If commercial space flight truly *is* viable then why aren't more companies investing their own dollars into it and not trying to pry open the public purse?
This article from the Dallas Observer tells the story of Beal Aerospace. Billionaire founder Andy Beal put about $200M of his own money into creating a private launch services company. Warning: it's not a happy story.
Trib's listed strips; more of my favorites
on
Web-Based Comics
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· Score: 2
The Trib picked a few strips as a survey of the field. No such list would get everything good. The links I added were meta-sites and mega-sites, not individual strips.
Having said that, here are some more that might appeal to fellow Slashers:
o Goats: nominally a couple of Web developers, mostly about... oh, never mind, just read it. PG-13; your mom might not like it.
o Freefall: A captain of a starship (that's only flown once in the history of the strip), his robot sidekick, and his furry engineer. SF meets Dilbert in a kindler, gentler way.
o GPF: life at a software development company with an unfortunate name.
o Help Desk: life at the tech support desk of a software megacompany named Ubersoft (with products such as Nifty Doorways and Tactile Basic).
(The last two recently had a crossover, a pretty common occurence in online strips.)
o Acid Reflux (previously here): vaguely-D&D-ish strip about a young god trying to restore the universe her sister abandoned.
o Mega Tokyo: a couple of American gamers stranded in Japan.
o Real Life: a couple of American gamers who know they're comic strip characters.
My program, dailystrips, automatically downloads web comics so that you don't have to visit several different websites.
There are sites that do this via CGI, too. I deliberately didn't mention them in the submission, because they short-circuit whatever ad revenue these artists are making.
I'm not saying you don't have the write to write or use such scripts. I'm saying there's an ethical decision to be made here.
I've been using Google since it's alpha test days. Back then, it was a very promising search engine with some serious limitations. (Example: you couldn't search for "AT&T" because all single letters were in the exclusion list of too-common words, so "AT&T" was treated as "AT".)
I've been pleasantly astonished at how Google has improved over the years. Even when they added advertisements, the ads didn't suck: they were on-topic, small, and loaded fast.
Yes, the current Google interface to the Deja archives isn't great. A lot of functionality is gone. Do I expect Google to make huge improvements in the next few months, even weeks? Based on their track record, yes, I do.
There are some great cartoonists publishing primarily or exclusively for the Web. (Aside from User Friendly, I'm a big fan of Kevin and Kell and a lot of the Keenspot comics.)
Could we please have some Slashdot interviews with some of the folks behind these comics?
Move to IE 5.5, even though IE 5.0 is far more stable? Move to Netscape 6, even though 4.7x is far more stable, much faster, and available on more platforms? (Which version of Lynx do they want us to use?)
Seems like these guys want to install a Big Red Switch on the Web, and turn it off for everyone not surfing on the bleeding edge. No thanks.
This CNET story has lots of details. It was posted October 30, 1998, when charges were filed (a few days before the attorney general in question was up for re-election).
The newsgroups in question were alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.early-teen; pretty non-subtle. There's a claim by the prosecution that the CDA had exceptions for child pornography, so the CDA's Good Samaritan provision (which was not struck down by the courts) does not apply.
What Leadbeater is trying to sell is dreamware, this time not developed by Californian anarcho capitalists but big media business, AOL-TimeWarner style.
<sarcasm> So he wants us to ignore the tiny little geek-driven companies like Yahoo! and look forward to the successes achived by Time-Warner's immense Pathfinder effort? </sarcasm>
(I'd include a URL for Pathfinder, but the site isn't there any more; it just redirects to Time.com.)
Until a year ago, there were four leading speech recognition firms out there: Lernout & Hauspie, Dragon Systems, IBM, and Philips (barely). Dragon was near bankrupcy, and L&H bought them last year. Now L&H is being rocked by financial scandals (see this list of articles on them in CNET), and may go under as well.
There is a free download version. You can only write GPL'ed programs with it because it links in code released under the GPL (whose viral nature means it can only be used with free (speech) software; the commercial version comes with a library licensed for both free (beer?) and non-free commercial software)... I have no problem with that, I applaud Borland for coming up with an interesting way to support free software development while still maintaining some intellectual property.
