Copyright offers protections for characters, and trademark can strengthen those protections. The copyright protections are quite strong for well-developed characters like Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, etc.
http://www.publaw.com/fiction.html seems to be a good discussion of the overlap of trademark, copyright and unfair competition law with respect to fictional characters. A side page on graphic characters is linked.
Tie-ins are per se unlawful if the seller possesses sufficient market power in the tying product, and coerces the buyer to take the tied product as a condition to obtaining the desired product.
(Walt Pennington - desktoplinux.com)
Microsoft... in court... arguing that Apple posesses too much power for Microsoft to fairly compete.
Bwah-hahahahah... Pigs... Flying... ohmigod, laughing too hard... can't breath... (gasp!).
Twice in this thread, I see you talking about training the bayesian filter. You seem to think this is something of a burden, like training a big dog...
I think you misunderstand how easily one trains the current Mozilla email client's bayesian filter.
Day 1:
1: the mail comes in, spam included.
2: one of the inbox columns is a blue 'recycle' lookin' symbol. It is a toggle that acts like the 'new' indicator column, and a click on it turns state on or off.
3: glancing through the list, one clicks on the obvious spam, on this column. If there are chunks or patterns that help, you sort them via whatever useful column, then highlight a group, and hit a 'junk' button up in the toolbar. The messages marked as junk disappear (into a 'junk' folder), where they are automatically parsed by the bayes filter. This is what you'd I guess mean by training the filter. For me, it took about 4 minutes the first day, for over 100 messages at a 90% spam ratio. No disrespect, but I doubt you could write your whole stack of filters in 4 minutes.
Day 2:
Most of the junk mail gets caught. I'd say well over 3/4ths of the spam goes away on day 2. You see it come into your inbox, and then a second later all the junk items get the little blue icon turned on, then flash away to the junk folder. A few missed items or new junky things surface.
Days 3 and on: same thing, only better. By the 4th day, my 100 messages a day had fallen back to the dozen nonspams, plus one or two bogus items. It's an automatic 'In, ZZAP! Junk!' Every few days, I glance at the junk folder as you mention, and so far in the last 4 months I've had 5 misfiled messages declared as junk. 3 of them were atypically 'spammy' messages on usually-clean lists.
Now, compared to your way, I have:
No rules to maintain,
no problems with exceptions that are hard to write filters for. In my case, I'm on a couple mailing lists that broadcast all messages with the true sender (not the list) as the 'from' field, and nothing obvious in the subject line to filter on.
Oh, and I'm lazy, too. What you describes sounds like it would take a few dozen built/tested filters, plus maintenance each time I get a new customer or the likes.
no problems if a prospective customer sends me a request for a bid 'out of the blue',
My way's sorta fun: Each morning, I see a message like 'getting 1 of 103 messages'... it counts up to 103, then I watch as the stack gets filtered back to just the real ones. Instead of admiring my own cleverness (advantage here to your way), I get to admire this nifty gadget that 'Just Works.' In fact, the one thing I'd like to see in this mail client is a 'Why' button, just so I could see diagnostics on a message's bayesian results. That, and a ranking to keep track of the spammiest message scores my filter ever sees!
no lost messages from people I neglected to include in my filters.
Granted, you'll find those lost in your method in the spam folder. I say the Mozilla 's built in bayes approach is better because these messages don't get misfiled in the first place.
Oh, and people I could never expect to set/maintain filters can intuitively 'click' the spam away. That's my favorite advantage to my way.
Proton Motive Force wrote: ...over 90% of the replies blather about "Superior?!"?...Get a grip. WMA has been proven time and again to be one of the best codecs......(DRM is) here to stay and I don't have a problem as long as the restrictions are reasonable... (Ogg Vorbis is) a good codec. Big freaking deal. It's _never_ going to storm the market... and WMA keeps improving...
For those just tuning in, I suggested that IP7 jump to a space that allowed mapping each atom in the universe, going for sarcasm. AC replies:
200 bits isn't enough... what about combinations of atoms?
duh... every atom gets it's own address. Combinations of n atoms have n addresses to use as they would. Unless you're planning on overloading these guys via permutations (where 3 atoms need 9 addresses), 200 bits really is enough.
That said, can you let me in on how spin, charmed, and strange are gonna get you the ultimate in tiny webservers? I mean, we are talking implementing some sort of tcp/ip stack *using one atom!* I'd sort of felt that it was safe to imagine needing 200-bytes, which I figured would take a dozen atoms each, giving each tiny webserver a few thousand IP's to burn.
Hmm... a cosmic ping responder address-space could exceed 200 bits. Dimensions of the universe in atomic units (cubed), where pings come back if there's an atom present! Of course, there is that whole uncertainty principle stuff and you'll be needing some zero axis defined, and the latency/timeouts code is gonna be UG-LY!
What *if* molecular nanotechnolo(g)y... to build a... massive number of 'replicators'...number of IP addresses required is then...2^128 addresses will be required to build a 700km cube.
I agreee...
So let's just plan for IPv7 use a 200-bit address space. At roughly 10^81 atoms in the universe, that should be enough for each atom to have it's own IP. Then we can all sleep comfortably...
