I have purchased several items from Dynamism. While I've been happy for the most part, I believe that this machine is overpriced in relation to what you get out of it. With a $1,900 USD tag, you might as well get a 12" PowerBook that will do a similar or better job, have a better screen, and include built-in wireless, Bluetooth, Ethernet, modem, etc. with about the same footprint. You'd get OS X. You can run Office:Mac if you must, at about the same price as MS-Office or cheaper. You'll have access to better quality software (i.e. OmniGraffle vs. Visio) if you must pay for it, or tons of OSS stuff that just compiles and runs, or installs with a button click.
Besides, chicks dig the PowerBooks. They look cool, not geeky.
The URI in your.sig leads us to what at first sight seems to be a iPod pyramid scam. I find myself hard pressed to take your comments on the current topic seriously.
The Google IPO reminds me of the Virgin IPO in the 80's, not so much for its format but for the people it may attract.
Public companies reap the biggest benefits from having institutional investors (i.e. mutual funds, other big companies, banks, etc.) buy in their stock. While it sounds like a nice and noble thing having lots of individual investors buy your shares, that's usually not in the best interest of the company and its underwriters. Why? Because they aren't likely to buy the same volume of shares, even when combined, as a group of institutional investors. Individual investors are also more fickle and likely to dump the shares at the first sign of trouble.
In Virgin's case, people loved the company, just like Google. Lots of individual investors bought the shares but few institutional investors participated. The IPO thudded and Virgin never quite took off in the markets. The company took itself private a few years later, and has been private (and profitable) ever since.
Something similar may happen in Google's case if the company fails to attract institutional investors for whatever reason, whether it's the high price of its shares or financial analyst buzz. I believe this is the real issue behind the IPO jitters and its unusual format. The last thing the markets need is the most hyped IPO in years landing with a baffled thud.
I was reading slashdot.org from DNA Lounge in San Francisco (http://www.dnalounge.com). I love clubbing and go out almost every Saturday but had not been to DNA since Jamie bought the joint.
Very cool web browsing/IRC/SSH set up.
And yes, I just couldn't resist checking slashdot.org from there, sometime around 30 minutes past midnight.
I understand that DNA Lounge is also a WiFi hot spot, for those of you geeky enough to bring a laptop to a dance club...
The problem with fining the companies offering the products/services is that you've then handed their competition a great way to get rid of them. Having trouble beating a rival in the market? Hire a direct marketer in Russia, say, to send out ten million mails, carefully targetted to include government and law enforcement officers in their jurisdiction claiming to be selling their service. Watch them implode under the fines.
Kjella wrote:
Quite simply, it's neither practically or legally possible to skip establishing the chain of events. To take a classic example, referral scams. It's the referer that is misleading them to the site, not the site itself.
I disagree with both of you. All I have to do is follow the Deep Throat Watergate Principle: follow the money. All I have to do is purchase one of the products or services and follow the chain through the payment processors all the way to the source. There will be a nice money trail. That's why I said "the vendors or their payment processors in my previous post.
I completely agree with the spirit of the law. I disagree on how it's being implemented. The law should also go after the idiots paying the spammers to send their unsolicited verbiage. The current laws are completely toothless if the spammer decides to start sending spam from servers out of US jurisdiction. The companies offering the products or services clogging my INBOX should be fined/prosecuted as well. There is no incentive to stop spam as things are. There is incentive to find a spammer who will be out of jurisdiction. How long do you think it will be before the better financed spammers move their servers to India or elsewhere? How long before some entreprenurial Mexicans, Czechs or Russians decide to offer their services?
(Disclaimer: I'm Mexican. I speak Russian and spend a lot of time there. I'm familiar with their technical capabilities and motivations. So don't start on "why did he singled those nationalities out?" Because in my opinion it's likely to happen. You're welcome to your opinion based on YOUR experiences.)
When the law starts going after the product or service pushers, or their credit card payment processors, I'll cheer it. I doubt the law will be applied correctly until then.
This is slightly off-topic but I thought I'd bring it up. A friend gave me the Monopoly 60th Anniversary Edition in 1995. That's the one with the nice board, brass tokens, ivory dice, wooden houses and hotels instead of plastic, etc.
