Hi, I can't find how to send you a message or email privately, so here goes... I lived in Melbourne for 4.5 years (Carlton and Kew) and am now a recruiter in Canada. I work for Hays in Calgary. Shoot me an email at matthew at area709 dot com - I've been through the whole gamut (brought my Aussie gf with me, got her PR, found her a job, etc etc) and work in recruitment so can probably steer you in the right direction in exchange for a pack of tim-tams on your arrival.:)
This is where I think there's a crisis of communication with the American people. What percentage of everyday Americans of voting age really have their head around what's going on? Once the gov't has this kind of control with no oversight or audit trail, how can anyone reasonably expect it *won't* be used improperly? It seems by the time people figure out what's going on in numbers enough to do anything about it, the opportunity for bringing about change will have come and gone. Which is a familiar refrain, sadly.
and yep, read your post, thought it was great. slide me one a them bonus points.:)
Just because you haven't experienced something, that doesn't mean that the phenomenon doesn't exist. There are certain pieces of music that a statistically significant number of people would rather hear played from vinyl via a proper stylus, cart and preamp than from a 16/44.1k CD through a consumer-grade DA. I wish it weren't true - vinyl is expensive and delicate. But, alas, it is.
The problem actually runs much deeper than that. Those of us who know how the net works and have seen the fossilised remains of our online actions during the latter part of the previous century wash up on more recent shores know only too well that we've likely already participated in enough silliness to effectively prevent us from seeking political office, lest we have past indiscretions show up in our faces at the worst possible time - which is of course when they always turn up.
Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all admitted (or at least lied poorly about, which is the same thing really) past indiscretions, but they were largely able to control when the news of those indiscretions came out. Tomorrow's politicians know they won't be so lucky. Unless the trend is reversed, our children will be forced to choose from candidates with completely sterilised white-bread virgin-till-marriage always-feed-the-meter coke-is-a-beverage pasts. Which, like it or not, is not the sort of past from which a real leader comes.
Google's new shorter-term memory is only a start. What other steps should be taken? Dunno. Which is why most of my most entertaining moments usually end with 'whoops, guess I won't be getting into politics now!' (My educational background is in political science, which makes the joke passably humourous. Or so I tell myself.)
I think you're missing a lot of the point here. The UN is non-democratic insofar as your country's delegate was not DIRECTLY elected by you, but how many americans voted for Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell? (hint - none, they were appointed). UN delegations are similarly appointed by the governments they represent. In many countries (ie Canada, Australia, the UK) the Prime Ministers are not elected by the people at all - and yet the people of those countries don't seem to consider their leadership undemocratically elected! (insert obligatory dubya joke here)
As for the rest of what you're saying regarding how a number of regimes want to block and censor the internet, I think you've been watching too much fox news. The vast majority of UN members want the internet to be as free and as accessible as possible because it is such a catalyst for economic growth. The views of Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia regarding internet censorship are definitely in the minority.
Ok - this is a *big* deal. Anyone who's surfed Ebay looking for a $150USD DC BBA knows that they're horrifically overvalued for what they are - a bit of plastic and an Realtek (8139?) ethernet chip. I wonder what other companies might think of re-tooling up their production lines in light of the fact that their discontinued products sellon the used market for well over the original MSRP? (Roland TB-303, anyone?)
Thats the most ignorant web page i have ever seen. Art project? Pagemill for the VIC20 could have made something nicer... I was hoping for some screenshots - seeing how quake hasn't been installed on my computer since right said fred was topping the dance charts.
In addition: Check out this. [google.com]. It's google's beta of their answer service. Ask a question, and Pay for the answer. Kinda cool if you have a complex or hard to find problem.
Am I the only one that's rather impressed by this? The quality and depth of some of the answers provided to some pretty straightforward or simple questions is remarkable.
EG, for $20, you can ask "abc television had a story on a lady in cambodia who set up a orphinage and her relationship with a cambodian pilot" and get this. Or, for two bucks, you can ask why your site isn't listed on google and they'll tell you. Lastly, if you're wondering how to help American businesses expand into Romania, for $30 you can find out.
