece of crap. The previous model, the HTB-502, had a much nicer remote. Get a universal remote, preferably a high-end one like that Sony unit with the touchscreen that looks like one of those data-pads on the newer Star Trek series.
Now for the best news of all - the price. $439.99 seems typical on the web (for example, check this out). This system has been reviewed in several audio magazines and they all rave that its sound quality rivals systems costing much, much more and that you can't find another system of this quality for anywhere near this price.
NOTE: I do not work for Kenwood, nor do I sell stereos for a living. I've never dealt with the store I posted in that link above, so don't consider it a recommendation. I'm just a guy who's real glad he bought a Kenwood HTB-503.
I have to agree with you. I just installed the Google toolbar last night, in fact. I feel the functionality outweighs the potential privacy risk. I use Google constantly and the convenience of having its major functions available to me on the toolbar is just too cool. Besides, I trust Google as a company. They did warn me that I'd be "tracked," and they even explained to me how to use only the "basic features" of the toolbar if I wanted to protect my privacy. Also, given that I use Google as much as I do, I don't mind giving a little something back to them. Hell, I browse the web through the Junkbuster Proxy, and Google is one of the few sites I allow to set cookies on me. The Google guys seem pretty trustworthy, and until I learn otherwise I'm going to just use their toolbar and enjoy it.
Okay, I know I'm, like, the billionth person to post a reply, but I'm going to jump in anyway. As a ham radio operator and private pilot, I've had more than my share of dealings with the FAA and FCC web sites. As you might suspect, I have some suggestions.
First and foremost, don't make the layout of the site conform to the organization of the agency itself. For an insider, this is fine - they know what departments/sub-agencies handle what, but for us outsiders, it's a freakin' nightmare.
Both the FAA and FCC have made great strides in improving the usability of their web sites in the last year or two. Check them out.
You've clearly missed the point of QoS. It's primarily about improving latency without overallocating bandwidth. At the moment, the only way to get lower packet latency is to buy more bandwidth - an expensive and often unnecessary proposition. QoS allows bandwidth and latency to be tweaked independently (or at least more independently than they are now). This has definite advantages to a variety of applications including voice-over-IP (VoIP), video conferencing, audio/video streaming, and games. VoIP in particular would benefit - it takes only about 1600 bytes/sec. for a decent VoIP data stream (i.e. one that uses a codec that's both reasonably efficient and reasonably fast). However, the piss-poor latency of the existing internet infrastructure means that any VoIP that takes place these days is likely to be full of delays and drop-outs. QoS could solve this problem. Games would obviously benefit tremendously from QoS. Imagine how happy the gaming community would be if 56K modem users could compete on a level playing field with users sitting on a dedicated T3.
You seem very focused on the web. You mention the web several times in your post. Keep in mind that there are other reasons to send packets across the internet besides viewing web pages.
As for VoIP through a central server, one signifcant advantage I can see is anonymity. If connections are made through a central server, it's possible to conceal the IP addresses of the participants from each other. Of course, it could be abused in a number of ways, too, but I just wanted to point out that there was, indeed, at least one clear reason why routing VoIP through a central server would be a good thing.
And finally, end-to-end is becoming increasingly less viable due to firewalls and NAT. Case in point: Napster. If two Napster users are behind firewalls or NAT routers that prohibit incoming connections, they can't exchange files with each other. This is another argument for routing traffic through central servers, too - it eliminates this problem. With NAT and firewalls becoming more commonplace, and the internet being used for more and more varied applications, I think now is a great time to start looking at alternatives to the end-to-end approach.
Garage door hacking kicks ass!
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Open Networking
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· Score: 1
Hahahaha... I did the exact same thing! I used a 555 timer to clock a 4020 binary counter and fed its first 10 output bits to a Stanley keychain garage door opener circuit board. I just desoldered the microswitches and connected the outputs of the 4020 directly to the board where the microswitches were. It worked beautifully. It took about 3 minutes to go through all 1024 codes. My friend and I used to drive around residential neighborhoods for hours just shootin' the shit and opening people's garages. There were some neighborhoods where we'd get 4 or 5 to open in one 3-minute run.
The funniest incident by far was when a guy's garage opened which clearly hadn't been opened in a long while. There were boxes piled high against the door which all spilled out onto his driveway. This was at about 1:00am and we were on foot, and it took all our will power to keep from laughing very loudly as we quickly walked away. We walked back to my car and drove past the place on our way out of the neighborhood and saw a guy outside in his bathrobe picking up boxes. We probably should have felt guilty, but we just laughed even harder. He must have thought aliens had abducted his garage door.
