I would still call both of those things pretty geeky.
Steps in a more mainstream direction, certainly, but anything called an "appliance" (that isn't a toaster) is going to make normal folks' eyes glaze over.
Just because you don't need a screwdriver to install it doesn't put it in the same market as Skype.
Opening up some of the "secrets" to potential customers and supporting intranet-only implementations of the software open up a revenue stream. Bingo. As long as Skype remains closed, only eBay gets to play "for real".
Somewhere between the lazy super-geeky hardware marketing done by Asterisk, and the ultra-mainstream consumerist approach taken by Skype, lies the whole freekin' revolution in voice communications that we've been waiting for since the late 90s.
How much does an enterprise pay for a new phone system? What if the front-end to that phone system was Skype and backend was Asterisk? I'm not an operator, but I suspect that IT managers could double their salaries, and both eBay and Digium would see big cash coming in the door.
Wow, I now have a real person to curse whenever Apple tries to charge me $30 to enable clipboard actions in the media player that ships with their OS.
I'm not sure that Mr. Perlman has anything to do with Apple's petty greed or not, but given his role in this little debacle I'll assume he does. I don't like cursing Jobs because he has magical charms that protect him.
Cheers, Steve! I remember cursing you for WebTV, too, back when people actually used it.
Jeebus, you STILL can't create playlists on the iPod?
What kind of lame engineering is that? You have all your music with you, endless time to fiddle around with it, and... nope. I was disappointed by this in 2003, and I'm disappointed even more now.
The wife is an avid LJ member, has a lifetime account and spends a lot of time keeping up with an extended circle of friends. I develop community software. We talk about this stuff constantly.
The problems on LiveJournal demonstrate that Six Apart's management has no idea of who the members of their community are, or what they care about. LiveJournal isn't blogging software; it's a system for building and role-playing personas. Many journals are "kept" by fictional characters, who write things that in no way represent the real life thoughts of their authors.
This was all fine until SA decided that ad revenue was the way to fund their enterprise. Six Apart's customer base is now split: part community members, part advertisers. The mission of LiveJournal (the company) has been corrupted, because it is now about delivering eyeballs to advertisers, rather than delivering great community software to end users.
The switch is painfully obvious to the community (Pepsi Max mood theme? What a piece of crap!) but the community IS LiveJournal so they can't just leave. There is no mass exodus--you can't export an LJ account, import it into some other system (even a free copy of LiveJournal on your own server) and expect to carry on as before.
The only way out that I can see is for the users to organize and buy Six Apart out, replacing them with a non-profit foundation. Since that's about as likely to happen as Harry giving Snape a blowjob in real life, the end result will be the slow death of LJ as we know it.
Three to four minutes for a smoke, a few minutes to walk back inside, a few more to get settled again... it adds up.
The real productivity nosedive occurred when they stopped letting us smoke at our desks. Imagine having a cigarette AND staying in the zone while you do!
Umm, do you think maybe DELL wanted you to think that your computer was slow _on purpose_?
I find it hard to imagine that the agency that produced your snowflakes ad didn't know exactly what they were doing.
Perhaps that's still the case with online... whenever you see a technical glitch in a TV ad, you can bet that it was actually intended to catch your attention. These folks pay a lot of money to the designers and producers; nothing is left to chance.
Parent acts as if roads and cars are the only viable way to move around in New York City.
Busses, subways, commuter rail, bicycles, inline skates, ferries, water taxis, and good old fashioned walking are used by millions of commuters here every single day. The number of New Yorkers who use cars to commute is something like 6%.
The real problem is that the money is controlled by upstate lawmakers who have a similar failure of imagination when it comes to funding transit projects. They like to fund roads, not rails, and certainly not bikeways. That's fine, because that money comes from gas tax. But it leaves some 94% of NYC residents/taxpayers riding crappy trains and negotiating potholes on the bikeways.
The goal of this particular congestion pricing plan is to reduce traffic, sure, but a secondary goal is to create a sustainable fund for improving the mass-transit infrastructure in the city.
Right now all transit funding is controlled by the state, and upstate and suburban lawmakers are happy to take NYC tax dollars without allocating a fair share of funding in return. Congestion pricing may or may not affect the number of cars in lower Manhattan, but it will finally give the mayor and city council the ability to solve a whole litany of real problems that they have been unable to address without funding.
Yep, they can track you: don't drive into Manhattan. It's that simple. That's the whole point of the proposed law, to keep people from driving into Manhattan.
You can walk in, bike in, skate in, helicopter in, take the bus or train (you paid for that MetroCard with cash, right?) and you won't be tracked. There isn't going to be a border checkpoint or anything like when you fly into one of our airports.
But if you choose to use a car, you forfeit this particular slice of your right to privacy.
I'm a paranoid guy, but I'm all for this. Get out and walk like the rest of us if you don't like it.
Remote control assassination aircraft were bad enough, now we're deploying a robot army? If only I could figure out how to stop paying my taxes I would.
I can see the value in deploying IPv6, but I think it has to be done from the bottom, not from the top. A lot of posters have mentioned using it on intranets, and I'd like to hear more about that.
