I remember those days well. It was all part of the nervous hysteria in the lead up to Y2K. The Comet itself was well publicized by Art Bell, from the previous november or so to January 16th of that year, when they exposed the hoaxsters live on the air.
That group in sandiago (who made lots of money as an offbeat web development company) offed themselves in march or april, claiming that the ealier events did not matter.
Perhaps you're congusing Mandrake with Microsoft, GE, IBM or some other company with lots of liquid assets they can absorb losses. In case you haven't noticed, Mandrake is suffering from low revenues, hence the membership drive.
It was an attempt at mild irony/sarcasm without sufficient morning coffee. Next time I'll make it explicit with the use of irony tags.
1) While technology will often come up with a solution that is "good enough" to do a job, it is quite another to make something technically perfect. Absolute requirements for all devices everywhere to meat a certain perfect standard will meet as many difficulties as mandating a perfectly safe car.
2) No Law should enforce draconian measure to protect an industry that is unable to keep up with the market.
3) Contrary to media industry spokesman, Actual sales on CDs went up during the time that Napster was running, and have since declined since Napster was shut down. Part of this was the browsing capability of the software. This was similar to you visiting a friends house, and seing what books, music, etc are in their collection, and so deciding to check it out since they already have things you like to begin with. Now this shut off.
4) People are becoming more educated about non-mainstream artists, and are starting to broaden their horizons. Therefore, they are not buying the same old product that is pumped out by the pop mills.
5) People may avoid the technology like the plague, and will get really upset for being forced to upgrade their equipment that they bought years ago.
Given the sheer number of companies, as well as the connections for finance, the attitudes that worked well over the past 20 to 40 years are gfoing to be hard to kill off by the simple collapse of a speculative bubble. There is still some demand for the product, vs the craze, let's say, of the tulip industry in Holland a long time ago. While that is taken as a typical example of a stock bubble, it is very different than what happened with the internet.
The internet has a major infrastructure component to it that continues to grow. the whole thing probably will continue nicely until moore's law fails.
At that point it will depend a bit on how much that planet has been wired, and how close we are to the "singularity" or machines being "smarter" than humans.
murphy's law, working in reverse, says that this will happen at or before the point that machines achieve human level intelligence, making it impractical to have armies of super intelligent robots develop before humans figure out what to do about it. (hahaha)
as a protestant german theologan, among other things he notes that much of the opposition to scientology in germany is because it is american, not for other reason.
He's an academic studying religions. even tho he dislike scientology, the absence of info gives the resources he can find in germany a strange flavor. doesn't help the objective study.
One bright spot for free software advocates: Any software that implements the standards must be "based on open source code." Hardware copy-protection schemes can remain proprietary.
The idiot had his own small time talk show on shortwave (I think) Someone had sent the idiot a rumor that had it all backwards, accusing the talk show host father Art Bell of peodophilia. Art Bell had been trying to keep it quiet to protect his son, and eventually came forward with the information on the air, when the rumors got to heavy, and he had to file a law suit. Needless to say, the father was not pleased, hired the best of lean and hungry lawyers, and had at the jerk.
Now there are programs like Mailwasher that let you erase and bounce email before you download it. Of course, Unix admins have been able to do this since the dawn of time.
Slightly off topic, but I saw this item on RFN a few weeks back:
Former Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is planning a chain of "orbiting hotels" cruising perpetually between the Earth and Mars. [...] The main trick to the operation is to have the main ships in a constant regular solar orbit so that no fuel is ever needed to keep going, just enough for boosters, manuvering, etc. The estimated trip time between the Earth and Mars is 8 Months.
(more links in the original story)
Maybe he might want to pick up some of the surplus items?
[smile]
There has to be a use for a lot of this surplus stuff for business.
Make sure that everthing you code is in modules/objects/etc.
Then, as people code they enter data about how the modules and interfaces behave into a database.
Everyone gets to add info about the modules, no one can remove it. You are building a database of knowledge about your work.
Modules in the database have extra fields to identify functionality, connections, general areas.
You can then run reports which become the basis for chapters, etc.
