Only corporate interests are going to follow a standards body that caters to their intellectual property. The W3C just shot itself in the groin area with this move and has orphaned itself from the constituencies that built it and the standards it was formed to shepherd.
Ericsson T68's muuuch better
on
New Nokia Phone
·
· Score: 1
I think Nokia is just trying to steal the thunder from the debut of the Ericsson T68 phone.
IMHO, this is the first phone Ericsson has ever made that gets almost everything right. The size is perfect, no antenna to poke me painfully in the gonads, no "cutesy" features like a silly keyboard cover that breaks off on six months.
This phone is almost a perfect phone! It has US coverage (1900 MHz), bluetooth (I love my Palm BT dongle!), color screen (cool games), amazing standby time (750+ hours, wow), GPRS, syncable with my Palm desktop data, and more.
The UI does need a bit of work below the first icon level, the color screen could be improved, and the menus are a bit confusing. Otherwise, a perfect phone!
I was one of the original category editors of DMOZ way back when it started and long before the AOL bureacrats took over. I was really dedicated to my two small categories - paragliding and paramotoring - and built them up from scratch. Shortly after AOL took over I suddenly found myself locked out as a category editor. After repeated inquiries as to why, it turns out that I had listed some non-English web sites on my "English only" categories and this was against AOL policy hence an immediate boot.
The real shame was watching the categories I created with TLC lie fallow for months and months without any one to update them.
With inane policies like these is it any wonder that this directory lacks up-to-date information and is in general disarray? Me thinks not.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
...a side effect of the sheer size of our country...
Oh, horse puckey! There are something like 385 million Europeans in Western Europe alone, all sectioned off into fiercely competing bureaucracies. The fact that even Europe can manage a unified mobile voice platform complete with transparent roaming, global text messaging, and standard frequencies is a testament to the power of government sponsored infrastructure building. The US is so far behind because private industry will always build proprietary systems where it can.
I am by no means a communist (or even socialist) but empirical evidence proves that private industry will not build open, interoperable standards and systems! It's just not in its interest to do so.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
Options have a time limit. If they are not exercised before that limit they are worthless. This is why many folks have exercised options, not mere stupidity.
And holding stock in a hot company in an up market is *smart*, not stupid. You can't blame folks for lack of 20-20 foresight for the current market conditions unless their name is Uri Geller.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
And just because the code in question might be contractuarly the property of your employer shouldn't stop you from stealing, should it?
Quick, hide the source code, quit your job, pop up with a running, complete app two weeks later and hope your former employer doesn't notice or doesn't care. In fact, why not just download the entire codebase of your current employer, quit, and sell the lot to a competitor? The fact he has paid for your clothing, heating bill, food, etc. via your salary since you started work there doesn't mean you, like, owe him something (like honest work..eeh gads) does it??
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
When I first heard of HURD back in, what, 1992 or 1993, I thought it sounded like a great idea. But now it's the better part of a decade later and the thing still isn't out of ALHPA testing!
I'll stick with Linux, thanks...
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
The Internet protocols are currently being redesigned for deployment in space. TCP/IP doesn't handle intermittent connections or long delays well enough. See this article where the father of the Internet, Vince Cert, says "TCP/IP (is not) an attractive option." The WAP protocols do handle these issues quite well, however.
BTW - Where did you get your space TCP/IP info? The Betamax manuals..?;-)
Remember the famous last words of Socrates, "I drank what?"
If they're going back to TCP/IP and xHTML, then WAP is plainly and simply dead, dead, dead.
I never liked WML much, but WSP/WTP and WTLS are pretty good at handling high-latency, intermittent connections. This is something TCP/IP and SSL don't do well. If what was quoted is true, then I think they are thowing the baby out with the bathwater.
Remember the famous last words of Socrates, "I drank what?"
"And BTW every cell phone in the US falls back on a common analog standard to allow universal roaming if need be."
