The shuttle disaster killed a part of all of us.
on
The Challenger
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· Score: 1
A little over 2 years ago a number of us crowded around a large screen TV in our student union to watch the oldest person ever be launced into space. During the launch there was a certian nervousness amoung everyone who had been old enough to remember the Challenger disaster. After the succesful launch, the discussion revieled that everyone had collectivly been remembering that day back in 1986, and we tried once again to understand what it ment.
Many of you are too young to remember this, and I don't think you understand why this is such a big deal. You have to understand the way the world was back in 1986. While only 15 years ago, it was a very different place. No world wide web. Computers were rare. A giant wall symbolic wall was still standing seperating ourselves and the Russians.
I was in the fifth grade. Old enough to know that the threat of nuclear war was still very, very real. In school and at home we discovered any method such as duck and cover would be useless. If the Russians came, we were doomed. It was that simple.
All around us we were discovering that America was not a great country. Vietnam was still fresh in many of our parents minds, and rumors of foul play began to surface in regards to our activities in the Middle East and South America.
And despite all of that, we had the space program. Here was something, as children, we all could get behind. It was, at times, the only good thing. It represented a bright contrast to the hopelessness of the cold war.
And in a way, it did so much more. We lived with the knowledge that by the year 2000 we would all be taking flights into space just as often as we fly from city to city. The idea of bold, heroic space exploration captured the imagination of myself and my classmates so profoundly.
And it all went away that day 15 years ago. All the students were called off the playground during recess and brought into one large classroom with a TV set. A teacher addressed us all, with sadness, telling us that the Space Shuttle had exploded and all of the astronauts died.
I remember how I felt that day. That complete disbelief, that complete shock. For myself, this was an impossibility. For the first time in our lives we learned all at once the very real reality that something good and perfect can be lost. A hard lesson to learn for millions of youngsters my age all at once.
The nation changed that day. The space program changed. I changed. In time the news storys stoped and things started to go on as usual, but something was missing: Hope.
That day, the space age ended, and the communications age began to emerge. The wonder of space exploration was put on the back burner. We learned that the economics of space travel was just something we could'nt afford any more.
The space program of today just is not the same. Rockets no longer objects to propel man into the heavens, they are expensive delivery trucks for big business. The international space station is more about politics and balence sheets then discovery. And when Mir is allowed to come crashing down from orbit, we begrudingly understand the economic factors behind it.
I've yet to see anything else that inspires and delights as much as the hope that was generated by Space Exploration in my youth.
It's been my experience that anyone over 35 will only deem something 'revolutionary' if the've seen something like it before and this new thing makes it better.
Saying that, and looking at our clues as to what 'IT' is, my best guess is IT is some sort of cheap new transportation.
What else do these folks know of that changed the way citys are designed, effected the envrionment, and required new legislation? The car of course! By extension, this must be just like the car, only different.
I'll be the first in line to order my Geo IT Metro.
7.1.2 post or transmit any unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, indecent, profane, hateful, bigoted or otherwise objectionable information of any kind.
Personally, I think the people at Sprint are a bunch of poo-poo heads who are most likely minorities who are stereotypically smelly and dirty. If I ever see a Sprint executive I shall spit on them and insult their mothers because I hate them. Incidently I'm naked while writing this if you want to check out my web cam. Oh, did I mention Hitler had some good ideas?
Whoops. I just lost my sprint account. Back to dialup!
Anyone with a special place in their heart for the old style technology/Arnold films, such as Running Man, T2, and Total Recal would love this. I was nearly convinced that Arnold was dead, starting with the horrid 'Kindergarden Cop' moving to the hokey 'Last Action Hero' all the way up intil the insultingly stupid 'End of Days'.
Arnold is back, in spite of himself. It's not that he's a great actor in this, but then again, he never was. You take an interesting situation stick him in them middle and watch him fuck shit up. The movie is not pure Arnold gold, but it's a step back in the right direction.
Perhaps the only real problems was the unnessescary scenes-- a football crunch up that could have been stolen from the editing room floor of 'Any given Sunday', a helocopter chase that serves no purpose then to show off CGI, and of course the obligitory car chase that kills the suspension of disbelife through unrealism.
But where this movie really shines is it's fresh take on the future; The future is not a dark place--it is sterile, bright, cheery. The wall screens don't show big brother looking down on you, they show happy ads and football updates. It's quite interesting how it demonstrates a future where the middle-class family seemlessly brings technology into their lives without batting an eye. But, at the same time there is an underlying uneasyness about all these new advances.
The purpose Arnold ultmatly serves in this is as a character study about letting go. He is the last old hat person in a changing world. When his daughter wants a grotesquly realistic robot doll that can play and sing just like a real freind, Arnold asks 'Why not just have a real freind?'. He finds himself the only one unconfortble with the idea of cloning his pet, as all of his peers think it's no big deal.
The battle, and subtle commentary becomes this: He's faced with a situation he knows to be wrong, yet his only advocates are radical protestors while the rest of normal society find him too triditional. And such is the situation many of us will face in the near future: As morally ambigious technology becomes more intertwined into our lives, do we question it and risk being labled a closed minded zelot? Or do we simply accept it without question in exchange for a sense of normalcy?
I've dreamed about doing this sort of thing if I ever had the money. But these folks who are doing it--and admit it.. it's pretty neet--they are doing it just to have it done, not to enjoy it.
They don't design it themselves, they need a staff of tech support to maintain it, and many of them admit they don't have the time to enjoy it. What's the point? Bragging rights? That's just lame.
It's like watching some old rich guy crusing down the interstate in his brand new Farrari with automatic transmission, going the speed limit. Why did he buy it? Because he could. Does he like it? He really couldn't care less if it was a Toyota.
I needed to hear that I'm not alone. I spent some 15 months at a large ISP. And you hit that feeling I used to get dead streight on.
It's not just the idiot customers. After time the idiot customers are more of a comic relief then anything else. It's when the customers are screaming at you, your powerless to do anything about it, and they are having problems because somebody up the ladder makes it impossible for you to fix it.