(Yes, this is sarcasm... seriously, a good engineer extrapolates and then adds a safety factor. For example, they might decide to 'use past trends to estimate capacity in 10 years, then double it'. They don't just pie-in-the-sky like this, unless they're seriously wanting the project to fail.) The only fun part of this was realizing that 200 bits (25 bytes, or just 6 words on a 64-bit platform) would be sufficient to give *me* my own 10^26-wide address space!)
...saying that Bush is expected to make an announcement towards the middle of next week, proposing a manned mission to Mars as well as a return to the moon...
I've compared notes with friends over the years. We've decided:
Marines Don't Need Sleep. Hoo-haw!
Army sleeps in barracks or on the dirt. The food sucks, too.
Navy bedrooms can sink. Nuke subs are cool unless you think of just how you can die.
Air Force stays in nicer barracks or motels. With Per Diem.
Oh, and get officer rank ASAP. Don't trust that all the enlisteds diss it.
------------ On a similar tangent:
Electrical Engineers learn lots of math, physics and engineering. Physicists learn lots of math and physics. Mathematicians learn lots of math.
The same game plays out on Chem E's, etc. I don't mean to pick your degree based on the above stuff... just don't ignore alternative paths if they better match your interests.
For example, based on where interests have taken me, I'd trade my physics degree for an engineer's degree. Then again, if I could go back and do it all again, I'd probably be a chef or a Plumber. Nobody's ever looked over my shoulder and said: wow, man... excellent integral. And I know a few pipe-fitters that make double what I do, so they only work 6 months out of the year. And them ain't jobs you can ship to India.
If [Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales] were to... leave us serverless, well you'd hear about it.;) Wikipedia is under the GNU Free Documentation License, and were there a real reason for it the community could fork the project, taking the content with them and outdoing the original site.
Heh, how do we go about doing that with slashdot?
I've written bits for, read and evangelized Wikipedia for ages. It rates up there with Project Gutenberg and Free Software in greatness. Donating a bit is no problem. Keep up the good work [pats self on back].
Um, a minor detail... turbotax 2002. This year's is 2003. Which I'm still not buying. Fsckers.
I'm only correcting you because several of us were talking about this earlier today:
Does anyone else wonder that tax software has somehow dodged the *illogical* urge to upgrade to a newer year-id. I mean, it makes *sense* that we're buying tax software for 2003 (not 2004) now, but doesn't logic fly straight out the window when pointy-hairs and marketing wonks are involved?!
(mutters to self: Yeah, like a reply to a comment's gonna ever get enough attention...on new year's eve, no less...)
if I wanted a small, remotely viewable camera for spying on my (
hypothetical) wife
Man, the slashdot mind reels...
Schrodinger jokes. Thousands of them.
Slashdot nerd + wife = of course she's hypothetical.
I think the word you were looking for was 'nymphomaniac'...
... unless you're using some codeword for your mom. One word: Eeee-wwww.
The usual 'In soviet russia, wife spies on you', , 'all your wives are belong to us', 'I for one welcome our new hypothetical domestic overlords' jokes.
Not a bad time to reprise older 'True meaning for 42'/'New explanation for What's the Frequency, Kenneth' jokes.
"I set up a webcam to spy on my wife and all I got was this lousy goatse.cx URL."
As I suffer thru the holidays with wife, in-laws and etc., I'd like to learn more about hypothetical wives. First, are they less hassle?
A more subtle schrodinger joke: Just by spying on a wife, she's more likely to become 'hypothetical'. Or homicidal, where I'm from.
Worrying about your hypothetical wife's affair? You need a shrink, not X10.
The law doesn't have any problem with reaching mutually-incompatible conclusions in two distinct cases. Here, we're not even talking two cases, so Red Hat can pony up evidence of damage that convinces a jury, even if we're right.
Second thought is that this is slashdot: Our opinions are slightly less valid than CNet news.com's (although the raft of innacuracies/errors/misinterpretations in this story have me thinking they've fallen below us). To really get the mental effect of how worthless our collective wisdom is, just imagine our own reaction if SCO pointed to this thread as 'proof' that Red Hat wasn't damaged. Several slashdotters would laugh themselves to death, for starters...
The first manifestation of our collective bias is that we'd all put on a game face when asked if SCO was winning. That said, we'd all also be able to come up with at least ONCE that some PHB or suit has asked us unfavorably about Linux based on the SCO case, if Red Hat asked us for supporting evidence.
Linux grows in spite of SCO. However, without SCO's lawsuit(s), we'd definitely have seen it grow faster.
Re:$2200.00 for a digital picture frame?
on
Linux Toys
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Charges for ceiva are $8 to $14 US per month, with a several percent discount on buying a year's subscription. That's not chicken feed, but it's manageable. There is assuredly no $3 monthly fee. Just bought two of them for my kids' non-techie great-grandmas.
Oh, and there's a fledgling linux-on-ceiva project that was my last enticement: I figured if granny didn't like it, I'd rip the guts out of it and make it mine.
For me, the ceiva 'Weatherchannel' with a 3-day localized forecast was the coolest thing so far. Although having cousins get into character-assasination games with funny pics and captions for granny has been a close second. We've also quickly decided it'd be nice to be able to eavesdrop on what everyone's uploading to the ceiva. For obvious reasons.