The best part is that they even give you the search terms they used on google, as well as any other resources they used. For those of us that have been using search engines since Altavista was good, feeding a search engine a balanced diet is pretty straight forward - but if you've seen someone new to the net try to work a search engine, you can understand how useful this is - the whole "teach a man to fish" bit, I suppose.
obligatory link to omegapunx's google-cached website is here
the best entry is certainly May 31st, when this gem appeared:
It seems to me that the Americans are actually the terrorists. I would elaborate right now but I am too lazy to type that much right now. 9:30PM: I had some fun with smoke bombs. I lit like 5 in my back yard and there was this pretty big smoke could going into my front yard. Sense it looked so cool I searched for some more smoke bombs, and all I could find was like 3. But then I lit them in the feild and that was cool. There was this cloud of blue smoke like 4 and a half feet from the ground. It was soo cool.
Ok, so here I am, doing my PhD in Australia. It is exceedingly difficult to find *good* books in my area of study at reasonable prices. Buying a $70 book to read it in a day and find half of it useless garbage, as I did yesterday, is *very* frustrating, and rough on a student's budget. It's also frustrating to spend a month harassing the interlibrary loan clerk at the Uni library to try to track down a book that ONLY the University of Waggawaggabernong has only to hear "oh sorry, they won't loan that one out!".
I've got more than a few books - books I'll be using to draft my "original contribution to knowledge" - that, were it not for centralized used-book databases like amazon.com, I would never have found.
Amazon can make their little profit on used books and referrals - that's honest money to me. They (and others that do the same thing) provide a mechanism to share information (real, print information - there's very few good books on the net) that provides a signficant net benefit, and one that will only grow more beneficial as more academic/intellectual/literate types take advantage of it.
Nice to see ecommerce used for something other than consume-consume-consume. Even e-bay doesn't seem like recycling - well ok, not to me at least, I only seem to be able to buy stuff from it! (/me looks guiltily around at numerous silly ebay purchases)
Quite an interesting article - for me, my family was never much into TV, but I always had friends whose families were. I still have memories of seeing an entire family gathered around a TV, staring blankly into it as Jeopardy or The Price Is Right would blare into their skulls... zero conversation, dinner plates on their laps... yikes.
I routinely go without TV - I just moved to a new country in August and only plugged my TV in Sept. 11th at the urgent insisting of a friend's IM.
Wondering if anyone else has comments or similar preferences, for I never thought about it before I read this article - I have zero interest in "pre-produced" TV shows. Virtually everything I watch is either live, (ie the news), or more commonly what I would call non-produced or underproduced footage: auto and bike racing on Speedvision, Cops, America's most Inbred Drunk Drivers, When Ex-Girlfriends Attack, TLC / Disco channel etc etc...
Of course for the amount of time I spent online... I'm almost tempted to read that Katz article... no wait somebody slap me.
When I turn my Thinkpad on, it gives me a nice big IBM logo. What if one could replace that logo with a bitmap of some sort, that was password protected like BIOS passwords are? It could say "property of, gimme the thing back, etc etc" and would be completely impenetrable.
The whole phone-home thing seems logical, but for those of us who use OS's that can't be accessed without a password (ie XP/WinNT/Win2k, assuming it's set up properly) the machine is going to NEED a reformat/reinstall before it's been swiped anyways. By the time someone got into my OS (so that a dialer could work) they would need my user pwd, which hopefully they wouldn't have.
It would also be nice to see a machine *properly* support secure smartcards so that the machine would be useless (except for parts, no way around that) without it.
Of course, I like the mini-tower-case-on-the-porch-stuffed-with-C4-and-a -remote-detonator as well.
Hmm... Whenever I hear of self-education in the sciences I am reminded of that wonderful "lay physicist" Ralph Rene who managed to convince himself that .
Calculus, chemistry, music....all can be learned to any degree on your own.
With who checking your work? With what equipment? Am I really going to build a particle accelerator or electron microscope out of old washing machine parts?
Until this point, I have tried to stay out of the active spam-hunting role, as it seems to be an awful lot of time and energy expelled in the wrong direction.
That said, I got all my spams in threes this morning, and they were all individually addressed to me (rather than BCC'd), which meant I actually had to look at them. What's worse is that all three of the addresses that they were sent to were dummy addresses on my domain, used only once, in this article!
Nice to see that the spam spiders are hitting/. articles on spam!!:(
So yes, today I think I'm quite willing to get on board the spam battle. It seems that having an unmunged email address appear on/. even ONCE is enough to get it picked up and raped.
