Which, while not exactly the kind of money that will put them through college, is far more than your average web designer is making flipping burgers these days (>$16/hr...far better than any PT job I ever had).
Until someone markets a good, cheap, uplink solution, the neighborhoods will still be slaves to the wire.
Which brings up yet another problem that even us slaves to the wire have. That is TOS agreements that prevent people from running any type of server on a broadband connection (usually cable but DSL as well). So even though I've got the pipe I can't send much of anything up it.
ADSL additionally has the problem that even if you are allowed to serve from your DSL line, upstream speeds are usually 1/8 - 1/4 of the downstream making serving anything more than a family/friends page an exercise in futility.
Otherwise, if they take this irresponsible and extreme action, then they'll have to do things like put ballgags in the customer's mouthes to prevent them from talking.
Great idea! I can't believe they haven't thought of this one yet. I'm on my way down to the AMC theater offices right now.
Here's the thing about this technology (however massively it's been pimped here lately) that most folks seem to be missing. It's not meant to replace your cell phone, or your pager either (for the most part). This product is targeted first at hospitals where regular cell phones are banned (not sure if the interference things is true or not but it's a risk we don't really need to be taking IMHO). The way that I envision this being used is that docs, nurses, technicians, etc. have these things on and can communicate quickly and easily with each other.
Think about how inefficient it is to have someone have to take their gloves off in the ER to pick up the phone and dial the blood bank, Radiology, OR, etc., then re-glove and dive back in to trying to keep someone from bleeding out on the table. Imagine that with a voice command, the attending/chief resident, head nurse, intern, whomever could just say, "get me the blood bank" and make the order like that. Not only does it speed things up but it utilizes an otherwise under-used resource.
The trick of course will be to prevent people from using them to chat with friends..."yo Jim...I'm off in 20, wanna get a beer?" isn't really the best use of this tech.
Salon, however, often writes about social trends and what's happening in society; they write about people. In order to do that coherently and effectively, the writers have to be where the people are.
Exactly. The WRITERS have to be where the action is and where the people are. Everybody else (copy editors, office support, the money folk, etc.) can all live and work in Eye Socket, MT or Bumble Fuck, KS or wherever. Writers can stay in SF or NYC and work out of their apartments.
I think the original poster's point was that they have big, insanely expensive corporate offices in SF which forces not only high outlays for the real estate but it also forces them to pay higher salaries to everyone who works there, from CEO on down to the janitors, in order to make it so that people can work there. If they move those offices to the previously mentioned small towns, cost of living goes down and a $35-50K salary goes twice as far as it would in SF or NYC.
Let us look at Slashdot. For them to do the same they would need to demonstrate that the funds they make are a direct result of user activity.
Actually this isn't quite true. My wife works for a non-profit, performing arts/artists services organization. One of the benefits that they have for artist members (who pay an annual membership fee in the $50-100 range) is that they can also get the same health insurance that the organizations employees get, only they have to pay the premium themselves instead of having the employer pick up the bill. This is roughly what eBay is doing with its "independent contractors."
So, assuming that Slashdot employees actually have health insurance, all they would have to do to offer it to Slashdotters would be to set themselves up as a legal non-profit organization with memberships (not unlike what Rusty is doing over at K5 right now) and then offer insurance to members who wanted to pay for it.
Remember this (the non-profit or eBay stuff) isn't free insurance, it's just a chance for people to get much cheaper (usually under $150-200/month) health insurance than they would be able to afford on their own (usually $400-1500/month).
Is if they also pre-configure them with StarOffice or OpenOffice, with all the icons changed to look like MS Office XP icons, install Opera as the default browser, change the icons as above and set it up to mimic IE, install GIMP and change it as above to look like MS Paint, port Real Player and WMP to Linux and then somehow set it up so it crashes more often.
Grab yourself a heaping helping of that gummint cheese. Bioinformaticians are in such huge demand right now that post-doc positions (routinely $26-32K for the first year in most other biology disciplines) are getting $60K+ in academic circles and $100K+ in industry.
