Of those 80 people at RealNames, how many were driving technology forward? Did their entire technology consist of a database mapping keywords to URLs? Three people at Microsoft could probably do that--and scale--in six months.
Huh? I could do it in 20 minutes.
The hard part was making anyone want to use it. That's what the 80 people were supposed to be doing.
Re:If you choose to dance with an elephant...
on
RealNames CEO Talks Back
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I take exception to Teare's comment:
The only naming technology in the world capable of allowing non-ASCII characters to be used as web addresses is being killed at birth
Also you might want to take exception to the lack of factual basis. Plenty of TLDs already support non-ASCII characters in DNS, and have for some time. Check out, for example, NUNIC's Worldnames project.
When I use Internet Explorer (which is not very often), I install Google's GoogleBar on it. This is a little toolbar on the browser where I type in a word and get a google search.
RealNames could do exactly the same thing, without paying millions of dollars in cash and 20% of their stock to Microsoft.
Wouldn't work. People install Google's toolbar because it adds some efficiency to their user experience.
RealNames just made things more confusing and had no coherent value proposition, so nobody had any interest in going out of their way to use it.
Maybe they could have made a deal with Audiogalaxy or someone to have the RealNames URL Befuckulator surreptitiously installed as a secret browser add-on.
An old friend of mine who worked for an ISP that shall remain nameless was one of the engineers working on the webcast of a Very Large Event (tm). They needed to deploy all of the architecture, etc. needed to broadcast the video to thousands and thousands of people worldwide, and they were under a tight deadline.
So, there were a multitude of servers, network gear, cables, etc. that all were shipped to the location.
Why on earth would they do that? Why not just ship the minimum required for onsite production, and then zap the data back to the main office for onward distribution? I've never heard of anything like this. It makes no sense.
Actually, it seems to me that it's a moderator's rejection of the late trend that everything on Slashdot is about how bad Microsoft is.
I tried to find a recent article that had no comments above 0 about how Microsoft is bad, but I came up with nothing.
It's not a late trend. It's been going on as long as I've been reading slashdot (which is longer than my ID# would have you believe).
I get about 200 hits per month through via a keyword - it's a trademarked madeup word. Many people I suspect simply forget the.com part and then after seeing they're still being routed properly to our site due to RealNames, they use it more and tell others. So in this regard, keywords do have some value in regards to convenience.
But most browsers would do the same thing anyway - fire up a non-Realnames-enabled browser and type in your made-up word without the.com on the end. Presto, it adds the http://www.\1.com/ on its own.
Honestly, it couldn't have happened to a stupider pack of schmucks. The business model was straight off an insane asylum rec-room wall, and their shrill arguments in its support made them (at least any of them who dared show their virtual faces in public) sound like they were holding first class tickets to Jonestown, for all the irrational yet fervent defensiveness they spurted out.
Add to that, of course, that their company's sole goal was to make money off the forced Balkanization of the internet. Sort of an online Slobodan Milosevic.
This news truly makes my week. Beers are on me tonight. Nobody at the bar will know what the hell I'm talking about, but that's probably for the better.
Actually it makes a lot of sense. Law enforcement shouldn't be arbitrary or random, or targetted at any specific group other than law breakers.
Targeting people who are breaking a specific law isn't arbitrary or random, any more than having the IRS targeting tax evaders rather than child molesters. It's simply a matter of using appropriate and available enforcement processes.
It's not as if the cameras are catching only people who are Jewish, or red-haired, or Republicans, or lousy cooks - or even just people who make left turns through red lights without using their turn signals.
You can edit PDF just fine. Get Acrobat (not Acrobat reader mind you).
You have got to be kidding.
With Acrobat you can do about the same level of editing that you could get a union typesetter to do on a line of hot type half an hour before deadline. That is, you can fix minor typos, and in a truly desperate situation, maybe add or remove a word. Text won't rewrap, so spacing will look weird, and you have little control over kerning. Basically it's useful for last-minute touchups and nothing else.
