For those of us who came in late, is there a definitive directory online anywhere of existing public wireless networks? Or semi-accessible private ones, for that matter? I'm new to this whole 802.11 thing.
A couple of years ago there was a guy who had a painting he found in his garage for sale. Rumor started getting around that it might be a Richard Diebenkorn painting, and hence potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course, not only did the painting turn out not to be authentic, but the messages starting the rumor were planted by the seller, as were over half of the bids that drove the painting up to about $90,000 on speculation. The seller and his sidekick later pleaded guilty to fraud. It was subtle, though; the seller never claimed that the painting was authentic, they just planted the rumor externally.
Didja notice the map in the decoded message is Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map Projection of Earth? Nifty cool. Also, there's a marking on the map over what appears to be Siberia. The location of the transmitter, perhaps?
another phil dick movie
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Review: Impostor
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· Score: 4, Informative
I just saw the trailer for Minority Report which looks like a better bet for Philip K Dick fans, despite the presence of both Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg. Is it just coincidence that both of these are coming out at the same time?
Of course, this thing is expensive, seemingly inefficient, and probably impractical... for now. But keep in mind a few things:
First of all, Ballard (the company that makes the fuel cell in this thing) has said all along that they're going to have the really practical consumer devices in the market in 2005 (I think it's in their annual report, if memory serves). I think anything you see out there earlier is going to be a test product to smooth out the edges in production.
The infrastructure to support hydrogen fuel (the price of those canisters, for example) is one of the things that needs to be smoothed out as well. The price of fuel should come WAY down with centralized production.
Ballard fuel cells can also run on other fuels (methanol, for one) but at a reduced efficiency and with a slight hydrocarbon emission (still something on the order of 3-5% of what comes out of a combustion engine, but enough that you couldn't run one in a closed room).
Yes, hydrogen fuel takes energy to produce, but so does fossil fuel extraction and then once you've got, say, gasoline, it gets burned inefficiently and with lotsa nasty waste products. I know cars seem to be getting more efficient all the time, but every car I know of requires a separate system to keep the engine cool (read: waste heat) and I wouldn't put my lips on a tailpipe. Fuel cells do their thing at 75-80 degrees F, and when hydrogen-fueled, the only output is distilled H20. That's it.
Once practical devices come to market , they'll have the potential of decentralizing power, with that huge advantage of EFFICIENCY. And aside from the abovementioned advantages, don't forget to factor in power loss from transmission through wires. A world where fuel cells are practical everyday devices is nothing less than a PC revolution for power: power plants for all! Think an power Gnutella as opposed to the power grid. After all, I'm sure some folks were saying "Two thousand dollars for 64K of RAM? These things'll never catch on" twenty years ago...
Just saw the whole thing happen from our house in Brooklyn (about 2 miles away). Bad, bad, BAD shit... we saw the second plane hit, saw the towers collapse. The wind is blowing right at us and ash and charred paper are falling throughout the neighborhood. I've picked up a few pieces, they're mostly from banks. The horror sank in when I found tax forms and papers with people's names and handwriting.
Pray for those who need it (even if you're as non-religious as I am), and donate blood if you're in the area. Do what you can. We're all in this together.
... is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, one of the mainstream journalists who "gets" the big picture of the internet and always has. Read his column today for a more balanced view of the motivations behind the current standoff.
>Eveyr time you search for ANYTHING, the first 1000 hits are always for a commercial site.
Umm, let's try an experiment: go to google and type in something inherently non-commercial: i.e., "am i hot or not" or "all your base belong to us". I guarantee that the first few links will NOT be commercial. Google's main ranking comes from back-links, which is great 'cause it's inherently difficult to fiddle with the rankings. If an indie is popular and many people link to it, it can come up first. The system ain't perfect, but it's close enough to be a modern miracle, especially if you're good at searching. Remember, folks, use lotsa proper nouns and "quote exact phrases"!
It utterly baffles me that people are surprised at all about the "decline" of the dotcoms. It is not the Internet industry on the whole that's suffering from the current shake-out, after all, but these ill-conceived, hastily assembled and often appallingy naive young corporations that all jumped in the pool at the same time.
pseudo.com is an interesting story, but don't call them a victim of the dotcom backlash... they got $15 million in funding and by all accounts ran a crash-pad for slackers, hackers, artists and assorted counterculture types, all the while putting out the odd piece of web-based entertaintment, until the cash ran out. Then they closed their doors. Surprise? Hell no. I say good for them, personally. Wish I'd pulled off that hack. But they hardly count as a failed company. I don't get the sense they ever really wanted to be a company. Andy Warhol's Factory is the comparison I've heard more than once.
Any company that thinks that the Internet economy has invalidated the terms "profit" and "return on investment" will of course wake up fast.
I consider myself part of the whole dotcom thing-- I consult in NYC on web design and programming, and I'm still turning down about 5 job offers a week. I just took a position with a design firm that focuses on top-flight clients, thinks internationally, and has a realistic business plan. I don't fear for my future.
Six months ago, we had one young woman who joined us, and spent most of the day chatting on the web with friends, arriving late and leaving early. When confronted about her slacking, she actually said, "It's the New Economy! Hours are flexible!" She was fired two weeks later.
The dotcoms that are going under are much like her, thinking that the New Economy rules mean that they can do whatever they want and still exist. But the new rules are really just a slight (albeit revolutionally important) modification to the old rules. Y'know, the ones where companies make money.
The sick and the weak go first, and I for one won't miss 'em.
...there is a limitation coming. Bill Joy, in an interview with Wired, spoke of his experiences with an experimental superfast network that Sun installed in Aspen, Colorado:
"There is a break point in bandwidth around a million bits, or a megabit, per second. If you get below a million bits you notice the lack of speed. But with anything above 1.5 million bits you hardly notice the increase; the difference between 2 megabits and 10 megabits is negligible. It is really surprising."
