Depends on the size of the company and how critical you are to them. waht you are asking for is actually a fundamental of California state law, so it's not that unusual. But if it's a large company, not operating in California, these sorts of things are likely to be rather boiler plate and immutable. If they have to have their lawyers get involved, it may be more trouble to alter the agreement than it's worth to them.
something else is that it's not clear if such provisions are really enforceable. Much like the contracts that say you can't do anything vaguely related to your original field of employ in the next decade.
Regardless, paying a good lawyer for an hour of his time to review it with you and give you advice, would probably be money well spent.
It depends on the building materials, but I've found that you're lucky to get 802.11 anything through 2 walls with any strength left. So yes, you'll want to set up repeaters, etc.
$7000 should be more than plenty for this. In fact, you could probably do this for under $1000 without too much trouble, then take the remaining $6000 and do something useful with it. For example, take a trip overseas and spend a few weeks somewhere you've never been. London is a great place to start. Foreign, but not too foreign.
For under a thousand you can get round trip airfare for two to London, leaving you with $5000 to blow while you are there. So, let's say two weeks in a decent hotel (say $200/night). That's $2800, leaving you with $2200 for meals, etc. Or hell, just do a one week venture and live really high on the hog.
But bayesian filtering is ineffective when applied that way. In fact, it can be quite harmful when applied that way because of it's proneness to filtering out what you do want. Do any of those systems actually use bayesian filters?
Just one thought. If you are a spammer, why would you want to send e-mail to somebody using bayesian filtering? It seems to me that these are people who are actively doing what they can to block these ads and are extremely unlikely to respond to the advertisement.
It seems like this would be beyond the point of diminishing returns. If I wanted viagra ads, they'd have been getting through my filter in the first place, non?
It's possible that if somebody was watching illegal content, the cops could get a warrant, grab the TiVo, and then have a log of every remote click that the TiVo heard, even those for devices other than the TiVo.
Unless, of course, they suspected you of terrorism, then they could do all of the above without the warrant.
I can't figure out how one would watch TV in a manner that would be a terrorist threat, but I could see a government agency wanting to use this information in profiling. If they discovered that 99.999% of terrorists watch reruns of Ba Ba Blacksheep, then they could use the Tivo data to track the bad guys...
A little far fetched, but I'd have said that about warantless searches and indefinited detentions a few years ago.
Here's the thing, if the goal here is to have a conversation, then, no, this probably isn't a good solution. If the goal, on the other hand, is to create a sense of being together, then this would work well.
I mean, when you are in a relationship long enough, you tend to have less conversations, and it's more time just spent being around the other person. Doing things together, or sometimes just being in the same place but doing your own things.
If you have a long distance relationship, it's easy to stay in communication these days. The trick is creating that sense of physical proximity, that the other person is somehow there. This may be possible, to a degree, through a gaming environment.
You go out and buy a brand new DVD for say $20. You then go and sell it on ebay used for $10. You can own this DVD for quite some time, and as long as you take decent care of it, it costs you only $10 over it's lifetime. This, as opposed to $7 for something that will become worthless in a short period.
Here's the thing. Comcast is offering a service and the only remedy for a breach of contract by either party is simply to terminate the service. So, if you go over your cap, and you get harassed by comcast you go somewhere else. They are happy because you aren't sucking up their resources, and you'll be happy because you'll find somebody that provides the service you need.
Having said that, the one exception I make to this is areas where Comcast is available and DSL isn't. If it's the only viable possibility for Internet service then I think local regulators need to step in and regulate how Comcast handles these cases. It would not surprise me if Comcast was sending out these letters to people that weren't really using up that much bandwidth in the hopes that they could push them into getting upgraded service. Regulators need to be aware of this possibility and prevent it.
It's simply stating the cultural differences that do exist. There are advantages and disadvantages to the approaches innate in each culture. It would seem that the American culture is better suited to innovation and creativity, but that other cultures are better suited to precision and perfection. Both are important in the development of technology.
This didn't say they cannot think for themselves, rather that they defer to authority, and in many situations, that's a good thing. Conversely it seems to suggest that Americans don't have much appreciation for structure, heirarchy and procedure, and that might explain why some software is as flaky as it is even if it is innovative.
In the real world, you'll get ping times in the 550-600ms range. It's not at terrible as you'd think, but like I said in a previous post, it makes using a terminal quite painful. It's usable, but really unpleasant.
I'm not familiar with DirecWay service, but I have done quite a bit of remote work using SSH over satellite. It's rather painful, but it is usable. I usually get about 1/2 second of latency and it is irritating, but you can still get stuff done if you have to.