First of all, for all of you asking "why Kazaa?", in case its not obvious yes, Kazaa is Dutch, not American. So logically it would be a court in the Netherlands that has to go after it. Napster, as most know, is as American as long stick bombing and apple pie. So it was pursued in an American court.
What is interesting in all of this is the international ramifications. What's to stop a file-swapping service from setting up in a small, easily-influenced island nation with lax laws on such things? Antigua and Barbuda, in the Caribbean, comes to mind (mostly because im in it at the moment) - low/non-existant taxes, a dedicated free trade zone, a FAT pipe back to the US and Europe, (the much-loved Casino-On-Net is here, for example), and a judicial system that is, well, not particularly likely to push through complex technology-based cases anytime soon. With enough other "legitimate" US-linked technology companies here (such as the casinos), any threat to simply unplug the island would be met with serious lobbying and financial pressure... And thus such companies as Kazaa would be in a more solid position to "sell out" - as is the logical outcome for these services: get big, get threatened, then sell out to a record company (Napster, MP3.com, et al).
As an interesting note, Antigua is building a call center that will house 800+ employees, with the express purpose of delivering outgoing telemarketing to the US and Canada. It's billed here as a wonderful project to provide "high tech" employment (really), with no thought given to how telemarketing is seen by Americans/Canadians. It will be very interesting to see how US telemarketing laws are applied to incoming international calls.
Are these file sharing services just going to hopscotch around the globe, then?
That X10 thing, I see (after unblocking the entire x10.com domain from my machine) is a simple wireless transmitter, something like a cordless baby monitor with a remote control. It purports to be "digital" (the same as those headphones that say "digital ready" on them at radio shack - try running a raw PCM stream into em and watch what happens) where really all it is is a radio transmitter and a remote control that plugs into your sound card and requires (undoubtedly silly) software (undoubtedly windoze only) to work. The SliMP3 is a *TOTALLY* different thing. Whoever modded this up obviously failed to pay any attention whatsoever to what either product is. How does the SliMP3 mean "you have to have the receiver and whatever you're snarfing the mp3s from in unobstructed view from one other" (whatever that means?!!?)? It's ethernet. Ethernet is actually able to go thru walls and whatnot... Colour me confused.
Is it just me or is slashdot slowly turning into bugtraq here? Do we really need to hear about every single fscking Windows bug and exploit found?
It wouldn't bother me so much except that there are plenty of interesting stories and provocative "Ask Slashdot" questions submitted regularly that are arbitrarily discarded. I know, because I've submitted a number and have had them very quickly rejected (altho I did get one, my first, accepted - gave me the false hope that there's a purpose in going to great length to research a topic, event or issue and submit it as a story).
Of course, I don't pay for/. so I suppose I shouldn't complain - on the whole it is enjoyable to read and participate in. I just find it hard to believe that the potential story pipeline/queue is really full of nothing more than "new version of [insert *nix variant here] available, which you already know if you use it!" and "M$ Software vulnerability found - who'da thunkit?".
A lot of the "consumer" applications that are being kicked around would probably be served just as well, for a LOT less $$, by SRAM and a watch-battery to back it up. Now I'm no engineer but if one really wanted a gig or more of cheap storage, why not take a gig of SRAM and back it up with a battery? Granted, battery backup is not forever (5 yr max?), but given the price of ram, I would think you could even make the thing completely redundant internally (two batteries and banks of SRAM that compare against each other RAID style)... I would expect the pressure on battery technology and SRAM pricing to move this idea in the direction of workable long before mega-storage write-once PROMs take off. I can't imagine these things being a replacement for CDRs or Floppys or much other than, err, low-storage PROMs.
Even those silly USB Keychains could use such a technique. 2x512MB DIMMs plus a lion or nimh battery to back it up (recharge off the USB bus) would be ~$100. Of course, I may be totally out to lunch here...
Look.ca has been doing it in Canada for some time, although they've been in rough shape financially - perhaps they're out of business already?
At any rate there seems to be no shortage of 'em in Canada. I can't imagine this is the first in the US, either.