This is a profound notion if you look at it in context-- someday, we will have enough bandwidth for everything. CD audio, for example, is near the threshold of human aural fidelity. Affordable (well, relatively) consumer machines are arriving that can handle hi-fidelity video. We only have two ears and two eyes each, after all. Imagine a world where we could saturate them, for each person on the planet...
We are lightyears ahead of where we thought we'd be 10 years ago. The current slowdown might be attributable to the fact that most people do have enough power for now (see this week's The Onion for one hilarious take on this concept). And the IT/EE community's been so busy (and well-paid) catering to the needs of the clamoring newbie masses that meeting deadlines and shipping applications more often than not trumps writing good code and realizing creative solutions.
I've often joked (well, to my geek friends that get such humor) that if I were emperor, I would declare a moratorium on new hardware. Software has a long way to catch up. We've been so busy building the Web that the Next Great Thing hasn't gotten built. Yet. But it will in time. And then another great surge of processing power will be required, which will push us until we reach Joy's observed saturation limit.
I look forward to that day when computers are cheap, plentiful, and so powerful that we'll be sated with bits, pixels and bandwidth. Then, with no more "up", we'll have to build out sideways, and wire the world.
Let's just hope fuel cells get perfected before then so the whole kit and caboodle runs on something other than dead trees.
The new vaio looks like an computer icon of itself, as if it were designed in MacPaint on a 32x32 grid. Weird. I think it would look good, though, under the arm of this guy.
But fer now I'll just stick with my trusty James-Bond-as-all-hell 505F.
I've seen a few posts with the tone of "yeah, I've got an old 486 you can have, hyuk, hyuk". But in fact there are many applications for these old computers. Not everyone requires the bleeding edge of technology; many non-profit organizations would be perfectly happy with a few dependable machines that run a word processor, a spreadsheet and print. And don't forget the rest of the world-- there are many many countries with little or no digital infrastructure that are scrambling for whatever computing power they can get.
Freeboxen is a way cool site that fills a needed trading niche, but there are other organizations that actively seek donations of old equipment, "de-obsolete" it by gutting it of counter-productive proprietary and weird components, and find organizations that can make use of it. See:
I'm sure there are more-- please post what you know! You might want to consider volunteering with one of these groups, too; users aren't likely to get the most out of an old machine without some guidance or help. But they can learn, and you might feel better about yourself for having helped to lessen the digital divide a bit for a person or two who could really use a machine, any machine.
Granted, not all old equipment is useful. But much of it is far more useful than some of us gearheads might think. Better in the hands of someone who might actually use it than taking up space in a landfill.
It's the Network Economy, after all, and for some, just being able to participate means a hell of a lot more than having a machine with mHz instead of gHz. As Harry Tuttle said in Brazil, "Hey, we're all in this together".
...clean on the outside, catchy as hell in parts, irritating in others, maybe a bit too long and complicated for its own good,but definitely unlike anything that's come before it and on the whole, a Good Thing to have a copy of.
I believe that a corporation which gives a serial-numbered tracking device free out to citizens as a "productivity tool", buries the little detail of "by the way, we're keeping your every move in a central database" in a lengthy legal contract, and then attempts to make gobs of cash off of the information gleaned thereby is immoral. However, I also believe in the rule of law, their freedom to do as they please within that law, and the capitalist system. It just happens to also be my right to see how the law works in my favor. And every bit of information that I can use against them I will gladly use. They may find that to be immoral from their point of view, but I'm only concerned that it's legal; then we're on even terms.
I am not usually an activist about such things, but this one seems to have crossed a line. Fortunately, these folks seem pretty technically and legally clueless, and I wish them a short ride to the business plan cemetery. So here's a plain-english recap for those who think that this issue is less than relevant:
DC launched the CueCat by giving them away free in exchange for registration information at Radio Shacks nationwide, AND by mailing them out to subscribers of Wired and Forbes magazines.
By giving away free hardware, DC immediately raises the antennae of privacy activists, who sniff the air for the scent of money and find, as expected, that their business model operates on collecting and collating demographic information on private citizens. Since the CueCat is a scanner that can scan coupons, UPC codes, book ISBNs and more, they can obviously gather a huge amount of info on shopping habits. This is all confirmed by DC's own corporate materials.
The ones that are sent through the mail (mine arrived sporting Wired colors) arrive in non-shrinkwrapped boxes containing a CueCat, a cable, a non-shrinkwrapped CD, and an instruction sheet. None of these have ANY legal contract on them. The legalese is all in the software CD (which I can't install 'cause it's Windows only and I'm only running mac and linux).
Meanwhile, hackers all over the place immediately take the little things apart and find out how they work. They're found to be super simple, without anything that can really be called encryption, just a base 64 conversion of some sort. Since the bar codes themselves are public domain, reverse-engineering happens quickly. Linux drivers are posted all over the net in no time flat.
More disturbingly, those who hack the little things discover a Serial Number encoded in each device, which gets transmitted as part of the datastream back to DC's servers. Privacy activists raise more antennae.
More linux drivers with serial-number-cleaning routines are posted, as are instructions on how to defeat the SN scheme by snipping a wire.
DC's lawyers send out Cease and Desist letters to the purveyors of the new code, on the grounds that the code is messing with their business model (boo-hoo), that it's tampering with their intellectual property (what, the public domain barcodes?) and their contract (which I, like many other, never even got a chance to see 'cause I couldn't even begin to boot their software). They also claim in the contract that they own the CueCat and are "loaning" it to me.
Now this story tells us that the contract might be irrelevant to those who received the CueCat in the mail because unsolicited gifts arriving in the mail belong to you no matter what. This is not an insignificant point, people! This is establishing the legal grounds that folks like you and me have the right to use this free gift however we want, and that right includes writing new software for it and promoting that software as an alternative to the intended use.
