There was at least one other company (MobileStar) providing 802.11b, but they went FC [f---edcompany.com] a few months back.
They got some angel capital from Voicestream and Starbucks, and they seem to be doing alright. I'm a subscriber, and I thought their service would drop off at any day, but it's doing well.
The Stepcharger product page says it's "Coming October 2001", and the site hasn't been updated in a while. Look closely at the product picture, and you'll see that the cords are tied together with not a twistie, not a ziptie, but good old electric tape. Methinks the product doesn't get quite as much use (or investor interest) as you might think.
...with a very unique (one-handed) means of inputting characters. It is too difficult to explain, just checkout the site.
If you can't explain an input device in the space of a Slashdot story, you're either a simpleton or the device is too complicated. In either case, I'm not interested. This Slashdot story writeup reminds me of a zillion business models that I read during the dot-com craze. "I can't explain it in just a paragraph, but it's going to be revolutionary, really. You have to see this." Whatever.
Come on,/. editors, can't you at least say "you select characters using a jog wheel and three buttons"? How hard is that? And furthermore, it's not that far away from the method my Sony 300-CD changer uses to select letters. If you want to put in the title for a CD that doesn't have CD-Text on it, you use the jog wheel. Big deal.
Sure, the title might look similar, but the real purpose is a little more obvious when you use the right name. The Porna is the next-generation airplane entertainment device. And it works with your palm, if you get my drift.
The Visor and Springboard are a good product and would have carried them far into the future (just look at Palm).
Uhhh, I think that's kind of the point. Have you looked at Palm stock prices lately? They're around $4, down from a 52-week high of $29. Palm didn't make it that far into the future just riding on their hardware, and it's not looking good for them either. At least Handspring has an exit plan.
How are they cooling this new one? It's got a G4, a SuperDrive, a GeForce2 MX, and the power supply, all inside that base, and there's no airflow from the bottom to the top? (There's a cover over the bottom, where the ram chips and Airport card go.) I can't believe this thing isn't going to get toasty-hot. The Cube didn't have a fan, but it had an external power supply, so they were kinda cheating.
I'll be watching the whole deal just to see how they pull that off. If they can cool that thing without a fan, I'll be impressed.
To the execs of VA Software, Inc. I implore you: Please give Mr. Katz the full support he deserves to become contender for next year.
I agree completely - instead of hiding his talent between moronic technical news posts, please give this man the soapbox he deserves. A man of Jon Katz's talents should have nothing less than his own web site, where he can publish more stories, more often, without having to compete with Slashdot's stories. And furthermore, this new site should have a complete lock on Katz's work, so that no other site can publish it. That's a moneymaker right there, VA, and the entire Slashdot community would stand up and applaud such a fine measure.
(Now let's see how many people moderate me down as a troll before they figure out what the real message is...)
"pretty immature when he was involved with a different staff member every month"
I find this statement a bit unclear: was it immature on his side or was it immature on their side ?
Both, obviously. I don't understand what's unclear there?:-D
It sounds like his immidiate bosses have never had a problem with him - they are most likely the ones to have done the hiring.
They are also the ones to do the firing. It's an extremely rare case when someone high up in the company fires someone despite what the employee's direct manager thinks. That's the whole thing about management: you're responsible to your direct manager, not two levels up. You're responsible for making your manager look good to those two levels up, but you're not responsible for making yourself look good to the upper management. There's only so much you can do.
It also sounds like you're falling for the same trick this employee is: "I like you, buddy, it's just my boss wishes that you would ____." Very old trick, almost as old as the good-cop-bad-cop routine. It's a great motivator, and it keeps the manager from looking bad and having to discipline directly.
Employers are not allowed by law to consider the hiring of a person based on age (or sex, religion, race or sexual preference for that matter). Although there are other reasons you mention that may cause his firing, the original author stated that age discrimination seemed to be the problem, and most likely, it is.
They're also not allowed to use it when making firing decisions, either, so what's your point? You're saying that they didn't do it when they hired him, but now they're doing it to fire him? Not in the course of just a year, I don't buy that.
And furthermore, don't expect the lawyer to do anything free on your behalf. You're making good money, and so do these sharks in suits, and you're both worth it: be prepared to spent $500. Nobody takes this stuff on contingency, and if you're smart, you'll realize this is an investment in your future.
I found that if you confront them and show them how much you know and how confident you are at your job then they will learn to respect your level of knowledge.
