Hah. That looks like the shipment I sent to myself when moving from southern California to one of the islands off the coast of Washington. I received my stereo speakers (big ones, 1.5'sqX3'h) broken in half, inside a box with all four corners blown out and the packing missing. Really. I never would have found out what happened, except that it was a small community, and I had a couple of friends who worked for UPS there. They'd actually dropped the box off of the side door of the airplane, hitting the rear edge of the loader, then landing on the tarmac.
But you want to know what the real mistake was? No insurance. No insurance means that the carrier has no liability and no incentive to protect the package. Frankly, if it falls out of the airplane over the ocean, they couldn't care less -- they have already received payment, and anything after that point is a loss. Unless you have insurance.
Judging from the pictures, they spent some extra time on your stuff. Perhaps they chocked the wheels on the 737 with your box?
I dunno about you, but I haven't lost much by betting that technology development ventures are usually lazy, sloppy, and cheap. Experience reinforces that view on a very regular basis. MAYBE they thought up something revolutionary, and I'd love to see it if they did. But it would be foolish to assume that this virtual keyboard (or any other whiz-bang doodad) is revolutionary.
Analyzing electrical impulses in my hand muscles? Riiight. Do you have any clue about the variability that would be involved in producing usable positional data and predicting intended movement? Would it work if I was sweaty? Agitated? Please. It'd be far easier to go with mechanical position measurement, and do the rest in software. Without knowing more about the device, the simplest answer would be a good bet. (Thank you, Occam.) As I said before, if they've done a good job of writing continually-adaptive algorithms, then I might be interested. But I won't hold my breath.
A virtual keyboard based on finger movement would have to rely on a software learning mechanism that tuned itself to your physical idiosyncracies. I mean, without a physical keyboard to hunt and peck on, the little finger of your left hand is going to move a different distance between the imaginary A and Q keys than your right index finger is going to move betwen the J and U keys. A sufficiently good learning mechanism would probably account for tuning itself to your hand movements continuously, so that your error rate would go down even as your typing patterns shifted over time. (Of course, this results in equipment with function profiles in software that make it unusable by anyone else.)
Or not.
More likely, you will be the part of the equation that conforms to the constraints of the software. You will have to learn how to be very consistent in your finger movements, without a physical keyboard to guide you. After a training period (just as you would do for voice recognition software), you would have to be quite consistent, even in different positions, desk heights, and times of day (tired or not). This screams "RSI" to me. Repetitive motion in a guided environment is one thing, but having to make precise repetitive motions in free air or against a flat object that provides no feedback would mightily increase the stress put on your fingers.
Thanks, but I already have a surgery scar on one wrist that makes people think I tried to off myself, I don't care to repeat the experience. I'll wait until the Senseboard software is well-reviewed and proven to be continuously adaptive. (Then I'll have an excuse for wearing funny gloves and dark glasses with a piece of wire hanging off them, while playing pocket pool on the bus: "Oh no, Miss, I have a proposal due this afternoon...")
Anon-ftp is easier to relay, use remotely, or use from a location that otherwise filters gnutella or other napster-ish traffic but does not pose a trace hazard.
Besides, ftp draws less fire. Ftp depends much more on the human being to find/judge/navigate the servers and content in ways that make it more difficult for corporate RIAA DoS'ers to deal with. Not that couldn't; but chances are they'll just keep gunning for the high-profile swap tools/communities.
Hrm. I don't think they mean DoS in terms of swamping trading communities with requests. And I don't think we should talk about this in the future tense; it's happening now. A few weeks ago, I fired up Limewire and spent some time poking around in a couple of communities.
What did I find? Searching for songs from certain artists/labels returned *hundreds* of hits on essentially identical audio files with slight filename changes and incrementally varied byte sizes. Any attempt to download the songs would be successful -- until the server killed the session at precisely 80%.
Then I noticed that *all* of the files were being hosted on three IP's. A quick look showed the IPs in a range belonging to a major commercial hosting operation. Nice. A honeypot of sorts. And of course, they have my home IP (fixed) logged as requesting the same songs over and over until the lightbulb went off over my head.
Yah, some bike freaks in North Seattle put a real engineer-designed jet engine onto one of their bikes as a marketing stunt, and I was stupid enough to take it for a ride on city streets. But I only got up to about 45mph with a jet engine, fercrissakes! (Of course, I weigh ~275#, and the turbine had an output of under 20ft/lbs at 150,000rpm...)
Actually there is a Mac OSX port underway, under the OpenOffice projects. It's not there yet, but hopefully when SO is feature-complete, the OSX port will be in hand. My statement assumed such a fruitful end. Currently you're right, MS holds the interop crown.
OTOH, MS Office XP does not support Windows 95, which is still a major (~10-15%) portion of desktop users. (There's your stealth forced-upgrade...) That severely limits their coverage. Between this and the online-activation BS that essentially kills the Office-compatibility growth undercurrent thru illicit home installs, it opens an opportunity for actual major traction of SO/OO in the home-user market.
I think it's worth a lot to Sun. They're not giving SO away just as a malicious jab at MS; there's a constructive angle to it as well.
A quick look at Sun's website shows six different base platforms that they are selling as "desktop" systems. I don't need to go into the depth of their server platforms. They've made significant (if sometimes clumsy) investments towards server-based office applications. Imho, I think IBM's mainframe-partitioned-linux solution kicks Sun's collective ass and would support the distributed office-app scenario much more efficiently, but that's not to say that Sun isn't trying to make a go of distributed/server-based office software. Any server-based software drives sales of OS software, high-end hardware, and networking infrastructure.
I like the idea about Sony and AOL. How about a giveaway CD with a JVM, Sun/Sony/AOL-branded copy of Mozilla, StarOffice, and a free copy of Forte (with J2EE network game components & samples) tucked in the extras folder for the kids? Now that would cause some righteous commotion.
It's nice to see some reasonable competition for MS Office. I alternate between Office2K and Openoffice (633) with reasonable success, but there are a few things left to complete the puzzle:
1. Where's the Mac OSX version? OS10.1 is getting great reviews, but this is even more critical from a general marketing standpoint than from a Mac-head view. Why? Cross-platform compatibility is a great marketing lever, not because of a possible massive platform shift (unlikely) but because of uncertainty about platforms and compatiblity over the long term. (See #4 below.)
