Did you never read your spam? You attach the full toner cartridges to your penis with a string... it hurts, and the cartridges kinda make a noise when you walk around town, but after five years I can honestly say that it works. Also, you *never* run out of toner... it's always just there, within reach. Just send me $50 today and I'll send detailed instructions! A word of advice... if anyone asks, tell them you're doing experimental art. If it's a pretty girl that asks, say you were selected from several hundred prospective artists because of the girth and strength of your equipment. Spam saved my life - it can do the same for you. Don't hesitate - send me the money NOW!
Anyhow, the article does not apply to most spam
on
Spam Doesn't Work?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It refers to long 'cc' lists, and is intuitvely true. Any self-respecting spam is sent personally to me, and really professional spam has a forged 'from' header that is someone I know. (Maybe I can patent this concept. "Description of a Computerised Machine for the Convincement of Naive Buyers as to the Authenticity and Validity of Unrequested Commercial Messages".)
Yes... if/when there is a legit application for gigabit P2P, it will probably emerge in arenas like this, before making its way to the wide world. Gigabit P2P would be a great way to exhaust the excessive capacity of the post-WorldCom era. My personal bet: P2P Reality TV. Maybe I should go and patent this...:)
:) Yeah, hmmm, assuming 7500 divers paying for air at any moment, this comes to 1/1000000 of the market. Not statistically significant. In any case, the divers don't pay for the air, they pay for the time and effort required to package it.
You're repeating the falacy that caused the telcos to throw their fortunes into holes in the ground. 'High demand' is meaningless when supply exceeds demand by 100 times or more. There is a high demand for air to breath but no-one makes money selling it. Economics 101: you can only make money in a market when demand and supply are balanced. To reach that balance, you can cut supply (e.g. OPEC, De Beers, etc.) or you can allow prices to fall (e.g. WorldCom shares). Presumably traffic prices will have to fall by an order of magnitude or two before the market is stable again. The question is: what killer application will soak up that capacity? Voice? File sharing? Video on demand?/.?
WorldCom was principally responsibly for the myth that Internet demand was doubling every 100 days when in fact it was doubling every 12 months, from the period 1998-2001. Capacity, OTOH, doubled about every 100 days thanks to lots of new cable, and much more efficient use of existing cable (up to 100 times gain). As a result, there is massive overcapacity. The result? Lowering prices at a time of incredible debt thanks to stupid 'investments' in things like 3G. When companies like WorldCom go bust, the capacity stays in place. Without the burden of servicing their debt (cause they generally go into chapter 11 or somesuch), the 'bankrupt' capacity gets sold at new low prices, forcing the rest of the market down, and so on and on. Conclusion a: we can expect a new era of really low prices, as the survivors of this period (probably the Baby Bells in the US, and the old monopoly telcos in Europe) get control of huge amounts of cheap capacity. I predict this will fuel the next boom. Conclusion b: whatever the next boom is, do not expect it to come from the telcos. They have failed to predict a single one of the successes (demand for fixed net links, text messaging, etc.) of the past. I predict the next boom will be based on commercialised P2P with links to portable phones for roaming control. E.g. I can rent a game or movie or TV programme during the day, pay with my mobile phone, then my PC will download the stuff through P2P. Conclusion c: this is going to be the biggest test of the Internet's strength in tough times. Many of our customers host their e-commerce apps at UUnet. What happens next week if UUnet shuts down? How fast can we get their servers onto another ISP? All interesting questions that will set the tone for the architectures of tomorrow.
We're well on the way to combining the two essential tools of geek life - the notebook and the coffee machine (or tea kettle for anglogeeks). Seriously: a little heat and water in the right place, and my laptop can act as a portable hot water source.
Combining laptop and espresso machine will solve so many critical workplace issues... like losing time to fetch coffee. Next stage: a dual circuit so that I can recyle my used coffee as coolant rather than having to waste time going to the toilet.
Of course any such effort will be based on Linux. No company is going to start from scratch when Linux/Wine/OpenOffice already provides most of their requirements of 'compatability with Office'. Microsoft will not need to sue anyone. What is more likely is that any government-sponsored package based on open source software will end-up breaking the GPL. Will the US government, through the WTO, oblige China to respect the GPL? Imagine the lobbying... this is going to be hilarious.