After I was there a few months, we were told flat out: Your job is not tech support; your job is customer service. Your job is the make the customer happy, not fix his problem. Then later, 'We get 2,000 resumes a week from people begging to do your job. If you don't think your replaceable, think again'.
The way call centers are run is so old fashioned and innefficent, it's a wonder customers ultimatly put up with them. You have a tech, who can do nothing but try to help and talk nice. You have the supervisor, who is being yelled at by the floor manager to shorten his/her 'teams' call time, then you have that guys boss yelling at the floor manager... and so on up the line.
And the insulting thing, which every employee sees through is how they deal with discontented workers. They tell us about all the ways they are making it really a great place to work.
Examples:
We have great health care--to a staff with an average age of 22.
"The president's of the companys office is right over there. He keeps an open door policy, so if you ever want to talk to him, go ahead and do it. ..however, don't actually do that, talk to me first (actually said to me)".
"We are offering free training for MCSEs and other items you can do during your work time, as long as it doesn't interfere with your calls"--meaning never.
In the meantime, every second of every day is logged on the clock. The rows and rows of cubicals are patrolled with armed guards (for our own security... they tell us).
So, why don't you just quit? Now that I'm no longer working there, I wonder about that. And I realize, it's because that call center, and presumably most of them out there foster such an envrionment that really, really dehumanizes their workers in such a way that they just can't. After a few months of taking abuse from callers and your employers, with no advocates, no place to vent except to your equally disinchanted co-workers, you just don't have enough self worth to go out there and get another job.
(On a side note, shortly after leaving that ISP, joy returned to my life. To all of those still drudging away... quit now, you have so much to live for).
Where is this concern comeing from? Sure, there is a small minority of people who have been made uneasy by violent video games, but it's always been a small minority. As my generation--who cut our teeth on the Atari 2600 and at the local arcade--is begins to have children of our own, this will seem less and less of an issue. It's not that we won't see playing video games as a distraction from other healthy activites as Katz suggests... we will see computer gaming as a healthy activity and part of growing up.
Overall Katz is confusing the role of the increased popularity of electronic games. It is not a revolutionary phenomena so much as it is a result of a much larger shift brought about by the personal computer and the internet, and yeilds as much importance in the grand scheme of things as chat-rooms, celluar phones, PDAs or CGI in grapically violent movies.
I have to take issue with the thesis of Katz' argument, insofar as the dramatic shift towards computer games is a reflection of our triditional love of sport, not some new cultural direction.
The new cultural direction that Katz' notices is one that he's touched on quite a bit: We are as humans tending to interact more with machines as a replacement of more triditional encounters. We get our news online instead of from the paper. We spend our nights in chat rooms instead of social clubs, and yes, we compete with each other and ourselves now on the computer instead of the playground or sporting field.
This isn't a revolution. The revolution is the microcomputer and internet. Video games are just a logical result of that revolution.
I've noticed quite a few comments poo-pahing the idea of paying for radio. But I would guess those guys are not really the market the sat radio folks are targeting.
The beauty of this sort of system is that you can get in your car in New York, and listen to the same station without interruption in a drive all the way to Los Angeles. That's what appeals to me.
As some one spends a good quarter of my working day behind the wheel, usually driving to remote, rural work sites where the only availble radio is religious, country-western and spanish speaking, (and in the city, it's just bland pop), Sat radio will be a godsend. I'd gladly pay $10-30 a month for this.
I had the unique oppertunity last year to view the digital projection screening of Episode 1 last year in Los Angeles. To compaire, I went and saw it in a regular theatre a few days before. At the time, I felt as many do, that digital is not the way, and film will last forever.
I was wrong. Other then some problems with the coloring, there was no real noticible distinction between the two. When I left the theatre, I knew at that moment, film was on it's way out.
The good part is, while we know that digital is comming, we arn't going to loose anything as an audience.
The bad part is, we arn't going to gain anything either. While digital will dramatically reduce the cost of filming allowing anyone with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment to make a full featured movie, chances are we'll still have the same Hollywood type films on the screens of our local cineplexes.
The reasoning is, theatres never show films based on price; a $100 million dollar movie costs the same to show as a $2 million dollar one. The only thing that will convince theatre owners to show a film is if they have a reasonible expectation that people will come (and pay) to see it.
So the people with the money to promote films still get to decide, and let's face it, they arn't providing us the best film choices right now. I see no reason that a change in the cost of produciton would drmatically alter the distribution network.
There is no question the ISP, at least legally, was in the right. As consumers we have the option to simply move to another ISP. ..for now.
But in our world, when a new idea comes about big companies end up doing everything they can to gobble up smaller companies, and after a while our options slowly begin to decrease. With time, industrys that benifit from 'scales of economy'--that is, the unit cost of production (in this case, for a service) goes down with more users--tend to equalize around 2-6 major suppliers and costs keep competitors out of the marketplace.
We may be lucky. The days of the mom and pop ISP may stick around for quite a while. However, if and when these ISPs are taken over, and our choices deminish, chances are without a large base of compitition, the TOS for each company will begin to look exactly the same, and it will not be to our advantage.
As consumers we should not simply rely on market choice to protect our freedom, because more often then that, that choice ends up going away.
...not known it?
This may sound a bit strange, but it always struck me as odd that we always assumed that alien life would have DNA and would be cellular in nature, simply because everything organic we see here on earth is cellular.
However, what if something is alive, intellegent and rational and is not cellular? That reproduces, is damanged and repaired on a compleatly different way then our DNA based cells.
Anything could be intellegent alien life, we just didn't bother to or know how to hear it/talk to it. It could just be that the comet itself is intellegent, and has manufactured biological tools to handle certian aspects of space travel, and all we are finding is the comet's spare parts.
File sharing is not dead. . .
on
Scour is Dead
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· Score: 2
Easy, slick professional looking file sharing is dead, and it only makes sense. While a few people I'm sure used napster/scour for legal purposes, most of the users did not.
There will always be FTP/Usenet/IRC (and others) to share your files, but did any body really expect that deep down a company would be allowed to facilitate the quick and easy exchange of illegal materials?