This is an interesting combination of Perl's dual license (GPL and Artistic) and the approach Cygnus took. They ported gcc to Windows NT/2000 (it mostly also works on 95/98/ME), and included a GPL'ed C runtime library. (This, plus a bunch of ported GNU software, is Cygwin.) This "infects" your application, so it can only be used to develop free (speech) software. Cygnus also implemented an alternative C runtime library, which they licensed as non-free, commercial software... which could be used to distribute other non-free commercial software.
What are some of the differences between ksh88 (which I think of as comparable to bash or the Posix shell) and ksh93, that makes the latest KornShell as good or better a language than Perl?
(as you might guess from the e-mail address listed here:-).
Probably most important: In my experience, it's always been up when I've wanted to send or receive e-mail, and it's nearly always as quick as any Web site out there.
You can install up to fifteen filters; enough to sort out, e.g., messages you get from a mailing list. Their "bulk mail" option (using the Brightmail spam filter, I think) catches a lot of spam. (It can also show all headers, e.g., for use with SpamCop.)
Good integration with Yahoo! Alerts (news searches forwarded to e-mail), Calendar, and other Yahoo! services. Vacation messages. Spell checking feature for outgoing messages. E-mail forwarding and POP3 means it plays well with your real e-mail software.
The 6MB limit for messages is lame; $20/year ups it to 25MB.
Finally: they've, ever, even once sent me any junk mail. Nice! --PSRC
You won't find out a lot about Crossgain if you go to their Web site:
At Crossgain we are laying the foundation for the next generation Internet. Radically simplifying how people build and deploy applications on the Web, we are solving problems that others think are impossible.
In the coming weeks, you'll be hearing more about us. A lot more. It will be worth the wait.
(Their job listings are pretty discrete, too, though they mention Unix a lot of times and Windows only once.)
Somehow, Microsoft knew enough about what Crossgain was doing to decide they were competing. I wonder how? Did they sign an MSFT non-diclosure agreement that got disclosed internally? Did a 'softie interview and then report back?
Or (as Cooper implies in the second Yahoo! article) has Microsoft decided that former employees can't do any software development (or anything related) at their next jobs, because anything would compete with something Microsoft does or might do? If you quit Microsoft, you can't do anything for a year more technical than flipping burgers?
I use Lexis.com all the time. It did not produce any of its content- the content there comes from state houses, law books and newspapers.... hundreds of people worked to construct the database- assembling the data and creating its indexing and search functions
I have no problem with Lexis offering its content only to paying customers. I have only a slight problem with Lexis (and the equivalent print company) having a monopoly on access to what I think of as public information (outcomes of trials).
I would have a big huge freaking problem if someone tried to put together a Web site of the court results in my town, and Lexis lawyers came in and said, "You can't do that, we have a patent on making that kind of information avilable electronically! No one else on the entire Internet can do that without giving us a pound of flesh!"
... it's been around (and used successfully) for over fifteen years?
As Jim Coplien has pointed out, OO (objected oriented programming / design / analysis) is older today than "structured" programming / design / analysis was when OO first burst upon the scene. (The structured movement first got some serious press in the mid to late 1960s; the classic book by Dahl, Dijkstra, and Hoare was published in 1972. OO started no later than Simula-67 and Smalltalk-72, and first gathered mainstream attention in the 1980 - 1982 timeframe. The first OOPSLA conference was in 1986.)
Yes, some snake-oil salesmen overhype OO... or whatever buzzword they can apply to their product. Surprise.
No, OO is not a panacea. It's not even always the right tool to apply to a particular design or programming problem. (Coplien's recent book, Multi-Paradigm Design for C++, is a tough but worthwhile read that addresses this issue.)
You may dislike a particular language that supports OO (Smalltalk, C++, Java, even Perl) but find the paradigm worthwhile in some other language.
For comparison, compare with this message in Risks Digest: "The structured programming revolution is a real bad idea that has been significantly holding back progress for years.... Have there been any double blind studies which unambiguously show that the kind of programs that structured programming partisans enjoy are really more maintainable than some other kind of program? I've heard lots of testimonials, but no real evidence." Sound kind of familiar? (Heh.) --PSRC
The "fifty thousand dollars" penalty is not mentioned (might have been added after the last visit from the Google spider).