(edited down) I was contacted by an outside company sponsored by Microsoft. I was supposed to get $25 for their "brief" survey. I remember the last question: "What could Microsoft do to get you to use their software?" My answer:
"GPL all your software"
I never got my $25... Shocker!!!!
I got this call, too.
When they started to ask the questions, after promising me $25, I said "Uh... waaiiit a minute. I don't know you. You certainly don't have an existing account with me. I'm afraid until you submit payment and open an account, we're done. I'm sure you understand, but it'd be bad business on my part to act otherwise. You just send me that $25 check and allow time for it to clear, and then call me back. I'll talk to you then."
I didn't get my money either. But I made a call-center monkey laugh out loud.
Feel free to use this tactic to torture just about any unwanted caller. Messages for room-mates ("yeah, coincidentally, I run this message-forwarding service, and to pass word along to Scott, I'll need $5. In advance."), surveys, windshield/siding sales ("I know someone that needs that. Cough up $20.").
I sat thru a presentation on this by the local power company a couple years ago in the DotCom heydey. 'Why not add a fiber-optic cable' got complicated fast:
1 - vendors come in, offer to pay for the infrastructure in return for exclusive rights to it. If you refuse, they ignore your town indefinitely (AT+T did this here when they owned the local cable company). Anyone approaching these vendors about subleasing access gets quoted insane prices ($20k per month to use an existing cellphone tower for an 802.11b antenna, in one case I know of).
2 - There are restrictions on putting cables onto poles. These range from weight and rain/wind/snow load design issues to vertical/horizontal clearance restrictions. Imagine being responsible to safely/quickly work on one of 25 cables (including data, fiber, and *power!*) on a single power pole and you start to see a worst case scenario.
3 - Each new cable needs full engineering, documentation, and 24x7 support staff.
4 - Buried lines are not cost-effective to piggy-back, so areas without poles are inaccessible.
5 - These aren't communications/IT gurus that are being asked to make these infrastructure decisions. They're politicians, planning and zoning staff, and a few Electrical Engineers (Power, not computer/communications). The learning curve to doing a good infrastructure with a 25-year expected life is nasty enough without this handicap.
6 - The existing owners hate complications. Power company doesn't want the liability/hassle, or phone company doesn't want the competition.
7 - The cost of cabling, repeaters, etc: let's say roughly 100 lattice lines per square mile x the area of your city. I dunno where to even look it up but I'll estimate cable cost installed at a buck per foot. And I'll throw in ten grand per square mile to handle the electronics. That's some serious cash, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn costs were much higher.
So, it isn't that the ideas aren't out there. There are even some *more* clever devices (little fiber-retrofit robots 'stapling' the fiber to the top of sewer pipe). But it's not cheap, it's not easy, and once those two concepts (hard and expensive) join forces, it becomes risky politically. Much riskier than doing nothing.
Of course, a lot of communities just nodded gratefully when presented with option one (where the town agrees to perpetual rape-n-pillage unregulated monopolies by a single vendor). Ow! Thank god for the multiple-headed threats of: powerline broadband, dsl, cable modems, wifi, cellphone wireless, and beyond, because that keeps just enough competition in my area to hopefully nudge cost-per-gig down. Hell, I left the above meeting intensely angry about the learning of the city's agreement to one such infrastructure monopoly, since there are hundreds of local IT geeks that would have volunteered to design things to eliminate/minimize a monopoly like this.
Disclaimer: These are all 2-year-old impressions of things a bit outside my area of specific experience. Actual details may vary widely, no warranty given. But the above was enough of an eye-opener for me to give me a greater respect and fear of the last mile problem.
Let me put things into perspective, since everyone seems to think this is an acceptable use of technology.
1 - Anyone who has wrangled with telecommute issues knows that bosses have a massive problem wrapping their brain around 'how can I tell if they're working if I can't count butts-in-chairs'? Yet previous threads show most slashdotters feel there are better ways to manage employees.
Likewise, even snowplowing has lots of performance metrics: verifiable complaints sounds like a start. Or spot checks (by whoever)
2 - If we start tracking miles, someone will get efficiency-expert on us and start comparing plow operators. The one with the most miles wins. Which means an operator that uses finesse to plow full-width and not leave berms of concrete-hard snow at driveways and around cars will rank below someone running full-speed and sloppy. For us, this is like paying a coder by lines of code (where verbose and poorly-refactored code wins!) or paying a researcher by the page-of-lab-results. It rewards a new flavor of cheating.
3 - The usual way of subcontracting to private firms doesn't help. We're too soft on incompetent/fraudulent contract awardees, and lowest-bid is too compelling. I've seen bids on projects that couldn't afford to cover maintenance/gas costs on the involved equipment if done right, let alone pay for staff. Yet they're the lowest bidder. Go back to my verifiable complaints suggestion, and add in some teeth to the contract. Ban a contractor for life for the first whiff of fraud. Backcharge them for any work you have to redo. Make it easy to void contracts if the job isn't done to standards. The rest of us have to operate to ISO standards, so can they.