Of course there are plenty of decent programs for this sort of thing, complete with version control, etc. In fact you could use any common coding version control program, storing basic text instead of code. Run it in side by side with the code. then export to a text file for reformatting, etc. just keep style, etc consistant.
out of 59 launches from 1958 to 1976, there were apparently 18 successful missions.
1969 was a really bad year.
over all, looks like about half (?) exploded or never left earth orbit, etc. or otherwise had other problems. Since the original post nattered about a mission about the time of the first American Moon landing (1969) quoting the stats from 1969 seemed relevant.
Nine or ten N1's were built at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The giant rocket was launched just four times; each one was a disaster ending in abrupt and catastrophic failure.
When things go BOOM, this is technically not a good thing.
For a comparion of magnetic pole shift vs other theories of polar and crusty disturbance, check out this page which picks apart the psuedo science of it all. There are a lot of wacko theories on what pole shift means, and a lot of it is based on lack of evidence and mis-conceptions.
There is this concern: The magnetic field acts as a shield against solar particles, etc. No field = no shield. Weak field = weak shield. This could be an issue with solar flares. Some folks are concerned that the field may be in the process of failing
Also, if the poles were to flip suddenly, many creatures that navigate magnetically could be affected. A full magnetic reversal could cause massive ecological problems across the whole of the Earth. If this took place slowly enough, each generation of creatures would learn to navigate with its' current situation.
Virtual Keyboard [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco with 248 comments on 05:27 PM -- Wednesday November 14 2001
Great gadgets at CeBIT
TechnologyPosted by timothy on 10:08 AM -- Monday March 18 2002
I also remember seeing photos, etc a few months back. so the company PR geek must be happy about making into Yahoo, etc.
As a general rule, users don't like a lot of change. If you notice the evolution of Windows software, there has been no great revolution in UI in Windows until XP
Well there was that change from 3.1 to 4.0 (aka 95), but then they just coped and screamed. It is one thing when there is a big change, it is another when you have a bunch of prima donnas.
I don't even want to talk about the people who call up and ask "could you walk me through that again?" for the umpteenth time.
I remember them from the navy. I actually prefer them for many uses. The typical track balls you buy retail feel like bowling with a golf ball.
A mouse is better for text editing, etc.
To get the idea, thing of something in the tabletop about the size of a mouse pad. At the top of the mouse pad are your buttons, right under your fingertips. The track ball sits under you hand in the cup of the palm. The curvature of the ball matches your palm nicely, basically a bowling ball on rollers. You spin it, and it has great momentum. good stuff.
Virtual Keyboard by CmdrTaco with 248 comments on 05:27 PM -- Wednesday November 14 2001
Using Tables as Speakers by Hemos with 312 comments on 10:41 AM -- Thursday March 14 2002
at least products are making it to the trade shows.
When it first started gaining popularity (or at least when I first noticed it) circa 1998, I found it to be juvenile, fan boy garbage and almost entirely apocryphal or at least wildly innaccurate (to quote D Adams).
I'm glad to see you think so highly of it. Sortof reminds of a geek gossip site in a way. Even if he has 'connections', his style is disturbing at best.
Slashdot Mirror
That group in sandiago (who made lots of money as an offbeat web development company) offed themselves in march or april, claiming that the ealier events did not matter.
other details here.
don't forget to look over your shoulder.
[smile]
Even they realized that most people would likely have some variatin on one favorite gesture to use with MS software.
And complex gestures would begin to resemble an arcane and ancient magic ritual. (which is an idea for a sf story someplace)
It was an attempt at mild irony/sarcasm without sufficient morning coffee. Next time I'll make it explicit with the use of irony tags.
or the could put Open Office in it, which is actually not bad, and if I recall rightly is vaguely related to Star Office.
I wonder if their is some sort of contractual obligation to include Star, or were blinsided by the announcement that 6.0 is going to be charged for.
1) While technology will often come up with a solution that is "good enough" to do a job, it is quite another to make something technically perfect. Absolute requirements for all devices everywhere to meat a certain perfect standard will meet as many difficulties as mandating a perfectly safe car.