Now, in order to turn this thread / article into something other than another "groan/. is posting old news waaah waaah" I will posit this:
How long until "real" wireless internet is a reality? I mean not point-this-at-the-antenna-a-block-away, but real iridium-style satellite-driven internet? Those of us stuck on dialup in the middle of nowhere want to know!:)
Unsolicited mass emails are never going to go away 100%. It frustrates me that so much time and energy and print/webspace is given to studies and articles that don't include what I would think to be the most important indicator of spam's level of infiltration - Signal to Noise Ratio. Sure, the "average" user gets xxx Spam per day/year/minute, but on what amount of traffic? If the "average" user gets 1600 spam out of 1700 emails, that's obviously very bad, but 1600 on 170,000 emails a year is a lot better. The poster's comment about being on the wrong side of the bell curve doesn't neccesarily mean he's getting more spam than most people as a ratio of spam-to-legit-emails. I would be most interested in studies that analyze the SNR, for in doing so I think we'll see (even more clearly!!) that there is indeed a spam problem that must be dealt with through enforceable legislation and/or international agreements.
As a side note, I have taken to giving out different email addresses for every place I'm asked for one, and using a "catch-all" from my domain, for example my email address here is slashdot@theoretica.net, but it might be goatpornmailinglist@theoretica.net or vic20overclockerslist@theoretica.net for other places. That way not only can I see what spammers got my email address from where, but I can also block a given address once its been overcome with spam - you know those places where you are asked for an email address and you just *know* you are going to get spammed senseless for providing it, but you must to get a login or pwd or whatever?
I also have OE move everything that's been BCC'd to me into a spam folder, mark it as read, and review it once a week.
According to this story Micron's not exactly picking the money trees either.
One interesting tidbit from that article to give you an idea just how much the DRAM market has turned - Micron recorded a record $625-million loss for its entire 2001 fiscal year, which came after a record $1.5 billion profit in fiscal 2000.
So I wonder if it's not that Toshiba wasn't doing ok (relatively speaking) but rather that they didn't have the pockets (or desire) to hang in there to watch it turn back (as one would expect it to in time).
Slashdot Mirror
Hi, I can't find how to send you a message or email privately, so here goes... I lived in Melbourne for 4.5 years (Carlton and Kew) and am now a recruiter in Canada. I work for Hays in Calgary. Shoot me an email at matthew at area709 dot com - I've been through the whole gamut (brought my Aussie gf with me, got her PR, found her a job, etc etc) and work in recruitment so can probably steer you in the right direction in exchange for a pack of tim-tams on your arrival. :)
This is where I think there's a crisis of communication with the American people. What percentage of everyday Americans of voting age really have their head around what's going on? Once the gov't has this kind of control with no oversight or audit trail, how can anyone reasonably expect it *won't* be used improperly? It seems by the time people figure out what's going on in numbers enough to do anything about it, the opportunity for bringing about change will have come and gone. Which is a familiar refrain, sadly.
:)
and yep, read your post, thought it was great. slide me one a them bonus points.
Just because you haven't experienced something, that doesn't mean that the phenomenon doesn't exist. There are certain pieces of music that a statistically significant number of people would rather hear played from vinyl via a proper stylus, cart and preamp than from a 16/44.1k CD through a consumer-grade DA. I wish it weren't true - vinyl is expensive and delicate. But, alas, it is.
The problem actually runs much deeper than that. Those of us who know how the net works and have seen the fossilised remains of our online actions during the latter part of the previous century wash up on more recent shores know only too well that we've likely already participated in enough silliness to effectively prevent us from seeking political office, lest we have past indiscretions show up in our faces at the worst possible time - which is of course when they always turn up.
Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all admitted (or at least lied poorly about, which is the same thing really) past indiscretions, but they were largely able to control when the news of those indiscretions came out. Tomorrow's politicians know they won't be so lucky. Unless the trend is reversed, our children will be forced to choose from candidates with completely sterilised white-bread virgin-till-marriage always-feed-the-meter coke-is-a-beverage pasts. Which, like it or not, is not the sort of past from which a real leader comes.
Google's new shorter-term memory is only a start. What other steps should be taken? Dunno. Which is why most of my most entertaining moments usually end with 'whoops, guess I won't be getting into politics now!' (My educational background is in political science, which makes the joke passably humourous. Or so I tell myself.)
