Unfortunately application compatibility has always been the key.
heck, I feel like a rant tonight.
Yep, unfortunately, MS quality control seems to have been aimed at the level of how many things we can we get away breaking ( like Lotius, etc) without people running away in terror.
right now, they could put out complete crap, and people would still buy it because they have to, not because of any apparent merit. Marketing and accounting love it, but it is a complete insult to the engineers, not that account or marketing would care much.
It is like engineering a new hardware widget. Some cool engineer invents something and does a damn good job. the prototype is excellent. it then gets fed to the production engineer, who work damn hard at trying to produce the widget as cheaply as possible, and still have it work.
MS engineers probably produce great shit, then it hits the marketing integration tem, and the result is crap. It doesn't survive well being integrated with the Microsft marketing vision.
This all seems to be fall out and unanticipated consequences of various things:
1) the various quantum tunneling experiments, where the Mozart 40th Symphony was transmitted through solid metal at several times the speed of light. There is a good link here. There was even a NOVA special or something on that (see that transcript here, - info about 2/3rds into the material)
2) maybe something involving the research of Steven Wolfram (developer of Mathematica), as seen in his forth coming book A New Kind of Science, which is very geeky, very bizarre, and right up this alley, and is supposed to be a rethinking of the very fundamentals of how science works. My head hurts already. This book is due for publication in January 2002, and is well worth pre-ordering.
Because of the new contracts, some industry insiders say, Excite@Home will likely be sold for pennies on the dollar--if any buyer at all steps forward.
Maybe Slash could buy it. Or better yet sell it to MS, and help bleed the beast of Remond as they desperately try to show how to run things right.
Basically, quicktime allowed the birth of multimedia. The attitudes from the first posters were along the line of "say thank you, and don't forget to kick it as you walk on by"
Of course, if you really like MS Brand Duct Tape, then keep on kicking.
It is sort of like bitching at your grandfather:"I wish you were never born". Which is not exactly bright, on several levels.
1) the site has to be apparently valuable enough that people will bookmark them and will continue to use the resource.
2) The support mechanism for the site (products advertised, etc) have to be valuable enough that people will go for these as well.
Maintaining the character of a site, breathing life into it so that it is constantly alive, is WORK. Some folks burn out on this faster than others.
An example of this are sites like ubersoft, a comic strip which is decent, often excellent, but where the author sometime falls behind due to distractions or other details, or the well runs dry for a day or two.
In a website like slash, the number of stories submitted, comments posted daily typically is something like one percent of the active users that day. It also depends on the events of the day, etc. A very crude measure to be sure. of course, you can have someone just pumping out stories for a year or two, But you better have an edge, like spinsanity does, being located in DC, etc.
Is it just me, or is this info simply dated, coming as it does from the middle of the dot-bomb boom, three years before the edge of the cliff was even visible?
Imagine getting killed before you can think as you spawn in the middle of a firefight involving the population of a small country:) With that much going on in one place, I don't think it would be much fun because the overall hit rate would preclude survival for a significant amount of time.
I don't know, you could always spawn in a dead zone where everyone has been killed off already, more or less...
But I am sure that there is a whole crowd of people who would go for it. Just as described. say, in an over-sized and semi dormant volcano caldera.
Ten thousand people in a square mile equals one person per 50 foot square (roughly) for a large distance. not so bad until they start mobbing. Start looking for many hole covers really quick.
Just then, Kamen rides up and hands his Segway over to Bezos. As the Amazon boss races madly around the warehouse, hooting and cackling and flapping his arms, someone yells out, "Yo, Jeff, what were you saying about the consumer market?" Whizzing past, Bezos shouts back, "There's definitely at least a consumer market of one!"
To make the machine even safer, it comes equipped with three computerized keys that set speed and performance limits. The slowest setting, now called training mode, used to be jokingly referred to around DEKA as CEO mode.
Not just a scooter, but similar. with computer controls to slow down the boss and allow you to track them
I guess we'll just have to see it to "get it". From everything I see, there is a big cooness factor involved. And I gues it doesn't have an engine. which makes me say "HUH?!"