2. Some major features are not quite there: imho outlining is the biggest hole; people who write large documents or like structure really need it. Instead of just copying the MS interface, perhaps the existing SO/Navigator tool could be extended to provide a killer structure interface similar to Framemaker+SGML. That would be pretty compelling. Likewise, a quickstart feature (as just implemented in Mozilla) would help to silence the yelps about quick startup ( after long preload) of MS Office XP.
3. Sun/OpenOffice needs migration documentation & tools. For example, it would be nice to have a short whitepaper from Sun that describes (or better yet, provides a one-click tool) that reconfigures MS Office to save in known cross-compatible formats. Word files should be saved in RTF or a reasonably-documented.DOC/95/97 format. Picking XLS/97 wouldn't be that difficult, but it's important to nail down the multitude of inconsistent PPT formats in a way that retains all content.
4. Marketing!! Star/OpenOffice has such potential, and if handled properly, can deliver a very compelling message. I'm no marketing guru, but imagine turning some heads with these advert leaders:
"StarOffice: Full-featured software for free. You pay for the support you use. You control when and how you upgrade. Isn't that how it should be?"
"The software license for Microsoft Office XP says you're prohibited from figuring out the.DOC format your own documents are stored in. Do you think you should pay a license for your own data? Try StarOffice - open formats, full compatibility, and lower costs."
"StarOffice is compatible with 99.xxx% of all systems worldwide. Freedom to choose."
"StarOffice is available on every major operating system in your company, from the systems guru to the graphics geek, and the secretary to the CEO. Shouldn't your company communicate like this?"
"The arrival of MS Office XP forces you to pay more for your licenses, and forces company-wide upgrades by introducing yet another data format. StarOffice reduces TCO by allowing you the flexibility of running any desktop OS you choose (even the free ones), and doesn't commit you to costly upgrades in the future."
"Running Office XP? That's great, as long as renew your licenses to the new, more expensive program, can support the increased hardware requirements, upgrade everyone in your organization at the same time, or are willing to take the productivity hit by introducing yet another document format. Oh, and you can't take it back for a refund. Try StarOffice for free."
Dumdeedum... downloaded Mozilla 0.9.4....
Added "user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);" to prefs.js.... restart...
Ooo. The web without any onload pop-ups or pop-under adverts. X-10? Who? Surfing actually seems pleasant again.
But my solution for click-thru advertising is simply to get my content elsewhere, and wait for this upsurge in irritating adverts to die down. And it will. Advertising drives money to content providers, but if the adverts drive the readership down, the money stops coming into the advert companies from their clients. There's a point of equilibrium that most print magazines have found, and it's just a matter of time before that balance settles down in the online-content world.
The advantages of a smaller disk include a smaller player (fits in your pocket, unlike the current raft of full-size CD/MP3 players), lower power consumption (it actually does take a lot less energy to spin up a ~40% smaller diameter disk), low-cost media (3" disks usually cost about US$0.55 in lots of 50 and US$1 in lots of 10 or less), requires no new software (!!), and low production cost of the player (since none of this is new technology). Out of about a dozen cd burner I've used, every one supports 3" CDRs, as well as all tray and most slot-loading players.
This player and two disks will almost get me thru most of the workday without hearing a repeat, I can play the disk in my computer without any hardware-specific software or drivers, and the trivial cost of the media make it quite nice for sneakernet music swapping. Are you going to swap or give away your CF card or MiniDisc? I didn't think so. Who knows, maybe this will bring the cost of 3" CDRWs down.
Low tech? Yes. But a very nice application of low-tech.
Urban wireless cells are nice, but you obviously need to have a landline at some point. Immediately you run into the problem of dependency on DSL or leased-line services that may or may not permit line-sharing in the TOS. What's the next step? Get off the landline. Us urbanites need to get in touch with our suburban and hillbilly roots, and convince them to run repeaters in order to connect multiple metropolitan areas. Really.
Here's the deal: I'm in Seattle. I looked at the Seattle Wireless map, and I could plug into the local network and just be another bump on the freeloading log. Or I could use the fact that I'm on one of the highest points in the city, and run a long-haul repeater w/~15mi range to a relative's place north of Federal Way, from there ~15mi to my brother-in-law in Tacoma, then I only need to find one willing person to bridge the haul to my in-laws in Olympia. What, four more hops to Portland? I've got more freinds and relatives down there too. Likewise, it's only a half a dozen hops north to Vancouver BC. It may not be much of a service to start, but it won't take much either.
Frankly, this is how McCaw Cellular (now AT&T Wireless, my former employer) built much of the North American Cellular Network (NACN). McCaw bought up ~200+ local operating companies, put in *tiny* connections between them to optimize the expensive traffic, wrote software to dump local traffic where it was cheapest, and the rest was marketing (hence the "NACN" name). It is very much within the realm of possibility to do this successfully.
I think the participation & sustainability problems can be turned around the other way -- instead of people on the wireless freenet only wanting to get off and connect out, it should be possible to build enough resources & self-sufficiency on the wireless network that people want to get into the freenet. Convince a few major businesses that there is revinue to be had by participating (just as commercial endeavors on the web were initially driven by sales of geek toys to geeks) and combine that with a rich geek participatory network mesh, and you have the foundation for a sustainable infrastructure.
"If you get a 100-kV power supply built in 1950, chances are you'll be happy. There is continual improvement, but no quantum leaps. Computers are the most useless--they are right up there with disposable diapers in landfill."
Oh, how true that is. And it applies on a personal level. I have a basement full of computer crap to prove it. I thought "Oh, I'll put them together and make some usable systems for a local charity." BZZZTT! The local charities won't even take anything less than a P5 or pm601 system. They say 486's and 040's cost more to test than they can sell them for. Frankly, it's hard to find a place to dispose of them.
But peripherals, cable and infrastructure stuff? That's a different matter. I picked up three fiber transceivers from Value Village a month ago for $5ea. Ditto ($7) for a HP Deskjet 1600 (the big 9ppm postcript color inkjet w/jetdirect). IMHO, local thrift stores are great for this sort of stuff IF you don't get sucked into buying more stuff to fix the great deal you got.