Wrong-o. If you confront a senior manager and start a showdown, you will win the battle and lose the war, looking like a cocky jerk. I can't believe how many times I see junior people try that stunt. If you correct your boss in front of other people, you are NOT helping your case. You will look like an overconfident know-it-all with zero political experience, and your boss will not have you around the next time he/she is in an important conversation.
That sort of trick works great when you're "fixing computers on my time off", as you said, but as soon as you get into a political office, you will be targeted for destruction. Think about how you feel when somebody corrects you, and you were wrong. Now think about how you'd react if they were much younger, and you had all the power. You might think you'd be nice to them, but in reality, you'd squash 'em like a bug and bring in somebody more polite and savvy.
Start your journey by reading The Art Of War. I can't emphasize enough how important this is in corporate culture: look weak when you're strong, and look strong when you're weak. Nothing impresses bosses more than an employee who gets the war of corporate culture, and knows how to pick battles.
It has recently come to my attention that our IT Director is trying to either find a way to get rid of me or transfer me into a miserable job position, all because of my age. My Boss explained to me he thinks it has to do with a bit of jealousy. Everyone I work with is over the age of 30 and the IT director is in his mid 40's.
OK, you need to buckle down a little here and realize that it might be a perfectly legitimate complaint. They hired you knowing full well what your age was (unless you've got premature gray hair or you dress like Mr. Rogers), and you need to realize that they wouldn't have hired you if they didn't want you. Something has changed between the time when they hired you, and now. Odds are you've demonstrated something about your age that didn't show up in the interview. I don't know what it is in your case, but typical guesses would be that you've made some less-than-mature decisions.
I know plenty of people who have done the same thing. One example that comes to mind is a guy who started dating coworkers. A lot of them. And while it wasn't against company policy, it looked pretty immature when he was involved with a different staff member every month - and it wasn't the kind of mistake a 40-year old programmer would have made. The powers of the company didn't start disliking him because of his age: they disliked him because of the decisions he made.
Another thing you need to consider is the economy. Suddenly, employers have their pick of the best that's out there, and prices are dropping. You might have been a choice pick two or three years ago, but now there are better people out there with more experience, and the IT director might even have someone in mind.
Don't forget that personal connections mean everything. Your chief responsibility is to make sure your boss doesn't make any mistakes, and that he/she looks like a hero. As long as that's the case, your boss will always go to the mat for you, no matter how old/young you are, and nobody else in the company will be able to override them. You know what they say about trust: people who don't trust others, can't be trusted. If you come off as paranoid, nobody's going to put you in charge of stuff.
Has this system even been built? All I see are pictures found on the products web pages. Where is completed project? Where is test of the decibals of it?
Read the last sentence of the article. It's very clear that they didn't build it - rather, they just culled through product listings of items that had decibel quotes. When a "review" tells me that the finished product "should" produce less than 30 decibels, they've completely wasted my time. This was nothing more than the journalistic equivalent of a high school book report.
You apparently didn't read the whole article (typical slashdot rush to post before reading). The pictures are generated from numbers using a formula. Those formulas are easily standarized (just like encryption algorithms are now such as Blowfish, DES, etc.) so that passwrods pictures are standard as well.
No, I read it, but you didn't read my reply. The formulas could indeed be standardized, but as a sysadmin, why would I use the standard pictures? Wouldn't I want my site to be more secure by using non-standard pictures, so that people would be forced to use a different password than the ones they universally use - thus ensuring more security?
I've found that most of the people I know tend to use the same password or pin for everything they have - their e-mail password is the same as their AOL password is the same as their bank PIN and so on.
Using pictures would make this all but impossible, since every provider would (or at least, SHOULD) be using their own set of pictures.
While that's all good for security, I can't believe that it would make remembering your password any easier. Since the story is touting that as the chief benefit, I think they're going to have a really hard sell.
The article also reports that approximately 13% of network admins are unreachable. These are the same people believed to be responsible for leaving Windows NT/2000 machines serving web pages without any service packs or security patches. These admins surface from time to time when they respond to said spam.
Yeah, I actually suggested that a poster above use it, but that's not voice web navigation. It's just a voice-response system, basically, with their own customized back end. Don't get me wrong, voice recognition is great - I love being able to say my responses to my bank's voice system when I'm on my cell phone, but that doesn't mean it's good for surfing the web yet.
I'm shopping for a new LCD display, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of them have a USB hub. I wasn't quite so happy that many have junky built-in speakers, but of course you don't have to use 'em.
Cheap SMP. I'll take my dual 550 over a single 1 GHz any day of the week.