Sometime in mid-1996 I was discussing the currency exchange between the dollar and the Russian ruble. The person I was with said something like "sounds and looks like Monopoly money" when I showed him a 500 ruble bill. To make a long story short, on my next trip to Russia I exchanged enough US dollars (around $40) to get real bills and coins for almost all the bill denominations for the game. For some (i.e. $1) we use the bills that came with the game.
Now, when we play Monopoly, we play with real money. That might be an interesting twist if you can find a currency that makes this affordable.
He will just get more emails now from the same people wondering why he didn't put machine x in frount of computer y.
If I were a cynical person I'd guess that, based on the number of page views that they got, he updated his list again in order to help increase the Houston Chronicle's web page ad impressions.
There was, in my opinion, a glaring omission in this article: no mention of IRC. I find this interesting because there is no reason why IRC shouldn't be adopted as the protocol of choice for text instant messaging. It's more stable than all the others. It interoperates nicely. There are IRC servers running on all kinds of operating systems. Endless clients.
How many millions of people use IRC? Why not adopt it as a mainstream system? I was surprised that the interviewer, being from Sendmail, so glaringly ignored throwing this into the mix. IRC can do everything instant messaging can, and then some.
Both the Mr. Ford and the interviewer failed in their mission: the former may not be much of an architect if he's willing to overlook this, and the latter should've asked more incisive questions.
Unfortunately I cannot find a web resource for it, but the original article appeared in Computers and Security. The article includes source code in a cross between pseudo-code and a shell command language.
The original article is:
Computer Viruses
Theory and Experiments
Fred Cohen
Computers and Security no. 6 (1987)
Pages 22-35
Elsevier Science Publishers, BV (North-Holland)
This article was followed by a plethora of misguided "containment" articles also in Computers & Security. Cohen proved them wrong again in:
Computational Aspects of Computer Viruses
Fred Cohen
Computers & Security no. 8 (1989)
Pages 325-344
Elsevier Science Publishers, Ltd.
As an aside, I read that Mr. Cohen had to wait several years before being able to publish his papers because not a single publication in the US would print his articles. The first article is very entertaining and instructional.
Cohen's first computer virus pseudo-code:
program virus:= { 1234567;
subroutine infect-executable:= { loop: file = random-executable; if first-line-of-file = 1234567 then goto loop; prepend virus to file; }
subroutine do-damage:= { whatever damage is desired }
subrutine trigger-pulled:= { return true on desired conditions }
main-program:= { infect-executable; if trigger-pulled then do-damage; goto next; } next: }// rest of the infrected program
(If I have time to scan them, I'll post a link to page scans of these articles; right now I have too much work.)
netsharc wrote: > and install the Matrix screensaver on them
That's exactly what they did at the Pyramid Cafe in Moscow, and uber-yuppie joint on Tverskaya avenue (think Times Square). A 250 ml glass of carrot juice there was about $10.00, plus tips, of course. The decor was rather nice, with the plasma screens showing The Matrix screen savers and looping through the movie in sync with techno music.
I don't know if the place is still there. It was so hip I'd guess it to be ephimeral. In case you visit Moscow, The Pyramid is on Tvyerskaya just a few steps away from the Mayakovskaya metro station.
This is a Good Thing(tm) that may be bad news for Apple in the mid-term future.
If it only took a week to get 1,000,000 songs purchased and downloaded, vs. 13,000,000 for the Mac-only version over six months, this could be used by Apple's board and/or investors to press the company to open more of their applications and operating system d00dahs to operate under Windows. Steve Jobs' challenge now becomes being able to keep the Apple high standards of quality in a world where crashes and confusing UIs are the order of the day.
Hopefully Jobs et. al. have a plan to prevent this cannibalization of their existing software when facing the demand and the BoD/investors pressures.
You should read David Zindell then -- particularly Neverness, Broken God, The Wild and War in Heaven (the last three are part of a series called A Requiem for Homo Sapiens).
I will certainly add those titles to my reading list. Thanks for your suggestion.
This story reminds me of the novel "The Modular Man" by Roger McBride Allen. This story is about a scientist who downloaded his psyche to a computer, and how the government wants to unplug said computer. The story touches on the meaning of consciousness, both philosophically and legally, and works with the real issues of what makes and what doesn't make a real person.