Bollocks. AMPS roaming isn't even close to what GSM provides. I grew up in California and I remember driving acros the US in the late 1980's and having to call the providers in every state to ask if I could roam. This ain't roaming. With GSM I am reachable in _any_ Western (and most Eastern) European countries with no interaction on my part. True roaming.
In the U.S. anything that can be bought or sold will be. There is no practical limit on this and anything that stands in the way of profits. This includes privacy and freedom.
"In God we trust" is printed on what we really hold most dear...money. The U.S. is no longer what it once was. If you really want freedom, you have one choice - move.
Java as a language is fine. But Java on a VM just doesn't cut it for real-world apps.
I am currently developing a product series of WAP servers and gateways. A few competitors have chosen Java and they can support a maximum of 500 simultaneous users, and that with at least 256 MB RAM and 2 to 4 Pentium III 600 MHz+ processors.The C versions of similar products have no problem supporting several thousand users on a single processor 64 MB machine. Java just ain't in the ballpark.(I should also point out that the Java VM's are not very stable and crash frequently.)
Java's specs as a language are really nice. Why don't we leave this VM stuff to the specialty apps that need it and start using Java as a COMPILED language?
IMHO this will happen eventually with or without a directed attempt. In fact, very primitive machine intelligence is already here.
Keep in mind that the first "real" intelligence that arises (or is created) is very, very unlikely to be something more sentient than your most basic of insects. And in the even more unlikely event that it is perceived as a threat, there is always a power switch on the machines hosting it.
One puzzle I have pondered is that machine intelligence will likely have no emotions/feelings. They won't have the built biological circuits for pain or irritability. Does that mean they probably won't develop without our help or will they develop a completely different goal-reward system to spur them on?
Yeah, neural networks are extremely interesting stuff.
Several of them are great at learning patterns (radial basis, Kohonen nets) while others are terriffic at learning non-linear mappings and formulae (back-propagation, probabilistic nets, cascade correlation nets).
The major problems are slowing training speed and the "plasticity" dilemma. Slow training times can be dealt with by several different methods, like partial pre-training and optimized learning algorithms. But the plasticity dilemma is tougher. The problem is that networks that learn easily and quickly also "forget" quickly (i.e. they are too plastic) but networks that don't are "fragile" and don't adapt well to new patterns that weren't in the original training set.
Unfortunately the entire neural network field, which was on its way to blossom in the early 1970's, was largely ignore after a paper by Marvin Minsky ("Perceptrons" by Minsky and Pappert) mathematically proved that a limited form of early neural network (the perceptron) couldn't learn things that were linearly inseparable (like XOR). This pretty much killed the field for 15 years and we are just now beginning to catch up.
One of the goals of the original ARPANET was to continue functioning even after large parts were destroyed - as might be the case in a nuclear conflict.
I think the Internet's routing protocols already contain a lot of the "hive" behavior these scientists are looking for.
Great, let's discuss this here!
on
Who Owns Dmoz?
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· Score: 1
[Description of what was in all caps?]
I was an editor long before Netscape or AOL came into the picture. Your amended "editors guidlines" were never pointed out clearly, and I did follow the guidelines that I signed up under several years ago.
If you want to act like this - fine - bureaucratic arrogance solves zip. Unfortunately, the open, cool thing ODP started out to be has become just another arm of a bureacratic hydra. But, hey, there's a ton of other search engines to choose from.
On a personal note, if you AOL guys had simply pointed out the fact that I hadn't followed your new "editors guidlines", I would have been happy to comply. But no, that would have too simple, too human. Well, go back to reading your log files dude. I'm goin' out and fly my bird for awhile (after I check Google and Yahoo! for the latest paramotor info)!
Re:DMOZ changed completely when AOL took over
on
Who Owns Dmoz?
·
· Score: 2
This person is NOT one of them!
I created and built the category from scratch, made it the BEST of its kind on the net, and never, ever abused it. Paramotoring is a passionate hobby of mine, and my intention was to create the definitive list of ALL related sites on the web. I think I did a very good job of this until AOL took over.