The bandwidth charge (how the kid raked his customers over the coals) is spelled out fairly clearly. The killer subclause: "You also understand that wusage statistics are not accurate enough for you to determine your own total bandwidth usage, as it does not include the following: e-mail transfer, httpd or ftp downloads from webpage, anonymous FTP downloads, CGI scripts, Real Audio, Real Video, Telnet, and SSH, as well as other items." Translation: We can make up numbers that you can't verify.
An anti-spam clause with teeth: "Upon even your first Spam offense your account will be terminated and a maintenance fee of $1000 will be billed to your payment method used upon sign up. This is due to the enormous amount of time it takes to serve spamming victims. If customer paid by credit card, they agree to pay this fee." (emphasis in original)
"ALL CUSTOMERS MUST BE AT LEAST 18 YEARS OF AGE" (but doesn't say anything about the management of the company:-)
P.S.: Someone please tell him "kilobits per second" is abbreviated Kb/s or Kbps but not kbp/s (kilobits per per second?-)
Can an ISP, instead of filtering mail from "bad" sites, add identifying header lines to messages from such hosts? That way, users could add fiters to block such messages, but have filters with a higher precedence to allow mail from friends and family. (I know this requires a fair level of expertise. Also not clear how you could set it up so users wouldn't even have to download spam.)
twice adapted to television
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Longitude
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· Score: 3
(Sorry for my previous erroneous post. There have been books made from NOVA episodes; I believe Simon Singh, author of The Code Book, adapted the 1997 episode on Fermat's Theorem into a 1998 book.)
based on the NOVA episode
on
Longitude
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· Score: 2
Slashdot Mirror
If commercial space flight truly *is* viable then why aren't more companies investing their own dollars into it and not trying to pry open the public purse?
This article from the Dallas Observer tells the story of Beal Aerospace. Billionaire founder Andy Beal put about $200M of his own money into creating a private launch services company. Warning: it's not a happy story.
So hows does Slashdot plan to keep its domain?
Good thing OSDN owns slashdot.com (but not slashdot.net).
... here.
Anyone know why so many Web comics have alien abduction themes? I've seen it in Kevin and Kell, College Roomies From Hell, Cool Cat Studio, and maybe Alice. Roomies, now known as It's Walky!, is now entirely about aliens. What gives?
The Trib picked a few strips as a survey of the field. No such list would get everything good. The links I added were meta-sites and mega-sites, not individual strips.
... oh, never mind, just read it. PG-13; your mom might not like it.
Having said that, here are some more that might appeal to fellow Slashers:
o Goats: nominally a couple of Web developers, mostly about
o Freefall: A captain of a starship (that's only flown once in the history of the strip), his robot sidekick, and his furry engineer. SF meets Dilbert in a kindler, gentler way.
o GPF: life at a software development company with an unfortunate name.
o Help Desk: life at the tech support desk of a software megacompany named Ubersoft (with products such as Nifty Doorways and Tactile Basic).
(The last two recently had a crossover, a pretty common occurence in online strips.)
o Acid Reflux (previously here): vaguely-D&D-ish strip about a young god trying to restore the universe her sister abandoned.
o Mega Tokyo: a couple of American gamers stranded in Japan.
o Real Life: a couple of American gamers who know they're comic strip characters.
o Schlock Mercenary: light SF strip.
All have complete archives back to the first strip, so you can catch up at your leisure. Enjoy!
My program, dailystrips, automatically downloads web comics so that you don't have to visit several different websites.
There are sites that do this via CGI, too. I deliberately didn't mention them in the submission, because they short-circuit whatever ad revenue these artists are making.
I'm not saying you don't have the write to write or use such scripts. I'm saying there's an ethical decision to be made here.
I've been using Google since it's alpha test days. Back then, it was a very promising search engine with some serious limitations. (Example: you couldn't search for "AT&T" because all single letters were in the exclusion list of too-common words, so "AT&T" was treated as "AT".)
I've been pleasantly astonished at how Google has improved over the years. Even when they added advertisements, the ads didn't suck: they were on-topic, small, and loaded fast.