Highly recommended -- Isaac Asimov wrote the prologue to the 1992 Bantam edition.
More infos: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553 295594/qid=1066608552/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-014398 6-0510511?v=glance&s=books
Like a lot of people here I was experiencing the crashes every time Trillian tried to connect to Yahoo! Messenger. The quick and dirty solution is to go into your Trillian directory and rename yahoo.dll to whatever else, then start the program. All the other services will work just fine.
This may be a way to remain on-line until a patch is offered for 0.74. The current patch is only good for 2.0 Pro, as far as I know.
In the movie, we're led to believe that Solitaire really can foretell the future--until she gives her virginity to Bond. When Mr. Big finds out about her dalliance, he complains that he would have taken care of her needs in due time. I guess things are a bit different in the book.
I've read every James Bond story written by Fleming, all the ones by Gardner, the one by Kingsley Amis and a couple of books by Raymond Benson. If you enjoy the James Bond movies, don't read any of the books. Fleming and Amis wrote wonderful stories; the others are sucky (except for Gardner's Icebreaker and For Special Services) but still good reads. Reading the stories, however, will probably make you hate the movies.
The best James Bond movies are the ones that closely followed the original stories (i.e. Dr. No, From Russia, With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball) or have characterizations based on the stories (The Living Daylights). The only non-Fleming-story movie that humms along well is "The Spy Who Loved Me".
Cheers!
E
Live And Let Die
on
Bay of Souls
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The original review sounds just like the plot for Ian Fleming's "Live And Let Die", with a couple of New Age twists.
"Live And Let Die" is the story of how James Bond embarks on a mission against Mr. Big, a black man who is funding communist operations in the United States using antique gold coins. It turns out that Mr. Big found a sunken ship in Jamaica and is using its treasures for this operation. Mr. Big exerts control over his "army" of men through superstition. He's rumoured to be Baron Samedi's zombie, with Baron Samedi being the baddest ghoul in voodoo superstition.
Of course, James Bond gets the babe (Solitaire, a woman who allegedly can see the future but in reality is Mr. Big's plaything), defeats Mr. Big and his goons, and everyone lives happily ever after (or at least until "Moonraker", a year later). Bond comes out of this one in poor shape, by the way. His back is totally messed up after being tugged over a coral reef and after a barracuda chomped at his right shoulder. Solitaire, however, provides some excellent bedside care.
Excellent book and a very entertaining read, specially considering it was written around 1954 or so.
According to Sanders, small groups of engineers who went to completely electronic communication in their workgroups became 'very lonely, depressed, negative, anti-social, brilliant people.'
We have a number of clients, from mid- to large enterprises, who have switched to *NIX/Linux over the last 3 years following our advice. The key for us was to define quantifiable targets in terms of $$$ and time-to-resolution, and kept statistics of similar environments running Windoze or commercial *NIX software.
Two test cases that immediately come to mind are Samba and VNC. In the first case the monetary quantification was instant: $0 against licenses for a 75-person department. There were no calls to support at all once we switched the servers. For the VNC case at another company, we pitted it against PC Anywhere. Once users understood the new logon sequence, they began champion VNC by themselves because they realized that *NIX machines and Macs were opened to their control, some of which had been closed before.
Both of my examples focused on solving specific problems, with a set time line and quantification targets. Don't try to implement everything in one single deployment because if something non-mission-critical breaks that affects a mission-critical app or service you'll invalidate your own case.
Of course, there's no mention of PostgreSQL or mSQL, but I guess that's typical.
This article has all the signs of being the effort of MySQL's PR firm. Nothing wrong with that; they didn't mention PostgreSQL or other OSS databases because their desired outcome is to increase awareness of MySQL, not the others.
Slashdot Mirror
I have purchased several items from Dynamism. While I've been happy for the most part, I believe that this machine is overpriced in relation to what you get out of it. With a $1,900 USD tag, you might as well get a 12" PowerBook that will do a similar or better job, have a better screen, and include built-in wireless, Bluetooth, Ethernet, modem, etc. with about the same footprint. You'd get OS X. You can run Office:Mac if you must, at about the same price as MS-Office or cheaper. You'll have access to better quality software (i.e. OmniGraffle vs. Visio) if you must pay for it, or tons of OSS stuff that just compiles and runs, or installs with a button click.