If it screws with DC's ability to make a profit, all the better, IMHO. But the bigger issue is not allowing corporations with lots of money to dictate what you can or can't do where privacy matters and freedoms are concerned.
i think the fckd.co. auction actually got pulled because of stoopid bids... i visited in the morning and someone had bid $44,150 or some such reasonable number that looked like a real bid, but when i went back in the afternoon, the high bid was "$10,000,000.00".
I live in Brooklyn and recently got my DSL up and running. After perusing the bible for this sort of stuff (dslreports: if you haven't seen it go now!), I chose to go with Megapath, a very customer-service oriented yet still 3rd party provider. They were wonderful throughout, always polite and accessible, but I depended on Bell Atlantic (ex-NYNEX) for the lines. Long story short... Northpoint sends someone to test the lines and install the inside wiring within 2 days. Lines need work, Bell Atlantic sends someone in two weeks. They don't fix it, send someone "ASAP" (another three weeks). Third guy finally discovers problem is not with lines but with Central Office wiring. Another two weeks, so on, so forth. Once lines test clear, Megapath installer finishes the job in 1 1/2 days. Total Bell Atlantic time: 4 months-ish. Total everyone else installed: 3 Days.
The problem is not the 3rd party, but that everyone depends on the telcos for wiring, so you should still check out all of the options for best price and installation, since all providers in your given area are gonna depend on the same folks for the wires anyway. I probably could've gotten a faster install if I'd ridden their asses a bit more, but why bust a vein when I knew from other people's experiences that this would probably take forever anyways?
But the line works great now that it's up, I'm almost always connected near the max, and the Megapath people's customer service is excellent.
The PC revolution affected people's brains as well as all the little machines. The reason that there's a premium on coders under 30 is because we (well, I just turned 30 so cut me the slack) are the first generation to be brought up with the PC. Like a lot of Slashdotters, I started young, at age 12 on a TRS-80, and later that year on Ataris. I think that's a profound generational shift that can't be overlooked; we are the first digital generation, the first to be brought up in a PC and videogame world, and that's as profound to this Internet age as the baby boomers were before us to the age of activism and rock'n'roll in the 60's. Coders currently over 30 probably learned their craft in the mainframe era either at large, old-economy companies, in the goverment or in academia. That's an institutional mindset, and specializing made more sense when dealing with Big Iron. After all, computing undoubtedly innovated in the 1970's and early 1980's, but the rate of change was glacial compared to the Net- and PC-driven redline of the last fifteen years.
Today's code kids, on the other hand, grew up digital and networked, with Logo in elementary school and Nintendo in the home and on and on. We've watched the technology move up and forward and eight ways from Sunday, and we know innately that it's damn foolish to pick a technology and say it's gonna be around forever. We effectively got a head start before we hit the workforce that those before us could never have had.
The key, I think, to success over 30 is to stay flexible. We get attached to the things we learn, and rarely unlearn them. But willingness to admit that software evolves, techniques change, and favored ways of operating obsolesce is a survival tactic that becomes increasingly necessary in this industry as the rate of progress increases. And the current generation of young, PC-weaned programmers gets that, innately. As they age, I think that the perceived glass ceiling will raise to hold their numbers.
But it's equally possible to argue that the glass ceiling doesn't really exist... when you say "programmers over 40" you can mean novice programmers who happen to be up there in age, or you can mean programmers with 20 years' experience. If it's the former, a 20-year-old novice will have an advantage over him because of the generation gap I mentioned. If it's the latter, though, he'd have to lack an awful lot of common sense to not be able to parlay years of *nix experience into a job in today's economy.
What it comes down to is this: if you evaluate the technologies to make an informed decision about which ones you think are the best and the most viable; if you learn those technologies accordingly in a caring and thorough fashion; and if you never lose sight of the big picture of this network of users and developers, nor the little picture of what it means to move information in bits; then you will probably not want for work in this new economy, whether that work is coding, managing, consulting, design or otherwise. If, on the other hand, you learn from a book or online course which switches to flip and which buttons to press to make a certain application or language do its thing without a certain amount of analytical knowledge (insert MCSE diatribe here), then you run the risk of waking up one day to find that those buttons and switches have moved or that, even more likely, that no one uses that application anymore. That's a much bleaker future.
A career based on a knowledge of how systems work can be long and fruitful and varied. A career based on a knowledge of one OS or one language or one app is a crapshoot. I think today's young'uns know this, and when the kids being born today start coding, it'll be twice as true.
Like many of the "older"/.'ers (just turned 30), i started programming on lil' ol' 8-bit machines like Atari 1200 and later, apple II's, and they kept my interest as a pre-teen because i could write something and see the result damn near instantaneously. By my college years, Windoze and the Mac had come along, and programming turned into a right drag because of the layers of GUI crap that now surrounded everything. I had to either commit to being a full time coder to make anything worthwhile that hadn't been invented yet, or look for a career that involved more fresh air. Having discovered girls, I opted for the latter and went on to study design and drift aimlessly for a year or two, leaving my programming chops behind. Then in the mid-90's when the internet started giving everyone jobs, i jumped on web design, and by extension web programming.
Perl is the language that got the kid in me psyched about programming again. Flexible variable-typing, no compiler voodoo, and compact enough for a short program to be both simple enough to understand yet do Something K00L. That giddy feeling of typing just a few lines and getting a useful result got me back into programming big-time.
I agree that kids are smarter than you think. Perl will let you explain pretty much any programming technique you'd wanna show young teens. You can run an interpreter locally, or if you can give them cgi access, they can run their creation from any web browser. Besides, by the time these kids are college-aged, the desktop application may be on the way out, what with all of these distributed application type model thingies... making something work on the Web should be as cool for them as putting something on the C-64 or TRS-80 screen was for us.
more than just book burning
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Fahrenheit 451
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· Score: 2
Fahrenheit 451 is one of the few books I make myself reread every two years or so, because we are, in some ways, in the middle of the world gone mad that Bradbury prophesied. But it's interesting for many, many other reasons than the censorship issue. The "parlor walls" that Montag's wife interacts with presage MUDs, chat rooms and cybersex, and her dependence on artificiality over reality leads her to suicidal depression when confronted with her husband's reality. And the scene in the end, when the suspected murderer is on the run, running past houses filled with people who are watching the chase on TV, and they come out to watch the chase-- yes, Bradbury described OJ in the white Bronco forty years before the fact.