Yes, the current Google interface to the Deja archives isn't great. A lot of functionality is gone. Do I expect Google to make huge improvements in the next few months, even weeks? Based on their track record, yes, I do.
There are some great cartoonists publishing primarily or exclusively for the Web. (Aside from User Friendly, I'm a big fan of Kevin and Kell and a lot of the Keenspot comics.)
Could we please have some Slashdot interviews with some of the folks behind these comics?
Move to IE 5.5, even though IE 5.0 is far more stable? Move to Netscape 6, even though 4.7x is far more stable, much faster, and available on more platforms? (Which version of Lynx do they want us to use?)
Seems like these guys want to install a Big Red Switch on the Web, and turn it off for everyone not surfing on the bleeding edge. No thanks.
This CNET story has lots of details. It was posted October 30, 1998, when charges were filed (a few days before the attorney general in question was up for re-election).
The newsgroups in question were alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.early-teen; pretty non-subtle. There's a claim by the prosecution that the CDA had exceptions for child pornography, so the CDA's Good Samaritan provision (which was not struck down by the courts) does not apply.
The words "chilling effect" come to mind.
What Leadbeater is trying to sell is dreamware, this time not developed by Californian anarcho capitalists but big media business, AOL-TimeWarner style.
<sarcasm> So he wants us to ignore the tiny little geek-driven companies like Yahoo! and look forward to the successes achived by Time-Warner's immense Pathfinder effort? </sarcasm>
(I'd include a URL for Pathfinder, but the site isn't there any more; it just redirects to Time.com.)
Speech recognition isn't perfect. It's not technology you can use casually, but it is usable with practice and training (for the software and the user). John Ousterhout, the creator of Tcl/Tk, has been using it for years after he developed problems with his wrist.
Until a year ago, there were four leading speech recognition firms out there: Lernout & Hauspie, Dragon Systems, IBM, and Philips (barely). Dragon was near bankrupcy, and L&H bought them last year. Now L&H is being rocked by financial scandals (see this list of articles on them in CNET), and may go under as well.
IBM, on the other hand, has supported their ViaVoice SDK for Linux for a long time. They also sell their ViaVoice dication software for Linux.
Without IBM, speech recognition might die. I'm glad to see they're pushing it futher, especially on Linux.
P.S.: "Voice recogintion" identifies people; "speech recognition" turns what they say into text.
P.P.S. It's possible to bind sneezes, sniffles, coughs, etc., into "null text."
There is a free download version. You can only write GPL'ed programs with it because it links in code released under the GPL (whose viral nature means it can only be used with free (speech) software; the commercial version comes with a library licensed for both free (beer?) and non-free commercial software) ... I have no problem with that, I applaud Borland for coming up with an interesting way to support free software development while still maintaining some intellectual property.
... which could be used to distribute other non-free commercial software.
This is an interesting combination of Perl's dual license (GPL and Artistic) and the approach Cygnus took. They ported gcc to Windows NT/2000 (it mostly also works on 95/98/ME), and included a GPL'ed C runtime library. (This, plus a bunch of ported GNU software, is Cygwin.) This "infects" your application, so it can only be used to develop free (speech) software. Cygnus also implemented an alternative C runtime library, which they licensed as non-free, commercial software
(Or they used to. A quick search of the Red Hat's site seems to show they now only do this for embedded software.)
What are some of the differences between ksh88 (which I think of as comparable to bash or the Posix shell) and ksh93, that makes the latest KornShell as good or better a language than Perl?
How would you compare the UWIN and Cygwin projects?
(as you might guess from the e-mail address listed here:-).
Probably most important: In my experience, it's always been up when I've wanted to send or receive e-mail, and it's nearly always as quick as any Web site out there.
You can install up to fifteen filters; enough to sort out, e.g., messages you get from a mailing list. Their "bulk mail" option (using the Brightmail spam filter, I think) catches a lot of spam. (It can also show all headers, e.g., for use with SpamCop.)
Good integration with Yahoo! Alerts (news searches forwarded to e-mail), Calendar, and other Yahoo! services. Vacation messages. Spell checking feature for outgoing messages. E-mail forwarding and POP3 means it plays well with your real e-mail software.
The 6MB limit for messages is lame; $20/year ups it to 25MB.
