The Lexis-Nexis agreement is the key bit. NYT Digital profited $25M and they have a $20M agreement with Lexis-Nexis that they wouldn't have if the archive were available free. The archive therefore clearly won't be free as long as Lexis-Nexis "owns" it.
I don't know what else is in Lexis-Nexis, but I imagine they have similar agreements with their other main sources of info. But it seems like they're the ones who are more threatened by Google, since they are so clearly in direct competition. When their first customers start making their content too free on the web, there's going to be a momentum that leads to the decline of Lexis-Nexis's current model--at which point NYT Digital will figure out some other way to make money.
Siempre means "always" in Spanish, and I'm pretty sure it comes from a similar latin root (as in "Semper Fi," "always faithful." "Always" can mean "always works," as opposed to "always powered on." In other words, you can use it for anything.
Of course that's only true for most people. I agree it's not nearly as good a name as Athlon or Duron.
I think in the long term, maybe, but expansion happens all at once, while population increases are gradual. So for a short time after expansion, the difference between the elite players (who are as amazing as they ever were) and the average players (average in a relative sense!) is greater.
Stephen Jay Gould used to talk about this. You can google for some related articles. He often mentioned how, as the population increased and everybody in baseball got better, the variation between the poorer players, the average players, and the elite players would be smaller. So you should see fewer.400 hitters, fewer perfect games. BUT, after an expansion the opposite would be true, in force, at least temporarily. You'd have these great pitchers whose greatness would be tremendously apparent as they faced suddenly weaker hitters.
What I don't know is, did these perfect games all happen in the years after an expansion? And did they happen against weaker teams? I had the great good fortune to witness, in person, David Cone's perfect game and it was clear he was facing a team on a bad day, on one of his best days. But I have to tell you, it takes nothing away from the accomplishment. He was completely unhittable that day, it may not have mattered much who he was facing.
I think we're going to see a little more of this. MS is starting to notice that people care about security, they care about FOSS, they care about being treated more like grown-ups.
They're having to deal with the open-source movement, and that's a good thing. It'll make competing harder, though.
The better, easier way is to buy white-box computers. Support sucks so bad these days there is no reason to buy a Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq, whatever. Save 20% buying a computer with no support, instead. That'll send a message to the big manufacturers.
CD's are pretty much dead, except in special cases (they still make sense, maybe, for Nat'l Geographic).
But what about the web? That's where are the republishing takes place these days. Every company out there is putting old newsletters, etc., online, and they all pay outside photographers.
I read the article mostly and I don't think it speculated about whether this applies to web republishing or not. I would have to guess that yes, it does apply.
As the founder of a free community hotspot , I wanna say, if giant corporations are willing to provide web services for free, because it's the only way to get people to come, why wouldn't we want to provide wireless access to those web services for free?
Basically, I don't see that the pay-to-play model of the wired ISP is the necessary model for wireless ISPs. In fact I think it's a doomed model. People are going to gravitate to the free hookups. It's not just cheaper, it's easier, and easier always wins.
It's not time to figure out how to get roaming on paid wireless ISPs. It's time to figure out how to stop charging for it.
I love my Tumi bag. I got one last summer, after 10 years of every typical computer bag (targus, etc.) out there. It shocked me how much better a bag could be. It "fit" so much better that you don't even notice the weight of the computer.
Because those aren't the only two ways you may ever use the computer. For example, you may plug it into a laser device that creates the image of the "monitor" on the back of your eye, and plug in a microphone, for hands-free operation. In that case the 6" LCD screen would be an annoyance to have hanging around.
Or, to be more specific, I love a few radio stations. WFMU (wfmu.org; 91.1 in the NYC/NJ area), KFJC, a few other great stations.
The radio we don't need is all the monopolized Clear Channel stations. We all know they suck. But great, personal, free-form radio is still out there, and with web streaming is thankfully more available than ever. Maybe I'm crazy, but I like to be surprised by what I like once in a while. Without WFMU, I'd be listening to the same stuff over and over.
If you're tired of radio, you're listening to the wrong stations.
I'm not actually convinced that you need to have compatability between Office suites. Really, most people can use their existing MS Office to edit their Office documents and their new Office to edit their new documents.
Have you ever worked in computer support? Having two different word processing programs is a nightmare. You won't be able to get people to switch from the old one if it's still available. Training, etc., would be nuts. It would just not be workable in a typical office.