Besides, chicks dig the PowerBooks. They look cool, not geeky.
Cheers,
E
Way to go, dmayle.
.sig leads us to what at first sight seems to be a iPod pyramid scam. I find myself hard pressed to take your comments on the current topic seriously.
The URI in your
Cheers,
E
The Google IPO reminds me of the Virgin IPO in the 80's, not so much for its format but for the people it may attract.
Public companies reap the biggest benefits from having institutional investors (i.e. mutual funds, other big companies, banks, etc.) buy in their stock. While it sounds like a nice and noble thing having lots of individual investors buy your shares, that's usually not in the best interest of the company and its underwriters. Why? Because they aren't likely to buy the same volume of shares, even when combined, as a group of institutional investors. Individual investors are also more fickle and likely to dump the shares at the first sign of trouble.
In Virgin's case, people loved the company, just like Google. Lots of individual investors bought the shares but few institutional investors participated. The IPO thudded and Virgin never quite took off in the markets. The company took itself private a few years later, and has been private (and profitable) ever since.
Something similar may happen in Google's case if the company fails to attract institutional investors for whatever reason, whether it's the high price of its shares or financial analyst buzz. I believe this is the real issue behind the IPO jitters and its unusual format. The last thing the markets need is the most hyped IPO in years landing with a baffled thud.
Comments, anyone?
Eugene
I was reading slashdot.org from DNA Lounge in San Francisco (http://www.dnalounge.com). I love clubbing and go out almost every Saturday but had not been to DNA since Jamie bought the joint.
Very cool web browsing/IRC/SSH set up.
And yes, I just couldn't resist checking slashdot.org from there, sometime around 30 minutes past midnight.
I understand that DNA Lounge is also a WiFi hot spot, for those of you geeky enough to bring a laptop to a dance club...
Cheers,
Eugene
RickHunter wrote
The problem with fining the companies offering the products/services is that you've then handed their competition a great way to get rid of them. Having trouble beating a rival in the market? Hire a direct marketer in Russia, say, to send out ten million mails, carefully targetted to include government and law enforcement officers in their jurisdiction claiming to be selling their service. Watch them implode under the fines.
Kjella wrote:
Quite simply, it's neither practically or legally possible to skip establishing the chain of events. To take a classic example, referral scams. It's the referer that is misleading them to the site, not the site itself.
I disagree with both of you. All I have to do is follow the Deep Throat Watergate Principle: follow the money. All I have to do is purchase one of the products or services and follow the chain through the payment processors all the way to the source. There will be a nice money trail. That's why I said "the vendors or their payment processors in my previous post.
Cheers,
EugeneI completely agree with the spirit of the law. I disagree on how it's being implemented. The law should also go after the idiots paying the spammers to send their unsolicited verbiage. The current laws are completely toothless if the spammer decides to start sending spam from servers out of US jurisdiction. The companies offering the products or services clogging my INBOX should be fined/prosecuted as well. There is no incentive to stop spam as things are. There is incentive to find a spammer who will be out of jurisdiction. How long do you think it will be before the better financed spammers move their servers to India or elsewhere? How long before some entreprenurial Mexicans, Czechs or Russians decide to offer their services?
(Disclaimer: I'm Mexican. I speak Russian and spend a lot of time there. I'm familiar with their technical capabilities and motivations. So don't start on "why did he singled those nationalities out?" Because in my opinion it's likely to happen. You're welcome to your opinion based on YOUR experiences.)
When the law starts going after the product or service pushers, or their credit card payment processors, I'll cheer it. I doubt the law will be applied correctly until then.
Cheers,
Eugene
Hello,
This is slightly off-topic but I thought I'd bring it up. A friend gave me the Monopoly 60th Anniversary Edition in 1995. That's the one with the nice board, brass tokens, ivory dice, wooden houses and hotels instead of plastic, etc.