To add a little detail to this saga: when I contacted the dmoz/AOL folks it took several tries to even get a reply, then the replies came back twice with the excuse that the replier didn't have the authority to authorize an editor. In short, it appears to be a simple case of bureaucraticitis. Such a disease never existed before AOL took over.
I think I am entitled to a little righteous indignation after all the hard work for naught and nary a "thank-you" or "sorry, oops, here you go" from AOL/dmoz.
DMOZ changed completely when AOL took over
on
Who Owns Dmoz?
·
· Score: 2
I was one of the original category editors when the "Open Directory" (as it was first called) started. (You can still check out my definitive Paramotor category here:-).
When AOL purchased it, I suddenly found my directory editor rights cancelled and my category listed as "needing an editor". I contacted the AOL/dmoz.org folks several times asking to be allowed back in to the category I created and worked so hard on, but to no avail. What a waste.
IMHO, these guys are the Internet equivalent of a lumbering Brontosaurus. They trample lots of good stuff in endless pursuit of the mediocre and Joe Average's $9.95 monthly check!
Herbert F. Schwartz is quoted in the above article as saying, "(Changes of the magnitude Bezos proposes ) could be the unraveling of the patent system," Schwartz warns. Special consideration sought by Internet and software companies today, he argues, could lead to similar accommodations made to other industries. "I am troubled by the broader notion that Bezos and his industry are entitled to special protection," he says.
This guy and his ilk just don't get it, do they?
We are fighting the broken PTO patent issuance system so that our industry is NOT "entitled to special protection".
The State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group decision opened the floodgates of bad patents. The business method and software patents issued after this decision have hurt industry, hurt competitiveness, hurt the U.S. free-market economy, and stifled growth - especially of small, innovative companies.
Meanwhile, lawyers like Schwartz are making out like bandits in the patent litigation feeding frenzy. Don't expect them to give up this lucrative new source of ready cash without a fight!
Bribery may be rampant throughout the world. But the nations where it is endemic are far less successful than those where it is rare.
I have lived in Stockholm the last five years in a culture where bribery is rare and treated as a crime (surf here). Despite the horrible tax rates and small population here, this society is one of the richest on earth.
Previous to this I lived in Honduras, which is listed as the sixth most corrupt nations in the world. Bribes in Honduras suck the country dry of any usable capital and hamstring the entire economy. The trickle down effect of bribes, feeding bribes, feeding bribes waters down any real value without producing anything (any good or service)!
I think the countries Woolsey is referring to most are Germany and France. While living in Central America, these guys played very fast and loose with all of the countries' natural resources there via a variety of NGO's and official aid agencies. Bribery was their modus operandi and I knew personally several Honduran officials on their 'payroll'. I also met a couple scientists who had first hand knowledge of German bribery funding Teak deforestation via an NGO in Indonesia.
For what it's worth, in my experience the countries that participate in this game always lose in the long run - and that includes both the bribers and bribees. Evesdropping may provide some short-term benefits in specific circumstances for more honest countries, but in the long run honesty pays off in direct, tangible benefits such as a vibrant economy and real wealth creation.
Bribery may be rampant throughout the world. But the nations where it is endemic are far less successful than those where it is rare.
I have lived in Stockholm the last five years in a culture where bribery is rare and treated as a crime (surf here). Despite the horrible tax rates and small population here, this society is one of the richest on earth.
Previous to this I lived in Honduras, which is listed as the sixth most corrupt nations in the world. Bribes in Honduras suck the country dry of any usable capital and hamstring the entire economy. The trickle down effect of bribes, feeding bribes, feeding bribes waters down any real value without producing anything (any good or service)!
I think the countries Woolsey is referring to most are Germany and France. While living in Central America, these guys played very fast and loose with all of the countries' natural resources there via a variety of NGO's and official aid agencies. Bribery was their modus operandi and I knew personally several Honduran officials on their 'payroll'. I also met a couple scientists who had first hand knowledge of German bribery funding Teak deforestation via an NGO in Indonesia.