Re-read the answer. The perjury bit does not refer to the accuracy of the claim, but to the authority of the complainant to act on the behalf of the allegedly damaged party.
I'm not seeing any architecture recommendations, as requested. For faith-in-the-future, space-age architecture, you can't beat Saarinen. In St. Louis, check out the awesome Gateway Arch; in NYC, fly into JFK and visit the TWA terminal, still the coolest space-age structure anywhere. Pictures don't do either justice.
I work at the Brooklyn Museum, where we had a show maybe a year ago about Robots and Space Toys, from the collection of Robert Lesser (we're having a show of stuff from his collection of pulp novels in a month or so, too). My favorite was Cragstan's Mr. Atomic. Totally cool. And then I have a huge poster from the show, of Giant Sonic Robot, on my wall. He's pretty damn cool, too.
I admit that I'm not sure of this: I think that happens at a more constant rate, and is not much affected by the concentration of CO2 in the water. So there is the probability that CO2 in the water increases or decreases much faster than it is lost to the ocean floor.
The Oceans are probably a buffered carbon dioxide sink. A LOT of climate research goes into the topic of how much CO2 they contain, and how much more they might contain.
For example, CO2 appears not to be increasing in the atmosphere as fast as it should be, given increased emissions. One likely carbon sink may be forests--that is, maybe production in forests increases when CO2 availability increases. However, many people doubt that forests are CO2-limited in terms of their growth. More likely, there's more than enough CO2 to go around and trees don't grow more than they do because they're limited by some other necessary ingredient (phosphorous, nitrogen, micro-nutrients, etc.). Of course, it's possible that forests are expanding--it's probably not the case, but it's conceivable given that large, previously cleared areas (the suburban northeast of the US) are growing more trees back.
The Oceans also may be absorbing CO2. One great environmental fear is that there is a limit to this absorption. Remember how buffered solutions worked in Chemistry 1? The ph goes down really slowly as you add acid, until the buffering is overwhelmed and then wham!, the ph increases rapidly with additional acid. Same thing with CO2 buffering in the Oceans, only we don't know when the buffering may be overwhelmed. If that happens, global warming rates should dramatically increase over what we see today.
Wally Broecker from Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory used to do a lot of work on this. I don't know if he still does, or who else might be doing it now.
Freedom of choice Is what you got Freedom from choice Is what you want
and they were talking about all of us, not just some of us. Honestly, not a bad article though. Well written and it bothers us partly because it's partly accurate, just like the song.
For examples where better consolidation is important, he picked areas that are already mostly well consolidated, though. Like, how many of us are fighting for a desktop other than KDE or Gnome? Some, but not too many.
Here at work we have an IMAP mail server. We make people use IE as a browser, because we don't have the staff to support two of anything, and IE is pretty much always there (a battle we choose not to fight). But it would be great to have a really good, really compliant IMAP mail client instead of Eudora (which doesn't really get IMAP, still). I would have users use Mozilla for mail if the browser didn't have to be included, so this could be great for us.
You could charge for spike "insurance" as an additional fee, that would be smaller than the cost of paying for the cost of an actual bandwidth spike.
This might look like extortion, but you could work out ways it wouldn't. For example, you could offer 3 choices:
1) customers pays for all the bandwith as usual. 2) customer pays regular flat fee plus small addendum as insurance for major traffic spikes (hire a statistician to get this to work out just barely in ISP's favor over time, and be honest about the process) 3) customer pays regular flat monthly fee and gets shut down upon hitting bandwidth threshold. With permission from customer, site can be restored at regular cost for additional bandwidth.
I think if you were really honest about how you came up with the cost of the insurance, customers would like it. For a lot of people, it's easier to pay $100/month for 12 months ($1200), than it is to pay $80/month for 11 months plus $300 for one month ($1180). Just because you can plan ahead, even if it costs more.
According to this ruling's interpretation of precedent, SSN is private; home address, work address are not. I don't think they talk about phone numbers.
They additionally go on to say that under NH state law, lying to the woman to get her to give up information was illegal in this case (because lying in the course of trade is illegal, and this was trade, even if the victim was not party to the transaction).
I disagree with the other respondent who says this ruling is limited in scope. It's huge. The investigators sold an SSN, and they are considered liable for foreseeable damages that ensued from that sale.
Given that SSN is the de facto "national ID," this is a pretty big deal.