Developed at a cost of more than $100 million, Kamen's vehicle is a complex bundle of hardware and software that mimics the human body's ability to maintain its balance. Not only does it have no brakes, it also has no engine, no throttle, no gearshift and no steering wheel. And it can carry the average rider for a full day, nonstop, on only five cents' worth of electricity.
Heh. While I'm agnostic/atheist/apathist, that's stupid. That is, to say that a person wouldn't be aware/wondering about god(s) unless they were told about it? How was the concept invented, if it takes someone else to inform another about it for the idea to exist? ALIENS?
Very similarly, the flaw in the argument is that it is not possible to have a new thought or to invent anything. which is of course silly.
unless you subscribed to the idea that all thoughts come from some god, in which case everyone was a robot. This is the same flaw as in the argument that everything has been thought of before. pure bunk.
Now some people Steal their Ideas, but that is something else indeed.
What I am concerned about is the quality of life for human animals hybrids.
I am not enamored with the idea of a race of morons created for our pleasure and to do our bidding, despite what certain very big companies and politicians might aspire to. How would you like to live that life? Would you wish it on anyone, well, besides Bill Gates?
Weta crowd supervisor Stephen Regelous has created software, dubbed Massive, that creates realistic crowds. Every individual in the crowd moves in response to stimulus such as terrain, and to the actions of others. The battles in The Return of the King will see hundreds of thousands of these intelligent agents in frame at the same time, Mr Labrie says, stretching the software to its limits.
Aside from the impressive technological feat, imagine looking forward to the day when effects like these are availble for Gaming Engines.
Imagine Quake IX out in an open plane of battle with literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers and other things out there all at once.
I am reminded of something similar to the weekend dogfights/lanparties at the Airforce Academy, but with a much larger field of action.
While it is all very wild over there, if there was a way to get geek volunteers into Kabul, this would do more to bring the rest of the world to Afghanistan than anything.
Point being, the first priority is not to bring democracy to Afghanistan, although this would be nice.
[Afghanistan, in fact, is democratic to a fault. Typically they do not have one or two major parties. They tend to have hundreds of them.]
What is more important is that _education_ is brought into the mix. Restoration of the education system is vital to an effective civilization, unless, like the Taliban, you maintain your power base through maintaining the population in ignorance.
A major part of this is Education in Technology. Bringing technology to Afghanistan, along with all the other fundamental resuorces, would accelerate the recovery of the country.
Information can be considered a fundamental resource for any civilization.
They'll probably have their site/'ed, and then they'll cite it as an example of a super sophisticated DDOS attack
watch that server go up in smoke, just by coincidence.
Given the french law, which does have a tendency to be draconian, and given the recent change in the security environment, it might have been safer to open a school for aspiring criminals, or something.
The implication I got from your comments was that the Tyranny of Numbers was nonsense. A sort of "nah, couldn't be possible type of thing". And what you said implied to me that the tyranny of numbers was not relevant because the MTBF as about 2 years, implying that it was not an issue because if you started out with all new tubes, it all should run for a year or so. which is of course wrong, as you have since demonstrated.
Which is why I pointed you to the source materials, etc. I was getting frustrated.
;-)
That said, of course the basics of this issue were not tubes so much, but the exponential increase in hand soldered connections, increasing wire length with attendent signal lag and interference problems, and exponential complexity of design in the smallest box possible. These issues continued to exist even with the discrete standalone transistors.
So tubes were not a core part of the issue at hand, even though they were still widely used. Looking over the previous posts, you seemed to miss things like this paragraph:
The problem was that transistors still had to be interconnected to form electronic circuits, and hand-soldering thousands of components to thousands of bits of wire was expensive and time-consuming. It was also unreliable; every soldered joint was a potential source of trouble. The challenge was to find cost-effective, reliable ways of producing these components and interconnecting them.
which got ungodly when dealing with thousands and thousands of components. (vs the many dozens in a radio or Stereo)
Obviously, submitted stories, such as on Slash, can be edited, if nothing else but for an occasional typo, etc.
User comments should not be touched, and in fact Slash does not permit this. You would have to access the MySQL files and edit the comments directly if you wanted to do that. This can be inconvenient.
That being said, posters should be resonsible for their own comments. If they post something against the site policy, or illegal, then the site should be able to retain the option to delete the comments.