If you're expecting to do hours upon hours of work this way though, I imagine it will drive you nuts.
They are normal WMA files by default. Which is to say, yes you can play them on anything capable of playing WMA, but then that's a standard Microsoft controls. This means that Apple and HP would ultimately be beholden to Microsoft if they support WMA. If WMA becomes the de facto standard then Apple and HP would have no choice but to support it and that woudld give Microsoft control over them.
As it now stands, WMA is not de facto. People became used to MP3's being the standard for digital music before WMA came into this scene. Whether it remains that way or not going forward remains to be seen. If all players support it and the majority of people are ripping wma files, then it's quite possible. At that point, then Microsoft controls the world of digital music.
You could almost make the same point except that AAC and WMA are very different beasts.
Quoting apple's site:
"AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia"
So Apple does not control the development of AAC, that consortium does. The only thing proprietary in Apple's AAC format is the DRM stuff. If you rip your own files, by default they'll be AAC without DRM, and I can play that music anywhere I have an AAC supporting player. I can play AAC files with XMMS if I want to, just not the DRM encoded Itunes files.
I can't figure out why Apple would ever want to support WMA. If they support WMA, then it's just one more reason for people to buy Microsoft over Apple, or anything else.
Once again we see the Microsoft monopoly extending it's grasp. They create WMA and then they set it up so that the built in CD-ripping in Windows will default to using WMA. Most people end up ripping in that format, not knowing any better. Then that becomes the standard for these files.
If that's the standard, then Microsoft can choose to enforce it however they want. They can alter licensing, build in whatever DRM restrictions they want, and since it's the standard everybody has to play ball.
Why precisely would I, or anybody, but the HP model over the IPod? Is it cheaper? Because it is waaaaay uglier than the IPod. If it's cheaper, then isn't this likely to hurt Apple? I mean, I'd give up aesthetics for say $50 off the price tag.
I was originally thinking that HP would have the ipod features, but in a different style case. This thing looks like an IPod that's been severely bruised.
You are right, it will not happen. Things have got too complicated, it would just not be affordable. If they tried to build a new run of Saturn 5 and Apollo, to return to the moon, safety regulations, inavailability of key components, and lots of other things would kill it, not to mention the huge amount of software needed.
Actually I disagree. We could do it, if we had the motivation, I just argue that we lack that motivation. Many of us think it would be cool, but nobody's willing to make a serious national investment in something that has no obvious payoff other than to say, "yup, we did that".
Until we have a necessity to be in space, we won't be there. Really it's a simple economic equation. When it becoems cost effective to mine minerals from other planets, we'll be out there. That's a combination of technological innovation, and economic strain. It will happen, some day, but until then, get comfortable on this rock.
Of course, the networks will be blathering on about a proposal that has no details, like the immigration proposal, and things like a tanking economy and soliders killed in Iraq will be ignored.
The news will always report what is sexy, shocking, etc. Soldiers killed in Iraq is shocking, but people are getting numb to it unless there's a dramatic spike in deaths. They'll blather on about this proposal, but not for more than a couple days. As for the economy, the press doesn't need to talk about it. The unemployed people will talk about it to all of their friends, and that will take care of itself (though the press will cover it).
As far as this goes there are two kinds of people Bush is addressing:
1) Space nuts 2) Everybody else
Yes, the space nuts are the type who would vote based on the NASA budget. There are few, but I'm sure they are out there.
Ultimately though this is about looking visionary. It's an ephemeral concept, but by proposing big ideas, he looks more like a leader. Saying that he wants to go to mars sounds forward thinking without being totally ridiculous. So people will add that into the composite of what they think of him.
This is not a major thing, but it does add one little piece to the puzzle and it costs him nothing. It's good press and all he has to do is say it, and have some of his people do a cursory investigation of the prospects. Then he can forget about it and let congress kill it.
That too, but I'd say the same thing if this were a president I liked. No major exploration was ever launched without a very good economic reason. The "new world" wasn't discovered for the sake of human endeavor. It was about money, and until a mars expedition is about money, it ain't gonna happen.
We aren't going to Mars or the moon. This is election year politics. He's trying to look like a visionary leader, by boldly setting forth to conquer the universe (or is that liberate?).
This will all get killed in budget negotiations after the election. He'll be able to look like he's fighting for it, but ultimately his own people in congress will cut the budget. Kinda like no child left behind. Yeah, real leadership there, except that the budget isn't there to run it properly.
So, for now, just whip out your 3D glasses and check out the photos coming back because that's as close as we are getting for a very long time.