I've been dreaming of my ultimate portable for some time, and this - roll-up screens - was all that was missing. I have a roll-up waterproof keyboard that works quite well. Imagine the guts of a notebook PC (no CD, keyboard, screen), a kind of brick the size of a stack of CDs. Fits into your pocket. You can add a flat battery underneath for portable use. You can plug in a roll-up screen and keyboard when you're on the road. At the office you dock it into your main notebook or desktop - synchronizing all your data, updating your email, etc.
Tried MojoNation on Windows, it did exactly nothing, and quite slowly too. It reminded me scarily of something I once wrote while totally stoned. It seemed to be useful, and I convinced several people to try it, but we could never quite figure out what it was supposed to be.
Somehow this experience (installing MojoNation and trying for a few days to figure out what it was actually supposed to do) does not make me eager to try their latest product. Give me a huge hard disk and rsync, please!
I don't mean to include every little local conflict; I'm speaking only about major conflicts like the U.S.'s invasion of Southeast Asia, Indonesia's genecide in East Timor, Israel's invasion of Lebanon, etc.
Have you never read a history book? WWII was the conclusion of 2000 years of organized warfare in Europe. Peace is a concept, not a natural state.
As for American 'greed', you give undue credit to the rest of the world. People are equally greedy everywhere. The US just happens to have exceptional natural resources and a hybrid mix of the 'best of breed' immigrants from several continents.
Ah, but Microsoft are working on the solution - the Trusted Car Platform Architecture. The TCPA will eliminate the use of 'unauthorized' parts in cars, thus easing maintenance, improving security, and ensuring business throughflow for the CAs (car authorities). Look: everyone knows that fitting cheap tires and filling up with unauthorized gazoline poses severe security risks. TCPA will eliminate all that! Windows Is Good For You!
Perhaps this is redundant, given that the 'standard PC' is pretty much a public standard, but perhaps another way of building cheap computers is to evolve a good open source hardware design that can be assembled from cheap components, and which GNU/Linux will be guaranteed to run on. The economies of scale will then work to keep costs down. We should be aiming at a $100 computer that approaches the power of a P100. To all those people who say: give people clean water and education before gadgets, I'd point out that information equals money, and computers used in the right way (like cars, mobile phones, capital, property etc.) are an excellent way of increasing real standards of wealth. Lastly, has anyone tried to run anything other than games on something like a Cybiko? It seems to be an excellent (robust and cheap) platform for small hand-held computing.
There is no reason why GEOS applications had to be written in assembler, any more than Windows applications had to be written in C. What made Windows 3.1 succeed was not Microsoft's marketing, but DOS compatibility on the one hand, VB on the other, and Word & Excel on the other other. Microsoft aimed right at developers with the right tools at the right time. IBM had nothing for OS/2, their C/C++ tools came our late and were expensive. GEOS had nothing, no tools and no apps. Where is the next VB? Get the small developers - the ones who use MS Access to make small applications - to adopt a new tool, and users will follow. It's a fallacy to think we can 'educate' people to use Linux. People take the way of least pain and change mental modes only when they have no choice at all. Microsoft understood (I think they are forgetting this) that you just have to make it really painless for developers to adopt your system. End users never choose an operating system. They take whatever they have to.
This reminds me so much of the period before Win3.0 came out. Lots of companies making valiant efforts to produce the 'best desktop'. IIRC, Microsoft beat them all largely because it produced VB and with it, a way for millions of amateur developers to make Windows applications.
I remember using GEOS, a GUI that kicked Windows' ass mightily. I remember trying to find tools to build GEOS applications. Zilch.
Today, Windows is totally out of reach of amateur developers. It is one of the most complex development environments imaginable. And Microsoft seems to be heading at full speed towards even more complexity with every new technology it brings out.
This creates a wonderful opportunity. Instead of aiming for 'end users', Linux desktops should aim at amateur developers who want a free and simple workbench for writing the kinds of applications that made Windows 3.1 rule the world. Imagine a really simple programming environment for excellent web applications, running on a database that is as easy to use as Access, with as many widgets as you can dream of.
This is the kind of thing that will start the revolution. Not cheaper Window-like boxes.
Human societies work best when there is little or no privacy in communal areas. We evolved to live in small villages where nothing was private unless you trekked across a mountainside to be alone. People just don't behave themselves unless they know they are being watched and either criticized or given approval. This applies to drivers, policemen, government employees, hackers, anyone, as far as I can see.
