From the article: Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
I was the homecoming king in my highschool, a member of the student body as well as a starter on the waterpolo team. I sat in the 'A' tables, and my popularity was even larger than me.
I also tought myself Pascal and C when I was 14, reading textbooks on the pool deck during swim meets.
How come so many slashdotters assume that geek==social misfit. That's a stereotype that (while often true) bears no correlation. You can be popular and be a geek. You can be female and be a geek. You can be a popular female and be a geek. Get over it.
Nobody talks about this, so I just thought that I'd point out the rats nest that is publishing rights. For an online service to be legal, one needs both copyrights and publishing rights. Copyright for most works is held by the members of the RIAA. The similar organization for publishing rights is called Harry Fox Agency. However, Harry Fox has thousands of members and they are all very small. If you want to make a legal online service, you have to get written authorization from these Harry Fox members. However, the lack of coordination and technology at Harry Fox makes this almost impossible. It is extremely diffucult to get this permission because they don't know who owns the publishing rights, or are unable to contact the owners for many songs.
This is why even services like pressplay and musicnet do not have a very good selection. For background, see this article where Universal lost a lawsuit when it was sued by the publishers when they attempted to put music that they owned the copyright for online.
All they want is word processing, and internet access.
Everybody keeps saying this, but it's just not the case. Maybe 3 years ago, but now people want a bit more. Digital photography is getting really big. Just about every average-joe I know either already prints out their own photos, or wants to print photos like the guy across the street. Oh yeah, and does it burn cds? People are asking more from their computers these days. Email, web, and word processing isn't going to cut it anymore.
I just returned from Italy and I can attest to the 80% statistic. What totally blew me away was the fact that even very old people all had cell phones. Perhaps somebody can explain what factors cause people in one of the oldest western countries around to conquer the fear of new technology so well.
In investigating the petswarehouse website I discovered this link which lists the 20th page of products that have the letter 'a' in the name.
Now, don't everybody hit that up a lot because selecting everything with 'a' from their database, and then jumping to the 20th page is a lot of work and it would cause unneeded strain on their website.
However, it's very useful if you are interested in viewing the depth of the petswarehouse catalog.
When you first use this phone you are able to dial numbers. Why? because the digits are on each buttons, and you just hunt-and-peck your way along. But the real beauty of this UI is for expert users, and everyone is an expert user of their cellphone. By arranging the buttons radially, you have a much easier time dialing blindly. Check out the keypad, there's a nice buttonless space for your thumb to go when you grab the phone in your pocket. From there, each button is easily naviagble. In fact, it's somewhat similar to mozilla's pie menus. They're going for ease of use while dialing blindly, and they know that whoever get's this as their phone will have more than enough time to become an expert at using it. That's because people use it every day. Handspring made the mistake of not enabling blind dialing in their Treo phone. Because the touch screen has no texture, it's impossible to find the buttons without looking.
So don't look at the nokia layout as an attmpt to be retro or to emulate a rotary phone, they're trying to make it easy for people to effortlessly use thier phone without looking. And there's no reason to stick to the 3x4 layout. Most cellphones' buttons are so different in size anyways that it's impossible to blind dial one after constantly using another. Therefore, they might as well rearrange them completely.
Not long ago I would have totally agreed with you, but then I got a Canon s110 and I totally changed the way I viewed cameras. Due to the fact that it was so small and that there is zero cost to take pictures, I started taking it everywhere with me. It is as common as keys, wallet, and cellphone. So why not consolidate the cellphone and camera? Actually, I'm seriously interested in buying a product that merges my wallet and my cellphone.
Wow, reading the header I though that the FBI is going after people who create the warchalk marks. But, if you RTA it's a lot less interesting. Basically, the FBI is saying that companies should be clued in if they get a warchalk marking an open WLAN next to their office. Duh. Dunno why I need the FBI to tell me that.
Even though I couldn't stand Wesley Crusher on STNG, I think Wil Wheaton is a great dude. I'm bummed for him but glad he's not in the movie all at the same time. Somebody needs to write him into a better role somewhere because I really do hope he finds more success.
It's not that the mp3's were "different" it was that they were "copies". Because mp3.com reproduced, or made copies of the cds in a commercial setting, it was copyright infringement.