I think the majority of people who were "educated" working white collar jobs did give a crap when factory jobs started leaving. Howver, when the blue collar jobs started going away there was a clear path out of that problem: education. Basically the theory was that if you lost your manufacturing job, you go to college, get your degree and get one of those better paying white collar jobs. We pass off the dirty, demanding, repetitive work to the reset of the world and move up the food chain.
The problem we face now is that there's no clear sense of where you go from here. Getting a college degree may not help you, and with the rising costs of college, it might actually hurt you in the long run. If you have to work at the Gap, do you really want to be paying off college loans too? So far, I've heard no good answer on what to do next.
I'm not big on patents, but I think that the tivo features in discussion here are non-obvious. To get an idea of how non-obvious it is, go to a lay person who is unfamiliar with tivo and try to explain what's so cool about it. They will most likely go, "so it's just like a VCR", and you'll run in mental circles explaining what is cool about Tivo.
Then you sit them down in front of Tivo, hit pause, fast forward through the commercial, etc, and then it dawns on them. Sounds like non-obvious to me. As for non-trivial, that's a little harder to back.
I have an IPod, and I paid a premium for it mostly because it is a very small form factor. It is the only hard drive based mp3 player I can carry in a shirt pocket without looking like a complete embicile. The IPod does one thing and it does it incredibly well.
This won't be an IPod killer because it's going to do everything and it will do it in a mediocre manner. How many people need an ultra portable video player? I live in the city and do a lot of walking so having a portable audio player makes perfect sense. But it would be dangerous to do the same thing and watch video.
Something for the kids perhaps? Not at $400-800, unless the thing is indestructible. Why would I shell out for that when I can shell out a fraction of that for a game boy that will keep them far more distracted.
I can see only two valuable uses for this:
1) Long flights - but how many of us have enough long flights to pay for this and don't carry a laptop along already.
2) Photo/Video storage on the go - if you take a lot of pictures, it's nice to have a device to store the data on while you are on the go.
Other than that, what possible use do I have for this device. I've got enough crap to lug around as it is, why would I want one more device?
Okay, let's think about this for a moment. You are going to try to compete in a market in which the 800 pound gorilla is competing. Do you really want to paying for that gorilla's bananas? Which is to say, it is damn foolish of them to use Windows as their OS because MS can sink their boat at a moments notice if it behooves them.
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Depends on the size of the company and how critical you are to them. waht you are asking for is actually a fundamental of California state law, so it's not that unusual. But if it's a large company, not operating in California, these sorts of things are likely to be rather boiler plate and immutable. If they have to have their lawyers get involved, it may be more trouble to alter the agreement than it's worth to them.
something else is that it's not clear if such provisions are really enforceable. Much like the contracts that say you can't do anything vaguely related to your original field of employ in the next decade.
Regardless, paying a good lawyer for an hour of his time to review it with you and give you advice, would probably be money well spent.
It depends on the building materials, but I've found that you're lucky to get 802.11 anything through 2 walls with any strength left. So yes, you'll want to set up repeaters, etc.
$7000 should be more than plenty for this. In fact, you could probably do this for under $1000 without too much trouble, then take the remaining $6000 and do something useful with it. For example, take a trip overseas and spend a few weeks somewhere you've never been. London is a great place to start. Foreign, but not too foreign.
For under a thousand you can get round trip airfare for two to London, leaving you with $5000 to blow while you are there. So, let's say two weeks in a decent hotel (say $200/night). That's $2800, leaving you with $2200 for meals, etc. Or hell, just do a one week venture and live really high on the hog.
But bayesian filtering is ineffective when applied that way. In fact, it can be quite harmful when applied that way because of it's proneness to filtering out what you do want. Do any of those systems actually use bayesian filters?
Just one thought. If you are a spammer, why would you want to send e-mail to somebody using bayesian filtering? It seems to me that these are people who are actively doing what they can to block these ads and are extremely unlikely to respond to the advertisement.
It seems like this would be beyond the point of diminishing returns. If I wanted viagra ads, they'd have been getting through my filter in the first place, non?
It's possible that if somebody was watching illegal content, the cops could get a warrant, grab the TiVo, and then have a log of every remote click that the TiVo heard, even those for devices other than the TiVo.
Unless, of course, they suspected you of terrorism, then they could do all of the above without the warrant.
I can't figure out how one would watch TV in a manner that would be a terrorist threat, but I could see a government agency wanting to use this information in profiling. If they discovered that 99.999% of terrorists watch reruns of Ba Ba Blacksheep, then they could use the Tivo data to track the bad guys...
A little far fetched, but I'd have said that about warantless searches and indefinited detentions a few years ago.