Next, let's go to work on the 'I wear a pager' mindset. I don't wear a pager. I moved from job to job until I found a firm that doesn't obsess at this level. Now, I don't wear a pager, I have very flexible hours, I live in a low-cost region (so I am saving money like crazy), and I really enjoy the job. My job has very rigorous quality standards, though. That's what matters. How or when I do the work is not an issue. In fact, my current boss, when he calls, starts every conversation with 'Good time/ Bad time?', meaning I can break the call off without explanation. I realize that a paycheck is more important than the perks I've mentioned, and a pager is a minor compromise. But the boss doesn't own me. Not even for 8 hours a day. And just like the ill-informed butts-in-seats metric, I take notes on any abuse of my minimum standards for how I like to be treated. Then I update my resume. Then I move on.
Funny thing is, I'm making twice what I did when the boss was a control-freak.
So...
Make the drivers be in communication (cellphone, radio, or data-link like UPS/Fedex tracking systems use), use it to give them a prioritized list of targets. Make them report back 'done' status. Enforce a code of honor/ethics. Have stiff penalties for lying. If a GPS goes into the truck, make it be there for crisis/safety needs, or only to be used as confirming evidence in a hearing/trial. Otherwise, let them be. Reward excellence, whether it be speed or precision or both. Use penalties to guide others to the realization that 'maybe you're just not suited to this job'. Life's too short to be obsessing about the wrong details.
Oh... and I'm sure there's a 'tinfoil hat' or faraday cage that'd thwart GPS reception, and that word will get around once detected. That tactic used to work when I didn't want to receive pager signals...
Um... Linux is only producing toys?! I admit that saying non-gpl or non-linux was a wasteland was utterly incorrect, but what good is a counterargument that is just as obviously wrong!?
What about ogg (vorbis, speex, etc), vmware, Mozilla, Bugzilla, the growing spectrum of GUI's and GUI-based and web-based tools that Unix ain't never had? What about apache, perl and python (all born under Unix but solidly linux-born nowadays), and the device-specific linux flavors like embedded linux is in, and 'recreational' systems like ReplayTV and mythTV (admittedly still a bit more cooking needed), and so on? That last pair are 'serious toys' (or only deserves 'toy' if you're saying it with a degree of respect, not dismissiveness). We just saved a ton of money implementing a linux-based project/issue tracking tool (my last employer blew six figures writing one inhouse).
Frankly, freshmeat is at least 75% never-seen-life-before-linux (I don't intend to prove a majority, just the existence of a LOT of counterarguments to your toy argument). Over the last 15 years there *are* a lot of innovations coming out of some Unix stalwarts (AT+T, Sun, SGI, Apple). But there used to be so many Unix vendors. Most are gone, but a few sellers of 'dead' Unix flavors remain. These vendors whack the dead horse every year for another chunk of revenue, but otherwise ignore Unix. Or, in the case of SCO, they go lookin for a bigger horse to poison, so they can make money off it, a la Dead Souls.
Ebay ended real garage sale bargains.... and now if libraries start posting online it will be the end of the $0.50 hardback bargain book.
Pshaw!
1 - My dad's family grew up reading Ted Malone. For his 70th birthday, I got him a signed copy of Ted Malone's book. Signed. Ebay. $3, plus a couple bucks insured shipping. Bar-GAIN!
2 - After I explained to my sister about alibris.com, she wandered through her house pullin' old books off shelves and getting quotes. Every nearly-100-year-old book she tried was worth under $10 on alibris. Often, $10 got something special like a dustjacket, a first edition, etc. Surprisingly, her most valuable book was an Ed Abbey novel (copyright 1987) autographed several years before his death.
3 - I regularly use ebay as a mechanism for determining 'fair value' on stuff, to convince myself I should get rid of junk. While some categories aren't well-populated, most things *can* be found online. And cheaply.
4 - My sister loaned me her kids' favorite book for my baby. Who ate a chunk out of it. Alibris.com had a new copy for just a few bucks. Presto!
Yeah, you might lose that $.50 hardback opportunity. But you can buy the book for $4, then sell it back a year later for... $4. You'll be out the postage, admittedly, but I don't for a moment see anything here to mourn for.
Frankly, I'd rather we got rid of the cheapskate conservativism that has so viciously put the screws to schools and libraries, but if they are stuck resorting to ebay for funding, I'm all for it. If libraries were smart, they'd spread the word so that locals would come online and browse for 'shipping-free' bargains on the ebay'ed books. Lots more people browsing the book sale, better access even for the locals, and more fair-market money for the librarians.
Oh, and a last thought: the local goodwill store gets picked clean of bargains by ebay resellers. But I don't resent the lost bargains; I resent the lost income goodwill suffers until they learn this very tactic themselves. The lost charitable revenue off every item they sell for a dime vs. the ebay dollar is a greater tragedy than your lost.50c hardcover book.
Click in the google search box. Type search terms.
Click on the 'search' button (power users: press the enter/return key)
Click on appropriate link.
... natch!
Am not sure 3-click rule was really *debunked*
on
Web 'Rules' Changing?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've just made the faux-pas of actually reading* the linked article that claimed that 3-click was debunked, and I don't agree.