I happen to like the moderation system, because otherwise you can devolve into a sea of moronic cluelessness. It will do until something else comes along. Things like the open publishing system seen at Indy Media are great, but they do not scale well.
Given that TLDs were chosen for the convenience of identification, or so it seems, I still think that there should be a large number (maybe thousands) of TLDs available, if for no ither reason than to provide labels for languages other than English. (thinking of Chinese characters, etc)
Other than that, the.museum TLD is a little long for convenience.
Info from the official PDF. Even from this you can see what the problem was.
11/30 Excite@Home pulls the plug
07/01 Excite@Home surpasses 3.67 million subscribers
01/01 Excite@Home surpasses 3 million subscribers
11/00 Excite@Home secures position as nation's 5th largest paid ISP and #1broadband ISP
08/00 Excite@Home surpasses 2 million broadband subscribers
03/00 Excite@Home principal cable partners extend distribution agreements,
AT&T assumes more prominent role
12/99 One million cable modem subscribers
05/99 NetherlandsExcite@Home merger completed, and @Home service launched in launched in Netherlands
04/99 500K @Home subscribers, and Japan cable modem service joint venture announced
01/99 Excite and @Home Network announce merger with initial capacity for 5 million users net backbone @Home Network creates new Internetbackbone with initial capacity for 5 million users
06/98 @Home goes retail, and @Home hits the road with a mall tour across North America
04/98 100K @Home subscribers, Netherlands cable modem service announced, and @Home Network builds a new corporate campusvice announced,
01/98 50K @Home subscribers
07/97 @Home Network IPO
04/97 Rogers and Shaw join, and Canadian cable modem service announced
09/96 @Home service in Fremont, CA
08/96 Cox and Comcast join as equity partners
04/96 Excite IPO
03/95 @Home Network founded by TCI and Kleiner Perkins
Capacity for 5 million, while servicing only 10% of that is not a good business plan.
I bet the Edonkey will be flying tonight with all that freed up bandwidth!! oh wait, all them files are hosted by cable-modem users? Damn it!
Since a lot of spammers are on @home, this will open up bandwidth. And various files probably have been mirrored around the world.
So the end result is that is that the internet load level will drop substantially. Even if all those guys go to dialup with Juno or get high speed via AOL.
Looks like the next few days are going to be great for surfing if you are not affected. Although I wonder how many porn sites are going to go down when Excite collapses?
Assuming that they will go off the air at mignight, here is the official announcement from Excite:
ExciteAtHome Cleared to Disconnect
Updated: Fri, Nov 30 3:46 PM EST
A judge cleared the way for bankrupt ExciteAtHome to turn off its high-speed Internet cable service as early as Friday night, which could affect about 4 million subscribers around the country.
The cable companies that connect their customers to the high-speed network said they plan to appeal the decision to U.S. District Court in San Francisco as soon as possible.
Bankruptcy Judge Thomas Carlson said Redwood City-based ExciteAtHome could reject its existing contracts with the cable companies as early as 3 a.m. EST Saturday, when their contracts expire.
Carlson gave ExciteAtHome the leeway to end the contracts after concluding they had become "clearly burdensome" to the company.
Under the contracts, ExciteAtHome executives said the company was losing up to $6 million per week.
A burnrate of 6 million per week is not good.
Someone grab a screen shot for the dot-bomb museum, please.
I recall from someplace (can't find the link) a page on what to do if you really were to contyact a space alien.
Suggestions were based on the idea that you would knot know each others languages, and so had to somehow use models for communication. typical type things would be coins for modelling the solar system, etc.
of course, if you could actually talk, proof would be in the form of an actual scientific facts for which there is no correct evidence for on earth. doesn't even have to be that technical.
With all of this you know that someone is going to start copyrighting their various body parts so that some CG studio doesn't do something like grabbing a pastiche of components from modern stars to make something that sort of looks like a well known star but isn't.
It is a quick way to try to rip of someone the glamour of a well known star.
I somehow expect that this would be more the rage in places with major government sponsorship of athletes, like China.
2012 is about right for the younger athletes, such gymnasts, etc if they were being born right now.