It's quite obvious that there are a huge number of likely invalid patents out there that are in desperate need of judicial/USPTO review.
One possible way of taking care of this and perhaps decreasing the number of frivolous patent infringment lawsuits (redundant?) is to require that in order to file such a suit, the patent holder must first prove that the patent is valid.
Whether this would happen through a judicial review process or a quick-and-dirty PTO review I don't know. This way, the person/company filing the lawsuit would have to be damn sure that the patent was legitimate before firing off a threatening lawsuit.
I don't really know how well this would work but it seems (at first blush anyway) like a decent idea. But then again, IANALAIWKMIIW (And I Would Kill Myself If I Was).
Another (perhaps equally hare-brained) idea would be to require patent holders to provide less restrictive/expensive licensing terms to academic and non-profit researchers and groups with the option of changing the licensing terms if the licensee derives a commercial product from the patent. This way, academic researchers could relatively easily incorporate patented ideas into their work instead of reinventing the wheel but still provide the original patent holder with protection on the original IP.
A friend of mine started out in the newspaper biz as a photographer/reporter at a small regional chain of weekly newspapers. Over the course of 2 years working that gig he ended up taking over most of the IS duties because the guy they had in the company was a trust fund idiot, he liked doing it and wanted to help the company transition to a more digital existence (which with papers covering all of northwest Washington State and a single printing plant made perfect sense to all concerned). Unfortunately there wasn't really an MIS type position at the company so he went looking for something that would allow him to follow this type of job path.
He was offered a position at a similar company in the region and took that to his current employer. Not only did he end up with a raise as the counter offer but an entire department including hardware/software budget, carte blanche on designing and spec-ing the systems, an assistant and the opportunity to identify others in the company that might be interested in doing similar work with him. Since that time, the company has been purchased by a larger, Canadian company and his job (including salary and responsibilites) have expanded dramatically and he couldn't be happier.
I guess the moral of my story is that if you like the company you work for, you like the job you have and you can identify similar advancement potential within your current company compared to the new company (assuming that's something you want), then you should go for it. You never know what kind of situation you'll be walking into in the other company (why do they need a new person anyway, churn because they treat their employees like shit?). Of course, if you think that the new company will provide better advancement potential, by all means, take that job.
You might also consider taking this opportunity to negotiate a performance review/pay-raise schedule with your current employer as part of the incentive package for keeping you there.
If you go to this page, you'll notice that he took a stock photo from Corbis as the basis of his model (probably taken from where you suggest) and then Photosop/GIMP-ed in the Chrysler Bldg, WTC (which seem to have been removed from the final version) and then added an imaginary building in the foreground to increase depth-of-field.
Really cool project, even if he'd completely made the whole skyline up.
Yes but PC Magazine doesn't email you to tell you that your Computer Shopper subscription is almost up and that you should renew to "a magazine" through them.
True but what I've been getting lately are "bills" for magazines that I haven't subsribed to from a billing company that services accounts for magazines I actually do subscribe to.
In other words, in addition to the bill for my subscription to MacWorld recently I received what appeared to be a bill for a subscription to Time an one to Sports Illustrated. On closer inspection, they were just solicitations but they were almost identical to the legit bill that arrived in the same envelope. --
OS X Version??
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So where's the OS X version? Or Classic Mac OS for that matter. I've got at least 10 machines that would run this instead of warezed versions of Orifice if it was available for Mac. If they can make it available for a 2 other Unices (leenooks and eyeriks), why not OS X, arguably the UNIX w/ the largest installed desktop user base?
Seriously, I'd buy 2 or 3 licenses for this if I could run them on my machines. --
Probably not an iPod killer yet, although it has many, many more features and welcome firewire port.
