"Fire" damage didn't do it. If you didn't see the video of the second impact, a Boeing 737 large enough to carry 60-70 people smashed right into the side of it, and an explosion came out the other side. That's going to cause a *lot* of internal structural damage. And once the top floors start to collapse, their weight and force punches right through the floors below.
Building codes aren't designed with events like this in mind, I'm afraid.
In a more Slashdotty vein, the CNN, MSNBC, and ABCNews web sites were all submitted to a relentless DDOS attack this morning, and it appears the people coordinating them are getting more and more creative....
Of *course* they're going to lock us down. Airports are halted across the country, transportation at the attack sites is paralyzed, and communication there is impossible. Right now, don't expect to fly anywhere anytime soon. This isn't an attack on personal freedom; it's practical safety measures. The first plane that hit the WTC was going from Boston to Los Angeles; another plane could come from *anywhere*.
The terrorists won't "re-retaliate" for a long, long time -- they know we're on alert now, any more "sneak attacks" would be futile. The thing to do now is make sure no more planes can be used as bombs, then find out who's responsible, and then DEMAND that he be dealt with. Right now, I don't give a crap if his host country wants to extradite him or not. If a government is going to protect whoever's responsible for this, then they're complicit, and they're inviting war. Not hysteria; a practial and well-earned response.
No one's talking about locking the entire country down with martial law yet, if that's what you're worried about. But some restrictions are very necessary, and anyone with a sense of the big picture should be all for it.
We need more court cases like this.
on
eBay Beats DMCA
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
EBay asked Hendrickson to submit a sworn, written statement detailing his claim through its Verified Rights Owner Program, which lets copyright holders request that eBay remove an infringing item. Hendrickson refused, saying his general complaints should have been good enough.
I love that part. EBay suggested he go through their standard procedure for filing copyright complaints, which (I believe) has worked for others in the past. He refused, snobbily. He brought a legal case, and he lost.
Good for him. If he'd done things the acceptable way instead of trying to let lawyers solve his problem, he'd probably have the problem solved already. America needs more lessons like this.
You know what's even funnier? The telephone is more immediate. With e-mail, I usually have to wait twelve to twenty-four hours minimum before I get a response to my questions.
The Katz doth love his technology too much, methinks. He's genuinely convinced himself that there was no technology worth using before personal computers.
...since every iteration of the Microsoft or Apple OS requires more RAM, a faster processor, and more colors on the monitor, I think it's more accurate to say that no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet program or Word document, provided they don't want to use the latest version.
And besides, there's more to a computer than just the processor and graphics card. I've got a three-year-old PowerMac clone sitting at home, and I can't hardly use it for anything new. It does its job fine, but all its hardware is legacy -- DIMMs, SCSI, and serial ports while everything else is moving to SDRAM, FireWire, and USB. This phenomenon exists in the PC world as well, just to a lesser degree. If I want to upgrade my machine, it's ironic that it will cost me more money than if I had a brand-new one with USB and SDRAM on the motherboard.
In other words, then: it also costs me more to make my machine compatible with a Palm handheld, a digital camera, a joystick, or a new printer, I need to spend the money to upgrade it first. If I want to do anything like digital video, I have to upgrade it a lot. Even downloaded Flash multimedia ran slow until I upgraded the processor, and I sure can't add an MP3 jukebox without a substantial hard drive upgrade (2 gigs doesn't go as far as it used to).
Games push the envelope harder than anything else in the consumer industry, true. But it's hardly the only thing. There's more to consumer PCs these days than video games and word processing, and it's all more demanding than it used to be.
...for all you longtime SUSE freeloaders to buy copies of their CDs. (Yes, I know it's free-as-in-beer to download, but do you want a new distro next year or not?)
You could also get most of this with an iMac. Buy a used one, drop your favorite PPC Linux distro on it, and soup it up with as much RAM as you can afford. A more recent iMac will even support their wireless Airport cards, which may or may not be Linux-accessible by this time, and will give you all the benefits of fanless computing.
As for TV-output options: your TV's resolution is probably too low. Wait for HDTV displays to come down, and for computers to ship from the manufacturer with interfaces for them. (I look forward to adding an old Intel box to my living room as an MP3 jukebox when that happens.)
That's why they also made the g180, with Graffiti and no keyboard. There are some people who would rather learn to use a stylus, and others who would prefer to stick to a familiar keyboard. This is a good move on Palm's part to offer identical features with both input methods and let the consumer decide.
"Check it out: the new Athlon 1600!"
"Excuse me? Yes, how fast does this processor actually run?"