I think you're missing a lot of the point here. The UN is non-democratic insofar as your country's delegate was not DIRECTLY elected by you, but how many americans voted for Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell? (hint - none, they were appointed). UN delegations are similarly appointed by the governments they represent. In many countries (ie Canada, Australia, the UK) the Prime Ministers are not elected by the people at all - and yet the people of those countries don't seem to consider their leadership undemocratically elected! (insert obligatory dubya joke here)
As for the rest of what you're saying regarding how a number of regimes want to block and censor the internet, I think you've been watching too much fox news. The vast majority of UN members want the internet to be as free and as accessible as possible because it is such a catalyst for economic growth. The views of Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia regarding internet censorship are definitely in the minority.
Ok - this is a *big* deal. Anyone who's surfed Ebay looking for a $150USD DC BBA knows that they're horrifically overvalued for what they are - a bit of plastic and an Realtek (8139?) ethernet chip. I wonder what other companies might think of re-tooling up their production lines in light of the fact that their discontinued products sellon the used market for well over the original MSRP? (Roland TB-303, anyone?)
Thats the most ignorant web page i have ever seen. Art project? Pagemill for the VIC20 could have made something nicer... I was hoping for some screenshots - seeing how quake hasn't been installed on my computer since right said fred was topping the dance charts.
In addition: Check out this. [google.com]. It's google's beta of their answer service. Ask a question, and Pay for the answer. Kinda cool if you have a complex or hard to find problem.
Am I the only one that's rather impressed by this? The quality and depth of some of the answers provided to some pretty straightforward or simple questions is remarkable.
EG, for $20, you can ask "abc television had a story on a lady in cambodia who set up a orphinage and her relationship with a cambodian pilot" and get this. Or, for two bucks, you can ask why your site isn't listed on google and they'll tell you. Lastly, if you're wondering how to help American businesses expand into Romania, for $30 you can find out.
The best part is that they even give you the search terms they used on google, as well as any other resources they used. For those of us that have been using search engines since Altavista was good, feeding a search engine a balanced diet is pretty straight forward - but if you've seen someone new to the net try to work a search engine, you can understand how useful this is - the whole "teach a man to fish" bit, I suppose.
Wow.
obligatory link to omegapunx's google-cached website is here
the best entry is certainly May 31st, when this gem appeared:
It seems to me that the Americans are actually the terrorists. I would elaborate right now but I am too lazy to type that much right now.
9:30PM: I had some fun with smoke bombs. I lit like 5 in my back yard and there was this pretty big smoke could going into my front yard. Sense it looked so cool I searched for some more smoke bombs, and all I could find was like 3. But then I lit them in the feild and that was cool. There was this cloud of blue smoke like 4 and a half feet from the ground. It was soo cool.
Am I the only one waiting for Mr. Hall (aka Moby) to make an appearance on Slashdot in his defence, as per his participation in the "Moby sucks because he uses DAT backup for his live shows" on USENET in 1993. (has it been that long? /me checks watch)
...beyond helping us consume more.
Ok, so here I am, doing my PhD in Australia. It is exceedingly difficult to find *good* books in my area of study at reasonable prices. Buying a $70 book to read it in a day and find half of it useless garbage, as I did yesterday, is *very* frustrating, and rough on a student's budget. It's also frustrating to spend a month harassing the interlibrary loan clerk at the Uni library to try to track down a book that ONLY the University of Waggawaggabernong has only to hear "oh sorry, they won't loan that one out!".
I've got more than a few books - books I'll be using to draft my "original contribution to knowledge" - that, were it not for centralized used-book databases like amazon.com, I would never have found.
Amazon can make their little profit on used books and referrals - that's honest money to me. They (and others that do the same thing) provide a mechanism to share information (real, print information - there's very few good books on the net) that provides a signficant net benefit, and one that will only grow more beneficial as more academic/intellectual/literate types take advantage of it.
Nice to see ecommerce used for something other than consume-consume-consume. Even e-bay doesn't seem like recycling - well ok, not to me at least, I only seem to be able to buy stuff from it! (/me looks guiltily around at numerous silly ebay purchases)
Quite an interesting article - for me, my family was never much into TV, but I always had friends whose families were. I still have memories of seeing an entire family gathered around a TV, staring blankly into it as Jeopardy or The Price Is Right would blare into their skulls... zero conversation, dinner plates on their laps... yikes.
I routinely go without TV - I just moved to a new country in August and only plugged my TV in Sept. 11th at the urgent insisting of a friend's IM.