I'm not sure where you get "many, many more" features. It's got a 10GB larger HD and the time scaling which is cool if you're trying to copy that Joe Satriani solo but otherwise fairly useless. If you count being 4.5X the size (on a volume basis) and more than 1/2 again the weight of an iPod as features then I suppose it has "many, many more" but then it's got that whole fugly thing going against it so I wouldn't panic just yet if I were Apple.
So the question in the original post was basically, how can I sit down at any computer anywhere and access my "desktop," whether that be an actual desktop machine or a home folder on a server somewhere. (Yes, I realize that he wussed out at the end and dropped it down to Wintel+Java but bear with me.)
I'm looking for a similar solution. I have the following machines that I'd really like to have access too: 2x Mac G3s running OS9.x on a T1 line, 1x Athlon running Win2K on a T1, 1x SGI Octane2 running Irix on a T1, 1x P2 running RH7.1 on a T1 and 1x Mac G4 running OSX on a Cable Modem (there's also a couple of powerbooks in there running OS9 and X).
So bandwidth isn't really an issue (within limits) but cost and cross-platform-ability is. To make things slightly more difficult, I need to do primary work (and store files locally, with backups of course) on 2 of the Macs (including the OSX G4), the SGI, the Win2K box and the Linux box so a single server/multiple client setup won't work.
VNC seems plausible but what other, low/no cost solutions are out there? --
Apparently, the Celera mouse sequence had a lot of stuff missing. At this fall's International Mouse Genome Conference in Edinburgh a few people got up at the end of the Celera hack's talk about their database and asked about all the mistakes and internal inconsistencies that they'd found. His reply was..."no you didn't, our data is right, you need to re-check your data." All in all it was quite sad.
I don't want to call bullshit on this one but I'm afraid I must. Sure, there are companies out there *cough* Celera *cough*who hoarded data and even used public data to advance their own research without then adding back to the public database. But to say that the public human (and mouse which is my specialty) genome project suffered because of private interference is karma whore bullshit.
If you remember correctly (which you apparently don't), the public and private human genome sequences were published on the exact same day, one in Science (Celera) and one in Nature (public). The data in the two sets is slightly different but essentially the same stuff. Interestingly though, the private data (to which I have some access) is almost completely undecipherable and full of restrictions on its use, whereas the public data is simple to get to, simple to understand and completely available for downstream academic use (and easily licensable for commercial use).
I do agree with you statement that many financial backers (including some who fund both public and private research) are...
doing it "to make a crap load of money" but I think you ignore the fact that many of us in "public" research take advantage of the private money to advance the public interest. Yes, there are situations in which NDAs and similar documents are involved, but more often than not, the "private" money that I've been involved with in research has had no limits on publication or sharing of resources/reagents. DOD money on the other hand (I'm just getting started on a DOD funded collaboration) comes with so many strings attached that you feel like a freakin' puppet.
It's different because it's branded Yahoo!(TM) which your average net going yahoo (not-TM) thinks is _the_ internet search engine. I've tried repeatedly to get an otherwise very intelligent colleague of mine to use Google for his searches because half the time Yahoo comes up short but he sticks with Yahoo for the same reason buy a Sony DVD player when there are dozens of better/cheaper alternatives. Branding/brainwashing plain and simple.
But of course, not everything is art. Sure, there are a lot of games out there that I would consider art (YMMV of course) but just because I think that something deserves the "art" moniker doesn't necessarily make it art. I think in this case, the real question is, "does SFMOMA think that video games are art?" If they're bothering to have the symposium then, to a certain extent, the question has been answered and the answer is a qualified, "yes."
In any case, I think we can all agree that Daikatana is definitely not art.
Slashdot Mirror
Which, while not exactly the kind of money that will put them through college, is far more than your average web designer is making flipping burgers these days (>$16/hr...far better than any PT job I ever had).
Until someone markets a good, cheap, uplink solution, the neighborhoods will still be slaves to the wire.