I can see such a government promoting better athletes by offering rewards if certain athletes got married and had kids. By creating such an articial village of swimmers, or runners, etc. one could improve chances over several generations. All very scientific, and all that.
Right now I do not see that many traits have been isolated as far as genes go for selecting for specific traits, such as reactions time, muscle size, or whatever. There is more to this somehow, and a lot of details are likely missing for the time being.
Slashdot Mirror
heck, I feel like a rant tonight.
Yep, unfortunately, MS quality control seems to have been aimed at the level of how many things we can we get away breaking ( like Lotius, etc) without people running away in terror.
right now, they could put out complete crap, and people would still buy it because they have to, not because of any apparent merit. Marketing and accounting love it, but it is a complete insult to the engineers, not that account or marketing would care much.
It is like engineering a new hardware widget. Some cool engineer invents something and does a damn good job. the prototype is excellent. it then gets fed to the production engineer, who work damn hard at trying to produce the widget as cheaply as possible, and still have it work.
MS engineers probably produce great shit, then it hits the marketing integration tem, and the result is crap. It doesn't survive well being integrated with the Microsft marketing vision.
It would be like seeing borgified art.
1) the various quantum tunneling experiments, where the Mozart 40th Symphony was transmitted through solid metal at several times the speed of light. There is a good link here. There was even a NOVA special or something on that (see that transcript here, - info about 2/3rds into the material)
2) maybe something involving the research of Steven Wolfram (developer of Mathematica), as seen in his forth coming book A New Kind of Science, which is very geeky, very bizarre, and right up this alley, and is supposed to be a rethinking of the very fundamentals of how science works. My head hurts already. This book is due for publication in January 2002, and is well worth pre-ordering.
Maybe Slash could buy it. Or better yet sell it to MS, and help bleed the beast of Remond as they desperately try to show how to run things right.
;-)
Basically, quicktime allowed the birth of multimedia. The attitudes from the first posters were along the line of "say thank you, and don't forget to kick it as you walk on by"
Of course, if you really like MS Brand Duct Tape, then keep on kicking.
It is sort of like bitching at your grandfather:"I wish you were never born". Which is not exactly bright, on several levels.
I find that I tend to not visit daily since the content does not update daily. I t falls of the radar, which is sort of a shame
2) The support mechanism for the site (products advertised, etc) have to be valuable enough that people will go for these as well.
Maintaining the character of a site, breathing life into it so that it is constantly alive, is WORK. Some folks burn out on this faster than others.
An example of this are sites like ubersoft, a comic strip which is decent, often excellent, but where the author sometime falls behind due to distractions or other details, or the well runs dry for a day or two.
In a website like slash, the number of stories submitted, comments posted daily typically is something like one percent of the active users that day. It also depends on the events of the day, etc. A very crude measure to be sure. of course, you can have someone just pumping out stories for a year or two, But you better have an edge, like spinsanity does, being located in DC, etc.
(Side note: a lot of research has apperantly gone into this.)
which is
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/bronson_pr .html
well, this is dated January 6, 1998.
Is it just me, or is this info simply dated, coming as it does from the middle of the dot-bomb boom, three years before the edge of the cliff was even visible?
I don't know, you could always spawn in a dead zone where everyone has been killed off already, more or less...
But I am sure that there is a whole crowd of people who would go for it. Just as described. say, in an over-sized and semi dormant volcano caldera.
Ten thousand people in a square mile equals one person per 50 foot square (roughly) for a large distance. not so bad until they start mobbing. Start looking for many hole covers really quick.
Now that's a scary picture
Not just a scooter, but similar. with computer controls to slow down the boss and allow you to track them
I guess we'll just have to see it to "get it". From everything I see, there is a big cooness factor involved. And I gues it doesn't have an engine. which makes me say "HUH?!"
Anyone got a better idea what this is about?
No Engine?
Why do I suddenly feel like Homer?
Very similarly, the flaw in the argument is that it is not possible to have a new thought or to invent anything. which is of course silly.
unless you subscribed to the idea that all thoughts come from some god, in which case everyone was a robot. This is the same flaw as in the argument that everything has been thought of before. pure bunk.
Now some people Steal their Ideas, but that is something else indeed.