The only reason why it lasted so long was because the triditional corporate/legal institutions did not understand the technology (and to a point, still don't) enough to break things up.
The best analogy I can think of is if somebody set up a 'trade your tapes' shop right next door to Sam Goody in the mall with a rack of duel decks installed that you could use for free. It would take a while for people to figure out if it was legal or not, but eventually it would be shut down. That doesn't mean people would'nt still be trading tapes with their freinds, it just means that there would be no central location to do it.
It took me a while, and most people are comeing around to this fact: Netscape is an inferior product. Every release since the AOL takeover has been progressivly worse. This comes as no surprise; AOL removed the employee freindly workspace at Netscape and riddled it with it's own burocratic garbage.
So netscape is a buggy advertisement desquised as a browser. So what. It stinks anyways. I was sad when I ended up throwing away netscape for IE, but I got over it. If I am going to use a browser created by an evil money grubbing company, I might as well use the one that works.
I've yet to try mozilla. I like the thinking behind it, but when your setting up machines for business use, you don't have the freedom to use beta software. Espcially when, on a well maintained machine, IE is pretty stable.
(Ironically, the only time IE crashes on my home machine with regularity is when I visit the hotmail website).
You seem to think that conforming to the norm will make you popular, will
make everything all right. Please get a clue.
Your missing the point entirely. The major problem with the 'norm' is that it is
based on a misguided value system where 'popularity' becomes a judge of worth.
It is wrong to expect someone to participate in 'normal' society when that society is
in and of itself broke.
Most of us don't want to be popular. Popularity is something that is
pressured upon many because it is a quality that they are expected to have if they
want to succeed. What we do want, however, is to want to belong. All people do
it, and they go to extensive lengths to achieve that.
Throwing out your black clothing for something more 'preppy' would only
demonstrate your wish to change from one clique to another. That would be stupid
and self defeating; you would only be attempting to get into a social circle that
champions our misguided value systems, as opposed to one that for whatever
reason chooses to demonstrate their contempt for those systems.
The irony is, both perpetuate the status que. Both are uniforms in an invisible war
that ensures no one ever leaves there place. School administrators are more likely
to look down on people like you because in their eyes, people like you are causing
the trouble. The cool kids don't go on shooting sprees, they simply demoralize,
taunt and physically abuse anyone not like them. From an administrative
standpoint, that's a minor inconvenience compared with the horrors committed by
people like you.
Of course, you will say 'I don't kill people, I'm not dangerous, nobody I know is
dangerous like that. I just want to be myself and left in peace. Why should I be
judged because of the clothing I wear and the music I listen to?' Why not. You do
it all the time. There are a bunch of kids wearing the Ambercrombe and Fitch
clothing who are on the football team who aren't assholes. It's a two way street.
We just seem to be more willing to take your side because your side is loosing,
because more often then not, the people on your side are the victims.
The most decent people you will find in your high school are the ones that don't
stand out. The ones who don't try to be different by hanging out with different
people just like them. The ones that go about their business in quiet terror because
they won't, or simply don't have the energy or inclination to participate in the tiered
social order. And it is these people that we should be encouraged to be like, it is
those who are the truly normal ones.
What bothers me about the direction this is going is that it seems to interpret the idea that pressure to conform to normality is
somehow wrong. We need a world where people feel and act normal, and encourage others into the fold.
The only real problem with what we have now is that the 'norm' is based on a faulty and destructive value system that places
looks and money above more human characteristics. Change the value system in schools to reward good deeds, fellowship,
and brotherhood and we no longer have these problems. (admittedly, easier said then done)
I went to the DARE class. Teacher said all drugs are bad and will kill me. The police man came in and said drugs will kill me.
Then I went to party and they were all smoking the weed. I asked them about the weed and they said it was fun and I should try some. I said 'No', that's peer pressure and I want none of it. They looked at me funny then said 'Oh well, more for us'.
The next day all the kids who were smoking the weed were at school. Even the smart ones. It was test day and I was nervous. All the kids who were smoking the weed didn't seem as nervous. They all got A's. I got a D.
I asked teacher again about the Weed. She said weed is bad and will kill me and if I smoke the weed I'm going to die. I told her that lots of the other kids at the school smoke the weed, and they seem alive and OK. "NO" Teacher said. "All of them are bad."
The next week I was at another party and decided teacher must be wrong since all the kids are having fun, so I smoked the weed too. Boy! It was fun. It felt so good, and the Pink Floyd really made sense. When I went home I thought 'I'm going to die now'.
The next day, I woke up feeling good. Great. At the school Teacher said drugs hook you for good and you can never stop taking them and if you try it hurts bad.
I didn't want to hurt bad, so I asked my friend who had the weed if I could have some more so I didn't hurt. He said he didn't have any so we went and saw a movie. I didn't hurt at all. I went three weeks with none of the weed, and I felt normal.
Then out on the playground there was a guy selling the crack. I saved up my lunch money for the crack. But before I did it I'd better ask Teacher. I asked 'Whats the difference between the weed and the crack'? Teacher said there was no difference. The weed and the crack are bad just the same.
So I smoked the crack, because the weed was not bad for me, so I figured the crack was not bad for me. Boy, teacher was right. Now I needed the crack and if I didn't get the crack it hurt bad.
I run US West (er, Quest) DSL in Tempe. It's been for the most part stable (few outages here and there). For some inexpicable reason, they upped our bandwith from 256k to 650 last month without charging us extra (I'm not compaining)
The sales system out here, however, is subpar. I had a client out in Glendale who kept getting mailers for DSL. We'd call up to order only to be told it's still not availble, that the local telco location had not been upgraded to the new equipment. It wasn't until we got fed up with waiting and went to order an IDSN line that the ISDN salesperson told us DSL was in fact availble and the equipment had been online for quite sometime. A few frustrating hours of going back and forth with US West to get all their departments to agree, and we got the thing ordered. Two weeks later it was up and running.
I don't know how US West has changed since Quest took it over, but I think the moral of the story is, keep calling back and talking to different salespeople until you find an answer that you like.