Which brings up yet another problem that even us slaves to the wire have. That is TOS agreements that prevent people from running any type of server on a broadband connection (usually cable but DSL as well). So even though I've got the pipe I can't send much of anything up it.
ADSL additionally has the problem that even if you are allowed to serve from your DSL line, upstream speeds are usually 1/8 - 1/4 of the downstream making serving anything more than a family/friends page an exercise in futility.
E
Otherwise, if they take this irresponsible and extreme action, then they'll have to do things like put ballgags in the customer's mouthes to prevent them from talking.
Great idea! I can't believe they haven't thought of this one yet. I'm on my way down to the AMC theater offices right now.
Here's the thing about this technology (however massively it's been pimped here lately) that most folks seem to be missing. It's not meant to replace your cell phone, or your pager either (for the most part). This product is targeted first at hospitals where regular cell phones are banned (not sure if the interference things is true or not but it's a risk we don't really need to be taking IMHO). The way that I envision this being used is that docs, nurses, technicians, etc. have these things on and can communicate quickly and easily with each other.
Think about how inefficient it is to have someone have to take their gloves off in the ER to pick up the phone and dial the blood bank, Radiology, OR, etc., then re-glove and dive back in to trying to keep someone from bleeding out on the table. Imagine that with a voice command, the attending/chief resident, head nurse, intern, whomever could just say, "get me the blood bank" and make the order like that. Not only does it speed things up but it utilizes an otherwise under-used resource.
The trick of course will be to prevent people from using them to chat with friends..."yo Jim...I'm off in 20, wanna get a beer?" isn't really the best use of this tech.
E
Salon, however, often writes about social trends and what's happening in society; they write about people. In order to do that coherently and effectively, the writers have to be where the people are.
Exactly. The WRITERS have to be where the action is and where the people are. Everybody else (copy editors, office support, the money folk, etc.) can all live and work in Eye Socket, MT or Bumble Fuck, KS or wherever. Writers can stay in SF or NYC and work out of their apartments.
I think the original poster's point was that they have big, insanely expensive corporate offices in SF which forces not only high outlays for the real estate but it also forces them to pay higher salaries to everyone who works there, from CEO on down to the janitors, in order to make it so that people can work there. If they move those offices to the previously mentioned small towns, cost of living goes down and a $35-50K salary goes twice as far as it would in SF or NYC.
E
Let us look at Slashdot. For them to do the same they would need to demonstrate that the funds they make are a direct result of user activity.
Actually this isn't quite true. My wife works for a non-profit, performing arts/artists services organization. One of the benefits that they have for artist members (who pay an annual membership fee in the $50-100 range) is that they can also get the same health insurance that the organizations employees get, only they have to pay the premium themselves instead of having the employer pick up the bill. This is roughly what eBay is doing with its "independent contractors."
So, assuming that Slashdot employees actually have health insurance, all they would have to do to offer it to Slashdotters would be to set themselves up as a legal non-profit organization with memberships (not unlike what Rusty is doing over at K5 right now) and then offer insurance to members who wanted to pay for it.
Remember this (the non-profit or eBay stuff) isn't free insurance, it's just a chance for people to get much cheaper (usually under $150-200/month) health insurance than they would be able to afford on their own (usually $400-1500/month).
E
Is if they also pre-configure them with StarOffice or OpenOffice, with all the icons changed to look like MS Office XP icons, install Opera as the default browser, change the icons as above and set it up to mimic IE, install GIMP and change it as above to look like MS Paint, port Real Player and WMP to Linux and then somehow set it up so it crashes more often.
Grab yourself a heaping helping of that gummint cheese. Bioinformaticians are in such huge demand right now that post-doc positions (routinely $26-32K for the first year in most other biology disciplines) are getting $60K+ in academic circles and $100K+ in industry.
YMMV of course.
It's quite obvious that there are a huge number of likely invalid patents out there that are in desperate need of judicial/USPTO review.