But the essence of the story really is the nature of the censorship. There's no 1984/Brazil-type monolithic central authority that's the source of the repression here, but a collective of unthinking people doing their part to keep the imagination of the individual under wraps. Note Mrs. Montag's lady-friends in the parlor tut-tutting over Guy's strange behavior, or the amoral teenagers driving fast on the highways looking for something to hit, or the blase half-interest in far-off wars on the TV. Even the chief fireman isn't presented as a functionary of central authority, but a dangerous anti-intellectual who functions with some autonomy but has no reason to change his relationship with society, because he's comfortable with his influence over others, not because he's pure evil.
Well chosen, a book that gets subtler upon rereading. Get it, read it often.
Judging by the rate of technological change, by the time any sane resolution comes of this debate, Napster, the RIAA, the MP3 format and the major record labels will already be nonexistent/irrelevant. The System already is there: we can record and trade recorded music files peer-to-peer over the internet in a largely public-domain format sans encryption and gatekeepers. That's right now, today. Once technologies are invented, they don't get uninvented, so it seems fair to assume that these new channels of distribution are going to only be getting smoother. As a result, the major labels are dead already and they know it. They're just trying to sqeeze out their share for the final inning of their game.
Encryption as a solution? It'll never happen because people aren't going to abandon 50 years worth of stereo infrastructure, and if I can play something on my stereo, I can, in the worst case scenario, record the audio out to my computer (getting a perfectly acceptable d-to-a-to-d) and recompress with the codec of my choice (or not). Encryption can be imperfectly circumvented here, but at a quality good enough for 99% of the music listening public.
So we're left with a world where the major labels are not in control. So what? There have been many fundamental shifts in technology that have ruined a business model; when i started in design ten years ago, my company bought a $2000 stat camera... two years later it was on the curb, worthless. Two years.
What do the record labels do for artists? Promote, record, market, and skim most of the profits. But thanks to the Net, the artist has an unprecedented amount of power to promote THEMSELVES, record THEMSELVES, and market THEMSELVES. Working the angles on the web will be as important for the 21st musician as catchy hooks and a good stage presence. And free distribution to consumers might be a part of those angles.
But none of this changes the fact that copyrights are still sacred to the artist. And I define copyright somewhat loosely as the right to determine where your song is distributed and for how much and why. Free distribution of a song on the Net by an artist does not mean a relinquishment of copyright! Chuck D gets this. You can give something away free to other individuals without losing the rights to control it.
Something no one has mentioned yet is the fact that there are many more ways to make money in the music biz than just selling CD's. The publishing rights are often more valuable to musicians, because even a single institutional use of a piece of music can be far, far more lucrative than selling cd's unit by unit. Chuck D wants his music to travel, he wants people to pass his shit hand to hand over the wires, because, then he can still be the song of the summer, the song that's blasting from the back of every Jeep in the 'hood, and have full rights to it w/no interference from the Man. Then, when Monday Night Football comes and wants to use Chuck's song at halftime under that goofy animation of helmets running into each other and exploding, they come to Chuck, not Chuck's label's lawyers, and he keeps the whole check, which is bound to be a big one. THAT'S where the $$$ is. I know smaller bands like Tortoise and Stereolab have sold the rights to songs for commercials (Calvin Klein and VW, respectively), and that's what made them financially solvent, not 20,000 CD sales on little indie labels. The mechanism for defending publishing rights still exists, still works, even in the Net age. See ASCAP. See BMI. Those are the organizations that cut the royalty checks, and a side effect of free consumer distribution is that those checks would be made out directly to the artist.
And remember that big summer arena tours are largely funded by the T-shirt vendors. Think different.
The current system makes 500-1000 selected lucky people millionaires, and screws everybody else. We need to get over Napster and MP3, and make sure we work on a system that'll turn that figure around, creating a new music industry where a million people can make a decent living making music each year w/o a middleman. As usual, the ones who get burned are the ones dependent on the current system when the system changes, but that always happens. But don't worry, Metallica-- in five years, there'll be a new Net to catch you. And you'll still rock.
I work for a company that's designing e-commerce sites and we were in the middle of coming up with design concepts when boo.com launched with The Buzz... everyone knew about it from industry press, etc. They had a great PR department and were well-funded, which is what made them "high-profile", _not_ favorable reactions from an adoring public. The site was overly tech-y, complex, and probably crashed half the browsers that visited it. There is a Golden Rule of web design (or any design, for that matter): Above All, Do No Harm. In the design of e-commerce, this can be refined as Don't Ever Get In The Way Of People Who Want To Spend Their Money On Your Site.
Boo.com eventually redesigned, but by the time Boo Mk.2 launched, I no longer heard The Buzz. My suspicion is that, flush with his/her buzz-generating success after launch, the PR person in charge at the beginning jumped ship for greener pastures, while the techs and a dwindling design staff, morale shaken by user criticism, scrambled to use ever-diminishing capital to make the site usuable on the second go-round. Just a guess.
Is the fall of boo.com a harbinger of the collapse of e-commerce? No more than RedHat stock's return to non-stratospheric levels invalidates Linux as a viable platform. Although I do think it's a harbinger of the inevitable return to earth of many overfunded companies flush with bright-eyed twenty-one-year-olds who think that being on the cutting edge guarantees their success and liberates them from such mundanities as user testing and developing a weatherproof business plan. Their ilk are numerous and we'll all be better off (and a bit wiser) without them.