The 3-click rule says info should be accessible within three clicks.
The article contesting this says they watched over 8000 user clicks, and most users clicked 25 times before 'giving up', when it appeared they were searching for stuff.
The gap that I see is in not more-deeply analyzing how the clicks of users related to depth-of-tree (i.e., 1-click from home, 2-clicks, or 3-clicks, etc.) or perceived website quality. It is possible that people spent 25 clicks wandering but resurfaced to 'home' several times in trying to find the proper 3-click path to their desired target.
My point is that truly debunking this concept would involve:
1 - looking for 'back to home' patterns in click streams. 2 - classifying users a few ways (Some people are too timid/stupid to use the 'back' button!) 3 - validating user satisfaction on usability of sites that honor/ignore the 3-click rule.
All the article does is prove that people are persistent, even in the face of crappy webpage design.
* - My apologies; I hope admitting that I read the article doesn't completely destroy my/. karma. I promise I won't read the article ever ever ever again, so this should be a one-time problem for slashdotters, since obviously no-one else ever reads articles here.
Well put! And, like the 'kills all' weapon I decried, all of these tend to wake up resentment in the global community. I will never buy a diamond (blood diamond violence), I am glad the Taliban has lost power in Afghanistan (oppressive to women), etc.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.publaw.com/fiction.html seems to be a good discussion of the overlap of trademark, copyright and unfair competition law with respect to fictional characters. A side page on graphic characters is linked.
Bwah-hahahahah... Pigs... Flying... ohmigod, laughing too hard... can't breath... (gasp!).
Twice in this thread, I see you talking about training the bayesian filter. You seem to think this is something of a burden, like training a big dog...
I think you misunderstand how easily one trains the current Mozilla email client's bayesian filter.
Day 1:
1: the mail comes in, spam included.
2: one of the inbox columns is a blue 'recycle' lookin' symbol. It is a toggle that acts like the 'new' indicator column, and a click on it turns state on or off.
3: glancing through the list, one clicks on the obvious spam, on this column. If there are chunks or patterns that help, you sort them via whatever useful column, then highlight a group, and hit a 'junk' button up in the toolbar. The messages marked as junk disappear (into a 'junk' folder), where they are automatically parsed by the bayes filter. This is what you'd I guess mean by training the filter. For me, it took about 4 minutes the first day, for over 100 messages at a 90% spam ratio. No disrespect, but I doubt you could write your whole stack of filters in 4 minutes.
Day 2:
Most of the junk mail gets caught. I'd say well over 3/4ths of the spam goes away on day 2. You see it come into your inbox, and then a second later all the junk items get the little blue icon turned on, then flash away to the junk folder. A few missed items or new junky things surface.
Days 3 and on: same thing, only better. By the 4th day, my 100 messages a day had fallen back to the dozen nonspams, plus one or two bogus items. It's an automatic 'In, ZZAP! Junk!' Every few days, I glance at the junk folder as you mention, and so far in the last 4 months I've had 5 misfiled messages declared as junk. 3 of them were atypically 'spammy' messages on usually-clean lists.
Now, compared to your way, I have:
- No rules to maintain,
- no problems with exceptions that are hard to write filters for. In my case, I'm on a couple mailing lists that broadcast all messages with the true sender (not the list) as the 'from' field, and nothing obvious in the subject line to filter on.
- Oh, and I'm lazy, too. What you describes sounds like it would take a few dozen built/tested filters, plus maintenance each time I get a new customer or the likes.
- no problems if a prospective customer sends me a request for a bid 'out of the blue',
- My way's sorta fun: Each morning, I see a message like 'getting 1 of 103 messages'... it counts up to 103, then I watch as the stack gets filtered back to just the real ones. Instead of admiring my own cleverness (advantage here to your way), I get to admire this nifty gadget that 'Just Works.' In fact, the one thing I'd like to see in this mail client is a 'Why' button, just so I could see diagnostics on a message's bayesian results. That, and a ranking to keep track of the spammiest message scores my filter ever sees!
- no lost messages from people I neglected to include in my filters.
Granted, you'll find those lost in your method in the spam folder. I say the Mozilla 's built in bayes approach is better because these messages don't get misfiled in the first place.Oh, and people I could never expect to set/maintain filters can intuitively 'click' the spam away. That's my favorite advantage to my way.
That said, can you let me in on how spin, charmed, and strange are gonna get you the ultimate in tiny webservers? I mean, we are talking implementing some sort of tcp/ip stack *using one atom!* I'd sort of felt that it was safe to imagine needing 200-bytes, which I figured would take a dozen atoms each, giving each tiny webserver a few thousand IP's to burn.
Hmm... a cosmic ping responder address-space could exceed 200 bits. Dimensions of the universe in atomic units (cubed), where pings come back if there's an atom present! Of course, there is that whole uncertainty principle stuff and you'll be needing some zero axis defined, and the latency/timeouts code is gonna be UG-LY!
So let's just plan for IPv7 use a 200-bit address space. At roughly 10^81 atoms in the universe, that should be enough for each atom to have it's own IP. Then we can all sleep comfortably...