One possible way of taking care of this and perhaps decreasing the number of frivolous patent infringment lawsuits (redundant?) is to require that in order to file such a suit, the patent holder must first prove that the patent is valid.
Whether this would happen through a judicial review process or a quick-and-dirty PTO review I don't know. This way, the person/company filing the lawsuit would have to be damn sure that the patent was legitimate before firing off a threatening lawsuit.
I don't really know how well this would work but it seems (at first blush anyway) like a decent idea. But then again, IANALAIWKMIIW (And I Would Kill Myself If I Was).
Another (perhaps equally hare-brained) idea would be to require patent holders to provide less restrictive/expensive licensing terms to academic and non-profit researchers and groups with the option of changing the licensing terms if the licensee derives a commercial product from the patent. This way, academic researchers could relatively easily incorporate patented ideas into their work instead of reinventing the wheel but still provide the original patent holder with protection on the original IP.
Just a thought
A friend of mine started out in the newspaper biz as a photographer/reporter at a small regional chain of weekly newspapers. Over the course of 2 years working that gig he ended up taking over most of the IS duties because the guy they had in the company was a trust fund idiot, he liked doing it and wanted to help the company transition to a more digital existence (which with papers covering all of northwest Washington State and a single printing plant made perfect sense to all concerned). Unfortunately there wasn't really an MIS type position at the company so he went looking for something that would allow him to follow this type of job path.
He was offered a position at a similar company in the region and took that to his current employer. Not only did he end up with a raise as the counter offer but an entire department including hardware/software budget, carte blanche on designing and spec-ing the systems, an assistant and the opportunity to identify others in the company that might be interested in doing similar work with him. Since that time, the company has been purchased by a larger, Canadian company and his job (including salary and responsibilites) have expanded dramatically and he couldn't be happier.
I guess the moral of my story is that if you like the company you work for, you like the job you have and you can identify similar advancement potential within your current company compared to the new company (assuming that's something you want), then you should go for it. You never know what kind of situation you'll be walking into in the other company (why do they need a new person anyway, churn because they treat their employees like shit?). Of course, if you think that the new company will provide better advancement potential, by all means, take that job.
You might also consider taking this opportunity to negotiate a performance review/pay-raise schedule with your current employer as part of the incentive package for keeping you there.
E
trying to figure out why Apple people would buy special software for recycling waste files into free space
Especially when Microsoft already has a monopoly on that market with default installs of their software.
If you go to this page, you'll notice that he took a stock photo from Corbis as the basis of his model (probably taken from where you suggest) and then Photosop/GIMP-ed in the Chrysler Bldg, WTC (which seem to have been removed from the final version) and then added an imaginary building in the foreground to increase depth-of-field.
Really cool project, even if he'd completely made the whole skyline up.
...to slashdot the fuck out of it
You haven't met many Columbia students, have you?
Yes but PC Magazine doesn't email you to tell you that your Computer Shopper subscription is almost up and that you should renew to "a magazine" through them.
True but what I've been getting lately are "bills" for magazines that I haven't subsribed to from a billing company that services accounts for magazines I actually do subscribe to.
In other words, in addition to the bill for my subscription to MacWorld recently I received what appeared to be a bill for a subscription to Time an one to Sports Illustrated. On closer inspection, they were just solicitations but they were almost identical to the legit bill that arrived in the same envelope.
--
So where's the OS X version? Or Classic Mac OS for that matter. I've got at least 10 machines that would run this instead of warezed versions of Orifice if it was available for Mac. If they can make it available for a 2 other Unices (leenooks and eyeriks), why not OS X, arguably the UNIX w/ the largest installed desktop user base?
Seriously, I'd buy 2 or 3 licenses for this if I could run them on my machines.
--
I'm not sure where you get "many, many more" features. It's got a 10GB larger HD and the time scaling which is cool if you're trying to copy that Joe Satriani solo but otherwise fairly useless. If you count being 4.5X the size (on a volume basis) and more than 1/2 again the weight of an iPod as features then I suppose it has "many, many more" but then it's got that whole fugly thing going against it so I wouldn't panic just yet if I were Apple.