Here's the relevant legal docs, assuming domains registered through Internic. The folks at GreatDomains.com (who probably know a thing or two about name squatting-- they're the ones who sold "loans.com" for US$3 million last month) say in their FAQ:
"It very much depends on the specifics. For example, if IBM bought apple.com, legal precedent indicates that the court would likely require IBM to release apple.com to Apple Computer. If, however, an apple farmer bought apple.com to sell fruit over the Internet, Apple Computer would likely have less of a claim.
Our coke.ch friend sounds more like a case of the latter, but since he's still just thinking about setting up the site, it seems to undercut any cred. Coca-Cola is one company that'll protect their trademark worldwide, whether they have the use for a site or not. I hate multinationals as much as the next free thinker, but this ain't a battle worth fighting.
btw, I've heard that courts can make you stop using a domain name but can't force you to turn it over. true?
Slashdot Mirror
If this keeps up, it won't be long before you start seeing aftermarket replacement chips to improve your computer's performance... oh, wait...
For those of us who came in late, is there a definitive directory online anywhere of existing public wireless networks? Or semi-accessible private ones, for that matter? I'm new to this whole 802.11 thing.
A couple of years ago there was a guy who had a painting he found in his garage for sale. Rumor started getting around that it might be a Richard Diebenkorn painting, and hence potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course, not only did the painting turn out not to be authentic, but the messages starting the rumor were planted by the seller, as were over half of the bids that drove the painting up to about $90,000 on speculation. The seller and his sidekick later pleaded guilty to fraud. It was subtle, though; the seller never claimed that the painting was authentic, they just planted the rumor externally.
Didja notice the map in the decoded message is Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map Projection of Earth? Nifty cool. Also, there's a marking on the map over what appears to be Siberia. The location of the transmitter, perhaps?
I just saw the trailer for Minority Report which looks like a better bet for Philip K Dick fans, despite the presence of both Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg. Is it just coincidence that both of these are coming out at the same time?
Of course, this thing is expensive, seemingly inefficient, and probably impractical... for now. But keep in mind a few things:
First of all, Ballard (the company that makes the fuel cell in this thing) has said all along that they're going to have the really practical consumer devices in the market in 2005 (I think it's in their annual report, if memory serves). I think anything you see out there earlier is going to be a test product to smooth out the edges in production.
The infrastructure to support hydrogen fuel (the price of those canisters, for example) is one of the things that needs to be smoothed out as well. The price of fuel should come WAY down with centralized production.
Ballard fuel cells can also run on other fuels (methanol, for one) but at a reduced efficiency and with a slight hydrocarbon emission (still something on the order of 3-5% of what comes out of a combustion engine, but enough that you couldn't run one in a closed room).
Yes, hydrogen fuel takes energy to produce, but so does fossil fuel extraction and then once you've got, say, gasoline, it gets burned inefficiently and with lotsa nasty waste products. I know cars seem to be getting more efficient all the time, but every car I know of requires a separate system to keep the engine cool (read: waste heat) and I wouldn't put my lips on a tailpipe. Fuel cells do their thing at 75-80 degrees F, and when hydrogen-fueled, the only output is distilled H20. That's it.
Once practical devices come to market , they'll have the potential of decentralizing power, with that huge advantage of EFFICIENCY. And aside from the abovementioned advantages, don't forget to factor in power loss from transmission through wires. A world where fuel cells are practical everyday devices is nothing less than a PC revolution for power: power plants for all! Think an power Gnutella as opposed to the power grid. After all, I'm sure some folks were saying "Two thousand dollars for 64K of RAM? These things'll never catch on" twenty years ago...
Pray for those who need it (even if you're as non-religious as I am), and donate blood if you're in the area. Do what you can. We're all in this together.
... is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, one of the mainstream journalists who "gets" the big picture of the internet and always has. Read his column today for a more balanced view of the motivations behind the current standoff.
>Eveyr time you search for ANYTHING, the first 1000 hits are always for a commercial site.
Umm, let's try an experiment: go to google and type in something inherently non-commercial: i.e., "am i hot or not" or "all your base belong to us". I guarantee that the first few links will NOT be commercial. Google's main ranking comes from back-links, which is great 'cause it's inherently difficult to fiddle with the rankings. If an indie is popular and many people link to it, it can come up first. The system ain't perfect, but it's close enough to be a modern miracle, especially if you're good at searching. Remember, folks, use lotsa proper nouns and "quote exact phrases"!
pseudo.com is an interesting story, but don't call them a victim of the dotcom backlash... they got $15 million in funding and by all accounts ran a crash-pad for slackers, hackers, artists and assorted counterculture types, all the while putting out the odd piece of web-based entertaintment, until the cash ran out. Then they closed their doors. Surprise? Hell no. I say good for them, personally. Wish I'd pulled off that hack. But they hardly count as a failed company. I don't get the sense they ever really wanted to be a company. Andy Warhol's Factory is the comparison I've heard more than once.
Any company that thinks that the Internet economy has invalidated the terms "profit" and "return on investment" will of course wake up fast.
I consider myself part of the whole dotcom thing-- I consult in NYC on web design and programming, and I'm still turning down about 5 job offers a week. I just took a position with a design firm that focuses on top-flight clients, thinks internationally, and has a realistic business plan. I don't fear for my future.
Six months ago, we had one young woman who joined us, and spent most of the day chatting on the web with friends, arriving late and leaving early. When confronted about her slacking, she actually said, "It's the New Economy! Hours are flexible!" She was fired two weeks later.
The dotcoms that are going under are much like her, thinking that the New Economy rules mean that they can do whatever they want and still exist. But the new rules are really just a slight (albeit revolutionally important) modification to the old rules. Y'know, the ones where companies make money.
The sick and the weak go first, and I for one won't miss 'em.