PDF is a horrible format for delivery of text that someone else needs to format - such as a periodical, where they need to incorporate it into their typesetting system, with their fonts, their styles, etc., and take out the double spaces that clueless morons add after periods because they think they're sending telegrams.
When you export text from a PDF using Acrobat, it's often out of sequence if there was a multicolumn layout or if there were photo captions or other non-flowed text.
Do everyone a favor, if you can't follow directions and provide it in the requested format, save it as text only; at least that's workable. Nobody gives a rat's ass about your favorite fonts.
Repeat after me: Entering an intersection while it is full is bad, mkay ?
Now there's something DC could really benefit from learning.
When I walk or bike home in the evening, I just shake my head in amazement at all the DC drivers sitting in the middle of the intersection blocking traffic in all four directions, sometimes for three or four light changes.
One thing they do really well in New York is levy painful and immediate fines for anyone who enters an intersection that's not clear on the other side. It really works - traffic keeps moving; slowly at busy times, but at least it moves.
Perhaps we need a law that allows full-speed ramming of anyone who is sitting in the intersection in front of you when the light turns green. All the drivers can install cow-catchers on the fronts of their cars and go to town. More entertainment for us pedestrians and cyclists.
Melbourne in Australia caught onto this lucrative traffic violation market years ago. There have been a number of investigations in Melbourne (sorry I don't know any URLs to any of them, I saw them all on TV) which described how speed cameras were installed around the city to raise revenue and get the state back in the black. Well it is in the black again, and revenue is always increasing
Good for Melbourne! Personally, I find this to be one of the best government revenue tools around. Given the choice to pay taxes that cover police, fire, public hospital, and other services, or to have reckless drivers pay for these services instead, I'm pretty happy with the latter. As a pedestrian, I don't endanger anyone, so why should I have to cover the costs created by those who do? Additionally, in a fair society, I should be rebated in exchange for the increased marginal risk I face as a result of driver action. If they can automate the process, so much the better - it's a nondiscretionary bright-line rule that anyone can choose to conform to.
I live in DC and every time I see one of those cameras I give a silent cheer. DC-area drivers, especially those with Virginia and Maryland plates, are among the worst I have ever experienced; a combination of incompetence and malice that is both dangerous and antisocial. Only in Saudi Arabia was the driving worse, but there it seemed to be more because people just didn't care rather than aggression.
Also, a single photograph of your car in mid-intersection with a picture of a red light above it doesn't tell the whole story. The lights make absolutely no distinction of the rest of your driving behavior leading up to the incident. For instance, a drunk driver swerving all over the road, then running a red light will merely be fined for running the red light. What would happen if a cop was there instead? A DWI arrest.
What sort of weird point is that? They shouldn't bust people for crime A because they're not also busting people for crime B at the same time? They shouldn't search people's bags for cocaine at the airport because they're not also interviewing them about whether they've paid their taxes?
2) Slurp up all traffic originating from an address not handed out by your DHCP server. Respond to requests on viable protocols (telnet, http) with a notice informing people how to switch to DHCP.
3) Put cards by the telephones that explain how people can set their machines to use DHCP.
4) Provide raju1kabir with free rooms chainwide for life in exchange for this helpful advice.
You could easily just alter step 2 in such a way that you indefinitely NAT people's traffic regardless of their preconfigured static addresses, but there is some chance that you'll have two guests who are both set to 192.168.1.1 or who have their gateways set to each other's addresses or something. The chance is slight, but it's hard to deal with without expensive physical segmentation of the network. So it's best to minimize the chances by getting 'em to switch to properly allocated addresses ASAP.
A transistor is a very fast little valve with three connectors. One is a large pipe leading in, one is a large pipe leading out, and one is a tiny little pipe that controls the flow through the large pipes. When no electricity is going into the tiny little pipe, the large pipes don't allow any electricity through. When electricity is going through the tiny pipe, the large pipe lets a lot of electricity through. So this makes it useful as an amplifier, because just a little bit of electricity - a weak, quiet signal - can control the flow of a much larger amount of electricity through the large pipe, producing a louder version of the same signal.