Swing by your local CompUSA. Dual CPU motherboards are now under $100, often well under $100. A quick check of Pricewatch shows that two P3-667's will cost you less than a single P3-1ghz, so the only thing stopping you from SMP heaven is - well, you.
Less patronizing Windows UI ("My Documents", "My Computer")
Well, I can't help you there. At least it's not Microsoft Bob.
I really got my hopes up as I read through it - I thought for once, I would see an article about The Future that didn't say the equivalent of, "This year is really the year when voice recognition will be everywhere." But noooo, they had to say that voice-driven web portals will be one of the Big Things.
What is it about voice recognition that suckers journalists in every time? Nobody seems to get it: voice recognition is here, it's been here for a long time, it's just that the accuracy isn't good enough. You can't walk up to somebody else's installation of ViaVoice and start dictating a letter without missing a few words in each paragraph at the bare minimum.
Now they're talking about voice navigation of web sites? Let me get this straight: half of the sites I visit are so poorly designed that it's hard to tell where to CLICK, let alone what I would say if the site was actually listening to my voice. And if I have to read instructions on how to surf a specific site, you can bet I won't bother reading it - or even clicking.
I didn't bother reading the rest of their Big Futuristic Ideas, but if they're the kind of journalists that include voice recognition, it's not the kind of article I want to read.
but still - a knee-jerk reaction of "This company is run by someone of religon xxx, so f**k them" should make people rather nervous, and certainly should not be moderated up.
You should have used "Jew" as an example instead of Catholic. That would have REALLY gotten people riled up, although it would have sent your moderation score rocketing in the other direction.
My New Hampshire business license didn't even break $50. I can only assume that's the same thing everyone here is talking about. =)
That's known as a DBA in Texas, and it's free here. It's the incorporation that we're talking about, so you can put Inc or Corp after your name, and you're free of most liabilities.
Remember, you don't have to incorperate in the state you live in.
That's correct, but you DO have to be licensed in any particular state that you do business in. Sure, you can incorporate in Delaware, but if you do business in Texas (meaning, you accept payments in Texas at a Texas PO box or address), your corporation has to be licensed in Texas as well.
Slashdot Mirror
There was at least one other company (MobileStar) providing 802.11b, but they went FC [f---edcompany.com] a few months back.
They got some angel capital from Voicestream and Starbucks, and they seem to be doing alright. I'm a subscriber, and I thought their service would drop off at any day, but it's doing well.
The Stepcharger product page says it's "Coming October 2001", and the site hasn't been updated in a while. Look closely at the product picture, and you'll see that the cords are tied together with not a twistie, not a ziptie, but good old electric tape. Methinks the product doesn't get quite as much use (or investor interest) as you might think.
...with a very unique (one-handed) means of inputting characters. It is too difficult to explain, just checkout the site.
/. editors, can't you at least say "you select characters using a jog wheel and three buttons"? How hard is that? And furthermore, it's not that far away from the method my Sony 300-CD changer uses to select letters. If you want to put in the title for a CD that doesn't have CD-Text on it, you use the jog wheel. Big deal.
If you can't explain an input device in the space of a Slashdot story, you're either a simpleton or the device is too complicated. In either case, I'm not interested. This Slashdot story writeup reminds me of a zillion business models that I read during the dot-com craze. "I can't explain it in just a paragraph, but it's going to be revolutionary, really. You have to see this." Whatever.
Come on,
Sure, the title might look similar, but the real purpose is a little more obvious when you use the right name. The Porna is the next-generation airplane entertainment device. And it works with your palm, if you get my drift.
The Visor and Springboard are a good product and would have carried them far into the future (just look at Palm).
Uhhh, I think that's kind of the point. Have you looked at Palm stock prices lately? They're around $4, down from a 52-week high of $29. Palm didn't make it that far into the future just riding on their hardware, and it's not looking good for them either. At least Handspring has an exit plan.
How are they cooling this new one? It's got a G4, a SuperDrive, a GeForce2 MX, and the power supply, all inside that base, and there's no airflow from the bottom to the top? (There's a cover over the bottom, where the ram chips and Airport card go.) I can't believe this thing isn't going to get toasty-hot. The Cube didn't have a fan, but it had an external power supply, so they were kinda cheating.
I'll be watching the whole deal just to see how they pull that off. If they can cool that thing without a fan, I'll be impressed.
You were close, but not quite right. The readers read just fine, it's the posters that don't read.
To the execs of VA Software, Inc. I implore you: Please give Mr. Katz the full support he deserves to become contender for next year.