Looking for little stuff like power adapters, modems, printers, etc? Head for the local thrift store. Looking for wiring or shielding? Check out industrial supply places (like Pacific Iron & Metal in Seattle, where you can get castoff spools from the local telcos). Looking for bigger infrastructure bits? You can get rackmount cases, cable, sensors, and all manner of interesting bits directly from telco salvage units, places like re-pc, or if you're nearby, places like Boeing Surplus
A little time spent doing some smart looking can save a lot of cash. Otoh, A lot of time looking can be a huge waste. You just gotta know when to stop and pay retail.
Easy: I want connectivity and enhanced input. At the same time. My wish list has varied somewhat over the past few years since I picked up an IBM Workpad 20x (Palm3 in formalwear), but it all boils down to the same connectivity and input needs/wants.
Over the past few years, some things have come close:
my first dip in the PDA pond was an HP-LX200 with a motorola PM100c cdpd (analog cellular-based) modem. The PM100c was externally powered so it lasted a while, and I got a hold of WWWlx browser for the HP. It was slick, dependable, and the compact keyboard was quite nice. It was very nice to pull up traffic maps with something that sat on my dashboard. If the service wasn't so dang expensive, I'd still use that combo today.
I really dig the Rex in concept, and bought a Rex3 when it first came out. The ease of data transfer by sticking it into a PCMCIA slot counts as good connectvity for that device form, but it's not an Itsy from Compaq. Input is horrible. Sheesh, how much would an accelerometer have added to the cost of a Rex? Even if it'd doubled the price, it would have stormed the market if it'd incorporated the "rock&scroll" input mechanisms.
Along with the rest of the herd, I bought my current Palm-compatible device and later a Palm keyboard. I periodically used it as a terminal, but whenever I was connected to something, I wanted my input to be better and faster. And besides, it's hard to type control characters using PalmTerm or DiCon when you're using it as a console for a Sun E4500. But the serial cable & kb are mutually exclusive, so I started to look for a keyboard+serial combo.
Then PalmV+GoType got me all excited until I realized that the serial-out on the GoType KB wasn't split or multiplexed, so I couldn't use a modem at the same time as the keyboard. Feh. Same for the NovaTel/Minstrel modems. How hard would it have been to put a passthru on the bottom of the Minstrel?
The TRG Pro is essentially a Palm3xe with a CF slot at the top and a standard palm3 connector at the bottom, so I could use a keyboard and a serial/modem or ethernet card at the same time. Bravo! this was the first real handheld that would give me connectivity and enhanced input at the same time, and was useful for me in a technical operations environment. But by the time this came out, I started pining for low-power ethernet cards or a 802.11 CF card.
The new Palm M5xx series and Handsprings are kinda neat, but why the heck did they go for a proprietary connector on the top? I can swallow one proprietary connector (the base serial connector), but two? Of course, the Handspring cellphone is a work of art -- if only GSM service wasn't crap in Seattle. (And doesn't the serial port on the Handspring hang when the cellphone is in use?)
Currently, the Handera, the new rev of the TRG Pro, looks like the winner. Serial connectivity on the bottom that's usable with inexpensive Palm3 devices, a standard CF slot for the high-end (microdrive, ethernet, forthcoming 802.11) devices, and a SD slot for instant backup (and some other proprietary crap I won't buy). And it's got a great screen. Now if the price would come down just a smidge...
Well, at least there are some options now. I've held off for a while, but I'm heavily leaning towards the HandEra. But I won't sell my kid for it; not until a CF 802.11 card comes out, at least.
This is precisely my point. There are a lot of people for whom homelessness and poverty are an unavoidable reality. I have a lot of sympathy for them, and I do my part to help on a regular basis. Just a few weeks ago, I assembled and donated half a dozen working computers to a place that provides them to economically disadvantaged families.
What brings out the bile are these displaced tech workers who would rather take food out of the mouths of the *actual* poor rather than move back in with their families or take jobs that provide less than the cushy overblown comfort they're used to. To me, that's someone who is actively doing damage to the community.
If you read the original article, one of the tech workers admitted that he's in the homeless shelter because he doesn't want to worry his mom. That's pathetic. There are *hungry* people out there, and this fool considers his career embarassment to take precedence. Are you defending that?
Is it that bad? Yes and no. And I'll give you examples of both:
A young relative of mine graduated from a respectable state university three months ago with a BS in Chem and a minor in CS. She moved into my Seattle basement and started sending out resumes for "web designer" jobs. I tactfully cautioned her that the market for such jobs was becoming *very* tough and that she might be better off looking to a chem-related company and work towards her development goals over the next few years.
Over the next few weeks, I became a bit more worried, because of several factors. Foremost, she lacks any experience in the real job market, and thus lacks the basic understanding of how to interview, and how to position herself as a desirable candidate. She's shooting for technical/dev design jobs when she needs to be looking at entry positions. Secondly, like many of her age-mates, she vastly overestimated the depth & value of her technical skills. Since I've done quite a bit of technical interviewing, I gave her my 10-question interview for an entry-level web-app developer. Basic stuff like "What kind of development do you want to do?" and technical zingers (not) like "What does SSL do?" If it has been a real interview, I would have ended it at question 5 in order to save her further humiliation. Finally, her salary expectations are completely unrealistic in the current environment. She's watched her friends with similar skillsets graduate over the past 2 years and walk into $40-70k jobs, so she feels like $40k is a reasonable minimum. This combination frightened me (I want the best for her, but I don't want her living in my basement forever), and I tried to give her some sense of reality. I pointed out that many of her friends in those $40-70k jobs are now unemployed. It didn't take. She continued searching for jobs that don't exist anymore.
Then I got laid off.
My company of 300 people had a major financial fuck-up (we grossly overestimated the target market for a new bet-the-company service and instantly saturated it in 4Q2000), and it finally hit hard with a layoff in April. I doubt the company will survive to see 1Q2002; the CFO has the brainpower of a barnacle and the money should run out sometime around September.