We are lightyears ahead of where we thought we'd be 10 years ago. The current slowdown might be attributable to the fact that most people do have enough power for now (see this week's The Onion for one hilarious take on this concept). And the IT/EE community's been so busy (and well-paid) catering to the needs of the clamoring newbie masses that meeting deadlines and shipping applications more often than not trumps writing good code and realizing creative solutions.
I've often joked (well, to my geek friends that get such humor) that if I were emperor, I would declare a moratorium on new hardware. Software has a long way to catch up. We've been so busy building the Web that the Next Great Thing hasn't gotten built. Yet. But it will in time. And then another great surge of processing power will be required, which will push us until we reach Joy's observed saturation limit.
I look forward to that day when computers are cheap, plentiful, and so powerful that we'll be sated with bits, pixels and bandwidth. Then, with no more "up", we'll have to build out sideways, and wire the world.
Let's just hope fuel cells get perfected before then so the whole kit and caboodle runs on something other than dead trees.
The new vaio looks like an computer icon of itself, as if it were designed in MacPaint on a 32x32 grid. Weird. I think it would look good, though, under the arm of this guy.
But fer now I'll just stick with my trusty James-Bond-as-all-hell 505F.
Freeboxen is a way cool site that fills a needed trading niche, but there are other organizations that actively seek donations of old equipment, "de-obsolete" it by gutting it of counter-productive proprietary and weird components, and find organizations that can make use of it. See:
The Detwiler Foundation's Computers for Schools program
A neat Wired article about the people who do the gutting and filleting of the old stuff
I'm sure there are more-- please post what you know! You might want to consider volunteering with one of these groups, too; users aren't likely to get the most out of an old machine without some guidance or help. But they can learn, and you might feel better about yourself for having helped to lessen the digital divide a bit for a person or two who could really use a machine, any machine.
Granted, not all old equipment is useful. But much of it is far more useful than some of us gearheads might think. Better in the hands of someone who might actually use it than taking up space in a landfill.
It's the Network Economy, after all, and for some, just being able to participate means a hell of a lot more than having a machine with mHz instead of gHz. As Harry Tuttle said in Brazil, "Hey, we're all in this together".
...clean on the outside, catchy as hell in parts, irritating in others, maybe a bit too long and complicated for its own good,but definitely unlike anything that's come before it and on the whole, a Good Thing to have a copy of.
;)
And more fun when stoned
From the Wired magazine archives, here's a great article on the history of Ted Nelson and the Xanadu project: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.htm l
I believe that a corporation which gives a serial-numbered tracking device free out to citizens as a "productivity tool", buries the little detail of "by the way, we're keeping your every move in a central database" in a lengthy legal contract, and then attempts to make gobs of cash off of the information gleaned thereby is immoral. However, I also believe in the rule of law, their freedom to do as they please within that law, and the capitalist system. It just happens to also be my right to see how the law works in my favor. And every bit of information that I can use against them I will gladly use. They may find that to be immoral from their point of view, but I'm only concerned that it's legal; then we're on even terms.
I am not usually an activist about such things, but this one seems to have crossed a line. Fortunately, these folks seem pretty technically and legally clueless, and I wish them a short ride to the business plan cemetery. So here's a plain-english recap for those who think that this issue is less than relevant:
DC launched the CueCat by giving them away free in exchange for registration information at Radio Shacks nationwide, AND by mailing them out to subscribers of Wired and Forbes magazines.
By giving away free hardware, DC immediately raises the antennae of privacy activists, who sniff the air for the scent of money and find, as expected, that their business model operates on collecting and collating demographic information on private citizens. Since the CueCat is a scanner that can scan coupons, UPC codes, book ISBNs and more, they can obviously gather a huge amount of info on shopping habits. This is all confirmed by DC's own corporate materials.
The ones that are sent through the mail (mine arrived sporting Wired colors) arrive in non-shrinkwrapped boxes containing a CueCat, a cable, a non-shrinkwrapped CD, and an instruction sheet. None of these have ANY legal contract on them. The legalese is all in the software CD (which I can't install 'cause it's Windows only and I'm only running mac and linux).
Meanwhile, hackers all over the place immediately take the little things apart and find out how they work. They're found to be super simple, without anything that can really be called encryption, just a base 64 conversion of some sort. Since the bar codes themselves are public domain, reverse-engineering happens quickly. Linux drivers are posted all over the net in no time flat.
More disturbingly, those who hack the little things discover a Serial Number encoded in each device, which gets transmitted as part of the datastream back to DC's servers. Privacy activists raise more antennae.
More linux drivers with serial-number-cleaning routines are posted, as are instructions on how to defeat the SN scheme by snipping a wire.
DC's lawyers send out Cease and Desist letters to the purveyors of the new code, on the grounds that the code is messing with their business model (boo-hoo), that it's tampering with their intellectual property (what, the public domain barcodes?) and their contract (which I, like many other, never even got a chance to see 'cause I couldn't even begin to boot their software). They also claim in the contract that they own the CueCat and are "loaning" it to me.
Now this story tells us that the contract might be irrelevant to those who received the CueCat in the mail because unsolicited gifts arriving in the mail belong to you no matter what. This is not an insignificant point, people! This is establishing the legal grounds that folks like you and me have the right to use this free gift however we want, and that right includes writing new software for it and promoting that software as an alternative to the intended use.
If it screws with DC's ability to make a profit, all the better, IMHO. But the bigger issue is not allowing corporations with lots of money to dictate what you can or can't do where privacy matters and freedoms are concerned.
i think the fckd.co. auction actually got pulled because of stoopid bids... i visited in the morning and someone had bid $44,150 or some such reasonable number that looked like a real bid, but when i went back in the afternoon, the high bid was "$10,000,000.00".
yeah, right...
