At this link there is a petition going to ask Apple to reconsider the $100/year fee for those who thought Apple was serious when they said "email address for life".
At this link there is a petition going to ask Apple to reconsider the $100/year fee for those who thought Apple was serious when they said "email address for life".
Followthis link for a place for feedback specific to the.mac subscription, so it may be a good place to speak your mind. I am feeling pretty betrayed by this, as I have a dozen websites I maintain for various non-profit organizations on homepage.mac.com and I don't see anyone springing to pay for those.
1536x1024 total is not exactly miraculous- and since pretty much every Powerbook since 98 has had the ability to do "dual head"="extended desktop" or whatever you want to call it, I don't think this counts as ground-breaking. Since there are already machines with 1600x1200 on a single LCD and there are already machines driving a second desktop (which could of course be an LCD) I don't see the novelty. Why, my puny 3-year-old Powerbook G3 drives its 1024 x 768 and an external monitor at 1600x1200 (maybe even higher with a bigger screen, not sure...)
Apparently, this is targeted at people who can't
figure out how to make their own copies. From
the article
Music industry consultant and former copyright lawyer Owen Trembath said: "The only ones whipping down to Woolies to make a burn will be parents. Mum has become the pirate."
Since at $5/burn is steep enough that anyone who
doesn't already have a burner would probably come
out ahead buying their own (about 20-30 disks worth should pay for it) it seems like the
people springing for this are ones who don't
have a computer setup or the knowhow but don't
want to miss out on all this CD duplication...
One of the simplest and most compelling experiments
to my mind is the "drop a feather and a penny in
a vacuum tube" demo. There is a nice one at
the Exploratorium in San Francisco- an evacuated
tube with a metal ball and a feather, pivoted in the
middle. Sure enough, when you turn it over, they
fall at the same rate. I found it surprisingly
addictive and fascinating and always have to
elbow a bunch of kids out of the way to get
to play with it for very long...
To properly understand the Foucault pendulum requires a fair amount more understanding than
many realize. At the north pole, the pendulum
makes a full circuit, once per day, and is
reasonably straightforward, but at other locations,
the change depends upon latitude in a subtle
enough way that most people don't really grasp
it. In particular, I am surprised that so
many museums have elaborate displays and
inadequate explantions of why it does not
complete a full revolution each day.
Many museums explain that this proves that
the earth rotates, but do not explain the
computation needed to compute one's latitude
from the amount of precession per day.
I have taught undergraduate differential
geometry many times, and covered the relevant material
(parallel transport of vectors along non-geodesics, holonomy) and frequently even reasonably
strong students have a hard time with
understanding it correctly. Particularly
when I put a parallel transport question
on an exam...
This
Smithsonian FAQ has a bit about pendulums, but just says
the relationship is complex. The
California Academy has a page that is much better than
a typical museum explanation in that it mentions that the amount of precession depends upon latitude and gives the relationship
(precession is 2 pi sin(phi) where phi is the latitude) as well as making a reasonable effort
at an explanation.
Therefore, If a company wants to maintain a freshness rate on par with the web as a whole, their site content should be updated at the inverse rate. In other words: 60% of the site should change every 3 months 70% of the site should change every 6 months 80% of the site should change every 12 months The only way to do this effectively is to either have a very small site, or have a site with dynamically generated information.
This seems so totally- "if everyone else is jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, then we should to" by itself that it discredits what sliver of credibility the article had. Using a web-wide average as a guideline for what a particular web site "should do" is meaningless. Web sites should present timely, appropriate information that is useful to those who visit. Some sites deal with material that changes frequently (stock quotes and sports sites should be presumably updated regularly) and some sites deal with material that does not change frequently (no need to redo your tech support documents for long- out of production products every week.) This notion of `freshness' is ill-defined, poorly measured and of dubious value.
Thanks, we will do. It's been a while since
we priced alternatives. One nice thing about our
setup is that since we have the internal infrastructure already, we are free to change
the incoming pipes as demand and economics
change. Of course, changing things is a config
hassle once it is working, but that factors into
the decision about whether or not to change.