I'd love to see IPv6 depolyed on a low-bandwidth municipal wireless mesh. Any device within range that could speak IPv6 could become a peer on the network. This would enable all kinds of really cool applications, like city-wide sensor projects and multicast audio feeds.
Gateway to the IPv4 Internet could be provided using NAT by any device that was willing to act as a bridge.
There's no need to convert teh entire Interweb. IPv6 makes much more sense (ironically) in a controlled deployment where legacy hardware (and legacy thinking) isn't really a factor.
Your ISP uses the hijacked botnet to install a rootkit so they can "update your antivirus" on a regular basis.
Then they sell filesystem access to the RIAA, MPAA, NSA, and "legitimate" spammers (like their own marketing departments).
You can call it paranoia, but I call it good business sense. Once the opportunity is there for them to do it, some PHB will see the potential for corporate synergy.
The EFF is behind this bill, and that's more than enough stamp of approval for me.
For those without the time or energy to read Slater's response to the FUD being flung at the bill, the bottom line is that it creates a minimum standard of accountability for federal elections.
Individual states can (and should!) require even more transparency; this law would force those without any transparency at all to open up quite a bit.
Actually, this is a great public service. I have a couple windows virtual desktops that I log into in order to check how pages look in MSIE, and now I know I need to patch them next week.
Anyway, given MS's market share, patches to Windows *are* a bigger deal, newswise, than patches to other systems.
This just makes me sad. This is video that is paid for by British citizens. Publicly funded content. And still, the PHBs feel the need to lock it to specific devices, limit the number of views, and keep track of who watched what when.
I agree that it should have been released on the Developer Connection website, as a means to aid web and iPhone developers who are stuck with Windows environments.
Jobs can't actually expect 25% market share for Safari, can he? I think it might just be about getting a larger install base for the whole Apple software platform, including QuickTime, iTunes and (most importantly) Apple Software Update.
Slashdot Mirror
Odd. You have to go through DELL's consumer division if you want anything other than "enterprise" Linux.
Mention Debian to the business reps and they'll drop you like a radioactive watermelon.
I would still call both of those things pretty geeky.
Steps in a more mainstream direction, certainly, but anything called an "appliance" (that isn't a toaster) is going to make normal folks' eyes glaze over.
Just because you don't need a screwdriver to install it doesn't put it in the same market as Skype.
Viva la revolucion, tho!
Somewhere between the lazy super-geeky hardware marketing done by Asterisk, and the ultra-mainstream consumerist approach taken by Skype, lies the whole freekin' revolution in voice communications that we've been waiting for since the late 90s.
How much does an enterprise pay for a new phone system? What if the front-end to that phone system was Skype and backend was Asterisk? I'm not an operator, but I suspect that IT managers could double their salaries, and both eBay and Digium would see big cash coming in the door.
Wow, I now have a real person to curse whenever Apple tries to charge me $30 to enable clipboard actions in the media player that ships with their OS.
I'm not sure that Mr. Perlman has anything to do with Apple's petty greed or not, but given his role in this little debacle I'll assume he does. I don't like cursing Jobs because he has magical charms that protect him.
Cheers, Steve! I remember cursing you for WebTV, too, back when people actually used it.
Jeebus, you STILL can't create playlists on the iPod?
What kind of lame engineering is that? You have all your music with you, endless time to fiddle around with it, and... nope. I was disappointed by this in 2003, and I'm disappointed even more now.
The wife is an avid LJ member, has a lifetime account and spends a lot of time keeping up with an extended circle of friends. I develop community software. We talk about this stuff constantly.
The problems on LiveJournal demonstrate that Six Apart's management has no idea of who the members of their community are, or what they care about. LiveJournal isn't blogging software; it's a system for building and role-playing personas. Many journals are "kept" by fictional characters, who write things that in no way represent the real life thoughts of their authors.
This was all fine until SA decided that ad revenue was the way to fund their enterprise. Six Apart's customer base is now split: part community members, part advertisers. The mission of LiveJournal (the company) has been corrupted, because it is now about delivering eyeballs to advertisers, rather than delivering great community software to end users.
The switch is painfully obvious to the community (Pepsi Max mood theme? What a piece of crap!) but the community IS LiveJournal so they can't just leave. There is no mass exodus--you can't export an LJ account, import it into some other system (even a free copy of LiveJournal on your own server) and expect to carry on as before.
The only way out that I can see is for the users to organize and buy Six Apart out, replacing them with a non-profit foundation. Since that's about as likely to happen as Harry giving Snape a blowjob in real life, the end result will be the slow death of LJ as we know it.
Three to four minutes for a smoke, a few minutes to walk back inside, a few more to get settled again... it adds up.
The real productivity nosedive occurred when they stopped letting us smoke at our desks. Imagine having a cigarette AND staying in the zone while you do!
Not that I smoke and code, of course...
> "Today's systems"? Vista's only been out for a year, just how fucking short-sighted are they?
That patch was committed in 2003.
> Why is media playback is more important than network performance?