Wondering if anyone else has comments or similar preferences, for I never thought about it before I read this article - I have zero interest in "pre-produced" TV shows. Virtually everything I watch is either live, (ie the news), or more commonly what I would call non-produced or underproduced footage: auto and bike racing on Speedvision, Cops, America's most Inbred Drunk Drivers, When Ex-Girlfriends Attack, TLC / Disco channel etc etc...
Of course for the amount of time I spent online... I'm almost tempted to read that Katz article... no wait somebody slap me.
.
I was thinking about this yesterday, actually.
a -remote-detonator as well.
When I turn my Thinkpad on, it gives me a nice big IBM logo. What if one could replace that logo with a bitmap of some sort, that was password protected like BIOS passwords are? It could say "property of, gimme the thing back, etc etc" and would be completely impenetrable.
The whole phone-home thing seems logical, but for those of us who use OS's that can't be accessed without a password (ie XP/WinNT/Win2k, assuming it's set up properly) the machine is going to NEED a reformat/reinstall before it's been swiped anyways. By the time someone got into my OS (so that a dialer could work) they would need my user pwd, which hopefully they wouldn't have.
It would also be nice to see a machine *properly* support secure smartcards so that the machine would be useless (except for parts, no way around that) without it.
Of course, I like the mini-tower-case-on-the-porch-stuffed-with-C4-and-
-
Hmmm, sounds rather like that last game attempt of his, doesn't it?
Ahh, my eyes must be going... I read that subject line as High Speed Pornography... :o
Hmm... Whenever I hear of self-education in the sciences I am reminded of that wonderful "lay physicist" Ralph Rene who managed to convince himself that .
Calculus, chemistry, music....all can be learned to any degree on your own.
With who checking your work? With what equipment? Am I really going to build a particle accelerator or electron microscope out of old washing machine parts?
Until this point, I have tried to stay out of the active spam-hunting role, as it seems to be an awful lot of time and energy expelled in the wrong direction.
/. articles on spam!! :(
/. even ONCE is enough to get it picked up and raped.
That said, I got all my spams in threes this morning, and they were all individually addressed to me (rather than BCC'd), which meant I actually had to look at them. What's worse is that all three of the addresses that they were sent to were dummy addresses on my domain, used only once, in this article!
Nice to see that the spam spiders are hitting
So yes, today I think I'm quite willing to get on board the spam battle. It seems that having an unmunged email address appear on
Hmm, that Willson boy seems to be quite well-informed... LOL...
I'm surprised I didn't see an essay on how NASA faked the moon landings on there.
First of all, for all of you asking "why Kazaa?", in case its not obvious yes, Kazaa is Dutch, not American. So logically it would be a court in the Netherlands that has to go after it. Napster, as most know, is as American as long stick bombing and apple pie. So it was pursued in an American court.
What is interesting in all of this is the international ramifications. What's to stop a file-swapping service from setting up in a small, easily-influenced island nation with lax laws on such things? Antigua and Barbuda, in the Caribbean, comes to mind (mostly because im in it at the moment) - low/non-existant taxes, a dedicated free trade zone, a FAT pipe back to the US and Europe, (the much-loved Casino-On-Net is here, for example), and a judicial system that is, well, not particularly likely to push through complex technology-based cases anytime soon. With enough other "legitimate" US-linked technology companies here (such as the casinos), any threat to simply unplug the island would be met with serious lobbying and financial pressure... And thus such companies as Kazaa would be in a more solid position to "sell out" - as is the logical outcome for these services: get big, get threatened, then sell out to a record company (Napster, MP3.com, et al).
As an interesting note, Antigua is building a call center that will house 800+ employees, with the express purpose of delivering outgoing telemarketing to the US and Canada. It's billed here as a wonderful project to provide "high tech" employment (really), with no thought given to how telemarketing is seen by Americans/Canadians. It will be very interesting to see how US telemarketing laws are applied to incoming international calls.
Are these file sharing services just going to hopscotch around the globe, then?
Uhh did you actually read about the SliMP3?
That X10 thing, I see (after unblocking the entire x10.com domain from my machine) is a simple wireless transmitter, something like a cordless baby monitor with a remote control. It purports to be "digital" (the same as those headphones that say "digital ready" on them at radio shack - try running a raw PCM stream into em and watch what happens) where really all it is is a radio transmitter and a remote control that plugs into your sound card and requires (undoubtedly silly) software (undoubtedly windoze only) to work. The SliMP3 is a *TOTALLY* different thing. Whoever modded this up obviously failed to pay any attention whatsoever to what either product is. How does the SliMP3 mean "you have to have the receiver and whatever you're snarfing the mp3s from in unobstructed view from one other" (whatever that means?!!?)? It's ethernet. Ethernet is actually able to go thru walls and whatnot... Colour me confused.
