After a daring raid in the previous episode, the Googlelots backed by Hades and Apollo, have captured and hold in the citadel of Beijing the beacon of search Dr. Chen; while King Ballmer of the Microsoft Empire, favored by Zeus & Athena, is rallying his allies from the US State department, Justice Department and everyone else who owns him tribute to undo this great injustice. The black sails are on the horizon, and war is coming in the early days of winter.
(with kind thanks to the epic stories I just shamelessly ripped off here)
A future revenue stream for Google Inc. is to earn a commission on each e-book sold through their website.
They already have each book scanned (and by the looks of it pretty well formatted) so that turning them into any random e-book format will be a piece of cake.
They just need a deal, similar to Apple's deal with the music publishing companies. They will just send a cheque in the mail every month for the books sold out of a publishers catalogue.
And you know what? I would buy books that way. My Sony CLIE is falling to pieces, but its a dream to read books on in the train.
Amazon's e-book selection is the pitts, just business and some SF. And my personal favorite (http://www.baen.com/) desperately needs to upgrade its website. Book publishers need a big kick under their butts, fast.
Our customers (who tend to be younger, as in below 30) would love for us to us IM.
We tell them that its not allowed because of company policy. The real reason it is that IM stops you dead in your track and you generally never get anything done. Try to handle a couple of dozen cases and being incesantly interrupted.
Same for e-mails, if its a quick answer then we write back. If the question has a lot of if-then-else's that would take ages to answer and still create confusion, just make a phonecall and sort it out. One e-mail just creates one more e-mail.
I should'nt have this habit where I click "view source code" for every interesting site I visit.
Amazon's code is just so,.. ugly? Bit like their site. It works, really well, but looks like a disorganised mess with an overload of "suggestions".
The code is the same, style sheets, javascript all in the main page. Must load quickly, and make best use of web server page compression but common, nearly identical Javascript code repeated 10 times?
On the other hand -- Barnes & Nobles seems to think that keyword spamming is the way forward (half a million "Barnes and Nobles in Meta tags and comment lines)
Actually I have been waiting for something like this to happen. When I first read the description of pay-per click it sounded like a zombienets wet dream.
Just imagine thousands of computers loading google keyword pages (or Yahoo/Overture's for that matter) and clicking completely randomly.
It would bring this whole click-and-pay economy down in an instant and there would be very little they would be able to do about it.
I just ran the tool as a test on my pathetic little WordPress blog (it has a total of 3 pages). It happily chucked away and reported 842 files by combining the complete blog directory, awstats sub directory and the urls it found in the Apache access_log.
That would be a lot of non-essential crud for Google to spider.
Using filters is very simple, so the following filters removed most rubbish:
The Apple Mini is just one size too small, and thus sacrifices efficiency (laptop HD, little cooling).
If you are looking for a good office solution look at the ASUS Pundit. They don't get hot, have space for a decent harddisk and DVD drive and are very efficient with desk space (especially when used with a flatscreen and wireless keyboard)
So get a Mac Mini clone, and then run Linux/KDE on it. It looks (kind of) like and Apple, talks like an Apple with an accent but its still not a real Apple.
I'm tempted... but not enough yet. I will stick with the gray ATX box that has so far survived many, many upgrades (of OS & hardware)
[Rant] My old Toshiba MSX (1.0) booted within seconds. Loading 64Kb of word processing software from tape took a little longer; but you could stick in ROM cartridges and be playing instantly at a blazing 3.5Mhz.
So a PC look a like that gets me working after just pressing the "ON" button and doesn't have a dumb "SHUT DOWN" sequence (power off should be good enough) gets my money.
At the moment I just never turn a PC off anymore so that I have the ability to do things when I want them without having enough waiting time to boil a kettle of water. [/Rant]
They are pretty much dead from the start. My old flash MP3 player supports WMA, so do my DVD players. The fine print is that they do not support any form of encrypted WMA files.
It must be the same for millions of similar devices out there in the "real" world. Imagine 70-90% of clueless first time Yahoo music users trying to figure out why their US$ 60 subscription downloaded WMA files just don't work at all....
I just hope they outsourced the helpdesk support because it will get busy.
The Economist , despite their name, not taking anything for granted, yearly asks a number of prominent economist their opinion on world affairs, and then advises that exactly the opposite will happen. So far they have been right two out of two times.
Just remember:
The First Law of Economists: For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite economist.
The Second Law of Economists: They're both wrong.
My (limited) observation is that Googles dominance is limited to the area they are playing in.
My European websites obtain 90% of their hits from Google.