You can also get pieces to secure nexel/metro shelving to the floor. It won't fall over, although the computers may fall off the rack. You can get little lips or rails, etc., that make that less likely.
I like nexel shelving relative to racks. I mean, not so much anymore, now that 1U servers are the norm. But my network admin is small, 5' 3" and maybe 100lbs. She can't lift things into the rack and hold them long enough to get the screws in. And I'm much bigger, but I can't get that 150 lb. UPS into the damn rack. But I can easily get it onto the bottom shelf of the nexel wire rack.
We have a mix of real rack and nexel shelves, and we'll probably start switching over to more real racks. But I don't think I ever want to put a UPS on a rack again, that was the worst experience of my life, next to getting my wisdom teeth pulled and finding I'm allergic to nitrous.
Matt Morgan Manager of Information Systems Brooklyn Museum of Art
One thing I know about Palm, as an IT manager... it's a complete pain. The software just does not work well with Windows NT/2000 and I assume XP. People will debate me on this.
My problem has always been that Palm software assumes you are a local admin or power user with rights to install software, alter HKLM registry settings, etc. They never updated the software to work with the more modern windows approach of install it once as an admin, then each user gets his or her own settings in the user profile.
This has meant that I've been unable to support palm software on the desktop since enforcing local security about 2.5 years ago.
I can't speak for PocketPC, since I've never tried it, but any advantage palm may have had for being early was lost when they failed to keep up with some sensible changes in Windows. Seeing Palm fail for so long, even without knowing how well PocketPC does in this regard, I expect PocketPC to do a lot better.
Not to mention PocketPC has a more regular browser and pcmcia slots for wireless networking. All the local db-backed intranet apps we do here are going to be a lot easier to get working on PocketPC.
I could see this working statistically, like Paul Graham's spam-klling approach that was up on slashdot a few weeks ago (here and here ). Each user is gradually tracked over time, and their activities are compared to there past activities. Sudden changes would be judged to be intrusion, while very gradual changes would not be.
You could then have a "user reset" button to set them back to "zero" when they changed positions, or with a really good way to statistically describe their actions, set them back to the average value for the other users in the same position.
Slashdot Mirror
The Lexis-Nexis agreement is the key bit. NYT Digital profited $25M and they have a $20M agreement with Lexis-Nexis that they wouldn't have if the archive were available free. The archive therefore clearly won't be free as long as Lexis-Nexis "owns" it.
I don't know what else is in Lexis-Nexis, but I imagine they have similar agreements with their other main sources of info. But it seems like they're the ones who are more threatened by Google, since they are so clearly in direct competition. When their first customers start making their content too free on the web, there's going to be a momentum that leads to the decline of Lexis-Nexis's current model--at which point NYT Digital will figure out some other way to make money.
"Always On"?
Siempre means "always" in Spanish, and I'm pretty sure it comes from a similar latin root (as in "Semper Fi," "always faithful." "Always" can mean "always works," as opposed to "always powered on." In other words, you can use it for anything.
Of course that's only true for most people. I agree it's not nearly as good a name as Athlon or Duron.
I think in the long term, maybe, but expansion happens all at once, while population increases are gradual. So for a short time after expansion, the difference between the elite players (who are as amazing as they ever were) and the average players (average in a relative sense!) is greater.
.400 hitters, fewer perfect games. BUT, after an expansion the opposite would be true, in force, at least temporarily. You'd have these great pitchers whose greatness would be tremendously apparent as they faced suddenly weaker hitters.
Stephen Jay Gould used to talk about this. You can google for some related articles. He often mentioned how, as the population increased and everybody in baseball got better, the variation between the poorer players, the average players, and the elite players would be smaller. So you should see fewer
What I don't know is, did these perfect games all happen in the years after an expansion? And did they happen against weaker teams? I had the great good fortune to witness, in person, David Cone's perfect game and it was clear he was facing a team on a bad day, on one of his best days. But I have to tell you, it takes nothing away from the accomplishment. He was completely unhittable that day, it may not have mattered much who he was facing.
I haven't tried this yet, but I am starting to get desperate for a way to digitize my LP's, and it can do that job:
http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/~costar/gramofile/
Looks pretty good.
I think we're going to see a little more of this. MS is starting to notice that people care about security, they care about FOSS, they care about being treated more like grown-ups. They're having to deal with the open-source movement, and that's a good thing. It'll make competing harder, though.