As far as wireless networks and security go, I'm interested in using the Cisco Aironet products for a project like this. They have a "system ID" for security purposes (I think it's a 24-bit value) which at least provides a basic level of security, but I don't think that would be quite enough. I also don't know what the deal is with 802.11b network cards as far as whether it's possible to put them into promiscuous mode and/or change their MAC address. I've heard rumors that one or both of those things aren't possible with some cards, which would definitely improve security substantially.
Okay, everyone on Earth seems to have gotten in a reply before I did, but that's okay; I'm going to run my mouth just like everyone else.;-)
As a big-time geek and a private pilot, I think it's just too cool that Ken Thompson's quitting the corporate life to pursue flight instruction. I don't know how many of you know this, but flight instruction is really a bottom-rung aviation career, used all too often as nothing more than a stepping stone on the way to flying for the airlines. It doesn't pay well at all. Sure, students pay you $35/hour, but you're lucky to clear $12/hour after all your expenses. A lot of student pilots get some piss-poor instruction and/or have bad experiences with these guys because all they care about is racking up hours until they can get picked up by the airlines.
There are other flight instructors, however, who teach just for the pure pleasure of it. They're the great ones - they stick with flight instruction because they love doing it. Certainly if a UNIX god like Ken Thompson quits his Bell Labs job to be a full-time flight instructor, he's doing it because he loves it. He sure as hell isn't doing it for the money. I envy his students - I'll bet every student he trains will benefit tremendously from his teaching.
If you're interested, here's his pilot certificate information from the database at landings.com.
I'm so glad this topic came up. I've been toying with the idea of setting up a wireless LAN based on Aeronet products. I figured such a medium-scale LAN could prove very useful for a number of reasons, including some nobody seems to have mentioned yet. For example, I'm sure most of you have done traceroutes between ISP's in the same town and seen your packets go halfway across the (state|country|world) before reaching their destination. This is the down-side of the internet's much-touted geographic independence. Wireless LAN's are inherently limited by geography, but that is a strength in this case. Imagine one wireless repeater (such as a Cisco Aeronet access point in repeater mode) on a mountaintop/tall building/tower visible from all over the area, with an omnidirectional antenna. Now imagine each local ISP with their own directional antennas pointed at the repeater station. Now imagine that the local ISP's are now one hop away from each other, at 11 Mbps. Hell, the reduction in lag for local gamers alone is mind-boggling! I imagine ISP's would jump at such a system because it would take some of the load off their expensive leased lines. And this is just one of the advantages of a system like this.
So, here's my vision for a regional wireless LAN. The backbone of the system consists of relay sites on high ground. These would be solar powered with storage batteries, eliminating the need for commercial power, thus increasing the number of suitable sites dramatically. The relay sites would communicate with each other and participating ISP's via 11 Mbps links and (possibly) directional antennas. "Clients" (individuals or businesses) could link to the repeater sites with lower-speed wireless devices comparable to cable modems/DSL. ISP's would join up to decrease the loads on their leased lines and to resell high-speed wireless internet access to individuals or businesses. Because the initial "network" could consist of a single repeater site, single ISP, and a handful of clients, the cost for early-adopters can be kept reasonable and the system can be scaled as needed.
There are obvious problems and shortcomings with a system like this, yes, but I think a system like this could prove very interesting and useful to a lot of people, some of whom have no other hope of getting high-speed internet access.
Launching Phase3D cost several million dollars. This was raised mostly (entirely?) through donations from hams all over the world over the course of the last 10 years or so.
I feel almost obligated to reply to this, being both a ham radio operator and a private pilot. For what it's worth, I've noticed the similarity between the FAA and FCC tests, including the fact that they both can be passed relatively easily simply by studying the questions and answers. This isn't such a big deal in the case of becoming a pilot, as there's a lot more you need to do than pass the written test, but in the case of hams, sure, maybe it does tend to let some of the "riff-raff" through, but the alternative is for the hobby to be in even more danger of death-through-disinterest than it is already.
I have to agree partially with the original poster and say that the reason for the death of ham radio has largely been ham radio itself. The internet didn't help matters, but it's not the only problem. The problems, as I see them, are:
Lack of innovation. When I first started in ham radio, the internet existed in obscurity and people still dialed up BBS's with 1200 bps modems. One of the major reasons for me getting into ham radio was to get into packet radio, which was also 1200 bps. Over the course of the next 10 years, modem technology reached 56K, whereas much of the current packet radio stuff is still at 1200 bps! ARRGH! Sure, 9600 bps is now relatively common, but that still pales in comparison even to a 56K modem, let alone cable/DSL.