My Chinese/Japanese language sites obtain 90% of their hits from the local Yahoo.
The browser wars are far from over outside of the ASCII 1-128 area.
So how do these work anyway?
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 1
It seems to me that these jammers require the same amount of electricity as a regular mobile phone. Probably a lot more; as your mobile actively tries to conserve it; and a jammer has to be active all the time to generate loud noice over the communications all around it; on multiple wavebands.
That means you will be carrying around a gadget with a pretty huge battery pack.
This needs to be recharged religiously, daily.
For no other purpose than to ensure other people can't talk on the phone.
Oh boy and you though the people blabbing loudly on cell phones were obnoxious freaks.
Simple answer: what you are looking for does not (yet) exist.
There are a lot of fancy applications on the net, none of them any usefull for your purposes (and please prove me wrong, I'd though I had been pretty thorough)
Having looked at the same problem for my own small business I'd say that if your business is essential to you, you either start asking for quotations for companies that can deliver a solution to fits your purposes or find a stock application that does most of what you need. (and does it in a way that most members of staff understand it)
Look at the price, and see if its matches your needs and budget.
As you are setting up your own business, you should NOT be fooling around trying to recreate the wheel; you will need al your energy to focus on your business and hope that it doesn't go belly up.
One sure way of doing that is having a dozen incompatible systems hide all your major business information from you, your customers, and your staff.
Who says that programming should be the only thing you do? "Skill Set" means a set of skills, programming is just one of them.
You probably remember the guys from CS college, who didn't spend their nights coding, but walked around in suits and always had some weird deal up their sleeves (re-cycled floppies in the early 1990's... this guy was onto something).
Unlike them, I spent my nights hacking, coding, and loved it (and had significantly less cash). However when I graduated I started working, and found other peoples projects less then interesting. Also, it was pretty limiting sitting in a cube and just waiting for more work.
So I quit, and did some completly unrelated stuff for some years. Had a good time, and now I am coding some times, but running my own non-IT business most times. (computers are a tool only, one I use to make money, I keep them sharp, and they help me run my business).
I can't do what I do now without what I learned in CS college, but I can't do it without what I learned outside of it either.
So keep up to date, but look outside the box for your own particular niche / edge.
Having installed RH9 on a new server, I wanted to make sure that the data disks were at least RAID mirrored.
The motherboard I bought has an onboard VIA 8237 Southbridge which has 2 S-IDE controllers (and an optional, Win2000+ only supported Software RAID bios). The stock RH9 does not recognize the VIA 8237, probably because its fairly recent. Newer kernels do, and with some patches to the IDE driver (adding the chips PCI ID's) the chip is now recognized ; the "old-style" IDE controllers work in DMA mode but it fails to find the two S-IDE controllers. End of story, as I had bought 2 S-IDE hard disks.
Second attempt was the Highpoint Rocket Raid S-IDE card (NT$ 3000) as it claimed to have Linux drivers. Standard the kernel will recognize the card as a Highpoint IDE controller.
You need to disable this (hde=ignore etc) and then compile and install your own RAID module. The code for the RAID module comes from the HighPoint website.
This I got to work, it recognizes the RAID array defined in the contollers BIOS. I setup partitions and an EXT-3 file system. But when I started copying files several GB of files to the new RAID array it crashed Linux hard ; and destroyed the filesystems.
No idea why; but as I didn't want to take any risks (and the Highpoint is Software Raid anyway); I disabled the Highpoint driver; and used the kernel IDE driver to access the Highpoint S-IDE controllers and installed the stock Linux software RAID solution. No problems, works charmingly.
Just my $.02 ; next time I have a larger budget I buy a decent hardware raid solution, not one of these half-baked software raid fakes.
The new "stored value" cards used in Taipei's public transport are using RFID. These are used for access to the subway system and by some of the bus companies.
Amazingly convinient; just wave your wallet next to the sensor and you can pass through. Don't need to bother about getting the actual card out; so they get points for cool technology value.
Made out of durable plastic the cards can be "recharged" when they run out of value saving on waste.
Oh, and you buy them by tossing some coins into a machine (no need for a DNA sample)
Still can't use them to buy soda or anything else..
A rare free saturday afternoon, children asleep, the wife has gone shopping, business quiet. Looking forward to a whopping 2 hours of nothing much on my mind.
Now I can:
Spend 2 hours trying to improve my business
Watch some television and chill out after yet another 60+ hour week
I was tempted for (1) but reading the article gives me plenty of excuses; since nothing much genius like is likely to come out of me today anyway. So no great American Novel/website/piece of software this weekend either.
yeah, Google is great now, but shit happens, and shit happening to Google would really ruin me. Half my job security is based on scavenging for answers!