The better, easier way is to buy white-box computers. Support sucks so bad these days there is no reason to buy a Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq, whatever. Save 20% buying a computer with no support, instead. That'll send a message to the big manufacturers.
CD's are pretty much dead, except in special cases (they still make sense, maybe, for Nat'l Geographic).
But what about the web? That's where are the republishing takes place these days. Every company out there is putting old newsletters, etc., online, and they all pay outside photographers.
I read the article mostly and I don't think it speculated about whether this applies to web republishing or not. I would have to guess that yes, it does apply.
As the founder of a free community hotspot , I wanna say, if giant corporations are willing to provide web services for free, because it's the only way to get people to come, why wouldn't we want to provide wireless access to those web services for free?
Basically, I don't see that the pay-to-play model of the wired ISP is the necessary model for wireless ISPs. In fact I think it's a doomed model. People are going to gravitate to the free hookups. It's not just cheaper, it's easier, and easier always wins.
It's not time to figure out how to get roaming on paid wireless ISPs. It's time to figure out how to stop charging for it.
I love my Tumi bag. I got one last summer, after 10 years of every typical computer bag (targus, etc.) out there. It shocked me how much better a bag could be. It "fit" so much better that you don't even notice the weight of the computer.
Because those aren't the only two ways you may ever use the computer. For example, you may plug it into a laser device that creates the image of the "monitor" on the back of your eye, and plug in a microphone, for hands-free operation. In that case the 6" LCD screen would be an annoyance to have hanging around.
Or, to be more specific, I love a few radio stations. WFMU (wfmu.org; 91.1 in the NYC/NJ area), KFJC, a few other great stations. The radio we don't need is all the monopolized Clear Channel stations. We all know they suck. But great, personal, free-form radio is still out there, and with web streaming is thankfully more available than ever. Maybe I'm crazy, but I like to be surprised by what I like once in a while. Without WFMU, I'd be listening to the same stuff over and over. If you're tired of radio, you're listening to the wrong stations.
I'm not actually convinced that you need to have compatability between Office suites. Really, most people can use their existing MS Office to edit their Office documents and their new Office to edit their new documents.
Have you ever worked in computer support? Having two different word processing programs is a nightmare. You won't be able to get people to switch from the old one if it's still available. Training, etc., would be nuts. It would just not be workable in a typical office.
Re-read the answer. The perjury bit does not refer to the accuracy of the claim, but to the authority of the complainant to act on the behalf of the allegedly damaged party.
I'm not seeing any architecture recommendations, as requested. For faith-in-the-future, space-age architecture, you can't beat Saarinen. In St. Louis, check out the awesome Gateway Arch; in NYC, fly into JFK and visit the TWA terminal, still the coolest space-age structure anywhere. Pictures don't do either justice.
I work at the Brooklyn Museum, where we had a show maybe a year ago about Robots and Space Toys, from the collection of Robert Lesser (we're having a show of stuff from his collection of pulp novels in a month or so, too). My favorite was Cragstan's Mr. Atomic. Totally cool. And then I have a huge poster from the show, of Giant Sonic Robot, on my wall. He's pretty damn cool, too.
I admit that I'm not sure of this: I think that happens at a more constant rate, and is not much affected by the concentration of CO2 in the water. So there is the probability that CO2 in the water increases or decreases much faster than it is lost to the ocean floor.
The Oceans are probably a buffered carbon dioxide sink. A LOT of climate research goes into the topic of how much CO2 they contain, and how much more they might contain.
For example, CO2 appears not to be increasing in the atmosphere as fast as it should be, given increased emissions. One likely carbon sink may be forests--that is, maybe production in forests increases when CO2 availability increases. However, many people doubt that forests are CO2-limited in terms of their growth. More likely, there's more than enough CO2 to go around and trees don't grow more than they do because they're limited by some other necessary ingredient (phosphorous, nitrogen, micro-nutrients, etc.). Of course, it's possible that forests are expanding--it's probably not the case, but it's conceivable given that large, previously cleared areas (the suburban northeast of the US) are growing more trees back.
The Oceans also may be absorbing CO2. One great environmental fear is that there is a limit to this absorption. Remember how buffered solutions worked in Chemistry 1? The ph goes down really slowly as you add acid, until the buffering is overwhelmed and then wham!, the ph increases rapidly with additional acid. Same thing with CO2 buffering in the Oceans, only we don't know when the buffering may be overwhelmed. If that happens, global warming rates should dramatically increase over what we see today.