What I am concerned about is the quality of life for human animals hybrids.
I am not enamored with the idea of a race of morons created for our pleasure and to do our bidding, despite what certain very big companies and politicians might aspire to. How would you like to live that life? Would you wish it on anyone, well, besides Bill Gates?
Aside from the impressive technological feat, imagine looking forward to the day when effects like these are availble for Gaming Engines.
Imagine Quake IX out in an open plane of battle with literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers and other things out there all at once.
I am reminded of something similar to the weekend dogfights/lanparties at the Airforce Academy, but with a much larger field of action.
[smile]
Point being, the first priority is not to bring democracy to Afghanistan, although this would be nice.
[Afghanistan, in fact, is democratic to a fault. Typically they do not have one or two major parties. They tend to have hundreds of them.]
What is more important is that _education_ is brought into the mix. Restoration of the education system is vital to an effective civilization, unless, like the Taliban, you maintain your power base through maintaining the population in ignorance.
A major part of this is Education in Technology. Bringing technology to Afghanistan, along with all the other fundamental resuorces, would accelerate the recovery of the country.
Information can be considered a fundamental resource for any civilization.
watch that server go up in smoke, just by coincidence.
Given the french law, which does have a tendency to be draconian, and given the recent change in the security environment, it might have been safer to open a school for aspiring criminals, or something.
Which is why I pointed you to the source materials, etc. I was getting frustrated.
;-)
That said, of course the basics of this issue were not tubes so much, but the exponential increase in hand soldered connections, increasing wire length with attendent signal lag and interference problems, and exponential complexity of design in the smallest box possible. These issues continued to exist even with the discrete standalone transistors.
So tubes were not a core part of the issue at hand, even though they were still widely used. Looking over the previous posts, you seemed to miss things like this paragraph:
The problem was that transistors still had to be interconnected to form electronic circuits, and hand-soldering thousands of components to thousands of bits of wire was expensive and time-consuming. It was also unreliable; every soldered joint was a potential source of trouble. The challenge was to find cost-effective, reliable ways of producing these components and interconnecting them.
which got ungodly when dealing with thousands and thousands of components. (vs the many dozens in a radio or Stereo)
So Basically, I said RTFM (ie, Article)
User comments should not be touched, and in fact Slash does not permit this. You would have to access the MySQL files and edit the comments directly if you wanted to do that. This can be inconvenient.
That being said, posters should be resonsible for their own comments. If they post something against the site policy, or illegal, then the site should be able to retain the option to delete the comments.
I happen to like the moderation system, because otherwise you can devolve into a sea of moronic cluelessness. It will do until something else comes along. Things like the open publishing system seen at Indy Media are great, but they do not scale well.
Other than that, the .museum TLD is a little long for convenience.
Since a lot of spammers are on @home, this will open up bandwidth. And various files probably have been mirrored around the world.
So the end result is that is that the internet load level will drop substantially. Even if all those guys go to dialup with Juno or get high speed via AOL.
Looks like the next few days are going to be great for surfing if you are not affected. Although I wonder how many porn sites are going to go down when Excite collapses?
Someone grab a screen shot for the dot-bomb museum, please.
Suggestions were based on the idea that you would knot know each others languages, and so had to somehow use models for communication. typical type things would be coins for modelling the solar system, etc.
of course, if you could actually talk, proof would be in the form of an actual scientific facts for which there is no correct evidence for on earth. doesn't even have to be that technical.
It is a quick way to try to rip of someone the glamour of a well known star.
2012 is about right for the younger athletes, such gymnasts, etc if they were being born right now.
I can see such a government promoting better athletes by offering rewards if certain athletes got married and had kids. By creating such an articial village of swimmers, or runners, etc. one could improve chances over several generations. All very scientific, and all that.
Right now I do not see that many traits have been isolated as far as genes go for selecting for specific traits, such as reactions time, muscle size, or whatever. There is more to this somehow, and a lot of details are likely missing for the time being.
Grappling Hook? nah... think Tractor beam.
Don't forget a stun setting for the Death Ray, as well as DNA matching security features
X-Ray vision features for looking through walls, clothing, etc.
and no windows to clog the thing up.