Now my situation is a little different. I have a mixed background (2/3 Tech/Sys+Net + 1/3 Security/InfoMgmt), with 10yrs experience. I don't have an MCSE, CCNA, or any of that crap, but I have experience that I can demonstrate, excellent references, and a heap of work samples. I know my shit, I know how to use it, and I play nice with others.
But I was blindsided by the layoff. That was stupid; it should not have been a surprise that a large number of the senior staff (read: expensive) would be let go. But I learn from my mistakes, and am relatively self-aware. I went home with my two cardboard boxes of personal belongings and worked on the yard for a few days. When the anger had left, I set about looking for a job in a careful and targeted manner. Yeah, most of the wads of cash are gone, but it took me 5 weeks to find a job with a *better* pay+bene package than the dot-bomb that gave me the heave-ho. It could have been worse, I know, but then again I'm not so proud that I wouldn't have taken work as an electrician or similar if nothing turned up.
Three months on, my relative is still looking for a job. She can get a job tomorrow at $25+k working for the state as a Chemist I, but she won't apply for it. She clings to the fiction that the fluffy web-dev Javascript-and-Photoshop jobs she wants are still out there. And she clings to the absurd notion that a just-graduated kid deserves $40-60k+. Shit, I graduated in '91 with a triple major at a US-top-10 private university, but I landed right smack into the Bush Sr. recession. It took me 2 months to land a $20k job. I could have held out for a better job then, but I don't regret taking the one offered for a moment. This isn't some sage BS about how I suffered this way or that -- you just have to take a realistic look at your situation, use your brain, and exercise your best options.
She's got another month, and I'm kicking her out. If the entire US economy were taking a complete shit, instead of a minor dip that's hitting tech kinda hard, maybe I would feel differently. But I have the same sentiment for her as I hold for every other whiner who thinks their trivial grasp of logic and knowledge makes them a technical genius deserving of huge wages. She can go take her unrealistic, job-market-clogging expectations and go live with her parents until she gets a clue. If there are ex-tech-sector workers who would rather go to a homeless shelter than move home or take a job that offends their out-of-balance sensibilities, I only feel sorry for the actual involuntarily homeless folks who have to listen to their whining.
Having your employer hold your passport is standard practice in some Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia. There's not really any way around it, and it wouldn't do you much good if you did, anyway. In most cases you need need an exit permit from your employer in your passport in order to leave the country.
I suppose if one were planning on exiting the country by illegal means you would be slightly less screwed than otherwise if you still had your non-exit-validated passport, but I surmise that is a relatively rare situation...
Is this the case for any other European nations? I have grandparents born in Germany, but I doubt that country is as liberal, what with its recent xenophobia.
I also can claim citizenship in Israel through one of my grandparents, but all that'll do is make it impossible for me to travel or work in any of the Gulf states...
HMD/goggles aren't just for 3D
on
3D w/o Goggles
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· Score: 4
I'm personally disappointed that the HMD (goggle display) news seems so dominated by 3D these days. And imho, I don't think the market is large enough to support desktop 3D displays. The way it's presented (in articles like this) make it seem like the only interest in HMDs is for 3D applications, and the broader goal is to get away from HMDs. I disagree -- I think a layered LCD 3D display is a very narrow market. Sure, many advances in display technology are driven by gamers with deep pockets and a few research organizations, but I see a whole raft of broad-market HMD-related benefits that are *non* 3D applications.
These are:
larger virtual displays
lower power consumption than big desktop CRTs (and layered 3D lcd boxes)
more advanced manufacturing experience with small lcd displays (usually = less expensive)
privacy (consumer market supported by security geeks & porn afficionados instead of gamers)
portability (imagine 1600x1200 res on a long flight)
potential reduction of cost by market expansion into other areas (connected to the 3D market)
potential for integration with wireless for truly portable systems
higher level of ergonomic flexibility due to reduced reliance on a particular seating/standing position
In other words, the logical technology+market progression would be to expand HMD to encompass 2D and 3D needs in a lower-cost & commercially viable manner, rather than push excessively specialized hardware.
The perfect package for me would include a set of relatively high-resolution (1280x1024) 2D goggles with a motion sensor configured for 3+ desktops, and a Datahand keyboard pair. Those interested in a 3D configuration would need only make a software reconfiguration to adjust the motion sensor input to provide perspective based on user motion, rather than physically emulating single-position stereoscopic vision. For me, it'd be far nicer than the multiple-monitor setup I have now, and would fit in a locked drawer when I wasn't using it.
A layered 3D desktop monitor would be kinda nifty, but a minor usability advance compared to a much more flexible HMD. But I suppose I'll have to be happy with the castoffs from the gamers...
Given the last item -- "a giant planet moving in an orbit around its Sun-like central star that is very similar to the one of the Earth and whose potential satellites (in theory, at least) might be "habitable"" -- I wonder not about how we humans might live there, but how life might evolve there.
In particular, I wonder if advanced space travel might develop at a faster evolutionary rate given several habitable planet-sized moons in close proximity. After all, great advances in technology are usually composed of thousands of small steps and an occasional leap. Starting from Earth, there are no close-by habitable locations, so we focus on making one great leap after another. Our drive to explore overrides reasons to return to the same spots again and again. That's not very efficient or productive in terms of developing travel technology. If the Moon, Mars, and Venus were all habitable, the amount of repetitive space travel we'd be engaged in would result in rapid incremental improvement in travel technology.
Racetrack demons start by going really fast around the block when they're little kids, and speeding up with every step. But here we are, stuck in a celestial backwater with nowhere to go nearby, so our first toddling steps involve building and driving the equivalent of a long-haul truck. I'd lay my money on us being visited far sooner than us finding/visiting another travel-capable race.
...by searching for "MIR space station". Does anyone have a mirror or pdf of the actual bidding page? There aren't many auction pages worth saving, but the Seattle earthquake rubble (~30 min after the quake) and the one for MIR salvage are pretty funny.
I was reminded about the internet horizon by a recent experience with some ca.1993 network equipment from Intel. Very little documentation and no driver software was available for pre-1995 equipment, and I find the experience rather common with other equipment and software vendors.