I live in Brooklyn and recently got my DSL up and running. After perusing the bible for this sort of stuff (dslreports: if you haven't seen it go now!), I chose to go with Megapath, a very customer-service oriented yet still 3rd party provider. They were wonderful throughout, always polite and accessible, but I depended on Bell Atlantic (ex-NYNEX) for the lines. Long story short... Northpoint sends someone to test the lines and install the inside wiring within 2 days. Lines need work, Bell Atlantic sends someone in two weeks. They don't fix it, send someone "ASAP" (another three weeks). Third guy finally discovers problem is not with lines but with Central Office wiring. Another two weeks, so on, so forth. Once lines test clear, Megapath installer finishes the job in 1 1/2 days. Total Bell Atlantic time: 4 months-ish. Total everyone else installed: 3 Days.
The problem is not the 3rd party, but that everyone depends on the telcos for wiring, so you should still check out all of the options for best price and installation, since all providers in your given area are gonna depend on the same folks for the wires anyway. I probably could've gotten a faster install if I'd ridden their asses a bit more, but why bust a vein when I knew from other people's experiences that this would probably take forever anyways?
But the line works great now that it's up, I'm almost always connected near the max, and the Megapath people's customer service is excellent.
A couple of observations:
The PC revolution affected people's brains as well as all the little machines. The reason that there's a premium on coders under 30 is because we (well, I just turned 30 so cut me the slack) are the first generation to be brought up with the PC. Like a lot of Slashdotters, I started young, at age 12 on a TRS-80, and later that year on Ataris. I think that's a profound generational shift that can't be overlooked; we are the first digital generation, the first to be brought up in a PC and videogame world, and that's as profound to this Internet age as the baby boomers were before us to the age of activism and rock'n'roll in the 60's. Coders currently over 30 probably learned their craft in the mainframe era either at large, old-economy companies, in the goverment or in academia. That's an institutional mindset, and specializing made more sense when dealing with Big Iron. After all, computing undoubtedly innovated in the 1970's and early 1980's, but the rate of change was glacial compared to the Net- and PC-driven redline of the last fifteen years.
Today's code kids, on the other hand, grew up digital and networked, with Logo in elementary school and Nintendo in the home and on and on. We've watched the technology move up and forward and eight ways from Sunday, and we know innately that it's damn foolish to pick a technology and say it's gonna be around forever. We effectively got a head start before we hit the workforce that those before us could never have had.
The key, I think, to success over 30 is to stay flexible. We get attached to the things we learn, and rarely unlearn them. But willingness to admit that software evolves, techniques change, and favored ways of operating obsolesce is a survival tactic that becomes increasingly necessary in this industry as the rate of progress increases. And the current generation of young, PC-weaned programmers gets that, innately. As they age, I think that the perceived glass ceiling will raise to hold their numbers.
But it's equally possible to argue that the glass ceiling doesn't really exist... when you say "programmers over 40" you can mean novice programmers who happen to be up there in age, or you can mean programmers with 20 years' experience. If it's the former, a 20-year-old novice will have an advantage over him because of the generation gap I mentioned. If it's the latter, though, he'd have to lack an awful lot of common sense to not be able to parlay years of *nix experience into a job in today's economy.
What it comes down to is this: if you evaluate the technologies to make an informed decision about which ones you think are the best and the most viable; if you learn those technologies accordingly in a caring and thorough fashion; and if you never lose sight of the big picture of this network of users and developers, nor the little picture of what it means to move information in bits; then you will probably not want for work in this new economy, whether that work is coding, managing, consulting, design or otherwise. If, on the other hand, you learn from a book or online course which switches to flip and which buttons to press to make a certain application or language do its thing without a certain amount of analytical knowledge (insert MCSE diatribe here), then you run the risk of waking up one day to find that those buttons and switches have moved or that, even more likely, that no one uses that application anymore. That's a much bleaker future.
A career based on a knowledge of how systems work can be long and fruitful and varied. A career based on a knowledge of one OS or one language or one app is a crapshoot. I think today's young'uns know this, and when the kids being born today start coding, it'll be twice as true.
Like many of the "older" /.'ers (just turned 30), i started programming on lil' ol' 8-bit machines like Atari 1200 and later, apple II's, and they kept my interest as a pre-teen because i could write something and see the result damn near instantaneously. By my college years, Windoze and the Mac had come along, and programming turned into a right drag because of the layers of GUI crap that now surrounded everything. I had to either commit to being a full time coder to make anything worthwhile that hadn't been invented yet, or look for a career that involved more fresh air. Having discovered girls, I opted for the latter and went on to study design and drift aimlessly for a year or two, leaving my programming chops behind. Then in the mid-90's when the internet started giving everyone jobs, i jumped on web design, and by extension web programming.
Perl is the language that got the kid in me psyched about programming again. Flexible variable-typing, no compiler voodoo, and compact enough for a short program to be both simple enough to understand yet do Something K00L. That giddy feeling of typing just a few lines and getting a useful result got me back into programming big-time.
I agree that kids are smarter than you think. Perl will let you explain pretty much any programming technique you'd wanna show young teens. You can run an interpreter locally, or if you can give them cgi access, they can run their creation from any web browser. Besides, by the time these kids are college-aged, the desktop application may be on the way out, what with all of these distributed application type model thingies... making something work on the Web should be as cool for them as putting something on the C-64 or TRS-80 screen was for us.
Fahrenheit 451 is one of the few books I make myself reread every two years or so, because we are, in some ways, in the middle of the world gone mad that Bradbury prophesied. But it's interesting for many, many other reasons than the censorship issue. The "parlor walls" that Montag's wife interacts with presage MUDs, chat rooms and cybersex, and her dependence on artificiality over reality leads her to suicidal depression when confronted with her husband's reality. And the scene in the end, when the suspected murderer is on the run, running past houses filled with people who are watching the chase on TV, and they come out to watch the chase-- yes, Bradbury described OJ in the white Bronco forty years before the fact.