"It's a 1600!"
"Yes, I know that, but how fast is it? in megahertz?"
"It's equivalent to a Pentium at 1600 Mz."
"Okay, but how fast does it run?"
"I don't understand the question, sir."
"How many megahertz does this processor run at?"
"Perhaps you're not familiar with what we call 'The Megahertz Myth'...."
"I'm thoroughly familiar with it, I've worked in hardware for fifteen years. I just want to know how many megahertz this particular processor runs at."
"It's equivalent to a...."
"No, I don't care about that. What's the clock speed?"
"It's faster than a...."
"That's nice. What's. The. Clock. Speed?"
"Would you like to see some comparisons to...."
"Never mind, I'll just go check out the Motorola booth."
When I was a kid, I adored Transformers robots. I mean, I was infatuated with those things. My brother and I would sometimes pretend we were transformable robots ourselves, contorting ourselves into mock-cars and mock-trucks and driving around the basement smashing into each other.
I got as many of the "cool" Transformers toys as I could, but there was a limit to how many of them I could afford. But my mom bought me LEGO space sets as well, which I assembled dutifully according to the instructions whenever I got a large one for my birthday or Christmas and then disassembled to make other stuff. Eventually, I figured out that if I couldn't collect all the Transformers I wanted, I could make them myself.
And I was good. Two "Autobot Clones" which looked the same as robots but turned into different vehicles were my favorite early effort. My last was a larger-than-the-toy Fortress Maximus, built out of every last black and grey LEGO brick I could find. It couldn't stand under its own weight, so I propped it against a wall to admire it. I never made a serious effort with the LEGO Transformers again, but they'd served their purpose.
If only those LEGO sets didn't cost as much, I would have bought them instead of the TF toys. Why buy one action figure when you can get a hundred?
Twenty-four days is nearly an entire month; longer, when you take weekends into account (nearly five five-day work weeks). Can you imagine how much client work would pile up if half of your department's staff took the entire month of August off? If all of them too the entire month off?
True, it's a fair tradeoff for the wages. But it's also true that it's a major disruption for any business that works under deadlines.
Good for the programmers, bad for their managers
on
Extreme Telecommuting
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Last year while I was on a job search, I was offered a position as an information architect for a small Chicago firm. Since I'd only worked in production up till then, I was definitely intrigued. But when I heard that all the developers who'd be working under me were located in India, I declined.
I mean, the position and authority sounded great. But who'd want to manage a group of people halfway across the globe? Even if there were no language barrier to overcome, I'd be "managing" a group of programmers whose clock was off of mine by nearly twelve hours. We'd do almost all our interaction by e-mail, asynchronously.
I know from having worked only in production that unless you can meet face-to-face with your immediate supervisor on a regular basis, it's difficult if not impossible to develop any cohesion as a team. I could have told those guys what to do, and I'm sure they'd have done it, but I'd never have been able to get a sense of who they were and what they were truly capable of. I'd be managing a big black box.
Sending programming labor overseas is no new concept, and it has obvious financial advantages. But practically speaking, I'd much rather have a highly-paid programmer next door to me than an inexpensive one several thousand miles away.
The ABM treaty is an agreement between STATES, and thus, an implied agreement between the people in those states
International patent law is likewise an implied agreement between states. I wasn't drawing a comparison between corporations and nations, but between one international agreement and another.
Brazil is essentially declaring a state of emergency in their war against AIDS and using this to justify breaking international patent law. Bush percieves the proliferation of black-market nuclear weapons as reason to declare a minor state of emergency and break the ABM treaty.
Both are diplomatic disasters, but the only difference is that Brazil is upsetting a corporation while the US is upsetting other countries. But if Brazil's actions were to someday lead to other pharmaceuticals restricting trade with developing countries, for fear of losing profits, the end result is the same as if they'd angered the United States government.
Both actions are defensive and for the protection of each country's individual citizens (and neither, despite your mention of Nazi Germany, involves encroaching on other nations' borders). The only difference is the immediacy of the threat. If Middle Eastern nations were already firing off nuclear missiles toward each other, no one would dare say Bush's actions were unjustified.
If nothing else, it allows Link and other characters to depict facial expressions and physical activity that would be difficult or impossible otherwise. This is something that's usually very lacking from 3-D computer games.
I think it's more significant, though, to note what a change in style this is. Nintendo and Sony have already neatly divided the gaming market into two pieces: mature players (PS2) and kids (Nintendo). Sega got caught between the two, which is what ultimately cost them in the console wars. By "tooning" Zelda, Nintendo is trying to make it more appealing to a younger audience who might otherwise be turned off by the renowned complexity of the game.