The same would be true if I purchased ever vhs tape in existance, and then burnt dvd's of all of them and rented the dvd's. It doesn't matter if I only burn one dvd per vhs tape, because it's still a copy, which violates copyright.
Just like the mp3.com thing
on
Borrowing ROMs
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· Score: 3
This is just what cost mp3.com 400 million bucks. The problem here is that when you copy the ROM from the chip to disk, you are making a copy of a copyrighted product for commercial use. This is illegal. It doesn't matter what you do with the ROM images on disk, once you make the copy you're screwed. The only way for this to work would be to rent the physical rom chips.
Petition NASA! Blast it out of the way now!
on
A Rock Moves In Space
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· Score: 4, Funny
This dangerous situation only get's harder to deride the longer we wait. I am doing everything I can to influence NASA to start working on getting a nuclear blast to deride the course of the oncoming danger. I agree that detonating a nuclear bomb in the course of the approaching llama is a bit drastic, but I refuse to sit idly by as the approaching threat of llama collision approaches.
How can you possibly test bugfixes/changes that need to get deployed to thousands of machines? Furthermore, how in the heck do you deploy the changes once they're tested. I understand you probably can't describe the exact process, but perhaps you can enlighten us on some principals learned on the subject of CM on such a massive scale.
You're totally right, and the perl community agrees with you. For example, on page 3 of the apocalypse, Larry Wall states that perl has too much historical baggage. But that's exactly why they're redesigning it for perl 6.
It's up for debate whether python, ruby, PHP do perl better than perl, but it's true that they all took the good things out from perl5 and left out the bad things. They're doing the same with perl 6. In addition, some extremely bright people are working on it that have had a lot of experience with designing and extending languages. If you read the apocalypse, it's amazing how Larry Wall has shed all of his preconceptions and leanings towards older versions of perl. They're taking the good stuff out of every language and fusing it together in a very colaborative way. And I'm convinced that the resulting perl6 will be a language to be reconed with.
Please note that bad latency does not only affect gaming. I used to have DirectPC and it made ssh sessions all but unusable. To experience this, try typing each shell command with your eyes closed until you hit enter, and only open them after you see the output.
Not only that, many modern webpages are riddled with many small images. Depending on how your browser parllelizes image requests, the latency can even affect your browsing experience too.
Klez passed through my work a ways back and ever since then we've all been getting all kinds of spam. From what we can figure, the virus replied to all kinds of spam with the From line set to everybody's email address, including mine. So even though I hardly ever give my email away except for work issues, i'm now inundated with spam. Makes me think that someday some spammer out there will write a virus solely to collect email addresses.
Ok, on the whole I like dark lighting, private offices, headphone music (classical). But I'd sell all of this for one thing. Leave me alone. It takes me up to 45 minutes after sitting down to really get into what I'm coding. If I have an interruption every 30 minutes I will get nothing done. Of course it's very diffucult to structure an environment where people can ask questions when they want without bothering all of the other coders who are in the zone. Here's some ways to make this easier:
* set up an irc server or get everyone on IM. If you have a question, IM it to somebody instead of interrupting them with a phone call or personal visit. If they are in the zone, they can wait until their train of thought winds down to answer.
* Catered, delivered meals are a diabolical way to squeeze more zone time out of your employees. Nothing is better for me (and the company) when somebody brings in a bag of burritos when I'm in the zone. Delivered dinner is the best way to explioit me for more unpaid work.
* Good CM and documentation limit the amount of interruptions because people can consult the docs instead of, "Ask Bob, he's the only guy who knows how that works."
* Let me work funky hours. We've got one guy who gets here at 7:30 AM, another who shows up at noon and stays till 10:00 PM. Why? Because there are large chunks of time where nobody is around to interrupt them. This can wreak havoc at your company if you don't do the above documentation, but it can work out very well if you do.
Yeah, private offices, screen real-estate and Aeron chairs are cool, but I'd throw them all away for a full day without interruptions.
I was looking at jabber for a different purpose. I've heard a lot of hype that you can use Jabber for more than just an IM gateway, and Programming Jabber talks all about this. The task I evaluated it for is more like a message passing system for many automated distributed programs. The problem is that you cannot cluster many jabber servers in a high availiablity way such that one jabberd outage doesn't segment your network. In your example, what happens when the main server running jabberd goes down? What happens to the clients connected to it?