I applaud your landlords and/or apartment co-op. This is very forward thinking in terms of future investment.
Despite the fact that it was a no-brainer
cost-wise, there was a lot of opposition from
people who thought that since we were one of the
first ones doing it, it could not possibly be
a good idea and that money could have been
better spent on painting some of the lobbies
or towards the gardening budget. Fortunately,
there were enough persuasive tech-saavy people
and now just about everyone in hindsight agrees that it has worked out well.
Actually, it wasn't a total no-brainer cost-wise
as to how to actually do something, and we did
look into wireless and thought that might work
out cheaper, but are happy with how
it is arranged now. Our buildings are prewar
and running the wires was nontrivial (we used
ventilation ducts and some space in the trash
compacter areas) but now that it is there,
we are happy. There are occasional outages
(30 minutes/month, usually less) and some odd
config problems,
but overall our service (run by community members,
primarily) is way better than what some of
us were paying for beforehand from Time Warner.
If you live in a big complex, it may well be cost-effective to do what our complex has done.
We have 6 T1 lines coming in and then a wired
network so that every unit has good high-speed
access. The cost is included in our maintenance,
and that brought the cable to just above your front
door. (If you want someone else to do the interior
wiring in your unit, you have to spring for that.) We've had this
for years and everyone is very happy with the arrangement. DSLreports speed test reports 2538kbps down/1368kps up,
so we are getting excellent connection speed.
We are in NYC and have co-op apartment in a
5 building complex with 400+ units. The co-op
arangement means that the units are owned collectively by people who live here, so
the decision was made by people live here and who have
very much the interests of those who live here
in mind. Our course, many of the people who
live here are not taking full advantage of
the bandwidth (there are many little old
ladies who emigrated from Eastern Europe
post WWII here.) In a sense, their
maintenance is subsidizing the rest, but
even those who do not use it or do not use
it much are very pleased with what it has
done for the resale value of the apartments.
("Free high-speed internet included with
unit.")
Before we did this, we tried to figure out
how much it would cost per unit, but that
was hard to get a true cost since much of
it was one-time costs like wiring and the
firewalls and hardware, and since much
of the setup and planning was done for free
by people who live here. Even the most
pessimistic estimates, though, put it at
around than $10/mo/unit long-term, way less
than the $50/mo
cost of cable modem "service", which had been
the only previous option. Since around
one in five units already were paying for cable
modem service, with more people signing up
each month (that was two years ago), it was
cost-effecive and a significant improvement in
many respects.
Normally it take a while for a proof to be verified-
a better title would be `A Proof has been announced
for the Poincare Conjecture.' The Poincare conjecture has attracted a great deal of attention
and lots of remarkable, deep work, but it has also
had its fair share of proofs which fell apart
under serious scrutiny.
Most notably, Colin Rourke and a co-author I can't
remember had claimed a proof of the Poincare conjecture in 1987 which took something like a year-plus before
the mistakes were found, and took a great deal of
energy by a number of mathematicians to find the errors.
That being said, Martin Dunwoody is a remarkable
researcher and this work relies on important,
ground-breaking work of Abby Thompson and
Hyam Rubenstein, and this preprint
sounds very promising!
Take a look at digitalconsumer.org- they have an easy "click here to fax your senators
and house rep" buttonbutton which is of course inferior to writing something yourself, but better than doing nothing. The fax supports a common-sense Consumer Bill of rights-
for more info, read Joe Kraus', founder of Excite's
well-though out and to-the-point
testimony
on the page.
There has been a lot of comparison, and there are definitely some nice things about Photoshop that are more polished than GIMP. Furthermore, if one is already accustomed to Photoshop, then it would take a while to get comfortable with GIMP.
But if not, there is a nice implementation of GIMP on Mac OS X that is pretty easy to install and of course the cost factor is a big plus for those of us on a budget. I wonder if Adobe's slowness in getting Photoshop out for OS X has resulted in more MacGIMP converts.