That wasn't too hard. I guess you can call "much larger amount" math but by that time you've more or less included any definition of anything.
A good example of a republic without democracy is, oh, say, the People's Republic of China; a good example of a democracy without republicanism is, say, the United Kingdom. Where would you rather live?
China, no question.
Repressive countries have much better weather. Drop me on Hainan or Hong Kong and I'm all set. All the politically perfect places (Denmark, Netherlands, etc.) are cold and drizzly. Some justice that is.
How can people be called ignorant when there are facts that a man, created by God, came down and preached to thousands upon thousands. Documented proof of the existance of a man who could cure the blind. Raise the dead. Heal a cripple, etc. The most popular book ever sold is the bible. Granted its translation is inaccurate to some degree but it isn't just Cathloics and Mormons and Lutherans believing in one God. It is Muslims and buddhists? and countless other religions believing in just one entity that created us. We are talking billions of people here.
[boggle]
More people read horoscopes every day than the Bible. What on earth does that prove? Popularity of a belief is not any sort of proof of its validity. Disagree? Look at the results of the study that headlines this topic. Half the people think that antibiotics kill viruses.
As for your documented proof of the existence of a man who could heal the blind, it's one book. I can come up with plenty of books that "prove" almost anything, from the Tooth Fairy to the "fact" that by the close the the 20th century the entire world will be part of the Soviet Empire.
A fact is not something written down and passed on like a giant centuries-long game of telephone. A fact is something that can be or has been independently verified by disinterested parties to the satisfaction of all observers.
There may be plenty of reasons to believe in God, but wrapping Him in the language of science is demeaning to both Him and you (mainly you).
Perhaps some of the pacific rim countries like the Philipines have fat pipes running through them en route to Australia?
FLAG touches in Malaysia. And you can find endless pirated software, music, and movies in plain sight at the evening markets in any Malaysian city. So there may be something there.
I think Australia's fattest pipes go through New Zealand and then onward to Hawaii and Japan (wouldn't make much sense to have them go to PNG, Indonesia, or East Timor!).
Uh huh, that little fantasy is going to last about exactly as long as it takes them to actually get some customers and start pissing people in the UK off.
They're sitting ducks. In fact, I personally will take them offline for $10,000 (that'll cover my costs plus get me a few nights in London). I can think of about 20 easy ways.
Find a country where laws don't care about distribution of information, and which has a reasonable amount of connectivity. Perhaps some of the countries in eastyern europe have decent connections.
Not likely this will work. There is an almost directly inverse relationship between rigor of intellectual property law enforcement and general level of development - and another inverse relationship between development and bandwidth costs. The countries where you can pirate all day long as places like Nigeria and Indonesia that don't have enough bandwidth to host a Thompson Twins fan site.
Eastern Europe has no bandwidth. The only possibilities are in east Asia, in particular Taiwan.
If you want total and complete freedom in hosting your web site, you'll need to get a hosting provider outside of the country you're likely to piss people off in.
Amen. This is the best advice I've seen in this whole discussion. The mere prospect of having to engage lawyers in another country is enough to deter 95% of potential adversaries.
Ive heard it said many times if you buy an actual T1/T3, you will be taken care of if there is an interruption of service.
Often true. One of our links is a UUnet T1, and any time I unplug the CSU/DSU to rearrange something, I get a phone call from them saying that they noticed my circuit has gone down but never fear, they're on the case.
It's never gone down for any reason other than my fiddling around. Wish I could say the same for the other ISPs...
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? I could do it in 20 minutes.
The hard part was making anyone want to use it. That's what the 80 people were supposed to be doing.
Also you might want to take exception to the lack of factual basis. Plenty of TLDs already support non-ASCII characters in DNS, and have for some time. Check out, for example, NUNIC's Worldnames project.
Wouldn't work. People install Google's toolbar because it adds some efficiency to their user experience.
RealNames just made things more confusing and had no coherent value proposition, so nobody had any interest in going out of their way to use it.