One of the nice things about IT is its ability to blast huge holes in walls of 'privacy'. Don't forget that every nasty corporation hoping to turn a quick buck by selling private data can eventually be subject to the same inspection as Joe Schmo driving to work.
I'm sitting in an office in Brussels, it will be interesting to see how stopping this backbone affects the Internet in Europe. The BBD reported that Ebone carries 25%, their website reports 50%, of traffic in Europe.
Anyone tried this kind of nuclear blast on th Internet before?
This could work... your alarm clock 'bings' and says 'don't bother getting up... the roads are all blocked, and I've taken the liberty of shifting your schedule today forward by two hours. Your boss will also be late, so don't worry about an excuse.'
We have something like this in Belgium, where mobile phone users can ring a central service to warn of traffic jams and delays. It works well, only it's about 30 minutes delayed, so occasionally you hear warnings of accidents and traffic jams that have already cleared-up.
The best use of this service is when they warn about 'ghost drivers', meaning idiots who are driving down the highway on the wrong side of the road. I wonder if a cellphone-based system could detect this as well?
As far as I can see, and this is confirmed by my own experience of two decades of commuting, people drive because they do not seriously try to find alternatives. Make an effort, look for places to live in the inner cities, find ways to work from home... all these will add to one's quality of life, save hours of wasted time, and cut the amount of waste caused by pushing a ton of metal around the countryside.
So, anything that makes driving less pleasant must be a 'good thing' in this respect, and anything that delays the inevitable must be a bad thing.
Typically people stick to highways, and these will get blocked while smaller roads will stay free. I can't see that 'load balancing' cars onto smaller roads is a good thing. It won't cut anyone's travel time. It won't reduce the total number of cars. It will simply create more accessible road space.
As for the 'potential' of roads: the capacity of a road decreases once you get past a certain car density. The only way I can see of optimizing road usage is to charge for it and raise the price until usage drops to this density.
The general rule is: add road capacity, and more people will drive. Inevitably a technology like this will feed back into mobile guidance systems based on GPS, with the final result that every road, major to minor, will be congested equally heavily. Building new roads or using smarter routing techniques will not cut traffic congestion. Living closer to work and using a bike or walking will.
Part of IBM's strategy for its future
on
IBM Spins Down
·
· Score: 2
IBM does not want to compete on hardware. It wants to become a services company. Getting rid of hardware is a good step on the way to becoming really profitable again.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you never read your spam? You attach the full toner cartridges to your penis with a string... it hurts, and the cartridges kinda make a noise when you walk around town, but after five years I can honestly say that it works. Also, you *never* run out of toner... it's always just there, within reach. Just send me $50 today and I'll send detailed instructions!
A word of advice... if anyone asks, tell them you're doing experimental art. If it's a pretty girl that asks, say you were selected from several hundred prospective artists because of the girth and strength of your equipment.
Spam saved my life - it can do the same for you. Don't hesitate - send me the money NOW!
It refers to long 'cc' lists, and is intuitvely true. Any self-respecting spam is sent personally to me, and really professional spam has a forged 'from' header that is someone I know. (Maybe I can patent this concept. "Description of a Computerised Machine for the Convincement of Naive Buyers as to the Authenticity and Validity of Unrequested Commercial Messages".)
My penis is 12" long, and I have never run out of laser toner. Surely this proves it!?
Yes... if/when there is a legit application for gigabit P2P, it will probably emerge in arenas like this, before making its way to the wide world. :)
Gigabit P2P would be a great way to exhaust the excessive capacity of the post-WorldCom era.
My personal bet: P2P Reality TV. Maybe I should go and patent this...
Time to move into tent production.
:) Yeah, hmmm, assuming 7500 divers paying for air at any moment, this comes to 1/1000000 of the market. Not statistically significant.
In any case, the divers don't pay for the air, they pay for the time and effort required to package it.
You're repeating the falacy that caused the telcos to throw their fortunes into holes in the ground. /.?
'High demand' is meaningless when supply exceeds demand by 100 times or more. There is a high demand for air to breath but no-one makes money selling it.
Economics 101: you can only make money in a market when demand and supply are balanced. To reach that balance, you can cut supply (e.g. OPEC, De Beers, etc.) or you can allow prices to fall (e.g. WorldCom shares). Presumably traffic prices will have to fall by an order of magnitude or two before the market is stable again.
The question is: what killer application will soak up that capacity? Voice? File sharing? Video on demand?