America Online (AOL) announced they would be providing broad band internet access on all major domestic flights at a
press conference this week. The large internet service provider will be installing AOL proprietary servers on all aircraft
operating in the United States within two months.
"We know people need AOL, even when on an airplane" stated Robert Worpindorf, AOL's new VP of aerospace
connectivity. "People need to stay connected, and when away from family and friends, they need the rich, vibrant content
only AOL can provide."
When asked about bandwidth, Worpindorf responded "Well, because of the nature of these connections, our bandwidth
requirements will double, but, as always, we are ready for it, and no user will ever see any noticeable disruption in service"
AOL's press release stated airline travelers would receive AOL stocks, news reports, and "Buddies. Everyone love's their
AOL buddies".
AOL's announcement comes at a difficult moment for its aerospace connectivity division, which has received some criticism
recently over a communications failure on the Russian space station Mir. Mir astronauts had received an AOL 5.0 CD-ROM
in the mail, and installed it on the station's main communications computer, knocking out all network communication stacks
previously installed. After a 45 minute call to AOL technical support (which suggested reinstalling IE5), AOL decided it
must be a modem problem. To date, Mir can only access terrestrial busy signals.
The article does raise some interesting points, but is also looking at the issue from an incorrect prospective.
We are at first reserved to accept his cathedral analogy because it implies that the vision and direction of the project is from
one source, and that is set in stone. Open source is organic: It's leaders are not chosen by seniority, resumes, or knowledge,
they are chosen according to competence. By his logic, if Torvolds died tomorrow, linux would stop developing; The
architect is gone. But that wouldn't happen; a new central leader would emerge, and that position would be thrust open
someone based on their competence to do a good job. Open source (or all software, for that matter) does not have a
beginning or an end, it consistently evolves and changes.
The other implication he makes is that projects in open source are necessarily 'steered' in a direction by a central manager.
And while I wouldn't argue that a central figure would suggest direction for a project, he or she wouldn't limit or try to focus
the development by only his/her own direction. Linux is a prime example of that; we find it now in everything from robust
mission critical servers to home desktop PCs to appliances and wrist watches. Linux did not become such an adaptable
operating system because it was carefully guided by one central figure, it became this way because the main central figure
allowed it to grow.
He discounts the Bazaar analogy because it is, in his mind, too chaotic to produce anything of value. He seems to confuse
chaos with freedom. In the Bazaar you can do anything you want, but if you want to succeed, you best do something of
value. This doesn't mesh with the corporate vision (Either traditional or contemporary views of project management)
because it allows an incredible amount of freedom with the developers at the bottom rung. A programmer may, one day, fix
a security hole, and the next, decide to write a driver for his brand new joystick. A corporate environment is very unsettled
by this: If nobody has an assigned task, how can anything get done? Things get done because the people doing them see
a need for them to get done. They, as users, recognize a missing piece of the puzzle, and feel compelled (by whatever personal reason) to complete it.
And it is for precisely this reason that the open source model will never work in a corporate environment. Once a concrete
direction is assigned to a project, it stops being organic. People loose interest. Moreover, people soon learn that the
software they create for a company, any company, is ultimately created for the profit of the company, not for the good of their
fellow users, and their true motivation will be lost.
Instead of getting into all this hub-bub about AOL and their servers, why don't we see any move towards an IM standard?
AOL, Yahoo, ICQ et.al. can all keep their servers running only their clients, which talk to each other over a standardized IM protocol.
The first response will be "But, why would a company let people utilize their servers if they can't put their ads on the clients
and make any money?" The answer is the same reason people use IM in the first place: They don't know any better. There
is already a much better communication solution out there; IRC. You get real time chat, messaging, file transfer etc. But the
people who don't use IRC and flock to IM as their first choice do so because either A, they don't know about it, B, all their
friends already use IM, or C, IRC is too hard. Even mind boggleingly easy software like mIRC is too much a challenge for
many computer novices (What's all these servers? Why do I have to type a # for a channel? What's with this '/' before every
command?).
If we can reach a point where all IM messaging operates over one simple standard, we can put together something like this:
User installs IM client from big company, which is preconfigured to use big company's server. User logs on, his/her client
sends his information to big company's server, which then goes about updating all the servers running under the IM standard.
User types in his/her buddy's name into the client, which queries big company's servers database and find's the buddy on
another big company's server, all seamless on the client end. Or, make it simpler. Think of the way the multitude of IRC
servers on a particular network all work together (this may prove difficult to do with the huge mass of people using a unified
IM standard all logged on at the same time. . . leave it up to the coding folks to figure it out).
What a company can do, however, is restrict access to their expensive, reliable server to only the clients they produce. This
lets AOL say 'It costs us a great deal of money to provide a server, so only people using AIM can use it', but it does not
restrict users not using AIM to talk to AIM users. Someone out there could produce a very nice IM client, but they would
have to connect to server of more questionable quality.
This creates three advantages for consumers: 1., everyone using IM could talk with anyone else, regardless of what client
they use. 2., More choices for users, and 3., It encourages more competition among the larger players on the bases of quality
and reliability, instead of user base. The winners will be those who put together the best server/client combination, instead of
who has market share.
The only real practical application this could be used for is when your really,
really drunk. Market a breathalyzer to plug into your USB port to integrate with the
email client.
A nice pop up that says 'these are pretty strong words to email your boss or
ex-girlfreind, you can't send this until your BAC gets closer to 0'
Somehow, I don't see anyone integrating this with ELM any time soon.
Potential counterbalances, perhaps, but what if your viewing habits are not normal for your demographic. If this information is stored on a remote
server, and if information could be cross referenced with demographic
information, what is to stop them from setting up a series of red flags which are
then sent to the appropriate authorities (remember a while back when we were
faced with computer monitoring of 'unusual' banking phenomenon which would be
reported for investigation?).
The 27 year old male who is reporting an income of $6,000 a year is spending an
awful lot of time watching the financial channels, when all of our data says he
should be watching professional wrestling and tractor truck pulls. We think the
IRS might find this interesting.