Here's the thing, if the goal here is to have a conversation, then, no, this probably isn't a good solution. If the goal, on the other hand, is to create a sense of being together, then this would work well.
I mean, when you are in a relationship long enough, you tend to have less conversations, and it's more time just spent being around the other person. Doing things together, or sometimes just being in the same place but doing your own things.
If you have a long distance relationship, it's easy to stay in communication these days. The trick is creating that sense of physical proximity, that the other person is somehow there. This may be possible, to a degree, through a gaming environment.
You go out and buy a brand new DVD for say $20. You then go and sell it on ebay used for $10. You can own this DVD for quite some time, and as long as you take decent care of it, it costs you only $10 over it's lifetime. This, as opposed to $7 for something that will become worthless in a short period.
Dude, I am soooo sorry. Tell me, how long does it take to download an entire ISO over a modem. That's gotta be painful.
Here's the thing. Comcast is offering a service and the only remedy for a breach of contract by either party is simply to terminate the service. So, if you go over your cap, and you get harassed by comcast you go somewhere else. They are happy because you aren't sucking up their resources, and you'll be happy because you'll find somebody that provides the service you need.
Having said that, the one exception I make to this is areas where Comcast is available and DSL isn't. If it's the only viable possibility for Internet service then I think local regulators need to step in and regulate how Comcast handles these cases. It would not surprise me if Comcast was sending out these letters to people that weren't really using up that much bandwidth in the hopes that they could push them into getting upgraded service. Regulators need to be aware of this possibility and prevent it.
It's simply stating the cultural differences that do exist. There are advantages and disadvantages to the approaches innate in each culture. It would seem that the American culture is better suited to innovation and creativity, but that other cultures are better suited to precision and perfection. Both are important in the development of technology.
This didn't say they cannot think for themselves, rather that they defer to authority, and in many situations, that's a good thing. Conversely it seems to suggest that Americans don't have much appreciation for structure, heirarchy and procedure, and that might explain why some software is as flaky as it is even if it is innovative.
In the real world, you'll get ping times in the 550-600ms range. It's not at terrible as you'd think, but like I said in a previous post, it makes using a terminal quite painful. It's usable, but really unpleasant.
I'm not familiar with DirecWay service, but I have done quite a bit of remote work using SSH over satellite. It's rather painful, but it is usable. I usually get about 1/2 second of latency and it is irritating, but you can still get stuff done if you have to.
If you're expecting to do hours upon hours of work this way though, I imagine it will drive you nuts.
They are normal WMA files by default. Which is to say, yes you can play them on anything capable of playing WMA, but then that's a standard Microsoft controls. This means that Apple and HP would ultimately be beholden to Microsoft if they support WMA. If WMA becomes the de facto standard then Apple and HP would have no choice but to support it and that woudld give Microsoft control over them.
As it now stands, WMA is not de facto. People became used to MP3's being the standard for digital music before WMA came into this scene. Whether it remains that way or not going forward remains to be seen. If all players support it and the majority of people are ripping wma files, then it's quite possible. At that point, then Microsoft controls the world of digital music.
You could almost make the same point except that AAC and WMA are very different beasts.
Quoting apple's site:
"AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia"
So Apple does not control the development of AAC, that consortium does. The only thing proprietary in Apple's AAC format is the DRM stuff. If you rip your own files, by default they'll be AAC without DRM, and I can play that music anywhere I have an AAC supporting player. I can play AAC files with XMMS if I want to, just not the DRM encoded Itunes files.
I can't figure out why Apple would ever want to support WMA. If they support WMA, then it's just one more reason for people to buy Microsoft over Apple, or anything else.
Once again we see the Microsoft monopoly extending it's grasp. They create WMA and then they set it up so that the built in CD-ripping in Windows will default to using WMA. Most people end up ripping in that format, not knowing any better. Then that becomes the standard for these files.
If that's the standard, then Microsoft can choose to enforce it however they want. They can alter licensing, build in whatever DRM restrictions they want, and since it's the standard everybody has to play ball.
Why precisely would I, or anybody, but the HP model over the IPod? Is it cheaper? Because it is waaaaay uglier than the IPod. If it's cheaper, then isn't this likely to hurt Apple? I mean, I'd give up aesthetics for say $50 off the price tag.
I was originally thinking that HP would have the ipod features, but in a different style case. This thing looks like an IPod that's been severely bruised.
You are right, it will not happen. Things have got too complicated, it would just not be affordable. If they tried to build a new run of Saturn 5 and Apollo, to return to the moon, safety regulations, inavailability of key components, and lots of other things would kill it, not to mention the huge amount of software needed.