The age gap. I got hooked on the idea of being a ham radio after my grandfather introduced me to it when I was around 8 years old. Unfortunately, that sort of thing doesn't happen nearly often enough. One of ham radio's stated purposes is to advance the state-of-the-art in radio communication technology, yet the vast majority of hams are retirees. The influx of new blood into the hobby isn't nearly sufficient to accomplish very much advancement of the state-of-the-art. Ham radio should be attracting exactly the sort of people who read Slashdot (young geeks, coders, and engineers), but it rarely does. It's depressing to go to a local ham club meeting and find that everyone there is old enough to be your grandfather.
The internet. The internet has harmed ham radio largely by providing a cheap, license-free way to explore many of the same technolgies that would attract someone to ham radio. After all, why would the young geeks mentioned above bother with ham radio when they can do many (all?) of the same things over the internet without getting a license, and at much higher speeds.
Cost. Ham radio is an expensive hobby these days. It didn't used to be, as the technology was far simpler and transceivers could be built at home out of inexpensive parts. That's not so true any more. This overlaps with the age-gap problem, too - much of the equipment necessary for the shiny new technologies that would attract hot-shot geeks are so expensive to get that these college-age people can't afford them. Even radios for simpler modes (FM voice, for example) are priced entirely too high. Why a 440 Mhz handheld ham radio shouldn't be as cheap as an FRS (Family Radio Service) radio is beyond me. They're virtually the same technology. Ham equipment is all too often priced for retirees with disposable income.
As you can see, this could easily turn into a sizable essay (and maybe it will at some point, now that I think about it). I think I've touched on the major points, though. For what it's worth, I've been anxiously awaiting the launch of Phase3D for years. It combines a number of technologies I'm very interested in (radio, satellite, digital communications, wireless, etc.) and it gives me reason to renew my ham license (which expires at the end of next month - Christ, it's been 10 years already...)
This is one more step toward American society becoming a police state. As the news post says, this is a major shift in the intent of the law here. I fully agree that child pornography should be illegal and that those who abuse children should be punished severely. However, the law has shifted from criminalizing abuse to criminalizing imagery. Granted, images of child pornography have always been illegal, but the difference is that in the past it was impossible to create such images without actually abusing children. Now that's all changed, yet the law does not recognize the distinction. I guess I'm not too surprised, though, as my understanding is that any images that appear to depict children in sexual situations - even if the models are of legal age - are illegal. The courts are basically attempting to criminalize being sexually aroused by children. Sure, it's easy to argue that that's a good thing, but where does it end? Whose rights to free thought will be taken away next?
I thought about mentioning that, too, but I figured I had caused enough trouble by ranting about Katz above.;-) Since you brought it up, though, I have to admit that I'm a little surprised, too. Napster has, from very early on, been a purely commercial venture. It's been a risky one, that's for sure, especially since nobody has been able to figure out how to make it profitable yet, but this deal with Bertelsmann sure looks like a good start. But the bottom line is that Napster is just another profit-hungry corporation with no interest in Free Software or Open Source. They're not even friendly toward the Free Software and Open Source people. They're refuse to release details of their protocols and they got pissy when Napigator listed their servers. It's too bad that we in the Free Software/Open Source community choose to ignore these issues just because Napster gives us so much free-beer music.
I hate to join the ranks of those shouting "K4TZ SUX0RZ!!11!" but dammit... this guy just doesn't fit in on Slashdot. It's clear he just doesn't have a firm grasp of the technology he's writing about. In this article, he refers to Gnutella and Freenet as "sites." They're not - they're programs, they're networks, but they have nothing to do with the web. We all know that, but Katz misses this distinction completely. It's bad enough that someone claiming to be a professional writer misuses "its/it's" as Katz does in this article, but that's a minor mistake and can be forgiven. What I can't get over is his use of a lowercase L in place of the digit 1 (one). What's this guy thinking? That's a habit one acquires from working on ancient typewriters which didn't even have 1 or 0 (one or zero) keys because a lowercase L or uppercase O would suffice.