Would you, as the leader of this country, REALLY allow people to DIE a slow, lingering, and very painful death just because a piece of paper says you have too?
It's interesting, because that's just the problem most people have with George W. Bush's decision to go ahead with the US missile shield. Why risk having millions of Americans subjected to slow, lingering, painful death from nuclear radiation when we can just ignore the treaty we signed with Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty we signed with Russia all those years ago?
But instead of educating and changing killer lifestyle habits, their government steals IP. This world is going to shit. But that's just MHO.
Brazil is widely regarded as having
a model anti-AIDS program among developing countries, and already produces generic versions of eight drugs for AIDS cocktails. Those drugs, distributed free to people with HIV/AIDS, are not covered by patents in Brazil.
Sounds like they're doing all they can so far. What it comes down to is that, despite all the travel-agency posters of Brazilian beaches, Brazil is still considered a developing country, with all the economic disadvantages we Slashdotters can't hope to understand.
This is clearly only the first version of Microsoft LetterWriter, so it's bound to have a few quirks. Everyone knows that by version 3.0, it'll be much easier to use, and will probably include support for faxes, answering machine messages, and "handwritten" fonts as well as these printed letters that were spotted so quickly.
...but only because they've overextended themselves. (In contrast, Microsoft is years away from overextending themselves because they have so many other ways to provide income.) However, the Palm name is still well-recognized and appreciated.
Think of all the apps available for the PalmOS. Think of how "PalmPilot" is still a casual name for any handheld computer, despite the fact that Palm hasn't made any "Pilots" for a couple of years. Now imagine a full-color, fully-interactive OS for a color handheld or web tablet with the Palm name branding it.
Be's name couldn't make that sell. Palm's name could. Microsoft could sell it better, of course, but (TabletPCs notwithstanding) they're still not quite there yet. And neither Sony nor Apple nor IBM is really in the handheld/portable market, while Palm has been about nothing but. If anyone can make the BeIA a success now, it'd be Palm. (Whether they will or not is open to speculation.)
Doubtless Palm was after not the desktop BeOS, but the BeIA internet appliance operating system. BeIA has, to date, only been sold to Sony for the eVilla gizmo, but that probably won't earn Sony much money. But if Palm can combine BeIA with their own PalmOS, they could really give PocketPC a run for the market.
Only if you can somehow prove it's impossible to overcome, i.e., you're mentally impaired or some chemical imbalance is keeping you from being able to motivate yourself.
(Yes, I know this was a joke, but there's a real point worth making in it. There are true disabilities out there that could be interpreted as laziness, but laziness itself is not a disability.)
Slashdot Mirror
Technology can do all sorts of amazing things, but it can't protect us from a handful of determined people.
Too bad it wasn't enough to redeem his idiot angle. For the first time, I'm blocking Katz from my front page. He's not funny anymore.
Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War.
And, at the opposite extreme of the evolutionary scale, army ants. Your point?
"Fire" damage didn't do it. If you didn't see the video of the second impact, a Boeing 737 large enough to carry 60-70 people smashed right into the side of it, and an explosion came out the other side. That's going to cause a *lot* of internal structural damage. And once the top floors start to collapse, their weight and force punches right through the floors below.
Building codes aren't designed with events like this in mind, I'm afraid.
*ba-ding bing*
In a more Slashdotty vein, the CNN, MSNBC, and ABCNews web sites were all submitted to a relentless DDOS attack this morning, and it appears the people coordinating them are getting more and more creative....
(Sorry. Humor helps me cope.)
Of *course* they're going to lock us down. Airports are halted across the country, transportation at the attack sites is paralyzed, and communication there is impossible. Right now, don't expect to fly anywhere anytime soon. This isn't an attack on personal freedom; it's practical safety measures. The first plane that hit the WTC was going from Boston to Los Angeles; another plane could come from *anywhere*.
The terrorists won't "re-retaliate" for a long, long time -- they know we're on alert now, any more "sneak attacks" would be futile. The thing to do now is make sure no more planes can be used as bombs, then find out who's responsible, and then DEMAND that he be dealt with. Right now, I don't give a crap if his host country wants to extradite him or not. If a government is going to protect whoever's responsible for this, then they're complicit, and they're inviting war. Not hysteria; a practial and well-earned response.
No one's talking about locking the entire country down with martial law yet, if that's what you're worried about. But some restrictions are very necessary, and anyone with a sense of the big picture should be all for it.