Because otherwise all the spam being sent by the bots on your system would prevent you from listening to your music, resulting in a support call.
Umm, do you think maybe DELL wanted you to think that your computer was slow _on purpose_?
I find it hard to imagine that the agency that produced your snowflakes ad didn't know exactly what they were doing.
Perhaps that's still the case with online... whenever you see a technical glitch in a TV ad, you can bet that it was actually intended to catch your attention. These folks pay a lot of money to the designers and producers; nothing is left to chance.
Parent acts as if roads and cars are the only viable way to move around in New York City.
Busses, subways, commuter rail, bicycles, inline skates, ferries, water taxis, and good old fashioned walking are used by millions of commuters here every single day. The number of New Yorkers who use cars to commute is something like 6%.
The real problem is that the money is controlled by upstate lawmakers who have a similar failure of imagination when it comes to funding transit projects. They like to fund roads, not rails, and certainly not bikeways. That's fine, because that money comes from gas tax. But it leaves some 94% of NYC residents/taxpayers riding crappy trains and negotiating potholes on the bikeways.
The goal of this particular congestion pricing plan is to reduce traffic, sure, but a secondary goal is to create a sustainable fund for improving the mass-transit infrastructure in the city.
Right now all transit funding is controlled by the state, and upstate and suburban lawmakers are happy to take NYC tax dollars without allocating a fair share of funding in return. Congestion pricing may or may not affect the number of cars in lower Manhattan, but it will finally give the mayor and city council the ability to solve a whole litany of real problems that they have been unable to address without funding.
Yep, they can track you: don't drive into Manhattan. It's that simple. That's the whole point of the proposed law, to keep people from driving into Manhattan.
You can walk in, bike in, skate in, helicopter in, take the bus or train (you paid for that MetroCard with cash, right?) and you won't be tracked. There isn't going to be a border checkpoint or anything like when you fly into one of our airports.
But if you choose to use a car, you forfeit this particular slice of your right to privacy.
I'm a paranoid guy, but I'm all for this. Get out and walk like the rest of us if you don't like it.
Remote control assassination aircraft were bad enough, now we're deploying a robot army? If only I could figure out how to stop paying my taxes I would.
I can see the value in deploying IPv6, but I think it has to be done from the bottom, not from the top. A lot of posters have mentioned using it on intranets, and I'd like to hear more about that.
I'd love to see IPv6 depolyed on a low-bandwidth municipal wireless mesh. Any device within range that could speak IPv6 could become a peer on the network. This would enable all kinds of really cool applications, like city-wide sensor projects and multicast audio feeds.
Gateway to the IPv4 Internet could be provided using NAT by any device that was willing to act as a bridge.
There's no need to convert teh entire Interweb. IPv6 makes much more sense (ironically) in a controlled deployment where legacy hardware (and legacy thinking) isn't really a factor.
That's why some clever software developer will make a widget that does it for them. Call it the "put my computer in responsive mode" button.
There. I claim prior art in case you try to patent that.
Your ISP uses the hijacked botnet to install a rootkit so they can "update your antivirus" on a regular basis.
Then they sell filesystem access to the RIAA, MPAA, NSA, and "legitimate" spammers (like their own marketing departments).
You can call it paranoia, but I call it good business sense. Once the opportunity is there for them to do it, some PHB will see the potential for corporate synergy.
Hmmm. Isn't this what inline frames are for?
The EFF is behind this bill, and that's more than enough stamp of approval for me.
For those without the time or energy to read Slater's response to the FUD being flung at the bill, the bottom line is that it creates a minimum standard of accountability for federal elections.
Individual states can (and should!) require even more transparency; this law would force those without any transparency at all to open up quite a bit.
That's not Firefox you hear crashing. It's Sun Java.
Took about 30 seconds to fire up the VM there. FF 2.0.0.4 on OSX 10.4.
Actually, this is a great public service. I have a couple windows virtual desktops that I log into in order to check how pages look in MSIE, and now I know I need to patch them next week.
Anyway, given MS's market share, patches to Windows *are* a bigger deal, newswise, than patches to other systems.
Play around with it isn't valid. I like the UI, but why can't it tell you the scores that the sliders are set to?
I know, a geek can figure it out in a few seconds, but it's dumb that he should have to deduce when the values could just be right there.
This just makes me sad. This is video that is paid for by British citizens. Publicly funded content. And still, the PHBs feel the need to lock it to specific devices, limit the number of views, and keep track of who watched what when.
Why should this site encourage more thoughtful posts than Slashdot does?
The USTPO is asking the public to do their jobs for them. Nice try, but real life doesn't work like that.
Now they're stuck with moderating the website and sifting though an enormous number of garbage posts.
Heh, interesting batch of replies to this post.
I agree that it should have been released on the Developer Connection website, as a means to aid web and iPhone developers who are stuck with Windows environments.
Jobs can't actually expect 25% market share for Safari, can he? I think it might just be about getting a larger install base for the whole Apple software platform, including QuickTime, iTunes and (most importantly) Apple Software Update.