In a previous life, I worked with a wide variety of PC hardware, and as a result have _hundreds_ of old (1985-1995) motherboard, drive, NIC, and peripheral manuals boxed up in my basement. I've often thought that I should scan them in (maybe to PDF or OCR->text so that they are text-searchable). However, the rub is that many of these companies are still in business, don't want bother supporting old stuff, and don't want someone else to do it for them, either.
Is there any way I can make these available for people to peruse just as if I had lent them the physical book? They're books, remember. What's the deal with fair use & copying of out-of-print books? Do I have to write an applet viewer that says "I'm sorry, someone else is reading that right now" if there's a simultaneous request for an archival copy of a manual? Better yet, is there a way to legally flip the original and the archival copy so that the physical original is considered the backup for the electronic document?
Seems that a boat with multiple high-power turbines moving a 750' hull at 50mph would make a hell of a racket. Has anyone considered the amount of damage this noise level would do to ambient marine life (particularly large marine mammals)? Would any environmentally-conscious nation allow this to operate in its waters? It seems like this design might make most of the crossing in a short time, but spend several days slowly coming into and leaving each port. Hmm.
Well, my contribution towards the torture of delivery people was aimed at UPS, but it was humorous just the same.
Last summer, I tracked down a fellow from Montana who has some blacksmithing tools I wanted, and sent him a check for a few hundred dollars. A few days later, I woke up to the sound of a UPS truck pulling in my driveway bright and early:
*slam*
*swoosh* (rear door opening)
"goddamn... fuggin..piece o...hrrrrr"
*stompstompstompstomp*
*hwathump* (on my doorstep)
"...can't fuggin believe... fuggin two of 'em... arrrr..."
*stompstompstompstomp*
*hwathump* (again on my doorstep)
By the time I got my jeans on, the truck was pulling away. And there they were: one 140 lb. anvil, and one 150 lb. anvil (nice ones, too), side by side on my doorstep, no packaging of any kind -- just a mailing label taped to the side of each -- right up against the screen door so that I couldn't get out.
It's our housemate's kitchen, and the neighbor's bedroom. Methinks the neighbor should buy the curtains, instead of my housemate having to drink his coffee in the dark every morning. Of course, if he gouges his eyes out, the point will be moot.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah. That looks like the shipment I sent to myself when moving from southern California to one of the islands off the coast of Washington. I received my stereo speakers (big ones, 1.5'sqX3'h) broken in half, inside a box with all four corners blown out and the packing missing. Really. I never would have found out what happened, except that it was a small community, and I had a couple of friends who worked for UPS there. They'd actually dropped the box off of the side door of the airplane, hitting the rear edge of the loader, then landing on the tarmac.
But you want to know what the real mistake was? No insurance. No insurance means that the carrier has no liability and no incentive to protect the package. Frankly, if it falls out of the airplane over the ocean, they couldn't care less -- they have already received payment, and anything after that point is a loss. Unless you have insurance.
Judging from the pictures, they spent some extra time on your stuff. Perhaps they chocked the wheels on the 737 with your box?
Jon
I dunno about you, but I haven't lost much by betting that technology development ventures are usually lazy, sloppy, and cheap. Experience reinforces that view on a very regular basis. MAYBE they thought up something revolutionary, and I'd love to see it if they did. But it would be foolish to assume that this virtual keyboard (or any other whiz-bang doodad) is revolutionary.
Analyzing electrical impulses in my hand muscles? Riiight. Do you have any clue about the variability that would be involved in producing usable positional data and predicting intended movement? Would it work if I was sweaty? Agitated? Please. It'd be far easier to go with mechanical position measurement, and do the rest in software. Without knowing more about the device, the simplest answer would be a good bet. (Thank you, Occam.) As I said before, if they've done a good job of writing continually-adaptive algorithms, then I might be interested. But I won't hold my breath.
Jon
Ok, I see a wee bit of a problem with this.
A virtual keyboard based on finger movement would have to rely on a software learning mechanism that tuned itself to your physical idiosyncracies. I mean, without a physical keyboard to hunt and peck on, the little finger of your left hand is going to move a different distance between the imaginary A and Q keys than your right index finger is going to move betwen the J and U keys. A sufficiently good learning mechanism would probably account for tuning itself to your hand movements continuously, so that your error rate would go down even as your typing patterns shifted over time. (Of course, this results in equipment with function profiles in software that make it unusable by anyone else.)
Or not.
More likely, you will be the part of the equation that conforms to the constraints of the software. You will have to learn how to be very consistent in your finger movements, without a physical keyboard to guide you. After a training period (just as you would do for voice recognition software), you would have to be quite consistent, even in different positions, desk heights, and times of day (tired or not). This screams "RSI" to me. Repetitive motion in a guided environment is one thing, but having to make precise repetitive motions in free air or against a flat object that provides no feedback would mightily increase the stress put on your fingers.
Thanks, but I already have a surgery scar on one wrist that makes people think I tried to off myself, I don't care to repeat the experience. I'll wait until the Senseboard software is well-reviewed and proven to be continuously adaptive. (Then I'll have an excuse for wearing funny gloves and dark glasses with a piece of wire hanging off them, while playing pocket pool on the bus: "Oh no, Miss, I have a proposal due this afternoon...")
Jon
Anon-ftp is easier to relay, use remotely, or use from a location that otherwise filters gnutella or other napster-ish traffic but does not pose a trace hazard.
Besides, ftp draws less fire. Ftp depends much more on the human being to find/judge/navigate the servers and content in ways that make it more difficult for corporate RIAA DoS'ers to deal with. Not that couldn't; but chances are they'll just keep gunning for the high-profile swap tools/communities.
Hrm. I don't think they mean DoS in terms of swamping trading communities with requests. And I don't think we should talk about this in the future tense; it's happening now. A few weeks ago, I fired up Limewire and spent some time poking around in a couple of communities.
What did I find? Searching for songs from certain artists/labels returned *hundreds* of hits on essentially identical audio files with slight filename changes and incrementally varied byte sizes. Any attempt to download the songs would be successful -- until the server killed the session at precisely 80%.
Then I noticed that *all* of the files were being hosted on three IP's. A quick look showed the IPs in a range belonging to a major commercial hosting operation. Nice. A honeypot of sorts. And of course, they have my home IP (fixed) logged as requesting the same songs over and over until the lightbulb went off over my head.