The sad truth is that Katz is a product of the old-school media he's so fond of criticizing. If he really wants to be a part of the Slashdot community, great - the more, the merrier - but he really needs to take the time to better understand the technology he writes about. I'm not saying the guy needs to become a hardcore coder, but he really needs to be able to grasp the difference between "the internet" and "the web," as well as the difference between a lowercase L and the number 1.
16C/F84 PIC programmer - VERY easy/cheap to build!
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Illusionary LED clock
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· Score: 1
Christ, the article makes it sound like it's difficult to come by a PIC programmer or something. It's not. I built Michael Covington's No-Parts PIC Programmer (NOPPP) from Rat Shack parts in less than an evening (which, as you may know, is some sort of standard unit of time for electronics kit building). It has worked flawlessly for me ever since. It only programs the 16C84/16F84, but if all you want to do is get into PIC programming or build this funky clock, that's all you need!
Dammit! My girlfriend just went home a few days ago! Damn these long-distance relationships. I'll bet dollars to donuts I could have gotten her to do that, too, and let me do a little digital imaging at the same time. As long as I didn't show her face or anything, I'll bet she would have let me post the images to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cuecat, too. She's swell like that.
Napster is NOT theft, and I can prove it.
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At The Crossroads
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· Score: 3
Napster is not theft, and I can prove it.
Okay, maybe I can't exactly prove it, but I have can make a rational argument for it, and that's more than most people involved in this debate can seem to do.
Theft involves taking something that belongs to someone else. The common argument in the case of Napster is that Napster users are "stealing" from record companies and artists, and that the alleged theft takes place in the form of lost sales. The underlying assumption is that the Napster user would have purchased the music had they not been able to download it for free. In many cases this simply isn't true. Most people I know aren't willing to buy a CD for $12-$15 just because they hear a single song they like. If you, the Napster user, want to be 100% sure that you can never rightly be called a thief, make a solemn vow to yourself right now that you will never again buy a CD, and stick to it. There - your actions are no longer the source of any "lost sales." After all, you wouldn't have bought the CD's anyway.
What Napster users are doing is called "unauthorized use," not "theft" or "stealing." Some would argue that unauthorized use is just as wrong, but that's another argument for another time. In any case, I suspect most people would agree that unauthorized use in this context is a lesser offense than stealing.
Another popular (and wrong) argument is that Napster users drive up the prices of CD's, or at least keep them at their current, excessively-high levels. This also is crap. CD's aren't getting more expensive; they've hovered around their current price point for years. Let's suppose, however, that Napster really is costing the music industry huge amounts of money, and let's also assume that Napster disappears overnight and all those "lost sales" suddenly aren't there to drive up the price of CD's any more. Are CD's going to get cheaper? No way - no way in hell. The prices will never come down - the only difference will be that the record companies stocks all surge due to a sudden increase in profits. Rest assured, consumers will continue to pay the same high prices they always have.
Only one thing forces down prices - competition. There is no competition in the music industry. Sure, there are multiple record companies, but artists sign with one company only, which then has a monopoly on that artist. People don't buy CD's because they want to own shiny, round pieces of plastic; they buy them because they contain music by the artists they like. It's not like a drop in Metallica CD prices is going to force down the cost of Britney Spears CD's. For competition to exist, artists would have to be able to sign with multiple record companies and let those companies duke it out in the marketplace. There's almost no chance that'll ever happen - unless, of course, something comes along that fundamentally changes the nature of the music industry. I'm not saying that Napster is that "something," but it's obviously having some real impact on the music industry, and sooner or later either Napster or something like it is going to force some major changes in the way the music industry operates.
So, does this mean intellectual property has ceased to have value? Er... no - not even close. I don't know what the ultimate impact of Napster-like technologies will be or what will change in the music industry (or any other industry based primarily on intellectual property). All I know is this: the companies who acknowledge that this technology isn't going to go away and who change their business models to take advantage of it are going to be the ones that turn a profit. The sooner a business realizes this and takes action, the sooner they'll have that ever-so-elusive "edge" over their competitors.
Linux will never be my gaming platform of choice. Why? Because Linux kicks ass. Allow me to explain...
Like many of you, I have more than one computer (I have three "real" computers, in fact). My fastest, most kick-ass machine runs Win98 Second Edition. This is my "main" machine - my primary user interface to the rest of the world. Usually, when I upgrade something in my "main" machine, the older component gets moved to the Linux box. There are a couple of good reasons for this. One is that hardware support sometimes takes longer to arrive and to mature on Linux than it does on Win9x. But this is becoming less and less true. More often than not, the reason is simply because Linux runs MUCH better on "slower" machines than Windoze could ever hope to. My "main" machine is an AMD K6-2 400 Mhz w/ 128M of RAM, whereas my Linux box is a Pentium 200 MMX w/96M of RAM. As you might expect, the Linux box runs fast 'n' smooth, whereas I'm currently contemplating a major upgrade to the Windoze box because it's so damned slow.