I don't think anyone has mentioned a reasonable
way of damping vibrations on the cheap. We set
up a cheap optical table (in high school, 20 years
ago...) by building a sandbox and setting on four
motorcycle inner tubes. That did a good job of
minimizing vibration which was important since
our exposure times were about 2 minutes with our
very weak laser... A nice benefit was that
by putting mirrors and objects mounted on PVC pipe
tubes, we could use the sand to position things
were we wanted them- just ram them in and wiggle into the best spot... Those were the days...
Apple being closed source works well with
Apple's software running only on their hardware-
because there are only so many possible
configurations (dozens, not thousands) it
is possible for a single company to manage.
For Wintel hardware, supporting the thousands
of possible hardware components is probably
more than any non-Microsoft company could manage.
It consumes a lot of resources and doesn't
really impress anyone (whoopee- there's
a driver...) Instead, people complain
when there aren't drivers. I don't know
how much of Be's energy went into supporting
so many configs, but even if it was done
in the most efficient way possible, it would
still complicate
things dramatically- both in terms of the install
process and the support process.
Its network cost $1 billion to build, but it had just 51,000 customers.
That's almost $20k of capital investment per user-
what a business plan that turned out to be!
For that much per user, I could arrange a pretty impressive setup for the 10 apartments on my floor-
$200k= $2000 in setup and 802.11b equipment plus
many many months of T1 service to share...
all seventh grade students and teachers will begin using portable, wireless computers in the Fall of 2002, and all eighth grade students and teachers will be equipped the following year
And maybe the year after that, the same students
will get computers as 9th graders!
T1. Prices have gone down. Check out UUnet's latest offerings. A 768k frac T1 can be had for about
$300/mo now, and the hardware is dirt cheap on ebay. No, it's not practical for personal use, but split it with
your neighbors (via 802.11b) and it can be even cheaper than @home.
This is exactly what the Manhattan apartment complex I live in has done (using wiring, though, not 802.11b) and it has worked out
well. We have 5 residential buildings and have
3 T1 lines shared throughout. The cost is
shared amoung the 400 units and is included
in the monthly maintenace fees, and works out
to much less than dialup even.
We used to have cable modem service but there
is no longer any point; I'll be expecting other
complexes to do similar things just given the
economies of scale involved.
By the way, this is not a cutting-edge yuppie
complex- we live in an older residential area
and many of our neighbors are little old ladies
who emigrated from eastern Europe post WWII.
They don't seem to hog the bandwidth much...
Actually, the sad thing is, it is not really Apple's
decision, as I understand it. The criminal
provisions of the DMCA make it the prosecutor's
decision, which Apple could oppose, but a
strict reading of the DMCA would be that
Apple's postion is irrelevant. It is true
that prosecution would be unlikely to proceed
without support from Apple, but the fact of the
matter is that the (extremely-poorly-written)
law is being broken. I suppose Apple could
license (for free, maybe) the "encryption" to avoid prosecution from happening if they desired, but this law is riduculous and puts
the burdens in the wrong places, among other
problems.
Anyone know the blank-disc level advancement stunt?
It worked like this- when you were in the tavern
resting up, the program went to the drive to read
the level advancement tables. If you pulled out
the normal Wizardry disk and put in a newly formatted blank disk at that time, it would read
that the experience points needed to advance to the
next level were 0, so of course you would advance.
Repeatedly. Of course, when you put the right disk
back in, you would need a ton of points to advance
to the next level, but that could be fixed by
getting intentionally "level drained" by a vampire or somesuch undead
to get you down one level= to the midpoint of
one level below your current one, which would
actually add tons of experience instead of
draing it (if you had done the "advance with
nothing" strategy above.) Those were the days...
Contra-dextra avenue, tiltowait, oh boy!
Does anyone know where Andy Greenberg and
Robert Woodhead are these days? Wizardry
was truly revolutionary... Andy was a student at
Cornell in the early 80s but I don't know what happened to him
after that...