Directed advertising is a good thing, (has anybody else sat through an annoyingly
high level of feminine hygiene ads during the A-team and though 'boy, somebody's
sure asleep at the wheel'?). But if that information is catalogued, stored and cross
referenced in such a way that any agency can, through whatever channels find it out
as it relates to a specific individual, then we could face potential problems.
If every household had some way of providing direct feedback as to their viewing habits, then the major ratings companys, (like Neilson) would be thrown out.
I've always belived that the statistical data collected by the ratings players was deeply flawed, since the only people who participate do so by being paid money, as well as know their viewing habits can have a dramatic effect on the world of television.
I have, and I think most people have come to the conculsion that everything I do on the Internet could be public knowledge, or, in other words, I simply would not go to a website or send an email that I would not want the whole world knowing about.
At the same time, however, the whole world probably does'nt care.
If Microsoft wants to track where I go, I guess it does'nt bother me. There's nothing they could do to use that information against me. At the very least, if I have to get spam, or see banner ads when I visit a website, at least those ads/email will be catered to my interest. And, perhaps if companies were able track my behavor for the past 6 years, in which time I have never responded to a Spam email, they will eventually stop sending them.
Then again, that probably will not happen.
I know that there are some people who want to protect their privacy, and to them I say 'let the buyer beware'. Microsoft has proven again and again that they opperate with questionable ethics, and while it is to be assumed that nothing you do on the Internet is truly private, it is also to be assumed that Microsoft will attempt to profit from it's users regardless of right or wrong. We still don't know the contents of the source. of the Windows OS, and what information it stores and could potentially send out, so if you use a Microsoft product, always assume the worst.
If your concerned with privacy, run linux on an AMD processor.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of you are too young to remember this, and I don't think you understand why this is such a big deal. You have to understand the way the world was back in 1986. While only 15 years ago, it was a very different place. No world wide web. Computers were rare. A giant wall symbolic wall was still standing seperating ourselves and the Russians.
I was in the fifth grade. Old enough to know that the threat of nuclear war was still very, very real. In school and at home we discovered any method such as duck and cover would be useless. If the Russians came, we were doomed. It was that simple.
All around us we were discovering that America was not a great country. Vietnam was still fresh in many of our parents minds, and rumors of foul play began to surface in regards to our activities in the Middle East and South America.
And despite all of that, we had the space program. Here was something, as children, we all could get behind. It was, at times, the only good thing. It represented a bright contrast to the hopelessness of the cold war.
And in a way, it did so much more. We lived with the knowledge that by the year 2000 we would all be taking flights into space just as often as we fly from city to city. The idea of bold, heroic space exploration captured the imagination of myself and my classmates so profoundly.
And it all went away that day 15 years ago. All the students were called off the playground during recess and brought into one large classroom with a TV set. A teacher addressed us all, with sadness, telling us that the Space Shuttle had exploded and all of the astronauts died.
I remember how I felt that day. That complete disbelief, that complete shock. For myself, this was an impossibility. For the first time in our lives we learned all at once the very real reality that something good and perfect can be lost. A hard lesson to learn for millions of youngsters my age all at once.
The nation changed that day. The space program changed. I changed. In time the news storys stoped and things started to go on as usual, but something was missing: Hope.
That day, the space age ended, and the communications age began to emerge. The wonder of space exploration was put on the back burner. We learned that the economics of space travel was just something we could'nt afford any more.
The space program of today just is not the same. Rockets no longer objects to propel man into the heavens, they are expensive delivery trucks for big business. The international space station is more about politics and balence sheets then discovery. And when Mir is allowed to come crashing down from orbit, we begrudingly understand the economic factors behind it.
I've yet to see anything else that inspires and delights as much as the hope that was generated by Space Exploration in my youth.
I deeply miss it.
Saying that, and looking at our clues as to what 'IT' is, my best guess is IT is some sort of cheap new transportation.
What else do these folks know of that changed the way citys are designed, effected the envrionment, and required new legislation? The car of course! By extension, this must be just like the car, only different.
I'll be the first in line to order my Geo IT Metro.
Personally, I think the people at Sprint are a bunch of poo-poo heads who are most likely minorities who are stereotypically smelly and dirty. If I ever see a Sprint executive I shall spit on them and insult their mothers because I hate them. Incidently I'm naked while writing this if you want to check out my web cam. Oh, did I mention Hitler had some good ideas?
Whoops. I just lost my sprint account. Back to dialup!
Arnold is back, in spite of himself. It's not that he's a great actor in this, but then again, he never was. You take an interesting situation stick him in them middle and watch him fuck shit up. The movie is not pure Arnold gold, but it's a step back in the right direction.
Perhaps the only real problems was the unnessescary scenes-- a football crunch up that could have been stolen from the editing room floor of 'Any given Sunday', a helocopter chase that serves no purpose then to show off CGI, and of course the obligitory car chase that kills the suspension of disbelife through unrealism.
But where this movie really shines is it's fresh take on the future; The future is not a dark place--it is sterile, bright, cheery. The wall screens don't show big brother looking down on you, they show happy ads and football updates. It's quite interesting how it demonstrates a future where the middle-class family seemlessly brings technology into their lives without batting an eye. But, at the same time there is an underlying uneasyness about all these new advances.
The purpose Arnold ultmatly serves in this is as a character study about letting go. He is the last old hat person in a changing world. When his daughter wants a grotesquly realistic robot doll that can play and sing just like a real freind, Arnold asks 'Why not just have a real freind?'. He finds himself the only one unconfortble with the idea of cloning his pet, as all of his peers think it's no big deal.
The battle, and subtle commentary becomes this: He's faced with a situation he knows to be wrong, yet his only advocates are radical protestors while the rest of normal society find him too triditional. And such is the situation many of us will face in the near future: As morally ambigious technology becomes more intertwined into our lives, do we question it and risk being labled a closed minded zelot? Or do we simply accept it without question in exchange for a sense of normalcy?