Anyway, the bottom line is this: my Windoze machine needs more horsepower and supports the latest hardware, and THAT'S why I use it for gaming.
I'd like to see Pinkerton set up an anonymous reporting hotline so we can turn in people who use lowercase L's when typing a year in numeric form.
Jon - it's okay to use the "1" key. Really.
Star Maker didn't just suck - it REALLY sucked.
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Star Maker
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· Score: 3
I read Star Maker a few years ago. I picked up an ancient copy at a used book store. I'd never heard of the author before, but the book sounded remotely interesting, so I figured I'd give it a shot.
Man, was that ever a mistake. Reading that book was a slow, agonizing process that made me want to shred my eyes with papercuts from the book's pages. I find it hard to even categorize the book as science fiction. It's much more accurately described as pompous, pseudo-intellectual mental masturbation, no doubt very satisfying for the author to write, but nothing anyone else in their right mind would want to read.
I have a personality quirk that made this whole experience very difficult - I can't stop reading a book until I finish it, no matter how much I hate it. I kept reading this night after night, a few pages at a time because that's all I could stand. It was torture - sheer torture - and I'd rather die the death of Sir Robin's minstrels than read this book again. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone thinks this is a great work by a great author.
Re:Expand your market by limiting your audience!
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Geographic Screening
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· Score: 1
That's not exactly the strategy. It's more accurately represented by the phrase "Expand your profits by segmenting your audience." It sucks, but it works.
Slashdot Mirror
export PS1='\h:\w# '
Yeah! I r0x0r!
I think the reason they added the text-to-speech to TE-II was to give some sort of accessibility of the online world (such as it was at the time) to the visually impaired.
I remember quite fondly, however, using the text-to-speech for less lofty goals. Prank calls come to mind. A friend and I wrote a "is your refrigerator running" program complete with 4 (count 'em, 4) menu options to select from when the person on the other end answered. I can still remember exactly how it sounded, especially with the "har-har, bye-bye" at the end. Heh...
I was going through some old stuff the other day and came across a copy of the Texas Instruments Terminal Emulator II Protocol Manual. I was obsessed with owning it even though I had no RS-232 stuff, as I said before. TI offered a free (or dirt cheap, I forget which) copy if you wrote and requested it. I begged my mother to do it, and she did. She was swell (still is, actually). Now I'm starting to wish I hadn't sold all my TI stuff at a tag sale years ago.
Damn, I miss the good ol' days sometimes...
Oh, and yes, I know X10 offers zero security. I rely purely on security through obscurity in this case. I know that's not great, but hey, if someone starts screwing with my X10 stuff, I'll just ditch it and find a better solution.
Katz, as usual, is missing the point. He's right when he says that the average consumer doesn't care about P2P and isn't really affected by it. P2P is an underlying technology that will provide the building blocks that will allow some truly kick-ass applications to be built. Joe Average may not have cared about the invention of plastic and probably doesn't know the first thing about polymer science, but Joe's life sure is made easier due to all that cool plastic shit he owns! People can, and hopefully will, develop applications that use P2P technology, but hide it behind an intuitive, easy-to-use user interface and that perform a useful function. Napster became popular not because it was a type of P2P technology, but because it was easy to install and use and because it did something people wanted to do - it located and obtained music. All the Napster clones, wannabes, lookalikes, etc. have all failed to become immensely popular because they either didn't do anything particularly useful or were too difficult for the casual user to figure out.
Katz also makes another mistake - he doesn't look far enough into the future. P2P may not appeal to today's consumers, but it appeals to their kids. I'll bet P2P will have a much greater impact on the way people share information by the time today's teenagers, who grew up on the web and Napster, reach the age of their parents.
It's that new revenue stream from the formerly-free RedHat Network.
The receiver/amplifier is very slick. It's got all the essentials - audio/video switching (with lots of inputs for all your crazy-ass components), S-video capability on all video inputs, two digital-capable audio inputs, each with coaxial and optical inputs. Supported audio formats are stereo, 3-stereo (two stereo channels plus a center channel), Dolby Pro Logic, Dolby Digital 5.1, and DTS.