WorldCom was principally responsibly for the myth that Internet demand was doubling every 100 days when in fact it was doubling every 12 months, from the period 1998-2001.
Capacity, OTOH, doubled about every 100 days thanks to lots of new cable, and much more efficient use of existing cable (up to 100 times gain).
As a result, there is massive overcapacity. The result? Lowering prices at a time of incredible debt thanks to stupid 'investments' in things like 3G.
When companies like WorldCom go bust, the capacity stays in place. Without the burden of servicing their debt (cause they generally go into chapter 11 or somesuch), the 'bankrupt' capacity gets sold at new low prices, forcing the rest of the market down, and so on and on.
Conclusion a: we can expect a new era of really low prices, as the survivors of this period (probably the Baby Bells in the US, and the old monopoly telcos in Europe) get control of huge amounts of cheap capacity. I predict this will fuel the next boom.
Conclusion b: whatever the next boom is, do not expect it to come from the telcos. They have failed to predict a single one of the successes (demand for fixed net links, text messaging, etc.) of the past. I predict the next boom will be based on commercialised P2P with links to portable phones for roaming control. E.g. I can rent a game or movie or TV programme during the day, pay with my mobile phone, then my PC will download the stuff through P2P.
Conclusion c: this is going to be the biggest test of the Internet's strength in tough times. Many of our customers host their e-commerce apps at UUnet. What happens next week if UUnet shuts down? How fast can we get their servers onto another ISP? All interesting questions that will set the tone for the architectures of tomorrow.
We're well on the way to combining the two essential tools of geek life - the notebook and the coffee machine (or tea kettle for anglogeeks). Seriously: a little heat and water in the right place, and my laptop can act as a portable hot water source.
Combining laptop and espresso machine will solve so many critical workplace issues... like losing time to fetch coffee. Next stage: a dual circuit so that I can recyle my used coffee as coolant rather than having to waste time going to the toilet.
Of course any such effort will be based on Linux. No company is going to start from scratch when Linux/Wine/OpenOffice already provides most of their requirements of 'compatability with Office'.
Microsoft will not need to sue anyone. What is more likely is that any government-sponsored package based on open source software will end-up breaking the GPL.
Will the US government, through the WTO, oblige China to respect the GPL? Imagine the lobbying... this is going to be hilarious.
I've been dreaming of my ultimate portable for some time, and this - roll-up screens - was all that was missing. I have a roll-up waterproof keyboard that works quite well. Imagine the guts of a notebook PC (no CD, keyboard, screen), a kind of brick the size of a stack of CDs. Fits into your pocket. You can add a flat battery underneath for portable use. You can plug in a roll-up screen and keyboard when you're on the road. At the office you dock it into your main notebook or desktop - synchronizing all your data, updating your email, etc.
Tried MojoNation on Windows, it did exactly nothing, and quite slowly too. It reminded me scarily of something I once wrote while totally stoned. It seemed to be useful, and I convinced several people to try it, but we could never quite figure out what it was supposed to be.
Somehow this experience (installing MojoNation and trying for a few days to figure out what it was actually supposed to do) does not make me eager to try their latest product. Give me a huge hard disk and rsync, please!
I don't mean to include every little local conflict; I'm speaking only about major conflicts like the U.S.'s invasion of Southeast Asia, Indonesia's genecide in East Timor, Israel's invasion of Lebanon, etc.
Have you never read a history book? WWII was the conclusion of 2000 years of organized warfare in Europe. Peace is a concept, not a natural state.
As for American 'greed', you give undue credit to the rest of the world. People are equally greedy everywhere. The US just happens to have exceptional natural resources and a hybrid mix of the 'best of breed' immigrants from several continents.
Ah, but Microsoft are working on the solution - the Trusted Car Platform Architecture. The TCPA will eliminate the use of 'unauthorized' parts in cars, thus easing maintenance, improving security, and ensuring business throughflow for the CAs (car authorities). Look: everyone knows that fitting cheap tires and filling up with unauthorized gazoline poses severe security risks. TCPA will eliminate all that! Windows Is Good For You!
Perhaps this is redundant, given that the 'standard PC' is pretty much a public standard, but perhaps another way of building cheap computers is to evolve a good open source hardware design that can be assembled from cheap components, and which GNU/Linux will be guaranteed to run on. The economies of scale will then work to keep costs down.