I agree completely - instead of hiding his talent between moronic technical news posts, please give this man the soapbox he deserves. A man of Jon Katz's talents should have nothing less than his own web site, where he can publish more stories, more often, without having to compete with Slashdot's stories. And furthermore, this new site should have a complete lock on Katz's work, so that no other site can publish it. That's a moneymaker right there, VA, and the entire Slashdot community would stand up and applaud such a fine measure.
(Now let's see how many people moderate me down as a troll before they figure out what the real message is...)
"pretty immature when he was involved with a different staff member every month" I find this statement a bit unclear: was it immature on his side or was it immature on their side ?
:-D
Both, obviously. I don't understand what's unclear there?
It sounds like his immidiate bosses have never had a problem with him - they are most likely the ones to have done the hiring.
They are also the ones to do the firing. It's an extremely rare case when someone high up in the company fires someone despite what the employee's direct manager thinks. That's the whole thing about management: you're responsible to your direct manager, not two levels up. You're responsible for making your manager look good to those two levels up, but you're not responsible for making yourself look good to the upper management. There's only so much you can do.
It also sounds like you're falling for the same trick this employee is: "I like you, buddy, it's just my boss wishes that you would ____." Very old trick, almost as old as the good-cop-bad-cop routine. It's a great motivator, and it keeps the manager from looking bad and having to discipline directly.
Employers are not allowed by law to consider the hiring of a person based on age (or sex, religion, race or sexual preference for that matter). Although there are other reasons you mention that may cause his firing, the original author stated that age discrimination seemed to be the problem, and most likely, it is.
They're also not allowed to use it when making firing decisions, either, so what's your point? You're saying that they didn't do it when they hired him, but now they're doing it to fire him? Not in the course of just a year, I don't buy that.
If you think you have a case see a lawyer.
And furthermore, don't expect the lawyer to do anything free on your behalf. You're making good money, and so do these sharks in suits, and you're both worth it: be prepared to spent $500. Nobody takes this stuff on contingency, and if you're smart, you'll realize this is an investment in your future.
I found that if you confront them and show them how much you know and how confident you are at your job then they will learn to respect your level of knowledge.
Wrong-o. If you confront a senior manager and start a showdown, you will win the battle and lose the war, looking like a cocky jerk. I can't believe how many times I see junior people try that stunt. If you correct your boss in front of other people, you are NOT helping your case. You will look like an overconfident know-it-all with zero political experience, and your boss will not have you around the next time he/she is in an important conversation.
That sort of trick works great when you're "fixing computers on my time off", as you said, but as soon as you get into a political office, you will be targeted for destruction. Think about how you feel when somebody corrects you, and you were wrong. Now think about how you'd react if they were much younger, and you had all the power. You might think you'd be nice to them, but in reality, you'd squash 'em like a bug and bring in somebody more polite and savvy.
Start your journey by reading The Art Of War. I can't emphasize enough how important this is in corporate culture: look weak when you're strong, and look strong when you're weak. Nothing impresses bosses more than an employee who gets the war of corporate culture, and knows how to pick battles.
It has recently come to my attention that our IT Director is trying to either find a way to get rid of me or transfer me into a miserable job position, all because of my age. My Boss explained to me he thinks it has to do with a bit of jealousy. Everyone I work with is over the age of 30 and the IT director is in his mid 40's.
OK, you need to buckle down a little here and realize that it might be a perfectly legitimate complaint. They hired you knowing full well what your age was (unless you've got premature gray hair or you dress like Mr. Rogers), and you need to realize that they wouldn't have hired you if they didn't want you. Something has changed between the time when they hired you, and now. Odds are you've demonstrated something about your age that didn't show up in the interview. I don't know what it is in your case, but typical guesses would be that you've made some less-than-mature decisions.
I know plenty of people who have done the same thing. One example that comes to mind is a guy who started dating coworkers. A lot of them. And while it wasn't against company policy, it looked pretty immature when he was involved with a different staff member every month - and it wasn't the kind of mistake a 40-year old programmer would have made. The powers of the company didn't start disliking him because of his age: they disliked him because of the decisions he made.
Another thing you need to consider is the economy. Suddenly, employers have their pick of the best that's out there, and prices are dropping. You might have been a choice pick two or three years ago, but now there are better people out there with more experience, and the IT director might even have someone in mind.
Don't forget that personal connections mean everything. Your chief responsibility is to make sure your boss doesn't make any mistakes, and that he/she looks like a hero. As long as that's the case, your boss will always go to the mat for you, no matter how old/young you are, and nobody else in the company will be able to override them. You know what they say about trust: people who don't trust others, can't be trusted. If you come off as paranoid, nobody's going to put you in charge of stuff.