Maybe they could have made a deal with Audiogalaxy or someone to have the RealNames URL Befuckulator surreptitiously installed as a secret browser add-on.
Why on earth would they do that? Why not just ship the minimum required for onsite production, and then zap the data back to the main office for onward distribution? I've never heard of anything like this. It makes no sense.
It's not a late trend. It's been going on as long as I've been reading slashdot (which is longer than my ID# would have you believe).
Microsoft is bad.
But most browsers would do the same thing anyway - fire up a non-Realnames-enabled browser and type in your made-up word without the .com on the end. Presto, it adds the http://www.\1.com/ on its own.
Honestly, it couldn't have happened to a stupider pack of schmucks. The business model was straight off an insane asylum rec-room wall, and their shrill arguments in its support made them (at least any of them who dared show their virtual faces in public) sound like they were holding first class tickets to Jonestown, for all the irrational yet fervent defensiveness they spurted out.
Add to that, of course, that their company's sole goal was to make money off the forced Balkanization of the internet. Sort of an online Slobodan Milosevic.
This news truly makes my week. Beers are on me tonight. Nobody at the bar will know what the hell I'm talking about, but that's probably for the better.
Targeting people who are breaking a specific law isn't arbitrary or random, any more than having the IRS targeting tax evaders rather than child molesters. It's simply a matter of using appropriate and available enforcement processes.
It's not as if the cameras are catching only people who are Jewish, or red-haired, or Republicans, or lousy cooks - or even just people who make left turns through red lights without using their turn signals.
I liked it before everyone got SUVs. Now the air is choking, and I can't see bikes coming from the sides at intersections.
You have got to be kidding.
With Acrobat you can do about the same level of editing that you could get a union typesetter to do on a line of hot type half an hour before deadline. That is, you can fix minor typos, and in a truly desperate situation, maybe add or remove a word. Text won't rewrap, so spacing will look weird, and you have little control over kerning. Basically it's useful for last-minute touchups and nothing else.
PDF is a horrible format for delivery of text that someone else needs to format - such as a periodical, where they need to incorporate it into their typesetting system, with their fonts, their styles, etc., and take out the double spaces that clueless morons add after periods because they think they're sending telegrams.
When you export text from a PDF using Acrobat, it's often out of sequence if there was a multicolumn layout or if there were photo captions or other non-flowed text.
Do everyone a favor, if you can't follow directions and provide it in the requested format, save it as text only; at least that's workable. Nobody gives a rat's ass about your favorite fonts.
Now there's something DC could really benefit from learning.
When I walk or bike home in the evening, I just shake my head in amazement at all the DC drivers sitting in the middle of the intersection blocking traffic in all four directions, sometimes for three or four light changes.
One thing they do really well in New York is levy painful and immediate fines for anyone who enters an intersection that's not clear on the other side. It really works - traffic keeps moving; slowly at busy times, but at least it moves.
Perhaps we need a law that allows full-speed ramming of anyone who is sitting in the intersection in front of you when the light turns green. All the drivers can install cow-catchers on the fronts of their cars and go to town. More entertainment for us pedestrians and cyclists.
Just ruminating: What if there were 4 or 5 lights instead of three? Or if the yellow light gradually changed color from greenish to reddish?
Come on. The police give their cameras monthly quotas?
Good for Melbourne! Personally, I find this to be one of the best government revenue tools around. Given the choice to pay taxes that cover police, fire, public hospital, and other services, or to have reckless drivers pay for these services instead, I'm pretty happy with the latter. As a pedestrian, I don't endanger anyone, so why should I have to cover the costs created by those who do? Additionally, in a fair society, I should be rebated in exchange for the increased marginal risk I face as a result of driver action. If they can automate the process, so much the better - it's a nondiscretionary bright-line rule that anyone can choose to conform to.
I live in DC and every time I see one of those cameras I give a silent cheer. DC-area drivers, especially those with Virginia and Maryland plates, are among the worst I have ever experienced; a combination of incompetence and malice that is both dangerous and antisocial. Only in Saudi Arabia was the driving worse, but there it seemed to be more because people just didn't care rather than aggression.