The only complaint I have with this unit is the remote - it sucks ass. I don't know what those Kenwood engineers were thinking when they designed this piece of crap. The previous model, the HTB-502, had a much nicer remote. Get a universal remote, preferably a high-end one like that Sony unit with the touchscreen that looks like one of those data-pads on the newer Star Trek series.
Now for the best news of all - the price. $439.99 seems typical on the web (for example, check this out). This system has been reviewed in several audio magazines and they all rave that its sound quality rivals systems costing much, much more and that you can't find another system of this quality for anywhere near this price.
NOTE: I do not work for Kenwood, nor do I sell stereos for a living. I've never dealt with the store I posted in that link above, so don't consider it a recommendation. I'm just a guy who's real glad he bought a Kenwood HTB-503.
I have to agree with you. I just installed the Google toolbar last night, in fact. I feel the functionality outweighs the potential privacy risk. I use Google constantly and the convenience of having its major functions available to me on the toolbar is just too cool. Besides, I trust Google as a company. They did warn me that I'd be "tracked," and they even explained to me how to use only the "basic features" of the toolbar if I wanted to protect my privacy. Also, given that I use Google as much as I do, I don't mind giving a little something back to them. Hell, I browse the web through the Junkbuster Proxy, and Google is one of the few sites I allow to set cookies on me. The Google guys seem pretty trustworthy, and until I learn otherwise I'm going to just use their toolbar and enjoy it.
First and foremost, don't make the layout of the site conform to the organization of the agency itself. For an insider, this is fine - they know what departments/sub-agencies handle what, but for us outsiders, it's a freakin' nightmare.
Both the FAA and FCC have made great strides in improving the usability of their web sites in the last year or two. Check them out.
You seem very focused on the web. You mention the web several times in your post. Keep in mind that there are other reasons to send packets across the internet besides viewing web pages.
As for VoIP through a central server, one signifcant advantage I can see is anonymity. If connections are made through a central server, it's possible to conceal the IP addresses of the participants from each other. Of course, it could be abused in a number of ways, too, but I just wanted to point out that there was, indeed, at least one clear reason why routing VoIP through a central server would be a good thing.
And finally, end-to-end is becoming increasingly less viable due to firewalls and NAT. Case in point: Napster. If two Napster users are behind firewalls or NAT routers that prohibit incoming connections, they can't exchange files with each other. This is another argument for routing traffic through central servers, too - it eliminates this problem. With NAT and firewalls becoming more commonplace, and the internet being used for more and more varied applications, I think now is a great time to start looking at alternatives to the end-to-end approach.
The funniest incident by far was when a guy's garage opened which clearly hadn't been opened in a long while. There were boxes piled high against the door which all spilled out onto his driveway. This was at about 1:00am and we were on foot, and it took all our will power to keep from laughing very loudly as we quickly walked away. We walked back to my car and drove past the place on our way out of the neighborhood and saw a guy outside in his bathrobe picking up boxes. We probably should have felt guilty, but we just laughed even harder. He must have thought aliens had abducted his garage door.
As far as wireless networks and security go, I'm interested in using the Cisco Aironet products for a project like this. They have a "system ID" for security purposes (I think it's a 24-bit value) which at least provides a basic level of security, but I don't think that would be quite enough. I also don't know what the deal is with 802.11b network cards as far as whether it's possible to put them into promiscuous mode and/or change their MAC address. I've heard rumors that one or both of those things aren't possible with some cards, which would definitely improve security substantially.
As a big-time geek and a private pilot, I think it's just too cool that Ken Thompson's quitting the corporate life to pursue flight instruction. I don't know how many of you know this, but flight instruction is really a bottom-rung aviation career, used all too often as nothing more than a stepping stone on the way to flying for the airlines. It doesn't pay well at all. Sure, students pay you $35/hour, but you're lucky to clear $12/hour after all your expenses. A lot of student pilots get some piss-poor instruction and/or have bad experiences with these guys because all they care about is racking up hours until they can get picked up by the airlines.
There are other flight instructors, however, who teach just for the pure pleasure of it. They're the great ones - they stick with flight instruction because they love doing it. Certainly if a UNIX god like Ken Thompson quits his Bell Labs job to be a full-time flight instructor, he's doing it because he loves it. He sure as hell isn't doing it for the money. I envy his students - I'll bet every student he trains will benefit tremendously from his teaching.
If you're interested, here's his pilot certificate information from the database at landings.com.