Oh, well, back to anon-ftp for me...
Wow. That's pretty impressive. Especially when at the beginning of this year, I took a ride on a recumbent bike with a microjet on the back, and didn't get nearly that fast.
Yah, some bike freaks in North Seattle put a real engineer-designed jet engine onto one of their bikes as a marketing stunt, and I was stupid enough to take it for a ride on city streets. But I only got up to about 45mph with a jet engine, fercrissakes! (Of course, I weigh ~275#, and the turbine had an output of under 20ft/lbs at 150,000rpm...)
Jon
Actually there is a Mac OSX port underway, under the OpenOffice projects. It's not there yet, but hopefully when SO is feature-complete, the OSX port will be in hand. My statement assumed such a fruitful end. Currently you're right, MS holds the interop crown.
OTOH, MS Office XP does not support Windows 95, which is still a major (~10-15%) portion of desktop users. (There's your stealth forced-upgrade...) That severely limits their coverage. Between this and the online-activation BS that essentially kills the Office-compatibility growth undercurrent thru illicit home installs, it opens an opportunity for actual major traction of SO/OO in the home-user market.
I think it's worth a lot to Sun. They're not giving SO away just as a malicious jab at MS; there's a constructive angle to it as well.
A quick look at Sun's website shows six different base platforms that they are selling as "desktop" systems. I don't need to go into the depth of their server platforms. They've made significant (if sometimes clumsy) investments towards server-based office applications. Imho, I think IBM's mainframe-partitioned-linux solution kicks Sun's collective ass and would support the distributed office-app scenario much more efficiently, but that's not to say that Sun isn't trying to make a go of distributed/server-based office software. Any server-based software drives sales of OS software, high-end hardware, and networking infrastructure.
I like the idea about Sony and AOL. How about a giveaway CD with a JVM, Sun/Sony/AOL-branded copy of Mozilla, StarOffice, and a free copy of Forte (with J2EE network game components & samples) tucked in the extras folder for the kids? Now that would cause some righteous commotion.
It's nice to see some reasonable competition for MS Office. I alternate between Office2K and Openoffice (633) with reasonable success, but there are a few things left to complete the puzzle:
1. Where's the Mac OSX version? OS10.1 is getting great reviews, but this is even more critical from a general marketing standpoint than from a Mac-head view. Why? Cross-platform compatibility is a great marketing lever, not because of a possible massive platform shift (unlikely) but because of uncertainty about platforms and compatiblity over the long term. (See #4 below.)
2. Some major features are not quite there: imho outlining is the biggest hole; people who write large documents or like structure really need it. Instead of just copying the MS interface, perhaps the existing SO/Navigator tool could be extended to provide a killer structure interface similar to Framemaker+SGML. That would be pretty compelling. Likewise, a quickstart feature (as just implemented in Mozilla) would help to silence the yelps about quick startup ( after long preload) of MS Office XP.
3. Sun/OpenOffice needs migration documentation & tools. For example, it would be nice to have a short whitepaper from Sun that describes (or better yet, provides a one-click tool) that reconfigures MS Office to save in known cross-compatible formats. Word files should be saved in RTF or a reasonably-documented
4. Marketing!! Star/OpenOffice has such potential, and if handled properly, can deliver a very compelling message. I'm no marketing guru, but imagine turning some heads with these advert leaders:
Jon (insertmyslashdotname@jetcity.com)
Dumdeedum... downloaded Mozilla 0.9.4....
Added "user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);" to prefs.js.... restart...
Ooo. The web without any onload pop-ups or pop-under adverts. X-10? Who? Surfing actually seems pleasant again.
But my solution for click-thru advertising is simply to get my content elsewhere, and wait for this upsurge in irritating adverts to die down. And it will. Advertising drives money to content providers, but if the adverts drive the readership down, the money stops coming into the advert companies from their clients. There's a point of equilibrium that most print magazines have found, and it's just a matter of time before that balance settles down in the online-content world.
A lot of folks have asked "why?"
The advantages of a smaller disk include a smaller player (fits in your pocket, unlike the current raft of full-size CD/MP3 players), lower power consumption (it actually does take a lot less energy to spin up a ~40% smaller diameter disk), low-cost media (3" disks usually cost about US$0.55 in lots of 50 and US$1 in lots of 10 or less), requires no new software (!!), and low production cost of the player (since none of this is new technology). Out of about a dozen cd burner I've used, every one supports 3" CDRs, as well as all tray and most slot-loading players.
This player and two disks will almost get me thru most of the workday without hearing a repeat, I can play the disk in my computer without any hardware-specific software or drivers, and the trivial cost of the media make it quite nice for sneakernet music swapping. Are you going to swap or give away your CF card or MiniDisc? I didn't think so. Who knows, maybe this will bring the cost of 3" CDRWs down.
Low tech? Yes. But a very nice application of low-tech.
Jon
Urban wireless cells are nice, but you obviously need to have a landline at some point. Immediately you run into the problem of dependency on DSL or leased-line services that may or may not permit line-sharing in the TOS. What's the next step? Get off the landline. Us urbanites need to get in touch with our suburban and hillbilly roots, and convince them to run repeaters in order to connect multiple metropolitan areas. Really.
Here's the deal: I'm in Seattle. I looked at the Seattle Wireless map, and I could plug into the local network and just be another bump on the freeloading log. Or I could use the fact that I'm on one of the highest points in the city, and run a long-haul repeater w/~15mi range to a relative's place north of Federal Way, from there ~15mi to my brother-in-law in Tacoma, then I only need to find one willing person to bridge the haul to my in-laws in Olympia. What, four more hops to Portland? I've got more freinds and relatives down there too. Likewise, it's only a half a dozen hops north to Vancouver BC. It may not be much of a service to start, but it won't take much either.
Frankly, this is how McCaw Cellular (now AT&T Wireless, my former employer) built much of the North American Cellular Network (NACN). McCaw bought up ~200+ local operating companies, put in *tiny* connections between them to optimize the expensive traffic, wrote software to dump local traffic where it was cheapest, and the rest was marketing (hence the "NACN" name). It is very much within the realm of possibility to do this successfully.