Is it just me or is slashdot slowly turning into bugtraq here? Do we really need to hear about every single fscking Windows bug and exploit found?
/. so I suppose I shouldn't complain - on the whole it is enjoyable to read and participate in. I just find it hard to believe that the potential story pipeline/queue is really full of nothing more than "new version of [insert *nix variant here] available, which you already know if you use it!" and "M$ Software vulnerability found - who'da thunkit?".
It wouldn't bother me so much except that there are plenty of interesting stories and provocative "Ask Slashdot" questions submitted regularly that are arbitrarily discarded. I know, because I've submitted a number and have had them very quickly rejected (altho I did get one, my first, accepted - gave me the false hope that there's a purpose in going to great length to research a topic, event or issue and submit it as a story).
Of course, I don't pay for
A lot of the "consumer" applications that are being kicked around would probably be served just as well, for a LOT less $$, by SRAM and a watch-battery to back it up. Now I'm no engineer but if one really wanted a gig or more of cheap storage, why not take a gig of SRAM and back it up with a battery? Granted, battery backup is not forever (5 yr max?), but given the price of ram, I would think you could even make the thing completely redundant internally (two batteries and banks of SRAM that compare against each other RAID style)... I would expect the pressure on battery technology and SRAM pricing to move this idea in the direction of workable long before mega-storage write-once PROMs take off. I can't imagine these things being a replacement for CDRs or Floppys or much other than, err, low-storage PROMs.
Even those silly USB Keychains could use such a technique. 2x512MB DIMMs plus a lion or nimh battery to back it up (recharge off the USB bus) would be ~$100. Of course, I may be totally out to lunch here...
shortrange wireless ISPs are old news, I thought?
/. is posting old news waaah waaah" I will posit this:
:)
Look.ca has been doing it in Canada for some time, although they've been in rough shape financially - perhaps they're out of business already?
At any rate there seems to be no shortage of 'em in Canada. I can't imagine this is the first in the US, either.
Now, in order to turn this thread / article into something other than another "groan
How long until "real" wireless internet is a reality? I mean not point-this-at-the-antenna-a-block-away, but real iridium-style satellite-driven internet? Those of us stuck on dialup in the middle of nowhere want to know!
Unsolicited mass emails are never going to go away 100%. It frustrates me that so much time and energy and print/webspace is given to studies and articles that don't include what I would think to be the most important indicator of spam's level of infiltration - Signal to Noise Ratio. Sure, the "average" user gets xxx Spam per day/year/minute, but on what amount of traffic? If the "average" user gets 1600 spam out of 1700 emails, that's obviously very bad, but 1600 on 170,000 emails a year is a lot better. The poster's comment about being on the wrong side of the bell curve doesn't neccesarily mean he's getting more spam than most people as a ratio of spam-to-legit-emails. I would be most interested in studies that analyze the SNR, for in doing so I think we'll see (even more clearly!!) that there is indeed a spam problem that must be dealt with through enforceable legislation and/or international agreements.
As a side note, I have taken to giving out different email addresses for every place I'm asked for one, and using a "catch-all" from my domain, for example my email address here is slashdot@theoretica.net, but it might be goatpornmailinglist@theoretica.net or vic20overclockerslist@theoretica.net for other places. That way not only can I see what spammers got my email address from where, but I can also block a given address once its been overcome with spam - you know those places where you are asked for an email address and you just *know* you are going to get spammed senseless for providing it, but you must to get a login or pwd or whatever?
I also have OE move everything that's been BCC'd to me into a spam folder, mark it as read, and review it once a week.
According to this story Micron's not exactly picking the money trees either.
One interesting tidbit from that article to give you an idea just how much the DRAM market has turned - Micron recorded a record $625-million loss for its entire 2001 fiscal year, which came after a record $1.5 billion profit in fiscal 2000.
So I wonder if it's not that Toshiba wasn't doing ok (relatively speaking) but rather that they didn't have the pockets (or desire) to hang in there to watch it turn back (as one would expect it to in time).