I've dreamed about doing this sort of thing if I ever had the money. But these folks who are doing it--and admit it.. it's pretty neet--they are doing it just to have it done, not to enjoy it. They don't design it themselves, they need a staff of tech support to maintain it, and many of them admit they don't have the time to enjoy it. What's the point? Bragging rights? That's just lame. It's like watching some old rich guy crusing down the interstate in his brand new Farrari with automatic transmission, going the speed limit. Why did he buy it? Because he could. Does he like it? He really couldn't care less if it was a Toyota.
I needed to hear that I'm not alone. I spent some 15 months at a large ISP. And you hit that feeling I used to get dead streight on.
.however, don't actually do that, talk to me first (actually said to me)".
It's not just the idiot customers. After time the idiot customers are more of a comic relief then anything else. It's when the customers are screaming at you, your powerless to do anything about it, and they are having problems because somebody up the ladder makes it impossible for you to fix it.
After I was there a few months, we were told flat out: Your job is not tech support; your job is customer service. Your job is the make the customer happy, not fix his problem. Then later, 'We get 2,000 resumes a week from people begging to do your job. If you don't think your replaceable, think again'.
The way call centers are run is so old fashioned and innefficent, it's a wonder customers ultimatly put up with them. You have a tech, who can do nothing but try to help and talk nice. You have the supervisor, who is being yelled at by the floor manager to shorten his/her 'teams' call time, then you have that guys boss yelling at the floor manager... and so on up the line.
And the insulting thing, which every employee sees through is how they deal with discontented workers. They tell us about all the ways they are making it really a great place to work.
Examples:
We have great health care--to a staff with an average age of 22.
"The president's of the companys office is right over there. He keeps an open door policy, so if you ever want to talk to him, go ahead and do it. .
"We are offering free training for MCSEs and other items you can do during your work time, as long as it doesn't interfere with your calls"--meaning never.
In the meantime, every second of every day is logged on the clock. The rows and rows of cubicals are patrolled with armed guards (for our own security... they tell us).
So, why don't you just quit? Now that I'm no longer working there, I wonder about that. And I realize, it's because that call center, and presumably most of them out there foster such an envrionment that really, really dehumanizes their workers in such a way that they just can't. After a few months of taking abuse from callers and your employers, with no advocates, no place to vent except to your equally disinchanted co-workers, you just don't have enough self worth to go out there and get another job.
(On a side note, shortly after leaving that ISP, joy returned to my life. To all of those still drudging away... quit now, you have so much to live for).
Overall Katz is confusing the role of the increased popularity of electronic games. It is not a revolutionary phenomena so much as it is a result of a much larger shift brought about by the personal computer and the internet, and yeilds as much importance in the grand scheme of things as chat-rooms, celluar phones, PDAs or CGI in grapically violent movies.
The new cultural direction that Katz' notices is one that he's touched on quite a bit: We are as humans tending to interact more with machines as a replacement of more triditional encounters. We get our news online instead of from the paper. We spend our nights in chat rooms instead of social clubs, and yes, we compete with each other and ourselves now on the computer instead of the playground or sporting field.
This isn't a revolution. The revolution is the microcomputer and internet. Video games are just a logical result of that revolution.
I've noticed quite a few comments poo-pahing the idea of paying for radio. But I would guess those guys are not really the market the sat radio folks are targeting.
The beauty of this sort of system is that you can get in your car in New York, and listen to the same station without interruption in a drive all the way to Los Angeles. That's what appeals to me.
As some one spends a good quarter of my working day behind the wheel, usually driving to remote, rural work sites where the only availble radio is religious, country-western and spanish speaking, (and in the city, it's just bland pop), Sat radio will be a godsend. I'd gladly pay $10-30 a month for this.
I had the unique oppertunity last year to view the digital projection screening of Episode 1 last year in Los Angeles. To compaire, I went and saw it in a regular theatre a few days before. At the time, I felt as many do, that digital is not the way, and film will last forever.
I was wrong. Other then some problems with the coloring, there was no real noticible distinction between the two. When I left the theatre, I knew at that moment, film was on it's way out.
The good part is, while we know that digital is comming, we arn't going to loose anything as an audience.
The bad part is, we arn't going to gain anything either. While digital will dramatically reduce the cost of filming allowing anyone with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment to make a full featured movie, chances are we'll still have the same Hollywood type films on the screens of our local cineplexes.
The reasoning is, theatres never show films based on price; a $100 million dollar movie costs the same to show as a $2 million dollar one. The only thing that will convince theatre owners to show a film is if they have a reasonible expectation that people will come (and pay) to see it.
So the people with the money to promote films still get to decide, and let's face it, they arn't providing us the best film choices right now. I see no reason that a change in the cost of produciton would drmatically alter the distribution network.
But in our world, when a new idea comes about big companies end up doing everything they can to gobble up smaller companies, and after a while our options slowly begin to decrease. With time, industrys that benifit from 'scales of economy'--that is, the unit cost of production (in this case, for a service) goes down with more users--tend to equalize around 2-6 major suppliers and costs keep competitors out of the marketplace.
We may be lucky. The days of the mom and pop ISP may stick around for quite a while. However, if and when these ISPs are taken over, and our choices deminish, chances are without a large base of compitition, the TOS for each company will begin to look exactly the same, and it will not be to our advantage.
As consumers we should not simply rely on market choice to protect our freedom, because more often then that, that choice ends up going away.
...not known it? This may sound a bit strange, but it always struck me as odd that we always assumed that alien life would have DNA and would be cellular in nature, simply because everything organic we see here on earth is cellular. However, what if something is alive, intellegent and rational and is not cellular? That reproduces, is damanged and repaired on a compleatly different way then our DNA based cells. Anything could be intellegent alien life, we just didn't bother to or know how to hear it/talk to it. It could just be that the comet itself is intellegent, and has manufactured biological tools to handle certian aspects of space travel, and all we are finding is the comet's spare parts.
Easy, slick professional looking file sharing is dead, and it only makes sense. While a few people I'm sure used napster/scour for legal purposes, most of the users did not.