We should be aiming at a $100 computer that approaches the power of a P100.
To all those people who say: give people clean water and education before gadgets, I'd point out that information equals money, and computers used in the right way (like cars, mobile phones, capital, property etc.) are an excellent way of increasing real standards of wealth.
Lastly, has anyone tried to run anything other than games on something like a Cybiko? It seems to be an excellent (robust and cheap) platform for small hand-held computing.
There is no reason why GEOS applications had to be written in assembler, any more than Windows applications had to be written in C. What made Windows 3.1 succeed was not Microsoft's marketing, but DOS compatibility on the one hand, VB on the other, and Word & Excel on the other other. Microsoft aimed right at developers with the right tools at the right time. IBM had nothing for OS/2, their C/C++ tools came our late and were expensive. GEOS had nothing, no tools and no apps.
Where is the next VB? Get the small developers - the ones who use MS Access to make small applications - to adopt a new tool, and users will follow.
It's a fallacy to think we can 'educate' people to use Linux. People take the way of least pain and change mental modes only when they have no choice at all. Microsoft understood (I think they are forgetting this) that you just have to make it really painless for developers to adopt your system. End users never choose an operating system. They take whatever they have to.
This reminds me so much of the period before Win3.0 came out. Lots of companies making valiant efforts to produce the 'best desktop'. IIRC, Microsoft beat them all largely because it produced VB and with it, a way for millions of amateur developers to make Windows applications.
I remember using GEOS, a GUI that kicked Windows' ass mightily. I remember trying to find tools to build GEOS applications. Zilch.
Today, Windows is totally out of reach of amateur developers. It is one of the most complex development environments imaginable. And Microsoft seems to be heading at full speed towards even more complexity with every new technology it brings out.
This creates a wonderful opportunity. Instead of aiming for 'end users', Linux desktops should aim at amateur developers who want a free and simple workbench for writing the kinds of applications that made Windows 3.1 rule the world.
Imagine a really simple programming environment for excellent web applications, running on a database that is as easy to use as Access, with as many widgets as you can dream of.
This is the kind of thing that will start the revolution. Not cheaper Window-like boxes.
Human societies work best when there is little or no privacy in communal areas. We evolved to live in small villages where nothing was private unless you trekked across a mountainside to be alone.
People just don't behave themselves unless they know they are being watched and either criticized or given approval. This applies to drivers, policemen, government employees, hackers, anyone, as far as I can see.
One of the nice things about IT is its ability to blast huge holes in walls of 'privacy'. Don't forget that every nasty corporation hoping to turn a quick buck by selling private data can eventually be subject to the same inspection as Joe Schmo driving to work.
So, does anyone actually know of a package using Vipul's Razor or similar that works on Windows and does not require me to switch to a MS product?
I'm sitting in an office in Brussels, it will be interesting to see how stopping this backbone affects the Internet in Europe. The BBD reported that Ebone carries 25%, their website reports 50%, of traffic in Europe.
Anyone tried this kind of nuclear blast on th Internet before?
We have something like this in Belgium, where mobile phone users can ring a central service to warn of traffic jams and delays. It works well, only it's about 30 minutes delayed, so occasionally you hear warnings of accidents and traffic jams that have already cleared-up.
The best use of this service is when they warn about 'ghost drivers', meaning idiots who are driving down the highway on the wrong side of the road. I wonder if a cellphone-based system could detect this as well?
So, anything that makes driving less pleasant must be a 'good thing' in this respect, and anything that delays the inevitable must be a bad thing.
Typically people stick to highways, and these will get blocked while smaller roads will stay free. I can't see that 'load balancing' cars onto smaller roads is a good thing. It won't cut anyone's travel time. It won't reduce the total number of cars. It will simply create more accessible road space.
As for the 'potential' of roads: the capacity of a road decreases once you get past a certain car density. The only way I can see of optimizing road usage is to charge for it and raise the price until usage drops to this density.
The general rule is: add road capacity, and more people will drive. Inevitably a technology like this will feed back into mobile guidance systems based on GPS, with the final result that every road, major to minor, will be congested equally heavily. Building new roads or using smarter routing techniques will not cut traffic congestion. Living closer to work and using a bike or walking will.
IBM does not want to compete on hardware. It wants to become a services company. Getting rid of hardware is a good step on the way to becoming really profitable again.
Just maybe, human civiliation is a lot older and spread much wider, earlier, than we tend to believe.