Wally Broecker from Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory used to do a lot of work on this. I don't know if he still does, or who else might be doing it now.
In one of my favorite albums ever:
Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want
and they were talking about all of us, not just some of us. Honestly, not a bad article though. Well written and it bothers us partly because it's partly accurate, just like the song.
For examples where better consolidation is important, he picked areas that are already mostly well consolidated, though. Like, how many of us are fighting for a desktop other than KDE or Gnome? Some, but not too many.
Here at work we have an IMAP mail server. We make people use IE as a browser, because we don't have the staff to support two of anything, and IE is pretty much always there (a battle we choose not to fight). But it would be great to have a really good, really compliant IMAP mail client instead of Eudora (which doesn't really get IMAP, still). I would have users use Mozilla for mail if the browser didn't have to be included, so this could be great for us.
You could charge for spike "insurance" as an additional fee, that would be smaller than the cost of paying for the cost of an actual bandwidth spike.
This might look like extortion, but you could work out ways it wouldn't. For example, you could offer 3 choices:
1) customers pays for all the bandwith as usual.
2) customer pays regular flat fee plus small addendum as insurance for major traffic spikes (hire a statistician to get this to work out just barely in ISP's favor over time, and be honest about the process)
3) customer pays regular flat monthly fee and gets shut down upon hitting bandwidth threshold. With permission from customer, site can be restored at regular cost for additional bandwidth.
I think if you were really honest about how you came up with the cost of the insurance, customers would like it. For a lot of people, it's easier to pay $100/month for 12 months ($1200), than it is to pay $80/month for 11 months plus $300 for one month ($1180). Just because you can plan ahead, even if it costs more.
According to this ruling's interpretation of precedent, SSN is private; home address, work address are not. I don't think they talk about phone numbers.
They additionally go on to say that under NH state law, lying to the woman to get her to give up information was illegal in this case (because lying in the course of trade is illegal, and this was trade, even if the victim was not party to the transaction).
I disagree with the other respondent who says this ruling is limited in scope. It's huge. The investigators sold an SSN, and they are considered liable for foreseeable damages that ensued from that sale.
Given that SSN is the de facto "national ID," this is a pretty big deal.
Lots of institutions prevent *.url attachments from passing through email servers. Where they tend to allow pasted text-based links.
You can also get pieces to secure nexel/metro shelving to the floor. It won't fall over, although the computers may fall off the rack. You can get little lips or rails, etc., that make that less likely.
I like nexel shelving relative to racks. I mean, not so much anymore, now that 1U servers are the norm. But my network admin is small, 5' 3" and maybe 100lbs. She can't lift things into the rack and hold them long enough to get the screws in. And I'm much bigger, but I can't get that 150 lb. UPS into the damn rack. But I can easily get it onto the bottom shelf of the nexel wire rack.
We have a mix of real rack and nexel shelves, and we'll probably start switching over to more real racks. But I don't think I ever want to put a UPS on a rack again, that was the worst experience of my life, next to getting my wisdom teeth pulled and finding I'm allergic to nitrous.
Matt Morgan
Manager of Information Systems
Brooklyn Museum of Art
One thing I know about Palm, as an IT manager ... it's a complete pain. The software just does not work well with Windows NT/2000 and I assume XP. People will debate me on this.
My problem has always been that Palm software assumes you are a local admin or power user with rights to install software, alter HKLM registry settings, etc. They never updated the software to work with the more modern windows approach of install it once as an admin, then each user gets his or her own settings in the user profile.
This has meant that I've been unable to support palm software on the desktop since enforcing local security about 2.5 years ago.
I can't speak for PocketPC, since I've never tried it, but any advantage palm may have had for being early was lost when they failed to keep up with some sensible changes in Windows. Seeing Palm fail for so long, even without knowing how well PocketPC does in this regard, I expect PocketPC to do a lot better.
Not to mention PocketPC has a more regular browser and pcmcia slots for wireless networking. All the local db-backed intranet apps we do here are going to be a lot easier to get working on PocketPC.
I could see this working statistically, like Paul Graham's spam-klling approach that was up on slashdot a few weeks ago (here and here ). Each user is gradually tracked over time, and their activities are compared to there past activities. Sudden changes would be judged to be intrusion, while very gradual changes would not be.
You could then have a "user reset" button to set them back to "zero" when they changed positions, or with a really good way to statistically describe their actions, set them back to the average value for the other users in the same position.