So, here's my vision for a regional wireless LAN. The backbone of the system consists of relay sites on high ground. These would be solar powered with storage batteries, eliminating the need for commercial power, thus increasing the number of suitable sites dramatically. The relay sites would communicate with each other and participating ISP's via 11 Mbps links and (possibly) directional antennas. "Clients" (individuals or businesses) could link to the repeater sites with lower-speed wireless devices comparable to cable modems/DSL. ISP's would join up to decrease the loads on their leased lines and to resell high-speed wireless internet access to individuals or businesses. Because the initial "network" could consist of a single repeater site, single ISP, and a handful of clients, the cost for early-adopters can be kept reasonable and the system can be scaled as needed.
There are obvious problems and shortcomings with a system like this, yes, but I think a system like this could prove very interesting and useful to a lot of people, some of whom have no other hope of getting high-speed internet access.
Launching Phase3D cost several million dollars. This was raised mostly (entirely?) through donations from hams all over the world over the course of the last 10 years or so.
I have to agree partially with the original poster and say that the reason for the death of ham radio has largely been ham radio itself. The internet didn't help matters, but it's not the only problem. The problems, as I see them, are:
As you can see, this could easily turn into a sizable essay (and maybe it will at some point, now that I think about it). I think I've touched on the major points, though. For what it's worth, I've been anxiously awaiting the launch of Phase3D for years. It combines a number of technologies I'm very interested in (radio, satellite, digital communications, wireless, etc.) and it gives me reason to renew my ham license (which expires at the end of next month - Christ, it's been 10 years already...)
This is one more step toward American society becoming a police state. As the news post says, this is a major shift in the intent of the law here. I fully agree that child pornography should be illegal and that those who abuse children should be punished severely. However, the law has shifted from criminalizing abuse to criminalizing imagery. Granted, images of child pornography have always been illegal, but the difference is that in the past it was impossible to create such images without actually abusing children. Now that's all changed, yet the law does not recognize the distinction. I guess I'm not too surprised, though, as my understanding is that any images that appear to depict children in sexual situations - even if the models are of legal age - are illegal. The courts are basically attempting to criminalize being sexually aroused by children. Sure, it's easy to argue that that's a good thing, but where does it end? Whose rights to free thought will be taken away next?
I thought about mentioning that, too, but I figured I had caused enough trouble by ranting about Katz above. ;-) Since you brought it up, though, I have to admit that I'm a little surprised, too. Napster has, from very early on, been a purely commercial venture. It's been a risky one, that's for sure, especially since nobody has been able to figure out how to make it profitable yet, but this deal with Bertelsmann sure looks like a good start. But the bottom line is that Napster is just another profit-hungry corporation with no interest in Free Software or Open Source. They're not even friendly toward the Free Software and Open Source people. They're refuse to release details of their protocols and they got pissy when Napigator listed their servers. It's too bad that we in the Free Software/Open Source community choose to ignore these issues just because Napster gives us so much free-beer music.
The sad truth is that Katz is a product of the old-school media he's so fond of criticizing. If he really wants to be a part of the Slashdot community, great - the more, the merrier - but he really needs to take the time to better understand the technology he writes about. I'm not saying the guy needs to become a hardcore coder, but he really needs to be able to grasp the difference between "the internet" and "the web," as well as the difference between a lowercase L and the number 1.
Christ, the article makes it sound like it's difficult to come by a PIC programmer or something. It's not. I built Michael Covington's No-Parts PIC Programmer (NOPPP) from Rat Shack parts in less than an evening (which, as you may know, is some sort of standard unit of time for electronics kit building). It has worked flawlessly for me ever since. It only programs the 16C84/16F84, but if all you want to do is get into PIC programming or build this funky clock, that's all you need!
Dammit! My girlfriend just went home a few days ago! Damn these long-distance relationships. I'll bet dollars to donuts I could have gotten her to do that, too, and let me do a little digital imaging at the same time. As long as I didn't show her face or anything, I'll bet she would have let me post the images to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cuecat, too. She's swell like that.
Okay, maybe I can't exactly prove it, but I have can make a rational argument for it, and that's more than most people involved in this debate can seem to do.
Theft involves taking something that belongs to someone else. The common argument in the case of Napster is that Napster users are "stealing" from record companies and artists, and that the alleged theft takes place in the form of lost sales. The underlying assumption is that the Napster user would have purchased the music had they not been able to download it for free. In many cases this simply isn't true. Most people I know aren't willing to buy a CD for $12-$15 just because they hear a single song they like. If you, the Napster user, want to be 100% sure that you can never rightly be called a thief, make a solemn vow to yourself right now that you will never again buy a CD, and stick to it. There - your actions are no longer the source of any "lost sales." After all, you wouldn't have bought the CD's anyway.