Amen to that, just to think of all the computer books I didn't have to buy because I could find the answers quicker, and better documented on the net? I used to pony over regular fortunes for the latest version of whatever was required to get the job done. I make a living solving stupid problems.
Some competition would be healthy, just in case that a rogue hostile take over takes out Google's data centres & civilisation, and my job, at the same time;-)
So if the government could impose taxes on copyright material distribution, shouldn't it be government distributing the proceeds (after taking a hefty cut, per naturel, pension deficits taking into account) to the copyright holders directly?
Why bother giving the money to RIAA/(whoever) as they are private companies. Of course, they hold most copyrights, but with an independent distribution system future artists would not sign their rights away so soon.
Pure wuzzy anti-free-market, big government thinking of couse. But then as organisations grow beyond control and start using their own international police forces to enforce their regulations (laywers, lobyists in employ) shouldn't we treat them as governments? When was the last time a national government gave any other competing country a break, or a share of its profits?
Of course, once the government gains directly from the proceeds, expect copyright duration to last forever.
While WAV, WMA, MP3 are supported formats, there are many variations of these. Please check that the bitrates used are compatible and if certain files will not play back, check the following: * The file must not be saved in a system folder, such as C:\Windows or C:\WINNT. * WMA file contains Digital Rights Management (DRM) which prevents reproduction on other devices. * The WAV file is not in RIFFWAVE format or is corrupt. Format Bitrate Sampling Frequency WAV(PCM) ---- 32k/44.1k/48kHz MP3 All 32k/44.1k/48kHz WMA 32/36/40/44/48/64/80/96/128/160/192bps 32k/44.1k/48kHz
Further, it uses DHCP to get an IP address. And needs ports 60096,60097. But that is of course all useless information until I actually find one of these machines.
Slashdot Mirror
After a daring raid in the previous episode, the Googlelots backed by Hades and Apollo, have captured and hold in the citadel of Beijing the beacon of search Dr. Chen; while King Ballmer of the Microsoft Empire, favored by Zeus & Athena, is rallying his allies from the US State department, Justice Department and everyone else who owns him tribute to undo this great injustice. The black sails are on the horizon, and war is coming in the early days of winter.
(with kind thanks to the epic stories I just shamelessly ripped off here)
A future revenue stream for Google Inc. is to earn a commission on each e-book sold through their website.
They already have each book scanned (and by the looks of it pretty well formatted) so that turning them into any random e-book format will be a piece of cake.
They just need a deal, similar to Apple's deal with the music publishing companies. They will just send a cheque in the mail every month for the books sold out of a publishers catalogue.
And you know what? I would buy books that way. My Sony CLIE is falling to pieces, but its a dream to read books on in the train.
Amazon's e-book selection is the pitts, just business and some SF. And my personal favorite (http://www.baen.com/) desperately needs to upgrade its website. Book publishers need a big kick under their butts, fast.
Our customers (who tend to be younger, as in below 30) would love for us to us IM.
We tell them that its not allowed because of company policy. The real reason it is that IM stops you dead in your track and you generally never get anything done. Try to handle a couple of dozen cases and being incesantly interrupted.
Same for e-mails, if its a quick answer then we write back. If the question has a lot of if-then-else's that would take ages to answer and still create confusion, just make a phonecall and sort it out. One e-mail just creates one more e-mail.
Just my $0.02
I should'nt have this habit where I click "view source code" for every interesting site I visit.
,.. ugly? Bit like their site. It works, really well, but looks like a disorganised mess with an overload of "suggestions".
Amazon's code is just so
The code is the same, style sheets, javascript all in the main page. Must load quickly, and make best use of web server page compression but common, nearly identical Javascript code repeated 10 times?
On the other hand -- Barnes & Nobles seems to think that keyword spamming is the way forward (half a million "Barnes and Nobles in Meta tags and comment lines)
Actually I have been waiting for something like this to happen. When I first read the description of pay-per click it sounded like a zombienets wet dream.
Just imagine thousands of computers loading google keyword pages (or Yahoo/Overture's for that matter) and clicking completely randomly.
It would bring this whole click-and-pay economy down in an instant and there would be very little they would be able to do about it.
I just ran the tool as a test on my pathetic little WordPress blog (it has a total of 3 pages). It happily chucked away and reported 842 files by combining the complete blog directory, awstats sub directory and the urls it found in the Apache access_log.