I think the participation & sustainability problems can be turned around the other way -- instead of people on the wireless freenet only wanting to get off and connect out, it should be possible to build enough resources & self-sufficiency on the wireless network that people want to get into the freenet. Convince a few major businesses that there is revinue to be had by participating (just as commercial endeavors on the web were initially driven by sales of geek toys to geeks) and combine that with a rich geek participatory network mesh, and you have the foundation for a sustainable infrastructure.
Jon
"If you get a 100-kV power supply built in 1950, chances are you'll be happy. There is continual improvement, but no quantum leaps. Computers are the most useless--they are right up there with disposable diapers in landfill."
Oh, how true that is. And it applies on a personal level. I have a basement full of computer crap to prove it. I thought "Oh, I'll put them together and make some usable systems for a local charity." BZZZTT! The local charities won't even take anything less than a P5 or pm601 system. They say 486's and 040's cost more to test than they can sell them for. Frankly, it's hard to find a place to dispose of them.
But peripherals, cable and infrastructure stuff? That's a different matter. I picked up three fiber transceivers from Value Village a month ago for $5ea. Ditto ($7) for a HP Deskjet 1600 (the big 9ppm postcript color inkjet w/jetdirect). IMHO, local thrift stores are great for this sort of stuff IF you don't get sucked into buying more stuff to fix the great deal you got.
Looking for little stuff like power adapters, modems, printers, etc? Head for the local thrift store. Looking for wiring or shielding? Check out industrial supply places (like Pacific Iron & Metal in Seattle, where you can get castoff spools from the local telcos). Looking for bigger infrastructure bits? You can get rackmount cases, cable, sensors, and all manner of interesting bits directly from telco salvage units, places like re-pc, or if you're nearby, places like Boeing Surplus
A little time spent doing some smart looking can save a lot of cash. Otoh, A lot of time looking can be a huge waste. You just gotta know when to stop and pay retail.
Jon
Easy: I want connectivity and enhanced input. At the same time. My wish list has varied somewhat over the past few years since I picked up an IBM Workpad 20x (Palm3 in formalwear), but it all boils down to the same connectivity and input needs/wants.
Over the past few years, some things have come close:
Well, at least there are some options now. I've held off for a while, but I'm heavily leaning towards the HandEra. But I won't sell my kid for it; not until a CF 802.11 card comes out, at least.
Jon
"Homelessness is not always a choice. "
This is precisely my point. There are a lot of people for whom homelessness and poverty are an unavoidable reality. I have a lot of sympathy for them, and I do my part to help on a regular basis. Just a few weeks ago, I assembled and donated half a dozen working computers to a place that provides them to economically disadvantaged families.
What brings out the bile are these displaced tech workers who would rather take food out of the mouths of the *actual* poor rather than move back in with their families or take jobs that provide less than the cushy overblown comfort they're used to. To me, that's someone who is actively doing damage to the community.
If you read the original article, one of the tech workers admitted that he's in the homeless shelter because he doesn't want to worry his mom. That's pathetic. There are *hungry* people out there, and this fool considers his career embarassment to take precedence. Are you defending that?
J
Is it that bad? Yes and no. And I'll give you examples of both:
A young relative of mine graduated from a respectable state university three months ago with a BS in Chem and a minor in CS. She moved into my Seattle basement and started sending out resumes for "web designer" jobs. I tactfully cautioned her that the market for such jobs was becoming *very* tough and that she might be better off looking to a chem-related company and work towards her development goals over the next few years.
Over the next few weeks, I became a bit more worried, because of several factors. Foremost, she lacks any experience in the real job market, and thus lacks the basic understanding of how to interview, and how to position herself as a desirable candidate. She's shooting for technical/dev design jobs when she needs to be looking at entry positions. Secondly, like many of her age-mates, she vastly overestimated the depth & value of her technical skills. Since I've done quite a bit of technical interviewing, I gave her my 10-question interview for an entry-level web-app developer. Basic stuff like "What kind of development do you want to do?" and technical zingers (not) like "What does SSL do?" If it has been a real interview, I would have ended it at question 5 in order to save her further humiliation. Finally, her salary expectations are completely unrealistic in the current environment. She's watched her friends with similar skillsets graduate over the past 2 years and walk into $40-70k jobs, so she feels like $40k is a reasonable minimum. This combination frightened me (I want the best for her, but I don't want her living in my basement forever), and I tried to give her some sense of reality. I pointed out that many of her friends in those $40-70k jobs are now unemployed. It didn't take. She continued searching for jobs that don't exist anymore.
Then I got laid off.
My company of 300 people had a major financial fuck-up (we grossly overestimated the target market for a new bet-the-company service and instantly saturated it in 4Q2000), and it finally hit hard with a layoff in April. I doubt the company will survive to see 1Q2002; the CFO has the brainpower of a barnacle and the money should run out sometime around September.
Now my situation is a little different. I have a mixed background (2/3 Tech/Sys+Net + 1/3 Security/InfoMgmt), with 10yrs experience. I don't have an MCSE, CCNA, or any of that crap, but I have experience that I can demonstrate, excellent references, and a heap of work samples. I know my shit, I know how to use it, and I play nice with others.
But I was blindsided by the layoff. That was stupid; it should not have been a surprise that a large number of the senior staff (read: expensive) would be let go. But I learn from my mistakes, and am relatively self-aware. I went home with my two cardboard boxes of personal belongings and worked on the yard for a few days. When the anger had left, I set about looking for a job in a careful and targeted manner. Yeah, most of the wads of cash are gone, but it took me 5 weeks to find a job with a *better* pay+bene package than the dot-bomb that gave me the heave-ho. It could have been worse, I know, but then again I'm not so proud that I wouldn't have taken work as an electrician or similar if nothing turned up.