What Napster users are doing is called "unauthorized use," not "theft" or "stealing." Some would argue that unauthorized use is just as wrong, but that's another argument for another time. In any case, I suspect most people would agree that unauthorized use in this context is a lesser offense than stealing.
Another popular (and wrong) argument is that Napster users drive up the prices of CD's, or at least keep them at their current, excessively-high levels. This also is crap. CD's aren't getting more expensive; they've hovered around their current price point for years. Let's suppose, however, that Napster really is costing the music industry huge amounts of money, and let's also assume that Napster disappears overnight and all those "lost sales" suddenly aren't there to drive up the price of CD's any more. Are CD's going to get cheaper? No way - no way in hell. The prices will never come down - the only difference will be that the record companies stocks all surge due to a sudden increase in profits. Rest assured, consumers will continue to pay the same high prices they always have.
Only one thing forces down prices - competition. There is no competition in the music industry. Sure, there are multiple record companies, but artists sign with one company only, which then has a monopoly on that artist. People don't buy CD's because they want to own shiny, round pieces of plastic; they buy them because they contain music by the artists they like. It's not like a drop in Metallica CD prices is going to force down the cost of Britney Spears CD's. For competition to exist, artists would have to be able to sign with multiple record companies and let those companies duke it out in the marketplace. There's almost no chance that'll ever happen - unless, of course, something comes along that fundamentally changes the nature of the music industry. I'm not saying that Napster is that "something," but it's obviously having some real impact on the music industry, and sooner or later either Napster or something like it is going to force some major changes in the way the music industry operates.
So, does this mean intellectual property has ceased to have value? Er... no - not even close. I don't know what the ultimate impact of Napster-like technologies will be or what will change in the music industry (or any other industry based primarily on intellectual property). All I know is this: the companies who acknowledge that this technology isn't going to go away and who change their business models to take advantage of it are going to be the ones that turn a profit. The sooner a business realizes this and takes action, the sooner they'll have that ever-so-elusive "edge" over their competitors.
Linux will never be my gaming platform of choice. Why? Because Linux kicks ass. Allow me to explain...
Like many of you, I have more than one computer (I have three "real" computers, in fact). My fastest, most kick-ass machine runs Win98 Second Edition. This is my "main" machine - my primary user interface to the rest of the world. Usually, when I upgrade something in my "main" machine, the older component gets moved to the Linux box. There are a couple of good reasons for this. One is that hardware support sometimes takes longer to arrive and to mature on Linux than it does on Win9x. But this is becoming less and less true. More often than not, the reason is simply because Linux runs MUCH better on "slower" machines than Windoze could ever hope to. My "main" machine is an AMD K6-2 400 Mhz w/ 128M of RAM, whereas my Linux box is a Pentium 200 MMX w/96M of RAM. As you might expect, the Linux box runs fast 'n' smooth, whereas I'm currently contemplating a major upgrade to the Windoze box because it's so damned slow.
Anyway, the bottom line is this: my Windoze machine needs more horsepower and supports the latest hardware, and THAT'S why I use it for gaming.
I'd like to see Pinkerton set up an anonymous reporting hotline so we can turn in people who use lowercase L's when typing a year in numeric form.
Jon - it's okay to use the "1" key. Really.
I read Star Maker a few years ago. I picked up an ancient copy at a used book store. I'd never heard of the author before, but the book sounded remotely interesting, so I figured I'd give it a shot.
Man, was that ever a mistake. Reading that book was a slow, agonizing process that made me want to shred my eyes with papercuts from the book's pages. I find it hard to even categorize the book as science fiction. It's much more accurately described as pompous, pseudo-intellectual mental masturbation, no doubt very satisfying for the author to write, but nothing anyone else in their right mind would want to read.
I have a personality quirk that made this whole experience very difficult - I can't stop reading a book until I finish it, no matter how much I hate it. I kept reading this night after night, a few pages at a time because that's all I could stand. It was torture - sheer torture - and I'd rather die the death of Sir Robin's minstrels than read this book again. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone thinks this is a great work by a great author.
That's not exactly the strategy. It's more accurately represented by the phrase "Expand your profits by segmenting your audience." It sucks, but it works.