There will always be FTP/Usenet/IRC (and others) to share your files, but did any body really expect that deep down a company would be allowed to facilitate the quick and easy exchange of illegal materials?
The only reason why it lasted so long was because the triditional corporate/legal institutions did not understand the technology (and to a point, still don't) enough to break things up.
The best analogy I can think of is if somebody set up a 'trade your tapes' shop right next door to Sam Goody in the mall with a rack of duel decks installed that you could use for free. It would take a while for people to figure out if it was legal or not, but eventually it would be shut down. That doesn't mean people would'nt still be trading tapes with their freinds, it just means that there would be no central location to do it.
So netscape is a buggy advertisement desquised as a browser. So what. It stinks anyways. I was sad when I ended up throwing away netscape for IE, but I got over it. If I am going to use a browser created by an evil money grubbing company, I might as well use the one that works.
I've yet to try mozilla. I like the thinking behind it, but when your setting up machines for business use, you don't have the freedom to use beta software. Espcially when, on a well maintained machine, IE is pretty stable.
(Ironically, the only time IE crashes on my home machine with regularity is when I visit the hotmail website).
Your missing the point entirely. The major problem with the 'norm' is that it is based on a misguided value system where 'popularity' becomes a judge of worth. It is wrong to expect someone to participate in 'normal' society when that society is in and of itself broke.
Most of us don't want to be popular. Popularity is something that is pressured upon many because it is a quality that they are expected to have if they want to succeed. What we do want, however, is to want to belong. All people do it, and they go to extensive lengths to achieve that.
Throwing out your black clothing for something more 'preppy' would only demonstrate your wish to change from one clique to another. That would be stupid and self defeating; you would only be attempting to get into a social circle that champions our misguided value systems, as opposed to one that for whatever reason chooses to demonstrate their contempt for those systems.
The irony is, both perpetuate the status que. Both are uniforms in an invisible war that ensures no one ever leaves there place. School administrators are more likely to look down on people like you because in their eyes, people like you are causing the trouble. The cool kids don't go on shooting sprees, they simply demoralize, taunt and physically abuse anyone not like them. From an administrative standpoint, that's a minor inconvenience compared with the horrors committed by people like you.
Of course, you will say 'I don't kill people, I'm not dangerous, nobody I know is dangerous like that. I just want to be myself and left in peace. Why should I be judged because of the clothing I wear and the music I listen to?' Why not. You do it all the time. There are a bunch of kids wearing the Ambercrombe and Fitch clothing who are on the football team who aren't assholes. It's a two way street.
We just seem to be more willing to take your side because your side is loosing, because more often then not, the people on your side are the victims.
The most decent people you will find in your high school are the ones that don't stand out. The ones who don't try to be different by hanging out with different people just like them. The ones that go about their business in quiet terror because they won't, or simply don't have the energy or inclination to participate in the tiered social order. And it is these people that we should be encouraged to be like, it is those who are the truly normal ones.
The only real problem with what we have now is that the 'norm' is based on a faulty and destructive value system that places looks and money above more human characteristics. Change the value system in schools to reward good deeds, fellowship, and brotherhood and we no longer have these problems. (admittedly, easier said then done)
Then I went to party and they were all smoking the weed. I asked them about the weed and they said it was fun and I should try some. I said 'No', that's peer pressure and I want none of it. They looked at me funny then said 'Oh well, more for us'.
The next day all the kids who were smoking the weed were at school. Even the smart ones. It was test day and I was nervous. All the kids who were smoking the weed didn't seem as nervous. They all got A's. I got a D.
I asked teacher again about the Weed. She said weed is bad and will kill me and if I smoke the weed I'm going to die. I told her that lots of the other kids at the school smoke the weed, and they seem alive and OK. "NO" Teacher said. "All of them are bad."
The next week I was at another party and decided teacher must be wrong since all the kids are having fun, so I smoked the weed too. Boy! It was fun. It felt so good, and the Pink Floyd really made sense. When I went home I thought 'I'm going to die now'.
The next day, I woke up feeling good. Great. At the school Teacher said drugs hook you for good and you can never stop taking them and if you try it hurts bad.
I didn't want to hurt bad, so I asked my friend who had the weed if I could have some more so I didn't hurt. He said he didn't have any so we went and saw a movie. I didn't hurt at all. I went three weeks with none of the weed, and I felt normal.
Then out on the playground there was a guy selling the crack. I saved up my lunch money for the crack. But before I did it I'd better ask Teacher. I asked 'Whats the difference between the weed and the crack'? Teacher said there was no difference. The weed and the crack are bad just the same.
So I smoked the crack, because the weed was not bad for me, so I figured the crack was not bad for me. Boy, teacher was right. Now I needed the crack and if I didn't get the crack it hurt bad.
I ODed and I died. If only I listened to DARE.
I run US West (er, Quest) DSL in Tempe. It's been for the most part stable (few outages here and there). For some inexpicable reason, they upped our bandwith from 256k to 650 last month without charging us extra (I'm not compaining) The sales system out here, however, is subpar. I had a client out in Glendale who kept getting mailers for DSL. We'd call up to order only to be told it's still not availble, that the local telco location had not been upgraded to the new equipment. It wasn't until we got fed up with waiting and went to order an IDSN line that the ISDN salesperson told us DSL was in fact availble and the equipment had been online for quite sometime. A few frustrating hours of going back and forth with US West to get all their departments to agree, and we got the thing ordered. Two weeks later it was up and running. I don't know how US West has changed since Quest took it over, but I think the moral of the story is, keep calling back and talking to different salespeople until you find an answer that you like.
Virginia (AP)
America Online (AOL) announced they would be providing broad band internet access on all major domestic flights at a press conference this week. The large internet service provider will be installing AOL proprietary servers on all aircraft operating in the United States within two months.
"We know people need AOL, even when on an airplane" stated Robert Worpindorf, AOL's new VP of aerospace connectivity. "People need to stay connected, and when away from family and friends, they need the rich, vibrant content only AOL can provide."