For what it's worth, in my experience the countries that participate in this game always lose in the long run - and that includes both the bribers and bribees. Evesdropping may provide some short-term benefits in specific circumstances for more honest countries, but in the long run honesty pays off in direct, tangible benefits such as a vibrant economy and real wealth creation.
Slashdot Mirror
Only corporate interests are going to follow a standards body that caters to their intellectual property. The W3C just shot itself in the groin area with this move and has orphaned itself from the constituencies that built it and the standards it was formed to shepherd.
I think Nokia is just trying to steal the thunder from the debut of the Ericsson T68 phone.
IMHO, this is the first phone Ericsson has ever made that gets almost everything right. The size is perfect, no antenna to poke me painfully in the gonads, no "cutesy" features like a silly keyboard cover that breaks off on six months.
This phone is almost a perfect phone! It has US coverage (1900 MHz), bluetooth (I love my Palm BT dongle!), color screen (cool games), amazing standby time (750+ hours, wow), GPRS, syncable with my Palm desktop data, and more.
The UI does need a bit of work below the first icon level, the color screen could be improved, and the menus are a bit confusing. Otherwise, a perfect phone!
The real shame was watching the categories I created with TLC lie fallow for months and months without any one to update them.
With inane policies like these is it any wonder that this directory lacks up-to-date information and is in general disarray? Me thinks not.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
Hmmm...so that's why Russia never made it to the moon.
What does that say about the US mobile infrastructure then?
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
Oh, horse puckey! There are something like 385 million Europeans in Western Europe alone, all sectioned off into fiercely competing bureaucracies. The fact that even Europe can manage a unified mobile voice platform complete with transparent roaming, global text messaging, and standard frequencies is a testament to the power of government sponsored infrastructure building. The US is so far behind because private industry will always build proprietary systems where it can.
I am by no means a communist (or even socialist) but empirical evidence proves that private industry will not build open, interoperable standards and systems! It's just not in its interest to do so.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
And holding stock in a hot company in an up market is *smart*, not stupid. You can't blame folks for lack of 20-20 foresight for the current market conditions unless their name is Uri Geller.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
Quick, hide the source code, quit your job, pop up with a running, complete app two weeks later and hope your former employer doesn't notice or doesn't care. In fact, why not just download the entire codebase of your current employer, quit, and sell the lot to a competitor? The fact he has paid for your clothing, heating bill, food, etc. via your salary since you started work there doesn't mean you, like, owe him something (like honest work..eeh gads) does it??
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
Oh man oh man, just looking at that link made me stand up and shout, "Ouuuuch!"
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
When I first heard of HURD back in, what, 1992 or 1993, I thought it sounded like a great idea. But now it's the better part of a decade later and the thing still isn't out of ALHPA testing!
I'll stick with Linux, thanks...
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
The Internet protocols are currently being redesigned for deployment in space. TCP/IP doesn't handle intermittent connections or long delays well enough. See this article where the father of the Internet, Vince Cert, says "TCP/IP (is not) an attractive option." The WAP protocols do handle these issues quite well, however.
BTW - Where did you get your space TCP/IP info? The Betamax manuals..? ;-)
Remember the famous last words of Socrates, "I drank what?"
If they're going back to TCP/IP and xHTML, then WAP is plainly and simply dead, dead, dead.
I never liked WML much, but WSP/WTP and WTLS are pretty good at handling high-latency, intermittent connections. This is something TCP/IP and SSL don't do well. If what was quoted is true, then I think they are thowing the baby out with the bathwater.
Remember the famous last words of Socrates, "I drank what?"
"And BTW every cell phone in the US falls back on a common analog standard to allow universal roaming if need be."
Bollocks. AMPS roaming isn't even close to what GSM provides. I grew up in California and I remember driving acros the US in the late 1980's and having to call the providers in every state to ask if I could roam. This ain't roaming. With GSM I am reachable in _any_ Western (and most Eastern) European countries with no interaction on my part. True roaming.