2) No Law should enforce draconian measure to protect an industry that is unable to keep up with the market.
3) Contrary to media industry spokesman, Actual sales on CDs went up during the time that Napster was running, and have since declined since Napster was shut down. Part of this was the browsing capability of the software. This was similar to you visiting a friends house, and seing what books, music, etc are in their collection, and so deciding to check it out since they already have things you like to begin with. Now this shut off.
4) People are becoming more educated about non-mainstream artists, and are starting to broaden their horizons. Therefore, they are not buying the same old product that is pumped out by the pop mills.
5) People may avoid the technology like the plague, and will get really upset for being forced to upgrade their equipment that they bought years ago.
The internet has a major infrastructure component to it that continues to grow. the whole thing probably will continue nicely until moore's law fails.
At that point it will depend a bit on how much that planet has been wired, and how close we are to the "singularity" or machines being "smarter" than humans.
murphy's law, working in reverse, says that this will happen at or before the point that machines achieve human level intelligence, making it impractical to have armies of super intelligent robots develop before humans figure out what to do about it. (hahaha)
http://www.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/jo urnal/mjr/frenschkowski.html
as a protestant german theologan, among other things he notes that much of the opposition to scientology in germany is because it is american, not for other reason.
He's an academic studying religions. even tho he dislike scientology, the absence of info gives the resources he can find in germany a strange flavor. doesn't help the objective study.
One bright spot for free software advocates: Any software that implements the standards must be "based on open source code." Hardware copy-protection schemes can remain proprietary.
Now this ought to prove interesting
What happened was that his son. artbell jr (or whatever) had been molested by a teacher, who was sent away to jail for a very long time.
The idiot had his own small time talk show on shortwave (I think) Someone had sent the idiot a rumor that had it all backwards, accusing the talk show host father Art Bell of peodophilia. Art Bell had been trying to keep it quiet to protect his son, and eventually came forward with the information on the air, when the rumors got to heavy, and he had to file a law suit. Needless to say, the father was not pleased, hired the best of lean and hungry lawyers, and had at the jerk.
Now there are programs like Mailwasher that let you erase and bounce email before you download it. Of course, Unix admins have been able to do this since the dawn of time.
My modest proposal is that we have to make it legal for people and service providers to charge spammers for the traffic they create.
If you can make a profit in hunting down spammers, i bet a lot of people would jump at the chance.
A federal spamm license requiring spammer to register, etc, pay huge taxes to the government, complete with cute little orange tag for the ear.
and allowing people to charge them for the hassle. did I mention tthat yet?
people would get rich off this, hunting down illegal spammers, collecting fees for ISPs, etc.
Former Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is planning a chain of "orbiting hotels" cruising perpetually between the Earth and Mars. [...] The main trick to the operation is to have the main ships in a constant regular solar orbit so that no fuel is ever needed to keep going, just enough for boosters, manuvering, etc. The estimated trip time between the Earth and Mars is 8 Months.
(more links in the original story)
Maybe he might want to pick up some of the surplus items?
[smile]
There has to be a use for a lot of this surplus stuff for business.
Make sure that everthing you code is in modules/objects/etc.
Then, as people code they enter data about how the modules and interfaces behave into a database.
Everyone gets to add info about the modules, no one can remove it. You are building a database of knowledge about your work.
Modules in the database have extra fields to identify functionality, connections, general areas.
You can then run reports which become the basis for chapters, etc.
Of course there are plenty of decent programs for this sort of thing, complete with version control, etc. In fact you could use any common coding version control program, storing basic text instead of code. Run it in side by side with the code. then export to a text file for reformatting, etc. just keep style, etc consistant.
Well, not in 1969. I note from your links that the successful ones were 1 in 1966, 2 in 1970, 1 in 1973, 1 in 1976.
I just didn't feel like posting the complete list, which you can see in the original link I provided.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_planetar y_lunar.html
has a comprehensive list.
out of 59 launches from 1958 to 1976, there were apparently 18 successful missions.