Sometime in mid-1996 I was discussing the currency exchange between the dollar and the Russian ruble. The person I was with said something like "sounds and looks like Monopoly money" when I showed him a 500 ruble bill. To make a long story short, on my next trip to Russia I exchanged enough US dollars (around $40) to get real bills and coins for almost all the bill denominations for the game. For some (i.e. $1) we use the bills that came with the game.
Now, when we play Monopoly, we play with real money. That might be an interesting twist if you can find a currency that makes this affordable.
Cheers!
E
fine09 wrote
He will just get more emails now from the same people wondering why he didn't put machine x in frount of computer y.
If I were a cynical person I'd guess that, based on the number of page views that they got, he updated his list again in order to help increase the Houston Chronicle's web page ad impressions.
Hrm... something to think about...
EugeneThere was, in my opinion, a glaring omission in this article: no mention of IRC. I find this interesting because there is no reason why IRC shouldn't be adopted as the protocol of choice for text instant messaging. It's more stable than all the others. It interoperates nicely. There are IRC servers running on all kinds of operating systems. Endless clients.
How many millions of people use IRC? Why not adopt it as a mainstream system? I was surprised that the interviewer, being from Sendmail, so glaringly ignored throwing this into the mix. IRC can do everything instant messaging can, and then some.
Both the Mr. Ford and the interviewer failed in their mission: the former may not be much of an architect if he's willing to overlook this, and the latter should've asked more incisive questions.
Cheers,
Eugene
Unfortunately I cannot find a web resource for it, but the original article appeared in Computers and Security. The article includes source code in a cross between pseudo-code and a shell command language.
The original article is:
Computer Viruses Theory and Experiments
Fred Cohen
Computers and Security no. 6 (1987)
Pages 22-35
Elsevier Science Publishers, BV (North-Holland)
This article was followed by a plethora of misguided "containment" articles also in Computers & Security. Cohen proved them wrong again in:
Computational Aspects of Computer Viruses
Fred Cohen
Computers & Security no. 8 (1989)
Pages 325-344
Elsevier Science Publishers, Ltd.
As an aside, I read that Mr. Cohen had to wait several years before being able to publish his papers because not a single publication in the US would print his articles. The first article is very entertaining and instructional.
Cohen's first computer virus pseudo-code:(If I have time to scan them, I'll post a link to page scans of these articles; right now I have too much work.)
Cheers,
Eugenenetsharc wrote:
> and install the Matrix screensaver on them
That's exactly what they did at the Pyramid Cafe in Moscow, and uber-yuppie joint on Tverskaya avenue (think Times Square). A 250 ml glass of carrot juice there was about $10.00, plus tips, of course. The decor was rather nice, with the plasma screens showing The Matrix screen savers and looping through the movie in sync with techno music.
I don't know if the place is still there. It was so hip I'd guess it to be ephimeral. In case you visit Moscow, The Pyramid is on Tvyerskaya just a few steps away from the Mayakovskaya metro station.
Cheers!
Eugene (aka Zhenya)
OK, it can do art but... ...can it display flying toasters?
(you may be too young to get this reference)
Cheers!
Eugene
This is a Good Thing(tm) that may be bad news for Apple in the mid-term future.
If it only took a week to get 1,000,000 songs purchased and downloaded, vs. 13,000,000 for the Mac-only version over six months, this could be used by Apple's board and/or investors to press the company to open more of their applications and operating system d00dahs to operate under Windows. Steve Jobs' challenge now becomes being able to keep the Apple high standards of quality in a world where crashes and confusing UIs are the order of the day.
Hopefully Jobs et. al. have a plan to prevent this cannibalization of their existing software when facing the demand and the BoD/investors pressures.
Cheers!
Eugene
metlin wrote:
You should read David Zindell then -- particularly Neverness, Broken God, The Wild and War in Heaven (the last three are part of a series called A Requiem for Homo Sapiens).
I will certainly add those titles to my reading list. Thanks for your suggestion.
Cheers,
Eugene
Interesting.
3 295594/qid=1066608552/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-014398 6-0510511?v=glance&s=books
This story reminds me of the novel "The Modular Man" by Roger McBride Allen. This story is about a scientist who downloaded his psyche to a computer, and how the government wants to unplug said computer. The story touches on the meaning of consciousness, both philosophically and legally, and works with the real issues of what makes and what doesn't make a real person.