(Yes, this is sarcasm... seriously, a good engineer extrapolates and then adds a safety factor. For example, they might decide to 'use past trends to estimate capacity in 10 years, then double it'. They don't just pie-in-the-sky like this, unless they're seriously wanting the project to fail.) The only fun part of this was realizing that 200 bits (25 bytes, or just 6 words on a 64-bit platform) would be sufficient to give *me* my own 10^26-wide address space!)
I've compared notes with friends over the years. We've decided:
Marines Don't Need Sleep. Hoo-haw!
Army sleeps in barracks or on the dirt. The food sucks, too.
Navy bedrooms can sink. Nuke subs are cool unless you think of just
how you can die.
Air Force stays in nicer barracks or motels. With Per Diem.
Oh, and get officer rank ASAP. Don't trust that all the enlisteds diss it.
------------
On a similar tangent:
Electrical Engineers learn lots of math, physics and engineering.
Physicists learn lots of math and physics.
Mathematicians learn lots of math.
The same game plays out on Chem E's, etc. I don't mean to pick your degree based on the above stuff... just don't ignore alternative paths if they better match your interests.
For example, based on where interests have taken me, I'd trade my physics degree for an engineer's degree. Then again, if I could go back and do it all again, I'd probably be a chef or a Plumber. Nobody's ever looked over my shoulder and said: wow, man... excellent integral. And I know a few pipe-fitters that make double what I do, so they only work 6 months out of the year. And them ain't jobs you can ship to India.
I've written bits for, read and evangelized Wikipedia for ages. It rates up there with Project Gutenberg and Free Software in greatness. Donating a bit is no problem. Keep up the good work [pats self on back].
Um, a minor detail... turbotax 2002. This year's is 2003. Which I'm still not buying. Fsckers.
I'm only correcting you because several of us were talking about this earlier today:
Does anyone else wonder that tax software has somehow dodged the *illogical* urge to upgrade to a newer year-id. I mean, it makes *sense* that we're buying tax software for 2003 (not 2004) now, but doesn't logic fly straight out the window when pointy-hairs and marketing wonks are involved?!
(mutters to self: Yeah, like a reply to a comment's gonna ever get enough attention...on new year's eve, no less...)
Man, the slashdot mind reels...
This is Michael, Hemos, and Taco we're talking about. What kind of dumbass question is that?!
Of *COURSE* they don't know. Heh, even avoiding dupes, spellcheck and fact checking are alien concepts...
The law doesn't have any problem with reaching mutually-incompatible conclusions in two distinct cases. Here, we're not even talking two cases, so Red Hat can pony up evidence of damage that convinces a jury, even if we're right.
Second thought is that this is slashdot: Our opinions are slightly less valid than CNet news.com's (although the raft of innacuracies/errors/misinterpretations in this story have me thinking they've fallen below us). To really get the mental effect of how worthless our collective wisdom is, just imagine our own reaction if SCO pointed to this thread as 'proof' that Red Hat wasn't damaged. Several slashdotters would laugh themselves to death, for starters...
The first manifestation of our collective bias is that we'd all put on a game face when asked if SCO was winning. That said, we'd all also be able to come up with at least ONCE that some PHB or suit has asked us unfavorably about Linux based on the SCO case, if Red Hat asked us for supporting evidence.
Linux grows in spite of SCO. However, without SCO's lawsuit(s), we'd definitely have seen it grow faster.
Charges for ceiva are $8 to $14 US per month, with a several percent discount on buying a year's subscription. That's not chicken feed, but it's manageable. There is assuredly no $3 monthly fee. Just bought two of them for my kids' non-techie great-grandmas.
Oh, and there's a fledgling linux-on-ceiva project that was my last enticement: I figured if granny didn't like it, I'd rip the guts out of it and make it mine.
For me, the ceiva 'Weatherchannel' with a 3-day localized forecast was the coolest thing so far. Although having cousins get into character-assasination games with funny pics and captions for granny has been a close second. We've also quickly decided it'd be nice to be able to eavesdrop on what everyone's uploading to the ceiva. For obvious reasons.
When they started to ask the questions, after promising me $25, I said "Uh... waaiiit a minute. I don't know you. You certainly don't have an existing account with me. I'm afraid until you submit payment and open an account, we're done. I'm sure you understand, but it'd be bad business on my part to act otherwise. You just send me that $25 check and allow time for it to clear, and then call me back. I'll talk to you then."
I didn't get my money either. But I made a call-center monkey laugh out loud.
Feel free to use this tactic to torture just about any unwanted caller. Messages for room-mates ("yeah, coincidentally, I run this message-forwarding service, and to pass word along to Scott, I'll need $5. In advance."), surveys, windshield/siding sales ("I know someone that needs that. Cough up $20.").
I sat thru a presentation on this by the local power company a couple years ago in the DotCom heydey. 'Why not add a fiber-optic cable' got complicated fast:
1 - vendors come in, offer to pay for the infrastructure in return for exclusive rights to it. If you refuse, they ignore your town indefinitely (AT+T did this here when they owned the local cable company). Anyone approaching these vendors about subleasing access gets quoted insane prices ($20k per month to use an existing cellphone tower for an 802.11b antenna, in one case I know of).