Western Europe alone has about 400 million people; 25% more than the U.S. alone. Add in Eastern Europe and the difference is even greater.
CDMA is also heavily patented by Qualcomm and is very unattractive to companies seeking an unencumbered, open standard for 3G wireless networks.
In the U.S. anything that can be bought or sold will be. There is no practical limit on this and anything that stands in the way of profits. This includes privacy and freedom.
"In God we trust" is printed on what we really hold most dear...money. The U.S. is no longer what it once was. If you really want freedom, you have one choice - move.
Java as a language is fine. But Java on a VM just doesn't cut it for real-world apps.
I am currently developing a product series of WAP servers and gateways. A few competitors have chosen Java and they can support a maximum of 500 simultaneous users, and that with at least 256 MB RAM and 2 to 4 Pentium III 600 MHz+ processors.The C versions of similar products have no problem supporting several thousand users on a single processor 64 MB machine. Java just ain't in the ballpark.(I should also point out that the Java VM's are not very stable and crash frequently.)
Java's specs as a language are really nice. Why don't we leave this VM stuff to the specialty apps that need it and start using Java as a COMPILED language?
IMHO this will happen eventually with or without a directed attempt. In fact, very primitive machine intelligence is already here.
Keep in mind that the first "real" intelligence that arises (or is created) is very, very unlikely to be something more sentient than your most basic of insects. And in the even more unlikely event that it is perceived as a threat, there is always a power switch on the machines hosting it.
One puzzle I have pondered is that machine intelligence will likely have no emotions/feelings. They won't have the built biological circuits for pain or irritability. Does that mean they probably won't develop without our help or will they develop a completely different goal-reward system to spur them on?
Yeah, neural networks are extremely interesting stuff.
Several of them are great at learning patterns (radial basis, Kohonen nets) while others are terriffic at learning non-linear mappings and formulae (back-propagation, probabilistic nets, cascade correlation nets).
The major problems are slowing training speed and the "plasticity" dilemma. Slow training times can be dealt with by several different methods, like partial pre-training and optimized learning algorithms. But the plasticity dilemma is tougher. The problem is that networks that learn easily and quickly also "forget" quickly (i.e. they are too plastic) but networks that don't are "fragile" and don't adapt well to new patterns that weren't in the original training set.
Unfortunately the entire neural network field, which was on its way to blossom in the early 1970's, was largely ignore after a paper by Marvin Minsky ("Perceptrons" by Minsky and Pappert) mathematically proved that a limited form of early neural network (the perceptron) couldn't learn things that were linearly inseparable (like XOR). This pretty much killed the field for 15 years and we are just now beginning to catch up.
One of the goals of the original ARPANET was to continue functioning even after large parts were destroyed - as might be the case in a nuclear conflict.
I think the Internet's routing protocols already contain a lot of the "hive" behavior these scientists are looking for.
I was an editor long before Netscape or AOL came into the picture. Your amended "editors guidlines" were never pointed out clearly, and I did follow the guidelines that I signed up under several years ago.
If you want to act like this - fine - bureaucratic arrogance solves zip. Unfortunately, the open, cool thing ODP started out to be has become just another arm of a bureacratic hydra. But, hey, there's a ton of other search engines to choose from.
On a personal note, if you AOL guys had simply pointed out the fact that I hadn't followed your new "editors guidlines", I would have been happy to comply. But no, that would have too simple, too human. Well, go back to reading your log files dude. I'm goin' out and fly my bird for awhile (after I check Google and Yahoo! for the latest paramotor info)!
This person is NOT one of them!
I created and built the category from scratch, made it the BEST of its kind on the net, and never, ever abused it. Paramotoring is a passionate hobby of mine, and my intention was to create the definitive list of ALL related sites on the web. I think I did a very good job of this until AOL took over.
To add a little detail to this saga: when I contacted the dmoz/AOL folks it took several tries to even get a reply, then the replies came back twice with the excuse that the replier didn't have the authority to authorize an editor. In short, it appears to be a simple case of bureaucraticitis. Such a disease never existed before AOL took over.