When asked about bandwidth, Worpindorf responded "Well, because of the nature of these connections, our bandwidth requirements will double, but, as always, we are ready for it, and no user will ever see any noticeable disruption in service"
AOL's press release stated airline travelers would receive AOL stocks, news reports, and "Buddies. Everyone love's their AOL buddies".
AOL's announcement comes at a difficult moment for its aerospace connectivity division, which has received some criticism recently over a communications failure on the Russian space station Mir. Mir astronauts had received an AOL 5.0 CD-ROM in the mail, and installed it on the station's main communications computer, knocking out all network communication stacks previously installed. After a 45 minute call to AOL technical support (which suggested reinstalling IE5), AOL decided it must be a modem problem. To date, Mir can only access terrestrial busy signals.
We are at first reserved to accept his cathedral analogy because it implies that the vision and direction of the project is from one source, and that is set in stone. Open source is organic: It's leaders are not chosen by seniority, resumes, or knowledge, they are chosen according to competence. By his logic, if Torvolds died tomorrow, linux would stop developing; The architect is gone. But that wouldn't happen; a new central leader would emerge, and that position would be thrust open someone based on their competence to do a good job. Open source (or all software, for that matter) does not have a beginning or an end, it consistently evolves and changes.
The other implication he makes is that projects in open source are necessarily 'steered' in a direction by a central manager. And while I wouldn't argue that a central figure would suggest direction for a project, he or she wouldn't limit or try to focus the development by only his/her own direction. Linux is a prime example of that; we find it now in everything from robust mission critical servers to home desktop PCs to appliances and wrist watches. Linux did not become such an adaptable operating system because it was carefully guided by one central figure, it became this way because the main central figure allowed it to grow.
He discounts the Bazaar analogy because it is, in his mind, too chaotic to produce anything of value. He seems to confuse chaos with freedom. In the Bazaar you can do anything you want, but if you want to succeed, you best do something of value. This doesn't mesh with the corporate vision (Either traditional or contemporary views of project management) because it allows an incredible amount of freedom with the developers at the bottom rung. A programmer may, one day, fix a security hole, and the next, decide to write a driver for his brand new joystick. A corporate environment is very unsettled by this: If nobody has an assigned task, how can anything get done? Things get done because the people doing them see a need for them to get done. They, as users, recognize a missing piece of the puzzle, and feel compelled (by whatever personal reason) to complete it.
And it is for precisely this reason that the open source model will never work in a corporate environment. Once a concrete direction is assigned to a project, it stops being organic. People loose interest. Moreover, people soon learn that the software they create for a company, any company, is ultimately created for the profit of the company, not for the good of their fellow users, and their true motivation will be lost.
The first response will be "But, why would a company let people utilize their servers if they can't put their ads on the clients and make any money?" The answer is the same reason people use IM in the first place: They don't know any better. There is already a much better communication solution out there; IRC. You get real time chat, messaging, file transfer etc. But the people who don't use IRC and flock to IM as their first choice do so because either A, they don't know about it, B, all their friends already use IM, or C, IRC is too hard. Even mind boggleingly easy software like mIRC is too much a challenge for many computer novices (What's all these servers? Why do I have to type a # for a channel? What's with this '/' before every command?).
If we can reach a point where all IM messaging operates over one simple standard, we can put together something like this: User installs IM client from big company, which is preconfigured to use big company's server. User logs on, his/her client sends his information to big company's server, which then goes about updating all the servers running under the IM standard. User types in his/her buddy's name into the client, which queries big company's servers database and find's the buddy on another big company's server, all seamless on the client end. Or, make it simpler. Think of the way the multitude of IRC servers on a particular network all work together (this may prove difficult to do with the huge mass of people using a unified IM standard all logged on at the same time. . . leave it up to the coding folks to figure it out).
What a company can do, however, is restrict access to their expensive, reliable server to only the clients they produce. This lets AOL say 'It costs us a great deal of money to provide a server, so only people using AIM can use it', but it does not restrict users not using AIM to talk to AIM users. Someone out there could produce a very nice IM client, but they would have to connect to server of more questionable quality.
This creates three advantages for consumers: 1., everyone using IM could talk with anyone else, regardless of what client they use. 2., More choices for users, and 3., It encourages more competition among the larger players on the bases of quality and reliability, instead of user base. The winners will be those who put together the best server/client combination, instead of who has market share.
A nice pop up that says 'these are pretty strong words to email your boss or ex-girlfreind, you can't send this until your BAC gets closer to 0'
Somehow, I don't see anyone integrating this with ELM any time soon.
The 27 year old male who is reporting an income of $6,000 a year is spending an awful lot of time watching the financial channels, when all of our data says he should be watching professional wrestling and tractor truck pulls. We think the IRS might find this interesting.
Directed advertising is a good thing, (has anybody else sat through an annoyingly high level of feminine hygiene ads during the A-team and though 'boy, somebody's sure asleep at the wheel'?). But if that information is catalogued, stored and cross referenced in such a way that any agency can, through whatever channels find it out as it relates to a specific individual, then we could face potential problems.
I've always belived that the statistical data collected by the ratings players was deeply flawed, since the only people who participate do so by being paid money, as well as know their viewing habits can have a dramatic effect on the world of television.
At the same time, however, the whole world probably does'nt care.
If Microsoft wants to track where I go, I guess it does'nt bother me. There's nothing they could do to use that information against me. At the very least, if I have to get spam, or see banner ads when I visit a website, at least those ads/email will be catered to my interest. And, perhaps if companies were able track my behavor for the past 6 years, in which time I have never responded to a Spam email, they will eventually stop sending them.
Then again, that probably will not happen.
I know that there are some people who want to protect their privacy, and to them I say 'let the buyer beware'. Microsoft has proven again and again that they opperate with questionable ethics, and while it is to be assumed that nothing you do on the Internet is truly private, it is also to be assumed that Microsoft will attempt to profit from it's users regardless of right or wrong. We still don't know the contents of the source. of the Windows OS, and what information it stores and could potentially send out, so if you use a Microsoft product, always assume the worst.
If your concerned with privacy, run linux on an AMD processor.