1969 was a really bad year.
over all, looks like about half (?) exploded or never left earth orbit, etc. or otherwise had other problems. Since the original post nattered about a mission about the time of the first American Moon landing (1969) quoting the stats from 1969 seemed relevant.
When things go BOOM, this is technically not a good thing.
Here is a summary of the Russian lunar launches. Here is the data from 1969
Jan. 20, 1969 7K-L1/ 13L - Circumlunar UR-500 Launch failure
Feb. 19, 1969 E-8 - Lunar rover 8K82K (UR-500) Failed to reach orbit
Feb. 21, 1969 7K-L1S - Circumlunar N-1 / L3 Exploded during launch
June 14, 1969 E-8-5 #402 - Sample return UR-500 Failed to reach orbit
July 3, 1969 7K-L1S - Circumlunar N-1 / 5L Exploded at launch
July 13, 1969 E-8-5 Luna-15 Sample return UR-500 Crashed on lunar surface
Aug. 8, 1969 7K-L1 Zond-7 Circumlunar UR-500 Flew around the Moon
Sept. 23, 1969 E-8-5 Cosmos-300 Sample return UR-500 Failed to leave Earth orbit
Oct. 22, 1969 E-8-5 Cosmos-305 Sample return UR-500 Failed to leave Earth orbit
Give them points for effort.
For a comparion of magnetic pole shift vs other theories of polar and crusty disturbance, check out this page which picks apart the psuedo science of it all. There are a lot of wacko theories on what pole shift means, and a lot of it is based on lack of evidence and mis-conceptions.
It is intereting to note that, the earth's core is rotating faster than the surface crust to begin with.
There is this concern: The magnetic field acts as a shield against solar particles, etc. No field = no shield. Weak field = weak shield. This could be an issue with solar flares. Some folks are concerned that the field may be in the process of failing
Also, if the poles were to flip suddenly, many creatures that navigate magnetically could be affected. A full magnetic reversal could cause massive ecological problems across the whole of the Earth. If this took place slowly enough, each generation of creatures would learn to navigate with its' current situation.
Virtual Keyboard [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco with 248 comments on 05:27 PM -- Wednesday November 14 2001
Great gadgets at CeBIT TechnologyPosted by timothy on 10:08 AM -- Monday March 18 2002
I also remember seeing photos, etc a few months back. so the company PR geek must be happy about making into Yahoo, etc.
He is probably trying to be too clever by half. Sounds like he is trying to apply elite hacker techniques to the legal system. And screwing up.
when you are hacking a system, mistakes like that are not going to any great harm, usually "access denied" or something like that.
hmmmm, never mind, he is in court because of hacking, anyhow. Maybe he is not so smart after all. maybe a slight bit of idiot savant.
Speaking of mind altering substances, the only one I know of who definitely less smart is this guy, who is currently facing a pakistani jail sentence.
Well there was that change from 3.1 to 4.0 (aka 95), but then they just coped and screamed. It is one thing when there is a big change, it is another when you have a bunch of prima donnas.
I don't even want to talk about the people who call up and ask "could you walk me through that again?" for the umpteenth time.
RFN had links to other research sites, some of which have pics every week or two for the past two months.
A mouse is better for text editing, etc.
To get the idea, thing of something in the tabletop about the size of a mouse pad. At the top of the mouse pad are your buttons, right under your fingertips. The track ball sits under you hand in the cup of the palm. The curvature of the ball matches your palm nicely, basically a bowling ball on rollers. You spin it, and it has great momentum. good stuff.
every have to deal with a whiner rebellion?
Virtual Keyboard by CmdrTaco with 248 comments on 05:27 PM -- Wednesday November 14 2001
Using Tables as Speakers by Hemos with 312 comments on 10:41 AM -- Thursday March 14 2002
at least products are making it to the trade shows.
I'm glad to see you think so highly of it. Sortof reminds of a geek gossip site in a way. Even if he has 'connections', his style is disturbing at best.
Well the Mirror is back up, and I even took the liberty of running the picks through photoshop so they are much easier to look at.
http://notnj.tripod.com/