That would be a lot of non-essential crud for Google to spider.
Using filters is very simple, so the following filters removed most rubbish:
<filter action="drop" type="wildcard" pattern="*index.htm*" >
<filter action="drop" type="wildcard" pattern="*awstats*" >
<filter action="drop" type="wildcard" pattern="*wp-admin*" >
<filter action="drop" type="wildcard" pattern="*wp-includes*" >
<filter action="drop" type="wildcard" pattern="*wp-content*" >
<filter action="drop" type="wildcard" pattern="*wp-images*" >
That must be a fan problem, as its the only moving part. You might want to replace it.
My pundits are completely quiet, if I wasn't for the light in front I wouldn't know if it was on or not.
The Apple Mini is just one size too small, and thus sacrifices efficiency (laptop HD, little cooling).
If you are looking for a good office solution look at the ASUS Pundit. They don't get hot, have space for a decent harddisk and DVD drive and are very efficient with desk space (especially when used with a flatscreen and wireless keyboard)
So get a Mac Mini clone, and then run Linux/KDE on it. It looks (kind of) like and Apple, talks like an Apple with an accent but its still not a real Apple.
I'm tempted... but not enough yet. I will stick with the gray ATX box that has so far survived many, many upgrades (of OS & hardware)
[Rant]
My old Toshiba MSX (1.0) booted within seconds. Loading 64Kb of word processing software from tape took a little longer; but you could stick in ROM cartridges and be playing instantly at a blazing 3.5Mhz.
So a PC look a like that gets me working after just pressing the "ON" button and doesn't have a dumb "SHUT DOWN" sequence (power off should be good enough) gets my money.
At the moment I just never turn a PC off anymore so that I have the ability to do things when I want them without having enough waiting time to boil a kettle of water.
[/Rant]
They are pretty much dead from the start. My old flash MP3 player supports WMA, so do my DVD players. The fine print is that they do not support any form of encrypted WMA files.
It must be the same for millions of similar devices out there in the "real" world. Imagine 70-90% of clueless first time Yahoo music users trying to figure out why their US$ 60 subscription downloaded WMA files just don't work at all....
I just hope they outsourced the helpdesk support because it will get busy.
What happens when you do THAT is documented in a '83 Dutch B-movie by Dick Maas (not all that bad, compared to other Dutch B-movies)
De Lift (Going Up)
The lift [elevator] got hungry... nuf' said.
Just remember:
The First Law of Economists: For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite economist.
The Second Law of Economists: They're both wrong.
My (limited) observation is that Googles dominance is limited to the area they are playing in.
My European websites obtain 90% of their hits from Google.
My Chinese/Japanese language sites obtain 90% of their hits from the local Yahoo.
The browser wars are far from over outside of the ASCII 1-128 area.
It seems to me that these jammers require the same amount of electricity as a regular mobile phone. Probably a lot more; as your mobile actively tries to conserve it; and a jammer has to be active all the time to generate loud noice over the communications all around it; on multiple wavebands.
That means you will be carrying around a gadget with a pretty huge battery pack.
This needs to be recharged religiously, daily.
For no other purpose than to ensure other people can't talk on the phone.
Oh boy and you though the people blabbing loudly on cell phones were obnoxious freaks.
My 2 cents? This isn't going to work.
Simple answer: what you are looking for does not (yet) exist.
There are a lot of fancy applications on the net, none of them any usefull for your purposes (and please prove me wrong, I'd though I had been pretty thorough)
Having looked at the same problem for my own small business I'd say that if your business is essential to you, you either start asking for quotations for companies that can deliver a solution to fits your purposes or find a stock application that does most of what you need. (and does it in a way that most members of staff understand it)
Look at the price, and see if its matches your needs and budget.
As you are setting up your own business, you should NOT be fooling around trying to recreate the wheel; you will need al your energy to focus on your business and hope that it doesn't go belly up.
One sure way of doing that is having a dozen incompatible systems hide all your major business information from you, your customers, and your staff.
Who says that programming should be the only thing you do? "Skill Set" means a set of skills, programming is just one of them.
You probably remember the guys from CS college, who didn't spend their nights coding, but walked around in suits and always had some weird deal up their sleeves (re-cycled floppies in the early 1990's... this guy was onto something).
Unlike them, I spent my nights hacking, coding, and loved it (and had significantly less cash). However when I graduated I started working, and found other peoples projects less then interesting. Also, it was pretty limiting sitting in a cube and just waiting for more work.