The Airport base station, as mentioned, does
have a built-in modem so that you can share a
dialup connection, but for most people, you
would pretty much want either a modem to share
OR an Ethernet connection to share, so having
both is kind of overkill.
One thing the article doesn't mention is
that for some folks, they have to have a
nationwide dialup ISP anyway for travelling
with a laptop,
so that is $20/month-ish right there.
So if you are paying $20/mo for dialup and
the DSL/Cable modem is $50/mo and is flaky, then you might bail on the DSL and just use the
dialup ISP you have to pay for anyways.
I don't know much about if DSL/cable
providers have some dialup services
bundled to solve the "away from home ISP"
problem, but it seems like something that
would be an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
At this link there is a petition going to ask Apple to reconsider the $100/year fee for those who thought Apple was serious when they said "email address for life".
At this link there is a petition going to ask Apple to reconsider the $100/year fee for those who thought Apple was serious when they said "email address for life".
Followthis link for a place for feedback specific to the .mac subscription, so it may be a good place to speak your mind. I am feeling pretty betrayed by this, as I have a dozen websites I maintain for various non-profit organizations on homepage.mac.com and I don't see anyone springing to pay for those.
1536x1024 total is not exactly miraculous- and since pretty much every Powerbook since 98 has had the ability to do "dual head"="extended desktop" or whatever you want to call it, I don't think this counts as ground-breaking. Since there are already machines with 1600x1200 on a single LCD and there are already machines driving a second desktop (which could of course be an LCD) I don't see the novelty. Why, my puny 3-year-old Powerbook G3 drives its 1024 x 768 and an external monitor at 1600x1200 (maybe even higher with a bigger screen, not sure...)
One of the simplest and most compelling experiments to my mind is the "drop a feather and a penny in a vacuum tube" demo. There is a nice one at the Exploratorium in San Francisco- an evacuated tube with a metal ball and a feather, pivoted in the middle. Sure enough, when you turn it over, they fall at the same rate. I found it surprisingly addictive and fascinating and always have to elbow a bunch of kids out of the way to get to play with it for very long...
I have taught undergraduate differential geometry many times, and covered the relevant material (parallel transport of vectors along non-geodesics, holonomy) and frequently even reasonably strong students have a hard time with understanding it correctly. Particularly when I put a parallel transport question on an exam...
This Smithsonian FAQ has a bit about pendulums, but just says the relationship is complex. The California Academy has a page that is much better than a typical museum explanation in that it mentions that the amount of precession depends upon latitude and gives the relationship (precession is 2 pi sin(phi) where phi is the latitude) as well as making a reasonable effort at an explanation.
This seems so totally- "if everyone else is
jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, then we
should to" by itself that it discredits what
sliver of credibility the article had. Using
a web-wide average as a guideline for what
a particular web site "should do" is
meaningless. Web sites should present timely,
appropriate information that is useful to
those who visit. Some sites deal with
material that changes frequently (stock quotes
and sports sites should be presumably updated
regularly) and some sites deal with material
that does not change frequently (no need to
redo your tech support documents for long-
out of production products every week.)
This notion of `freshness' is ill-defined,
poorly measured and of dubious value.
Thanks, we will do. It's been a while since we priced alternatives. One nice thing about our setup is that since we have the internal infrastructure already, we are free to change the incoming pipes as demand and economics change. Of course, changing things is a config hassle once it is working, but that factors into the decision about whether or not to change.
Actually, it wasn't a total no-brainer cost-wise as to how to actually do something, and we did look into wireless and thought that might work out cheaper, but are happy with how it is arranged now. Our buildings are prewar and running the wires was nontrivial (we used ventilation ducts and some space in the trash compacter areas) but now that it is there, we are happy. There are occasional outages (30 minutes/month, usually less) and some odd config problems, but overall our service (run by community members, primarily) is way better than what some of us were paying for beforehand from Time Warner.