But the essence of the story really is the nature of the censorship. There's no 1984/Brazil-type monolithic central authority that's the source of the repression here, but a collective of unthinking people doing their part to keep the imagination of the individual under wraps. Note Mrs. Montag's lady-friends in the parlor tut-tutting over Guy's strange behavior, or the amoral teenagers driving fast on the highways looking for something to hit, or the blase half-interest in far-off wars on the TV. Even the chief fireman isn't presented as a functionary of central authority, but a dangerous anti-intellectual who functions with some autonomy but has no reason to change his relationship with society, because he's comfortable with his influence over others, not because he's pure evil.
Well chosen, a book that gets subtler upon rereading. Get it, read it often.
Judging by the rate of technological change, by the time any sane resolution comes of this debate, Napster, the RIAA, the MP3 format and the major record labels will already be nonexistent/irrelevant. The System already is there: we can record and trade recorded music files peer-to-peer over the internet in a largely public-domain format sans encryption and gatekeepers. That's right now, today. Once technologies are invented, they don't get uninvented, so it seems fair to assume that these new channels of distribution are going to only be getting smoother. As a result, the major labels are dead already and they know it. They're just trying to sqeeze out their share for the final inning of their game.
Encryption as a solution? It'll never happen because people aren't going to abandon 50 years worth of stereo infrastructure, and if I can play something on my stereo, I can, in the worst case scenario, record the audio out to my computer (getting a perfectly acceptable d-to-a-to-d) and recompress with the codec of my choice (or not). Encryption can be imperfectly circumvented here, but at a quality good enough for 99% of the music listening public.
So we're left with a world where the major labels are not in control. So what? There have been many fundamental shifts in technology that have ruined a business model; when i started in design ten years ago, my company bought a $2000 stat camera... two years later it was on the curb, worthless. Two years.
What do the record labels do for artists? Promote, record, market, and skim most of the profits. But thanks to the Net, the artist has an unprecedented amount of power to promote THEMSELVES, record THEMSELVES, and market THEMSELVES. Working the angles on the web will be as important for the 21st musician as catchy hooks and a good stage presence. And free distribution to consumers might be a part of those angles.
But none of this changes the fact that copyrights are still sacred to the artist. And I define copyright somewhat loosely as the right to determine where your song is distributed and for how much and why. Free distribution of a song on the Net by an artist does not mean a relinquishment of copyright! Chuck D gets this. You can give something away free to other individuals without losing the rights to control it.
Something no one has mentioned yet is the fact that there are many more ways to make money in the music biz than just selling CD's. The publishing rights are often more valuable to musicians, because even a single institutional use of a piece of music can be far, far more lucrative than selling cd's unit by unit. Chuck D wants his music to travel, he wants people to pass his shit hand to hand over the wires, because, then he can still be the song of the summer, the song that's blasting from the back of every Jeep in the 'hood, and have full rights to it w/no interference from the Man. Then, when Monday Night Football comes and wants to use Chuck's song at halftime under that goofy animation of helmets running into each other and exploding, they come to Chuck, not Chuck's label's lawyers, and he keeps the whole check, which is bound to be a big one. THAT'S where the $$$ is. I know smaller bands like Tortoise and Stereolab have sold the rights to songs for commercials (Calvin Klein and VW, respectively), and that's what made them financially solvent, not 20,000 CD sales on little indie labels. The mechanism for defending publishing rights still exists, still works, even in the Net age. See ASCAP. See BMI. Those are the organizations that cut the royalty checks, and a side effect of free consumer distribution is that those checks would be made out directly to the artist.
And remember that big summer arena tours are largely funded by the T-shirt vendors. Think different.
The current system makes 500-1000 selected lucky people millionaires, and screws everybody else. We need to get over Napster and MP3, and make sure we work on a system that'll turn that figure around, creating a new music industry where a million people can make a decent living making music each year w/o a middleman. As usual, the ones who get burned are the ones dependent on the current system when the system changes, but that always happens. But don't worry, Metallica-- in five years, there'll be a new Net to catch you. And you'll still rock.
I work for a company that's designing e-commerce sites and we were in the middle of coming up with design concepts when boo.com launched with The Buzz... everyone knew about it from industry press, etc. They had a great PR department and were well-funded, which is what made them "high-profile", _not_ favorable reactions from an adoring public. The site was overly tech-y, complex, and probably crashed half the browsers that visited it. There is a Golden Rule of web design (or any design, for that matter): Above All, Do No Harm. In the design of e-commerce, this can be refined as Don't Ever Get In The Way Of People Who Want To Spend Their Money On Your Site.
Boo.com eventually redesigned, but by the time Boo Mk.2 launched, I no longer heard The Buzz. My suspicion is that, flush with his/her buzz-generating success after launch, the PR person in charge at the beginning jumped ship for greener pastures, while the techs and a dwindling design staff, morale shaken by user criticism, scrambled to use ever-diminishing capital to make the site usuable on the second go-round. Just a guess.
Is the fall of boo.com a harbinger of the collapse of e-commerce? No more than RedHat stock's return to non-stratospheric levels invalidates Linux as a viable platform. Although I do think it's a harbinger of the inevitable return to earth of many overfunded companies flush with bright-eyed twenty-one-year-olds who think that being on the cutting edge guarantees their success and liberates them from such mundanities as user testing and developing a weatherproof business plan. Their ilk are numerous and we'll all be better off (and a bit wiser) without them.
Here's the relevant legal docs, assuming domains registered through Internic. The folks at GreatDomains.com (who probably know a thing or two about name squatting-- they're the ones who sold "loans.com" for US$3 million last month) say in their FAQ:
Our coke.ch friend sounds more like a case of the latter, but since he's still just thinking about setting up the site, it seems to undercut any cred. Coca-Cola is one company that'll protect their trademark worldwide, whether they have the use for a site or not. I hate multinationals as much as the next free thinker, but this ain't a battle worth fighting.
btw, I've heard that courts can make you stop using a domain name but can't force you to turn it over. true?