EBay asked Hendrickson to submit a sworn, written statement detailing his claim through its Verified Rights Owner Program, which lets copyright holders request that eBay remove an infringing item. Hendrickson refused, saying his general complaints should have been good enough.
I love that part. EBay suggested he go through their standard procedure for filing copyright complaints, which (I believe) has worked for others in the past. He refused, snobbily. He brought a legal case, and he lost.
Good for him. If he'd done things the acceptable way instead of trying to let lawyers solve his problem, he'd probably have the problem solved already. America needs more lessons like this.
You know what's even funnier? The telephone is more immediate. With e-mail, I usually have to wait twelve to twenty-four hours minimum before I get a response to my questions.
The Katz doth love his technology too much, methinks. He's genuinely convinced himself that there was no technology worth using before personal computers.
...since every iteration of the Microsoft or Apple OS requires more RAM, a faster processor, and more colors on the monitor, I think it's more accurate to say that no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet program or Word document, provided they don't want to use the latest version.
And besides, there's more to a computer than just the processor and graphics card. I've got a three-year-old PowerMac clone sitting at home, and I can't hardly use it for anything new. It does its job fine, but all its hardware is legacy -- DIMMs, SCSI, and serial ports while everything else is moving to SDRAM, FireWire, and USB. This phenomenon exists in the PC world as well, just to a lesser degree. If I want to upgrade my machine, it's ironic that it will cost me more money than if I had a brand-new one with USB and SDRAM on the motherboard.
In other words, then: it also costs me more to make my machine compatible with a Palm handheld, a digital camera, a joystick, or a new printer, I need to spend the money to upgrade it first. If I want to do anything like digital video, I have to upgrade it a lot. Even downloaded Flash multimedia ran slow until I upgraded the processor, and I sure can't add an MP3 jukebox without a substantial hard drive upgrade (2 gigs doesn't go as far as it used to).
Games push the envelope harder than anything else in the consumer industry, true. But it's hardly the only thing. There's more to consumer PCs these days than video games and word processing, and it's all more demanding than it used to be.
...for all you longtime SUSE freeloaders to buy copies of their CDs. (Yes, I know it's free-as-in-beer to download, but do you want a new distro next year or not?)
You could also get most of this with an iMac. Buy a used one, drop your favorite PPC Linux distro on it, and soup it up with as much RAM as you can afford. A more recent iMac will even support their wireless Airport cards, which may or may not be Linux-accessible by this time, and will give you all the benefits of fanless computing.
As for TV-output options: your TV's resolution is probably too low. Wait for HDTV displays to come down, and for computers to ship from the manufacturer with interfaces for them. (I look forward to adding an old Intel box to my living room as an MP3 jukebox when that happens.)
That's why they also made the g180, with Graffiti and no keyboard. There are some people who would rather learn to use a stylus, and others who would prefer to stick to a familiar keyboard. This is a good move on Palm's part to offer identical features with both input methods and let the consumer decide.
"Check it out: the new Athlon 1600!"
"Excuse me? Yes, how fast does this processor actually run?"
"It's a 1600!"
"Yes, I know that, but how fast is it? in megahertz?"
"It's equivalent to a Pentium at 1600 Mz."
"Okay, but how fast does it run?"
"I don't understand the question, sir."
"How many megahertz does this processor run at?"
"Perhaps you're not familiar with what we call 'The Megahertz Myth'...."
"I'm thoroughly familiar with it, I've worked in hardware for fifteen years. I just want to know how many megahertz this particular processor runs at."
"It's equivalent to a...."
"No, I don't care about that. What's the clock speed?"
"It's faster than a...."
"That's nice. What's. The. Clock. Speed?"
"Would you like to see some comparisons to...."
"Never mind, I'll just go check out the Motorola booth."
When I was a kid, I adored Transformers robots. I mean, I was infatuated with those things. My brother and I would sometimes pretend we were transformable robots ourselves, contorting ourselves into mock-cars and mock-trucks and driving around the basement smashing into each other.
I got as many of the "cool" Transformers toys as I could, but there was a limit to how many of them I could afford. But my mom bought me LEGO space sets as well, which I assembled dutifully according to the instructions whenever I got a large one for my birthday or Christmas and then disassembled to make other stuff. Eventually, I figured out that if I couldn't collect all the Transformers I wanted, I could make them myself.