Three months on, my relative is still looking for a job. She can get a job tomorrow at $25+k working for the state as a Chemist I, but she won't apply for it. She clings to the fiction that the fluffy web-dev Javascript-and-Photoshop jobs she wants are still out there. And she clings to the absurd notion that a just-graduated kid deserves $40-60k+. Shit, I graduated in '91 with a triple major at a US-top-10 private university, but I landed right smack into the Bush Sr. recession. It took me 2 months to land a $20k job. I could have held out for a better job then, but I don't regret taking the one offered for a moment. This isn't some sage BS about how I suffered this way or that -- you just have to take a realistic look at your situation, use your brain, and exercise your best options.
She's got another month, and I'm kicking her out. If the entire US economy were taking a complete shit, instead of a minor dip that's hitting tech kinda hard, maybe I would feel differently. But I have the same sentiment for her as I hold for every other whiner who thinks their trivial grasp of logic and knowledge makes them a technical genius deserving of huge wages. She can go take her unrealistic, job-market-clogging expectations and go live with her parents until she gets a clue. If there are ex-tech-sector workers who would rather go to a homeless shelter than move home or take a job that offends their out-of-balance sensibilities, I only feel sorry for the actual involuntarily homeless folks who have to listen to their whining.
J
Having your employer hold your passport is standard practice in some Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia. There's not really any way around it, and it wouldn't do you much good if you did, anyway. In most cases you need need an exit permit from your employer in your passport in order to leave the country.
I suppose if one were planning on exiting the country by illegal means you would be slightly less screwed than otherwise if you still had your non-exit-validated passport, but I surmise that is a relatively rare situation...
J
Is this the case for any other European nations? I have grandparents born in Germany, but I doubt that country is as liberal, what with its recent xenophobia.
I also can claim citizenship in Israel through one of my grandparents, but all that'll do is make it impossible for me to travel or work in any of the Gulf states...
These are:
In other words, the logical technology+market progression would be to expand HMD to encompass 2D and 3D needs in a lower-cost & commercially viable manner, rather than push excessively specialized hardware. The perfect package for me would include a set of relatively high-resolution (1280x1024) 2D goggles with a motion sensor configured for 3+ desktops, and a Datahand keyboard pair. Those interested in a 3D configuration would need only make a software reconfiguration to adjust the motion sensor input to provide perspective based on user motion, rather than physically emulating single-position stereoscopic vision. For me, it'd be far nicer than the multiple-monitor setup I have now, and would fit in a locked drawer when I wasn't using it.
A layered 3D desktop monitor would be kinda nifty, but a minor usability advance compared to a much more flexible HMD. But I suppose I'll have to be happy with the castoffs from the gamers...
J
Given the last item -- "a giant planet moving in an orbit around its Sun-like central star that is very similar to the one of the Earth and whose potential satellites (in theory, at least) might be "habitable"" -- I wonder not about how we humans might live there, but how life might evolve there.
In particular, I wonder if advanced space travel might develop at a faster evolutionary rate given several habitable planet-sized moons in close proximity. After all, great advances in technology are usually composed of thousands of small steps and an occasional leap. Starting from Earth, there are no close-by habitable locations, so we focus on making one great leap after another. Our drive to explore overrides reasons to return to the same spots again and again. That's not very efficient or productive in terms of developing travel technology. If the Moon, Mars, and Venus were all habitable, the amount of repetitive space travel we'd be engaged in would result in rapid incremental improvement in travel technology.
Racetrack demons start by going really fast around the block when they're little kids, and speeding up with every step. But here we are, stuck in a celestial backwater with nowhere to go nearby, so our first toddling steps involve building and driving the equivalent of a long-haul truck. I'd lay my money on us being visited far sooner than us finding/visiting another travel-capable race.
...by searching for "MIR space station". Does anyone have a mirror or pdf of the actual bidding page? There aren't many auction pages worth saving, but the Seattle earthquake rubble (~30 min after the quake) and the one for MIR salvage are pretty funny.
I was reminded about the internet horizon by a recent experience with some ca.1993 network equipment from Intel. Very little documentation and no driver software was available for pre-1995 equipment, and I find the experience rather common with other equipment and software vendors.
In a previous life, I worked with a wide variety of PC hardware, and as a result have _hundreds_ of old (1985-1995) motherboard, drive, NIC, and peripheral manuals boxed up in my basement. I've often thought that I should scan them in (maybe to PDF or OCR->text so that they are text-searchable). However, the rub is that many of these companies are still in business, don't want bother supporting old stuff, and don't want someone else to do it for them, either.
Is there any way I can make these available for people to peruse just as if I had lent them the physical book? They're books, remember. What's the deal with fair use & copying of out-of-print books? Do I have to write an applet viewer that says "I'm sorry, someone else is reading that right now" if there's a simultaneous request for an archival copy of a manual? Better yet, is there a way to legally flip the original and the archival copy so that the physical original is considered the backup for the electronic document?
hmm.
-Jon
Seems that a boat with multiple high-power turbines moving a 750' hull at 50mph would make a hell of a racket. Has anyone considered the amount of damage this noise level would do to ambient marine life (particularly large marine mammals)? Would any environmentally-conscious nation allow this to operate in its waters? It seems like this design might make most of the crossing in a short time, but spend several days slowly coming into and leaving each port. Hmm.
my $0.02
Jon
Well, my contribution towards the torture of delivery people was aimed at UPS, but it was humorous just the same.
Last summer, I tracked down a fellow from Montana who has some blacksmithing tools I wanted, and sent him a check for a few hundred dollars. A few days later, I woke up to the sound of a UPS truck pulling in my driveway bright and early:
*slam*
*swoosh* (rear door opening)
"goddamn... fuggin..piece o...hrrrrr"
*stompstompstompstomp*
*hwathump* (on my doorstep)
"...can't fuggin believe... fuggin two of 'em... arrrr..."
*stompstompstompstomp*
*hwathump* (again on my doorstep)
By the time I got my jeans on, the truck was pulling away. And there they were: one 140 lb. anvil, and one 150 lb. anvil (nice ones, too), side by side on my doorstep, no packaging of any kind -- just a mailing label taped to the side of each -- right up against the screen door so that I couldn't get out.
Served me right, I suppose.
Jon
It's our housemate's kitchen, and the neighbor's bedroom. Methinks the neighbor should buy the curtains, instead of my housemate having to drink his coffee in the dark every morning. Of course, if he gouges his eyes out, the point will be moot.