So I quit, and did some completly unrelated stuff for some years. Had a good time, and now I am coding some times, but running my own non-IT business most times. (computers are a tool only, one I use to make money, I keep them sharp, and they help me run my business).
I can't do what I do now without what I learned in CS college, but I can't do it without what I learned outside of it either.
So keep up to date, but look outside the box for your own particular niche / edge.
Of course, it could be that these are a totally new 10,000 ...... (nah)
CNET Asia ; August 2003 IBM to up India headcount to 10,000?
So now what? US$ 450 mln of real estate hanging out to dry being totally useless.
Do we get to crash this thing into the moon for kicks?
Sure its not as cool as doing a kamikaze into Jupiter ; but we can set a target, points if they hit the flag.
Having installed RH9 on a new server, I wanted to make sure that the data disks were at least RAID mirrored.
The motherboard I bought has an onboard VIA 8237 Southbridge which has 2 S-IDE controllers (and an optional, Win2000+ only supported Software RAID bios). The stock RH9 does not recognize the VIA 8237, probably because its fairly recent. Newer kernels do, and with some patches to the IDE driver (adding the chips PCI ID's) the chip is now recognized ; the "old-style" IDE controllers work in DMA mode but it fails to find the two S-IDE controllers. End of story, as I had bought 2 S-IDE hard disks.
Second attempt was the Highpoint Rocket Raid S-IDE card (NT$ 3000) as it claimed to have Linux drivers. Standard the kernel will recognize the card as a Highpoint IDE controller.
You need to disable this (hde=ignore etc) and then compile and install your own RAID module. The code for the RAID module comes from the HighPoint website.
This I got to work, it recognizes the RAID array defined in the contollers BIOS. I setup partitions and an EXT-3 file system. But when I started copying files several GB of files to the new RAID array it crashed Linux hard ; and destroyed the filesystems.
No idea why; but as I didn't want to take any risks (and the Highpoint is Software Raid anyway); I disabled the Highpoint driver; and used the kernel IDE driver to access the Highpoint S-IDE controllers and installed the stock Linux software RAID solution. No problems, works charmingly.
Just my $.02 ; next time I have a larger budget I buy a decent hardware raid solution, not one of these half-baked software raid fakes.
The new "stored value" cards used in Taipei's public transport are using RFID. These are used for access to the subway system and by some of the bus companies.
Amazingly convinient; just wave your wallet next to the sensor and you can pass through. Don't need to bother about getting the actual card out; so they get points for cool technology value.
Made out of durable plastic the cards can be "recharged" when they run out of value saving on waste.
Oh, and you buy them by tossing some coins into a machine (no need for a DNA sample)
Still can't use them to buy soda or anything else..
Now I can :
- Spend 2 hours trying to improve my business
- Watch some television and chill out after yet another 60+ hour week
I was tempted for (1) but reading the article gives me plenty of excuses; since nothing much genius like is likely to come out of me today anyway. So no great American Novel/website/piece of software this weekend either.Oh well, there is always next week....
Amen to that, just to think of all the computer books I didn't have to buy because I could find the answers quicker, and better documented on the net? I used to pony over regular fortunes for the latest version of whatever was required to get the job done. I make a living solving stupid problems.
Some competition would be healthy, just in case that a rogue hostile take over takes out Google's data centres & civilisation, and my job, at the same time ;-)
Why bother giving the money to RIAA/(whoever) as they are private companies. Of course, they hold most copyrights, but with an independent distribution system future artists would not sign their rights away so soon.
Pure wuzzy anti-free-market, big government thinking of couse. But then as organisations grow beyond control and start using their own international police forces to enforce their regulations (laywers, lobyists in employ) shouldn't we treat them as governments? When was the last time a national government gave any other competing country a break, or a share of its profits?
Of course, once the government gains directly from the proceeds, expect copyright duration to last forever.
http://www.net-tune.net
From the Onkyo FAQ:
While WAV, WMA, MP3 are supported formats, there are many variations of these. Please check that the bitrates used are compatible and if certain files will not play back, check the following: * The file must not be saved in a system folder, such as C:\Windows or C:\WINNT. * WMA file contains Digital Rights Management (DRM) which prevents reproduction on other devices. * The WAV file is not in RIFFWAVE format or is corrupt. Format Bitrate Sampling Frequency WAV(PCM) ---- 32k/44.1k/48kHz MP3 All 32k/44.1k/48kHz WMA 32/36/40/44/48/64/80/96/128/160/192bps 32k/44.1k/48kHz
Further, it uses DHCP to get an IP address. And needs ports 60096,60097. But that is of course all useless information until I actually find one of these machines.