2 - There are restrictions on putting cables onto poles. These range from weight and rain/wind/snow load design issues to vertical/horizontal clearance restrictions. Imagine being responsible to safely/quickly work on one of 25 cables (including data, fiber, and *power!*) on a single power pole and you start to see a worst case scenario.
3 - Each new cable needs full engineering, documentation, and 24x7 support staff.
4 - Buried lines are not cost-effective to piggy-back, so areas without poles are inaccessible.
5 - These aren't communications/IT gurus that are being asked to make these infrastructure decisions. They're politicians, planning and zoning staff, and a few Electrical Engineers (Power, not computer/communications). The learning curve to doing a good infrastructure with a 25-year expected life is nasty enough without this handicap.
6 - The existing owners hate complications. Power company doesn't want the liability/hassle, or phone company doesn't want the competition.
7 - The cost of cabling, repeaters, etc: let's say roughly 100 lattice lines per square mile x the area of your city. I dunno where to even look it up but I'll estimate cable cost installed at a buck per foot. And I'll throw in ten grand per square mile to handle the electronics. That's some serious cash, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn costs were much higher.
So, it isn't that the ideas aren't out there. There are even some *more* clever devices (little fiber-retrofit robots 'stapling' the fiber to the top of sewer pipe). But it's not cheap, it's not easy, and once those two concepts (hard and expensive) join forces, it becomes risky politically. Much riskier than doing nothing.
Of course, a lot of communities just nodded gratefully when presented with option one (where the town agrees to perpetual rape-n-pillage unregulated monopolies by a single vendor). Ow! Thank god for the multiple-headed threats of: powerline broadband, dsl, cable modems, wifi, cellphone wireless, and beyond, because that keeps just enough competition in my area to hopefully nudge cost-per-gig down. Hell, I left the above meeting intensely angry about the learning of the city's agreement to one such infrastructure monopoly, since there are hundreds of local IT geeks that would have volunteered to design things to eliminate/minimize a monopoly like this.
Disclaimer: These are all 2-year-old impressions of things a bit outside my area of specific experience. Actual details may vary widely, no warranty given. But the above was enough of an eye-opener for me to give me a greater respect and fear of the last mile problem.
Let me put things into perspective, since everyone seems to think this is an acceptable use of technology.
1 - Anyone who has wrangled with telecommute issues knows that bosses have a massive problem wrapping their brain around 'how can I tell if they're working if I can't count butts-in-chairs'? Yet previous threads show most slashdotters feel there are better ways to manage employees.
Likewise, even snowplowing has lots of performance metrics: verifiable complaints sounds like a start. Or spot checks (by whoever)
2 - If we start tracking miles, someone will get efficiency-expert on us and start comparing plow operators. The one with the most miles wins. Which means an operator that uses finesse to plow full-width and not leave berms of concrete-hard snow at driveways and around cars will rank below someone running full-speed and sloppy. For us, this is like paying a coder by lines of code (where verbose and poorly-refactored code wins!) or paying a researcher by the page-of-lab-results. It rewards a new flavor of cheating.
3 - The usual way of subcontracting to private firms doesn't help. We're too soft on incompetent/fraudulent contract awardees, and lowest-bid is too compelling. I've seen bids on projects that couldn't afford to cover maintenance/gas costs on the involved equipment if done right, let alone pay for staff. Yet they're the lowest bidder. Go back to my verifiable complaints suggestion, and add in some teeth to the contract. Ban a contractor for life for the first whiff of fraud. Backcharge them for any work you have to redo. Make it easy to void contracts if the job isn't done to standards. The rest of us have to operate to ISO standards, so can they.
Next, let's go to work on the 'I wear a pager' mindset. I don't wear a pager. I moved from job to job until I found a firm that doesn't obsess at this level. Now, I don't wear a pager, I have very flexible hours, I live in a low-cost region (so I am saving money like crazy), and I really enjoy the job. My job has very rigorous quality standards, though. That's what matters. How or when I do the work is not an issue. In fact, my current boss, when he calls, starts every conversation with 'Good time/ Bad time?', meaning I can break the call off without explanation. I realize that a paycheck is more important than the perks I've mentioned, and a pager is a minor compromise. But the boss doesn't own me. Not even for 8 hours a day. And just like the ill-informed butts-in-seats metric, I take notes on any abuse of my minimum standards for how I like to be treated. Then I update my resume. Then I move on.
Funny thing is, I'm making twice what I did when the boss was a control-freak.
So...
Make the drivers be in communication (cellphone, radio, or data-link like UPS/Fedex tracking systems use), use it to give them a prioritized list of targets. Make them report back 'done' status. Enforce a code of honor/ethics. Have stiff penalties for lying. If a GPS goes into the truck, make it be there for crisis/safety needs, or only to be used as confirming evidence in a hearing/trial. Otherwise, let them be. Reward excellence, whether it be speed or precision or both. Use penalties to guide others to the realization that 'maybe you're just not suited to this job'. Life's too short to be obsessing about the wrong details.