--
So the question in the original post was basically, how can I sit down at any computer anywhere and access my "desktop," whether that be an actual desktop machine or a home folder on a server somewhere. (Yes, I realize that he wussed out at the end and dropped it down to Wintel+Java but bear with me.)
I'm looking for a similar solution. I have the following machines that I'd really like to have access too: 2x Mac G3s running OS9.x on a T1 line, 1x Athlon running Win2K on a T1, 1x SGI Octane2 running Irix on a T1, 1x P2 running RH7.1 on a T1 and 1x Mac G4 running OSX on a Cable Modem (there's also a couple of powerbooks in there running OS9 and X).
So bandwidth isn't really an issue (within limits) but cost and cross-platform-ability is. To make things slightly more difficult, I need to do primary work (and store files locally, with backups of course) on 2 of the Macs (including the OSX G4), the SGI, the Win2K box and the Linux box so a single server/multiple client setup won't work.
VNC seems plausible but what other, low/no cost solutions are out there?
--
How about this, or this, or perhaps, this, or what about this one, or even this old thing.
--
I don't think he was an employee of CompUSA, else he would have stopped the little bugger.
Actually if it had been a CompUSA employee, he wouldn't have had the slightest idea what was going on.
--
Granted, this isn't a PC chip, but one wonders how long it will be before we hear 'dude, you've got a 110GHz Dell!'
Dude...your 110 GHz Dell melted through your desk 55 times faster than my my 2Ghz Dell did. Coo!
Apparently, the Celera mouse sequence had a lot of stuff missing. At this fall's International Mouse Genome Conference in Edinburgh a few people got up at the end of the Celera hack's talk about their database and asked about all the mistakes and internal inconsistencies that they'd found. His reply was..."no you didn't, our data is right, you need to re-check your data." All in all it was quite sad.
I don't want to call bullshit on this one but I'm afraid I must. Sure, there are companies out there *cough* Celera *cough*who hoarded data and even used public data to advance their own research without then adding back to the public database. But to say that the public human (and mouse which is my specialty) genome project suffered because of private interference is karma whore bullshit.
...
If you remember correctly (which you apparently don't), the public and private human genome sequences were published on the exact same day, one in Science (Celera) and one in Nature (public). The data in the two sets is slightly different but essentially the same stuff. Interestingly though, the private data (to which I have some access) is almost completely undecipherable and full of restrictions on its use, whereas the public data is simple to get to, simple to understand and completely available for downstream academic use (and easily licensable for commercial use).
I do agree with you statement that many financial backers (including some who fund both public and private research) are
doing it "to make a crap load of money" but I think you ignore the fact that many of us in "public" research take advantage of the private money to advance the public interest. Yes, there are situations in which NDAs and similar documents are involved, but more often than not, the "private" money that I've been involved with in research has had no limits on publication or sharing of resources/reagents. DOD money on the other hand (I'm just getting started on a DOD funded collaboration) comes with so many strings attached that you feel like a freakin' puppet.
It's different because it's branded Yahoo!(TM) which your average net going yahoo (not-TM) thinks is _the_ internet search engine. I've tried repeatedly to get an otherwise very intelligent colleague of mine to use Google for his searches because half the time Yahoo comes up short but he sticks with Yahoo for the same reason buy a Sony DVD player when there are dozens of better/cheaper alternatives. Branding/brainwashing plain and simple.
But of course, not everything is art. Sure, there are a lot of games out there that I would consider art (YMMV of course) but just because I think that something deserves the "art" moniker doesn't necessarily make it art. I think in this case, the real question is, "does SFMOMA think that video games are art?" If they're bothering to have the symposium then, to a certain extent, the question has been answered and the answer is a qualified, "yes."
In any case, I think we can all agree that Daikatana is definitely not art.
--