I think I am entitled to a little righteous indignation after all the hard work for naught and nary a "thank-you" or "sorry, oops, here you go" from AOL/dmoz.
I was one of the original category editors when the "Open Directory" (as it was first called) started. (You can still check out my definitive Paramotor category here :-).
When AOL purchased it, I suddenly found my directory editor rights cancelled and my category listed as "needing an editor". I contacted the AOL/dmoz.org folks several times asking to be allowed back in to the category I created and worked so hard on, but to no avail. What a waste.
IMHO, these guys are the Internet equivalent of a lumbering Brontosaurus. They trample lots of good stuff in endless pursuit of the mediocre and Joe Average's $9.95 monthly check!
Herbert F. Schwartz is quoted in the above article as saying, "(Changes of the magnitude Bezos proposes ) could be the unraveling of the patent system," Schwartz warns. Special consideration sought by Internet and software companies today, he argues, could lead to similar accommodations made to other industries. "I am troubled by the broader notion that Bezos and his industry are entitled to special protection," he says.
This guy and his ilk just don't get it, do they?
We are fighting the broken PTO patent issuance system so that our industry is NOT "entitled to special protection".
The State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group decision opened the floodgates of bad patents. The business method and software patents issued after this decision have hurt industry, hurt competitiveness, hurt the U.S. free-market economy, and stifled growth - especially of small, innovative companies.
Meanwhile, lawyers like Schwartz are making out like bandits in the patent litigation feeding frenzy. Don't expect them to give up this lucrative new source of ready cash without a fight!
Bribery may be rampant throughout the world. But the nations where it is endemic are far less successful than those where it is rare.
I have lived in Stockholm the last five years in a culture where bribery is rare and treated as a crime (surf here). Despite the horrible tax rates and small population here, this society is one of the richest on earth.
Previous to this I lived in Honduras, which is listed as the sixth most corrupt nations in the world. Bribes in Honduras suck the country dry of any usable capital and hamstring the entire economy. The trickle down effect of bribes, feeding bribes, feeding bribes waters down any real value without producing anything (any good or service)!
I think the countries Woolsey is referring to most are Germany and France. While living in Central America, these guys played very fast and loose with all of the countries' natural resources there via a variety of NGO's and official aid agencies. Bribery was their modus operandi and I knew personally several Honduran officials on their 'payroll'. I also met a couple scientists who had first hand knowledge of German bribery funding Teak deforestation via an NGO in Indonesia.
For what it's worth, in my experience the countries that participate in this game always lose in the long run - and that includes both the bribers and bribees. Evesdropping may provide some short-term benefits in specific circumstances for more honest countries, but in the long run honesty pays off in direct, tangible benefits such as a vibrant economy and real wealth creation.
Bribery may be rampant throughout the world. But the nations where it is endemic are far less successful than those where it is rare.
I have lived in Stockholm the last five years in a culture where bribery is rare and treated as a crime (surf here). Despite the horrible tax rates and small population here, this society is one of the richest on earth.
Previous to this I lived in Honduras, which is listed as the sixth most corrupt nations in the world. Bribes in Honduras suck the country dry of any usable capital and hamstring the entire economy. The trickle down effect of bribes, feeding bribes, feeding bribes waters down any real value without producing anything (any good or service)!
I think the countries Woolsey is referring to most are Germany and France. While living in Central America, these guys played very fast and loose with all of the countries' natural resources there via a variety of NGO's and official aid agencies. Bribery was their modus operandi and I knew personally several Honduran officials on their 'payroll'. I also met a couple scientists who had first hand knowledge of German bribery funding Teak deforestation via an NGO in Indonesia.
For what it's worth, in my experience the countries that participate in this game always lose in the long run - and that includes both the bribers and bribees. Evesdropping may provide some short-term benefits in specific circumstances for more honest countries, but in the long run honesty pays off in direct, tangible benefits such as a vibrant economy and real wealth creation.