Highly recommended -- Isaac Asimov wrote the prologue to the 1992 Bantam edition.
More infos: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/055
Cheers,
Eugene
Greetings,
Like a lot of people here I was experiencing the crashes every time Trillian tried to connect to Yahoo! Messenger. The quick and dirty solution is to go into your Trillian directory and rename yahoo.dll to whatever else, then start the program. All the other services will work just fine.
This may be a way to remain on-line until a patch is offered for 0.74. The current patch is only good for 2.0 Pro, as far as I know.
Cheers!
Eugene
PEBCAK
Cheers!
E
Oswald wrote:
In the movie, we're led to believe that Solitaire really can foretell the future--until she gives her virginity to Bond. When Mr. Big finds out about her dalliance, he complains that he would have taken care of her needs in due time. I guess things are a bit different in the book.
I've read every James Bond story written by Fleming, all the ones by Gardner, the one by Kingsley Amis and a couple of books by Raymond Benson. If you enjoy the James Bond movies, don't read any of the books. Fleming and Amis wrote wonderful stories; the others are sucky (except for Gardner's Icebreaker and For Special Services) but still good reads. Reading the stories, however, will probably make you hate the movies.
The best James Bond movies are the ones that closely followed the original stories (i.e. Dr. No, From Russia, With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball) or have characterizations based on the stories (The Living Daylights). The only non-Fleming-story movie that humms along well is "The Spy Who Loved Me".
Cheers!
EThe original review sounds just like the plot for Ian Fleming's "Live And Let Die", with a couple of New Age twists.
"Live And Let Die" is the story of how James Bond embarks on a mission against Mr. Big, a black man who is funding communist operations in the United States using antique gold coins. It turns out that Mr. Big found a sunken ship in Jamaica and is using its treasures for this operation. Mr. Big exerts control over his "army" of men through superstition. He's rumoured to be Baron Samedi's zombie, with Baron Samedi being the baddest ghoul in voodoo superstition.
Of course, James Bond gets the babe (Solitaire, a woman who allegedly can see the future but in reality is Mr. Big's plaything), defeats Mr. Big and his goons, and everyone lives happily ever after (or at least until "Moonraker", a year later). Bond comes out of this one in poor shape, by the way. His back is totally messed up after being tugged over a coral reef and after a barracuda chomped at his right shoulder. Solitaire, however, provides some excellent bedside care.
Excellent book and a very entertaining read, specially considering it was written around 1954 or so.
Cheers!
E
According to Sanders, small groups of engineers who went to completely electronic communication in their workgroups became 'very lonely, depressed, negative, anti-social, brilliant people.'
Bah! Humbug...
E
Just a pet peeve of mine: Marconi did not invent radio. Nikola Tesla did.
Cheers,
E...chicken_little.exe
Cheers!
E
Greetings,
We have a number of clients, from mid- to large enterprises, who have switched to *NIX/Linux over the last 3 years following our advice. The key for us was to define quantifiable targets in terms of $$$ and time-to-resolution, and kept statistics of similar environments running Windoze or commercial *NIX software.
Two test cases that immediately come to mind are Samba and VNC. In the first case the monetary quantification was instant: $0 against licenses for a 75-person department. There were no calls to support at all once we switched the servers. For the VNC case at another company, we pitted it against PC Anywhere. Once users understood the new logon sequence, they began champion VNC by themselves because they realized that *NIX machines and Macs were opened to their control, some of which had been closed before.
Both of my examples focused on solving specific problems, with a set time line and quantification targets. Don't try to implement everything in one single deployment because if something non-mission-critical breaks that affects a mission-critical app or service you'll invalidate your own case.
Good luck and have fun!
E
* Scientists will soon develop a safe and efficient cold fusion mechanism
* Microsoft will soon source for Windows under OSS license
* A vaccine for AIDS will soon be available
Have a nice day.
E
From the posting:
Of course, there's no mention of PostgreSQL or mSQL, but I guess that's typical.
This article has all the signs of being the effort of MySQL's PR firm. Nothing wrong with that; they didn't mention PostgreSQL or other OSS databases because their desired outcome is to increase awareness of MySQL, not the others.
Cheers!
E