What sort of weird point is that? They shouldn't bust people for crime A because they're not also busting people for crime B at the same time? They shouldn't search people's bags for cocaine at the airport because they're not also interviewing them about whether they've paid their taxes?
I'd suggest doing it this way:
1) Run a DHCP server to handle the normal people.
2) Slurp up all traffic originating from an address not handed out by your DHCP server. Respond to requests on viable protocols (telnet, http) with a notice informing people how to switch to DHCP.
3) Put cards by the telephones that explain how people can set their machines to use DHCP.
4) Provide raju1kabir with free rooms chainwide for life in exchange for this helpful advice.
You could easily just alter step 2 in such a way that you indefinitely NAT people's traffic regardless of their preconfigured static addresses, but there is some chance that you'll have two guests who are both set to 192.168.1.1 or who have their gateways set to each other's addresses or something. The chance is slight, but it's hard to deal with without expensive physical segmentation of the network. So it's best to minimize the chances by getting 'em to switch to properly allocated addresses ASAP.A transistor is a very fast little valve with three connectors. One is a large pipe leading in, one is a large pipe leading out, and one is a tiny little pipe that controls the flow through the large pipes. When no electricity is going into the tiny little pipe, the large pipes don't allow any electricity through. When electricity is going through the tiny pipe, the large pipe lets a lot of electricity through. So this makes it useful as an amplifier, because just a little bit of electricity - a weak, quiet signal - can control the flow of a much larger amount of electricity through the large pipe, producing a louder version of the same signal.
That wasn't too hard. I guess you can call "much larger amount" math but by that time you've more or less included any definition of anything.
China, no question.
Repressive countries have much better weather. Drop me on Hainan or Hong Kong and I'm all set. All the politically perfect places (Denmark, Netherlands, etc.) are cold and drizzly. Some justice that is.
[boggle]
More people read horoscopes every day than the Bible. What on earth does that prove? Popularity of a belief is not any sort of proof of its validity. Disagree? Look at the results of the study that headlines this topic. Half the people think that antibiotics kill viruses.
As for your documented proof of the existence of a man who could heal the blind, it's one book. I can come up with plenty of books that "prove" almost anything, from the Tooth Fairy to the "fact" that by the close the the 20th century the entire world will be part of the Soviet Empire.
A fact is not something written down and passed on like a giant centuries-long game of telephone. A fact is something that can be or has been independently verified by disinterested parties to the satisfaction of all observers.
There may be plenty of reasons to believe in God, but wrapping Him in the language of science is demeaning to both Him and you (mainly you).
Since they closed the Foundry, I just haven't had the heart to go out to see movies in DC anymore.
I think Australia's fattest pipes go through New Zealand and then onward to Hawaii and Japan (wouldn't make much sense to have them go to PNG, Indonesia, or East Timor!).
Uh huh, that little fantasy is going to last about exactly as long as it takes them to actually get some customers and start pissing people in the UK off.
They're sitting ducks. In fact, I personally will take them offline for $10,000 (that'll cover my costs plus get me a few nights in London). I can think of about 20 easy ways.
Not likely this will work. There is an almost directly inverse relationship between rigor of intellectual property law enforcement and general level of development - and another inverse relationship between development and bandwidth costs. The countries where you can pirate all day long as places like Nigeria and Indonesia that don't have enough bandwidth to host a Thompson Twins fan site.
Eastern Europe has no bandwidth. The only possibilities are in east Asia, in particular Taiwan.
Amen. This is the best advice I've seen in this whole discussion. The mere prospect of having to engage lawyers in another country is enough to deter 95% of potential adversaries.
Often true. One of our links is a UUnet T1, and any time I unplug the CSU/DSU to rearrange something, I get a phone call from them saying that they noticed my circuit has gone down but never fear, they're on the case.
It's never gone down for any reason other than my fiddling around. Wish I could say the same for the other ISPs...