We are in NYC and have co-op apartment in a 5 building complex with 400+ units. The co-op arangement means that the units are owned collectively by people who live here, so the decision was made by people live here and who have very much the interests of those who live here in mind. Our course, many of the people who live here are not taking full advantage of the bandwidth (there are many little old ladies who emigrated from Eastern Europe post WWII here.) In a sense, their maintenance is subsidizing the rest, but even those who do not use it or do not use it much are very pleased with what it has done for the resale value of the apartments. ("Free high-speed internet included with unit.")
Before we did this, we tried to figure out how much it would cost per unit, but that was hard to get a true cost since much of it was one-time costs like wiring and the firewalls and hardware, and since much of the setup and planning was done for free by people who live here. Even the most pessimistic estimates, though, put it at around than $10/mo /unit long-term, way less
than the $50/mo
cost of cable modem "service", which had been
the only previous option. Since around
one in five units already were paying for cable
modem service, with more people signing up
each month (that was two years ago), it was
cost-effecive and a significant improvement in
many respects.
That being said, Martin Dunwoody is a remarkable researcher and this work relies on important, ground-breaking work of Abby Thompson and Hyam Rubenstein, and this preprint sounds very promising!
Take a look at digitalconsumer.org- they have an easy "click here to fax your senators and house rep" buttonbutton which is of course inferior to writing something yourself, but better than doing nothing. The fax supports a common-sense Consumer Bill of rights- for more info, read Joe Kraus', founder of Excite's well-though out and to-the-point testimony on the page.
are definitely some nice things about Photoshop
that are more polished than GIMP. Furthermore,
if one is already accustomed to Photoshop, then
it would take a while to get comfortable with
GIMP.
But if not, there is a nice
implementation of
GIMP on Mac OS X that is pretty easy to install and of course
the cost factor is a big plus for those of us
on a budget. I wonder if Adobe's slowness in
getting Photoshop out for OS X has resulted in
more MacGIMP converts.
it shouldn't be too hard to write.
this page has a nice description of implementing
a similar mechanism via procmail.
There are actually many tools for testing for an open relay. Try:
has a list and lots of info
For Wintel hardware, supporting the thousands of possible hardware components is probably more than any non-Microsoft company could manage. It consumes a lot of resources and doesn't really impress anyone (whoopee- there's a driver...) Instead, people complain when there aren't drivers. I don't know how much of Be's energy went into supporting so many configs, but even if it was done in the most efficient way possible, it would still complicate things dramatically- both in terms of the install process and the support process.
By the way, this is not a cutting-edge yuppie complex- we live in an older residential area and many of our neighbors are little old ladies who emigrated from eastern Europe post WWII. They don't seem to hog the bandwidth much...
It worked like this- when you were in the tavern resting up, the program went to the drive to read the level advancement tables. If you pulled out the normal Wizardry disk and put in a newly formatted blank disk at that time, it would read that the experience points needed to advance to the next level were 0, so of course you would advance. Repeatedly. Of course, when you put the right disk back in, you would need a ton of points to advance to the next level, but that could be fixed by getting intentionally "level drained" by a vampire or somesuch undead to get you down one level= to the midpoint of one level below your current one, which would actually add tons of experience instead of draing it (if you had done the "advance with nothing" strategy above.) Those were the days... Contra-dextra avenue, tiltowait, oh boy!
Does anyone know where Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead are these days? Wizardry was truly revolutionary... Andy was a student at Cornell in the early 80s but I don't know what happened to him after that...
-
Apple's Airport base station: $299
- Linksys 802.11b base station: about $150
The Airport base station, as mentioned, does have a built-in modem so that you can share a dialup connection, but for most people, you would pretty much want either a modem to share OR an Ethernet connection to share, so having both is kind of overkill.So if you are paying $20/mo for dialup and the DSL/Cable modem is $50/mo and is flaky, then you might bail on the DSL and just use the dialup ISP you have to pay for anyways.
I don't know much about if DSL/cable providers have some dialup services bundled to solve the "away from home ISP" problem, but it seems like something that would be an issue.