Finally: they've, ever, even once sent me any junk mail. Nice! --PSRC
You won't find out a lot about Crossgain if you go to their Web site:
At Crossgain we are laying the foundation for the next generation Internet. Radically simplifying how people build and deploy applications on the Web, we are solving problems that others think are impossible.
In the coming weeks, you'll be hearing more about us. A lot more. It will be worth the wait.
(Their job listings are pretty discrete, too, though they mention Unix a lot of times and Windows only once.)
Somehow, Microsoft knew enough about what Crossgain was doing to decide they were competing. I wonder how? Did they sign an MSFT non-diclosure agreement that got disclosed internally? Did a 'softie interview and then report back?
Or (as Cooper implies in the second Yahoo! article) has Microsoft decided that former employees can't do any software development (or anything related) at their next jobs, because anything would compete with something Microsoft does or might do? If you quit Microsoft, you can't do anything for a year more technical than flipping burgers?
More info on Crossgain: a story on c|net and a blurb from a company that gave them $10M.
I use Lexis.com all the time. It did not produce any of its content- the content there comes from state houses, law books and newspapers.... hundreds of people worked to construct the database- assembling the data and creating its indexing and search functions
I have no problem with Lexis offering its content only to paying customers. I have only a slight problem with Lexis (and the equivalent print company) having a monopoly on access to what I think of as public information (outcomes of trials).
I would have a big huge freaking problem if someone tried to put together a Web site of the court results in my town, and Lexis lawyers came in and said, "You can't do that, we have a patent on making that kind of information avilable electronically! No one else on the entire Internet can do that without giving us a pound of flesh!"
Prior art, anyone? --PSRC
P.S.: The Internet World article is dated January 15th, five days after CMGI cancelled AltaVista's IPO. Coincidence?
... it's been around (and used successfully) for over fifteen years?
... or whatever buzzword they can apply to their product. Surprise.
As Jim Coplien has pointed out, OO (objected oriented programming / design / analysis) is older today than "structured" programming / design / analysis was when OO first burst upon the scene. (The structured movement first got some serious press in the mid to late 1960s; the classic book by Dahl, Dijkstra, and Hoare was published in 1972. OO started no later than Simula-67 and Smalltalk-72, and first gathered mainstream attention in the 1980 - 1982 timeframe. The first OOPSLA conference was in 1986.)
Yes, some snake-oil salesmen overhype OO
No, OO is not a panacea. It's not even always the right tool to apply to a particular design or programming problem. (Coplien's recent book, Multi-Paradigm Design for C++ , is a tough but worthwhile read that addresses this issue.)
You may dislike a particular language that supports OO (Smalltalk, C++, Java, even Perl) but find the paradigm worthwhile in some other language.
For comparison, compare with this message in Risks Digest: "The structured programming revolution is a real bad idea that has been significantly holding back progress for years.... Have there been any double blind studies which unambiguously show that the kind of programs that structured programming partisans enjoy are really more maintainable than some other kind of program? I've heard lots of testimonials, but no real evidence." Sound kind of familiar? (Heh.) --PSRC
The original critical Web page hosted by Mindspring pointed to another page on AdWanted, which shut down the review on threat of lawsuit (but at least pointed to the current location on Geocities).
P.S.: Someone please tell him "kilobits per second" is abbreviated Kb/s or Kbps but not kbp/s (kilobits per per second?-)
... why doesn't MS do mascots?
All the good insects were already spoken for.
Can an ISP, instead of filtering mail from "bad" sites, add identifying header lines to messages from such hosts? That way, users could add fiters to block such messages, but have filters with a higher precedence to allow mail from friends and family. (I know this requires a fair level of expertise. Also not clear how you could set it up so users wouldn't even have to download spam.)
The book (or at least its subject) has been made into a 1998 episode of NOVA (here is the Internet Movie Database entry; there's also a transcript on the PBS Web site), and a made-for-TV movie (starring Jeremey Irons) by A&E.
(Sorry for my previous erroneous post. There have been books made from NOVA episodes; I believe Simon Singh, author of The Code Book, adapted the 1997 episode on Fermat's Theorem into a 1998 book.)
It was a great book, based on a great epsiode of NOVA.