Oh... and I'm sure there's a 'tinfoil hat' or faraday cage that'd thwart GPS reception, and that word will get around once detected. That tactic used to work when I didn't want to receive pager signals...
Um... Linux is only producing toys?! I admit that saying non-gpl or non-linux was a wasteland was utterly incorrect, but what good is a counterargument that is just as obviously wrong!?
What about ogg (vorbis, speex, etc), vmware, Mozilla, Bugzilla, the growing spectrum of GUI's and GUI-based and web-based tools that Unix ain't never had? What about apache, perl and python (all born under Unix but solidly linux-born nowadays), and the device-specific linux flavors like embedded linux is in, and 'recreational' systems like ReplayTV and mythTV (admittedly still a bit more cooking needed), and so on? That last pair are 'serious toys' (or only deserves 'toy' if you're saying it with a degree of respect, not dismissiveness). We just saved a ton of money implementing a linux-based project/issue tracking tool (my last employer blew six figures writing one inhouse).
Frankly, freshmeat is at least 75% never-seen-life-before-linux (I don't intend to prove a majority, just the existence of a LOT of counterarguments to your toy argument). Over the last 15 years there *are* a lot of innovations coming out of some Unix stalwarts (AT+T, Sun, SGI, Apple). But there used to be so many Unix vendors. Most are gone, but a few sellers of 'dead' Unix flavors remain. These vendors whack the dead horse every year for another chunk of revenue, but otherwise ignore Unix. Or, in the case of SCO, they go lookin for a bigger horse to poison, so they can make money off it, a la Dead Souls.
1 - My dad's family grew up reading Ted Malone. For his 70th birthday, I got him a signed copy of Ted Malone's book. Signed. Ebay. $3, plus a couple bucks insured shipping. Bar-GAIN!
2 - After I explained to my sister about alibris.com, she wandered through her house pullin' old books off shelves and getting quotes. Every nearly-100-year-old book she tried was worth under $10 on alibris. Often, $10 got something special like a dustjacket, a first edition, etc. Surprisingly, her most valuable book was an Ed Abbey novel (copyright 1987) autographed several years before his death.
3 - I regularly use ebay as a mechanism for determining 'fair value' on stuff, to convince myself I should get rid of junk. While some categories aren't well-populated, most things *can* be found online. And cheaply.
4 - My sister loaned me her kids' favorite book for my baby. Who ate a chunk out of it. Alibris.com had a new copy for just a few bucks. Presto!
Yeah, you might lose that $.50 hardback opportunity. But you can buy the book for $4, then sell it back a year later for ... $4. You'll be out the postage, admittedly, but I don't for a moment see anything here to mourn for.
Frankly, I'd rather we got rid of the cheapskate conservativism that has so viciously put the screws to schools and libraries, but if they are stuck resorting to ebay for funding, I'm all for it. If libraries were smart, they'd spread the word so that locals would come online and browse for 'shipping-free' bargains on the ebay'ed books. Lots more people browsing the book sale, better access even for the locals, and more fair-market money for the librarians.
Oh, and a last thought: the local goodwill store gets picked clean of bargains by ebay resellers. But I don't resent the lost bargains; I resent the lost income goodwill suffers until they learn this very tactic themselves. The lost charitable revenue off every item they sell for a dime vs. the ebay dollar is a greater tragedy than your lost .50c hardcover book.
I've just made the faux-pas of actually reading* the linked article that claimed that 3-click was debunked, and I don't agree.
/. karma. I promise I won't read the article ever ever ever again, so this should be a one-time problem for slashdotters, since obviously no-one else ever reads articles here.
The 3-click rule says info should be accessible within three clicks.
The article contesting this says they watched over 8000 user clicks, and most users clicked 25 times before 'giving up', when it appeared they were searching for stuff.
The gap that I see is in not more-deeply analyzing how the clicks of users related to depth-of-tree (i.e., 1-click from home, 2-clicks, or 3-clicks, etc.) or perceived website quality. It is possible that people spent 25 clicks wandering but resurfaced to 'home' several times in trying to find the proper 3-click path to their desired target.
My point is that truly debunking this concept would involve:
1 - looking for 'back to home' patterns in click streams.
2 - classifying users a few ways (Some people are too timid/stupid to use the 'back' button!)
3 - validating user satisfaction on usability of sites that honor/ignore the 3-click rule.
All the article does is prove that people are persistent, even in the face of crappy webpage design.
* - My apologies; I hope admitting that I read the article doesn't completely destroy my
Gollum's Cut -- NZ Herald interview
(A side note: Would it have been *that* hard to find someone (even just a competent fan) to improve this interview's quality of dialogue?)
Ya know, TCP is confusing... I say we start using the nickname 'TCraP'.
You losers need to realize that feudalism and totalitarianism is all about getting people to behave.
Getting other nations and noncitizens to behave is fine by me; I'm a big fan of 'The Prince': it's better to be feared than loved.
Oh, and stop slinging liberal around incorrectly, you anon-coward cheap-labor-conservative troll!
Well put! And, like the 'kills all' weapon I decried, all of these tend to wake up resentment in the global community. I will never buy a diamond (blood diamond violence), I am glad the Taliban has lost power in Afghanistan (oppressive to women), etc.