Has this system even been built? All I see are pictures found on the products web pages. Where is completed project? Where is test of the decibals of it?
Read the last sentence of the article. It's very clear that they didn't build it - rather, they just culled through product listings of items that had decibel quotes. When a "review" tells me that the finished product "should" produce less than 30 decibels, they've completely wasted my time. This was nothing more than the journalistic equivalent of a high school book report.
You apparently didn't read the whole article (typical slashdot rush to post before reading). The pictures are generated from numbers using a formula. Those formulas are easily standarized (just like encryption algorithms are now such as Blowfish, DES, etc.) so that passwrods pictures are standard as well.
No, I read it, but you didn't read my reply. The formulas could indeed be standardized, but as a sysadmin, why would I use the standard pictures? Wouldn't I want my site to be more secure by using non-standard pictures, so that people would be forced to use a different password than the ones they universally use - thus ensuring more security?
I've found that most of the people I know tend to use the same password or pin for everything they have - their e-mail password is the same as their AOL password is the same as their bank PIN and so on.
Using pictures would make this all but impossible, since every provider would (or at least, SHOULD) be using their own set of pictures.
While that's all good for security, I can't believe that it would make remembering your password any easier. Since the story is touting that as the chief benefit, I think they're going to have a really hard sell.
The article also reports that approximately 13% of network admins are unreachable. These are the same people believed to be responsible for leaving Windows NT/2000 machines serving web pages without any service packs or security patches. These admins surface from time to time when they respond to said spam.
Have you tried the voice portal - tellme?
Yeah, I actually suggested that a poster above use it, but that's not voice web navigation. It's just a voice-response system, basically, with their own customized back end. Don't get me wrong, voice recognition is great - I love being able to say my responses to my bank's voice system when I'm on my cell phone, but that doesn't mean it's good for surfing the web yet.
You should try TellMe. It's a free service that does news, stock quotes, sports scores, gets taxis, and more.
Bring back those monitors-with-built-in-USB-hubs.
I'm shopping for a new LCD display, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of them have a USB hub. I wasn't quite so happy that many have junky built-in speakers, but of course you don't have to use 'em.
Cheap SMP. I'll take my dual 550 over a single 1 GHz any day of the week.
Swing by your local CompUSA. Dual CPU motherboards are now under $100, often well under $100. A quick check of Pricewatch shows that two P3-667's will cost you less than a single P3-1ghz, so the only thing stopping you from SMP heaven is - well, you.
Less patronizing Windows UI ("My Documents", "My Computer")
Well, I can't help you there. At least it's not Microsoft Bob.
I really got my hopes up as I read through it - I thought for once, I would see an article about The Future that didn't say the equivalent of, "This year is really the year when voice recognition will be everywhere." But noooo, they had to say that voice-driven web portals will be one of the Big Things.
What is it about voice recognition that suckers journalists in every time? Nobody seems to get it: voice recognition is here, it's been here for a long time, it's just that the accuracy isn't good enough. You can't walk up to somebody else's installation of ViaVoice and start dictating a letter without missing a few words in each paragraph at the bare minimum.
Now they're talking about voice navigation of web sites? Let me get this straight: half of the sites I visit are so poorly designed that it's hard to tell where to CLICK, let alone what I would say if the site was actually listening to my voice. And if I have to read instructions on how to surf a specific site, you can bet I won't bother reading it - or even clicking.
I didn't bother reading the rest of their Big Futuristic Ideas, but if they're the kind of journalists that include voice recognition, it's not the kind of article I want to read.
but still - a knee-jerk reaction of "This company is run by someone of religon xxx, so f**k them" should make people rather nervous, and certainly should not be moderated up.
You should have used "Jew" as an example instead of Catholic. That would have REALLY gotten people riled up, although it would have sent your moderation score rocketing in the other direction.
My New Hampshire business license didn't even break $50. I can only assume that's the same thing everyone here is talking about. =)
That's known as a DBA in Texas, and it's free here. It's the incorporation that we're talking about, so you can put Inc or Corp after your name, and you're free of most liabilities.
Remember, you don't have to incorperate in the state you live in.
That's correct, but you DO have to be licensed in any particular state that you do business in. Sure, you can incorporate in Delaware, but if you do business in Texas (meaning, you accept payments in Texas at a Texas PO box or address), your corporation has to be licensed in Texas as well.