And I was good. Two "Autobot Clones" which looked the same as robots but turned into different vehicles were my favorite early effort. My last was a larger-than-the-toy Fortress Maximus, built out of every last black and grey LEGO brick I could find. It couldn't stand under its own weight, so I propped it against a wall to admire it. I never made a serious effort with the LEGO Transformers again, but they'd served their purpose.
If only those LEGO sets didn't cost as much, I would have bought them instead of the TF toys. Why buy one action figure when you can get a hundred?
Twenty-four days is nearly an entire month; longer, when you take weekends into account (nearly five five-day work weeks). Can you imagine how much client work would pile up if half of your department's staff took the entire month of August off? If all of them too the entire month off?
True, it's a fair tradeoff for the wages. But it's also true that it's a major disruption for any business that works under deadlines.
I mean, the position and authority sounded great. But who'd want to manage a group of people halfway across the globe? Even if there were no language barrier to overcome, I'd be "managing" a group of programmers whose clock was off of mine by nearly twelve hours. We'd do almost all our interaction by e-mail, asynchronously.
I know from having worked only in production that unless you can meet face-to-face with your immediate supervisor on a regular basis, it's difficult if not impossible to develop any cohesion as a team. I could have told those guys what to do, and I'm sure they'd have done it, but I'd never have been able to get a sense of who they were and what they were truly capable of. I'd be managing a big black box.
Sending programming labor overseas is no new concept, and it has obvious financial advantages. But practically speaking, I'd much rather have a highly-paid programmer next door to me than an inexpensive one several thousand miles away.
International patent law is likewise an implied agreement between states. I wasn't drawing a comparison between corporations and nations, but between one international agreement and another.
Brazil is essentially declaring a state of emergency in their war against AIDS and using this to justify breaking international patent law. Bush percieves the proliferation of black-market nuclear weapons as reason to declare a minor state of emergency and break the ABM treaty.
Both are diplomatic disasters, but the only difference is that Brazil is upsetting a corporation while the US is upsetting other countries. But if Brazil's actions were to someday lead to other pharmaceuticals restricting trade with developing countries, for fear of losing profits, the end result is the same as if they'd angered the United States government.
Both actions are defensive and for the protection of each country's individual citizens (and neither, despite your mention of Nazi Germany, involves encroaching on other nations' borders). The only difference is the immediacy of the threat. If Middle Eastern nations were already firing off nuclear missiles toward each other, no one would dare say Bush's actions were unjustified.
I think it's more significant, though, to note what a change in style this is. Nintendo and Sony have already neatly divided the gaming market into two pieces: mature players (PS2) and kids (Nintendo). Sega got caught between the two, which is what ultimately cost them in the console wars. By "tooning" Zelda, Nintendo is trying to make it more appealing to a younger audience who might otherwise be turned off by the renowned complexity of the game.
It's interesting, because that's just the problem most people have with George W. Bush's decision to go ahead with the US missile shield. Why risk having millions of Americans subjected to slow, lingering, painful death from nuclear radiation when we can just ignore the treaty we signed with Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty we signed with Russia all those years ago?
This is clearly only the first version of Microsoft LetterWriter, so it's bound to have a few quirks. Everyone knows that by version 3.0, it'll be much easier to use, and will probably include support for faxes, answering machine messages, and "handwritten" fonts as well as these printed letters that were spotted so quickly.
Transformers are my current action figure of choice, but YMMV.
I nearly LOL'ed, myself... product placement is getting sneakier every year.
...but only because they've overextended themselves. (In contrast, Microsoft is years away from overextending themselves because they have so many other ways to provide income.) However, the Palm name is still well-recognized and appreciated. Think of all the apps available for the PalmOS. Think of how "PalmPilot" is still a casual name for any handheld computer, despite the fact that Palm hasn't made any "Pilots" for a couple of years. Now imagine a full-color, fully-interactive OS for a color handheld or web tablet with the Palm name branding it. Be's name couldn't make that sell. Palm's name could. Microsoft could sell it better, of course, but (TabletPCs notwithstanding) they're still not quite there yet. And neither Sony nor Apple nor IBM is really in the handheld/portable market, while Palm has been about nothing but. If anyone can make the BeIA a success now, it'd be Palm. (Whether they will or not is open to speculation.)
Doubtless Palm was after not the desktop BeOS, but the BeIA internet appliance operating system. BeIA has, to date, only been sold to Sony for the eVilla gizmo, but that probably won't earn Sony much money. But if Palm can combine BeIA with their own PalmOS, they could really give PocketPC a run for the market.
(Yes, I know this was a joke, but there's a real point worth making in it. There are true disabilities out there that could be interpreted as laziness, but laziness itself is not a disability.)