Actually I disagree. We could do it, if we had the motivation, I just argue that we lack that motivation. Many of us think it would be cool, but nobody's willing to make a serious national investment in something that has no obvious payoff other than to say, "yup, we did that".
Until we have a necessity to be in space, we won't be there. Really it's a simple economic equation. When it becoems cost effective to mine minerals from other planets, we'll be out there. That's a combination of technological innovation, and economic strain. It will happen, some day, but until then, get comfortable on this rock.
Of course, the networks will be blathering on about a proposal that has no details, like the immigration proposal, and things like a tanking economy and soliders killed in Iraq will be ignored.
The news will always report what is sexy, shocking, etc. Soldiers killed in Iraq is shocking, but people are getting numb to it unless there's a dramatic spike in deaths. They'll blather on about this proposal, but not for more than a couple days. As for the economy, the press doesn't need to talk about it. The unemployed people will talk about it to all of their friends, and that will take care of itself (though the press will cover it).
Don't worry, it's just another minor distraction.
As far as this goes there are two kinds of people Bush is addressing:
1) Space nuts
2) Everybody else
Yes, the space nuts are the type who would vote based on the NASA budget. There are few, but I'm sure they are out there.
Ultimately though this is about looking visionary. It's an ephemeral concept, but by proposing big ideas, he looks more like a leader. Saying that he wants to go to mars sounds forward thinking without being totally ridiculous. So people will add that into the composite of what they think of him.
This is not a major thing, but it does add one little piece to the puzzle and it costs him nothing. It's good press and all he has to do is say it, and have some of his people do a cursory investigation of the prospects. Then he can forget about it and let congress kill it.
That too, but I'd say the same thing if this were a president I liked. No major exploration was ever launched without a very good economic reason. The "new world" wasn't discovered for the sake of human endeavor. It was about money, and until a mars expedition is about money, it ain't gonna happen.
We aren't going to Mars or the moon. This is election year politics. He's trying to look like a visionary leader, by boldly setting forth to conquer the universe (or is that liberate?).
This will all get killed in budget negotiations after the election. He'll be able to look like he's fighting for it, but ultimately his own people in congress will cut the budget. Kinda like no child left behind. Yeah, real leadership there, except that the budget isn't there to run it properly.
So, for now, just whip out your 3D glasses and check out the photos coming back because that's as close as we are getting for a very long time.
I think the majority of people who were "educated" working white collar jobs did give a crap when factory jobs started leaving. Howver, when the blue collar jobs started going away there was a clear path out of that problem: education. Basically the theory was that if you lost your manufacturing job, you go to college, get your degree and get one of those better paying white collar jobs. We pass off the dirty, demanding, repetitive work to the reset of the world and move up the food chain.
The problem we face now is that there's no clear sense of where you go from here. Getting a college degree may not help you, and with the rising costs of college, it might actually hurt you in the long run. If you have to work at the Gap, do you really want to be paying off college loans too? So far, I've heard no good answer on what to do next.
I'm not big on patents, but I think that the tivo features in discussion here are non-obvious. To get an idea of how non-obvious it is, go to a lay person who is unfamiliar with tivo and try to explain what's so cool about it. They will most likely go, "so it's just like a VCR", and you'll run in mental circles explaining what is cool about Tivo.
Then you sit them down in front of Tivo, hit pause, fast forward through the commercial, etc, and then it dawns on them. Sounds like non-obvious to me. As for non-trivial, that's a little harder to back.
I have an IPod, and I paid a premium for it mostly because it is a very small form factor. It is the only hard drive based mp3 player I can carry in a shirt pocket without looking like a complete embicile. The IPod does one thing and it does it incredibly well.
This won't be an IPod killer because it's going to do everything and it will do it in a mediocre manner. How many people need an ultra portable video player? I live in the city and do a lot of walking so having a portable audio player makes perfect sense. But it would be dangerous to do the same thing and watch video.
Something for the kids perhaps? Not at $400-800, unless the thing is indestructible. Why would I shell out for that when I can shell out a fraction of that for a game boy that will keep them far more distracted.
I can see only two valuable uses for this:
1) Long flights - but how many of us have enough long flights to pay for this and don't carry a laptop along already.
2) Photo/Video storage on the go - if you take a lot of pictures, it's nice to have a device to store the data on while you are on the go.
Other than that, what possible use do I have for this device. I've got enough crap to lug around as it is, why would I want one more device?
Okay, let's think about this for a moment. You are going to try to compete in a market in which the 800 pound gorilla is competing. Do you really want to paying for that gorilla's bananas? Which is to say, it is damn foolish of them to use Windows as their OS because MS can sink their boat at a moments notice if it behooves them.