My big problem with Jabber...
on
Programming Jabber
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I read this book looking to use jabber for automated XML messaging and I'll have to say, it has a lot of nifty features that I'd love to use. Unfortunately, it's never getting deployed in my network. Why? You can't cluster jabber servers. If the main jabber server goes down, you're hosed. In any application that's worth the effort to deploy, having such a single point of failure is a big problem. Additionally, I was kinda annoyed at how jabber leans so much towards instant messaging. I know, I know, that's what it was built for, but this book is trying to pass it off as an "XML messaging" tool, but it's properties often sway back to IM.
In conclusion, if you wanna fool around with a nifty IM robot that doesn't need to be relied on, jabber is a nifty tool. If you wanna do real XML messaging, try something like xmlblaster.
They're marketing BitTorrent as a solution to web providers with bandwidth limitations. The client registers a mime-type so when you click on a BitTorrent download link it hands it to the p2p client which then downloads it from the network. The technology is nothing spectacular, but it's nice to see a simple install method that integrates nicely into the browser.
One interesting side-effect of this implementation is that there is no searching. You only download stuff from BitTorrent if you find a link on a web page for it. However, without the requirement for searching, Freenet would be a great replacement for this role of browser-download accellerator. All you really need to do to implement this would be to provide a nice installation.exe of freenet that could parse a meta-file pointing to the freenet key of the object you wanted to download.
I hate to rain on the parade but Morpheus et al. as well as the latest version of BearShare both do this, and have for some time. When you say p2p with brains, to me it means somebody has come up with a elegant balance between centralization and search speeds.
For some background reading, check out this press release where the music publishers sued Universal for trying to put (Universal) music online without the permission of the publishers.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article: Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
I was the homecoming king in my highschool, a member of the student body as well as a starter on the waterpolo team. I sat in the 'A' tables, and my popularity was even larger than me.
I also tought myself Pascal and C when I was 14, reading textbooks on the pool deck during swim meets.
How come so many slashdotters assume that geek==social misfit. That's a stereotype that (while often true) bears no correlation.
You can be popular and be a geek. You can be female and be a geek. You can be a popular female and be a geek. Get over it.
Nobody talks about this, so I just thought that I'd point out the rats nest that is publishing rights. For an online service to be legal, one needs both copyrights and publishing rights. Copyright for most works is held by the members of the RIAA. The similar organization for publishing rights is called Harry Fox Agency. However, Harry Fox has thousands of members and they are all very small. If you want to make a legal online service, you have to get written authorization from these Harry Fox members. However, the lack of coordination and technology at Harry Fox makes this almost impossible. It is extremely diffucult to get this permission because they don't know who owns the publishing rights, or are unable to contact the owners for many songs.
This is why even services like pressplay and musicnet do not have a very good selection. For background, see this article where Universal lost a lawsuit when it was sued by the publishers when they attempted to put music that they owned the copyright for online.
All they want is word processing, and internet access.
Everybody keeps saying this, but it's just not the case. Maybe 3 years ago, but now people want a bit more. Digital photography is getting really big. Just about every average-joe I know either already prints out their own photos, or wants to print photos like the guy across the street. Oh yeah, and does it burn cds? People are asking more from their computers these days. Email, web, and word processing isn't going to cut it anymore.
I just returned from Italy and I can attest to the 80% statistic. What totally blew me away was the fact that even very old people all had cell phones. Perhaps somebody can explain what factors cause people in one of the oldest western countries around to conquer the fear of new technology so well.
In investigating the petswarehouse website I discovered this link which lists the 20th page of products that have the letter 'a' in the name.
Now, don't everybody hit that up a lot because selecting everything with 'a' from their database, and then jumping to the 20th page is a lot of work and it would cause unneeded strain on their website.
However, it's very useful if you are interested in viewing the depth of the petswarehouse catalog.
4. linux has a journaling filesystem, freebsd doesn't
5. linux has SMP (multiprocessor support), freebsd doesn't
Those are the big two reasons why I would use linux in a professional environment.
When you first use this phone you are able to dial numbers. Why? because the digits are on each buttons, and you just hunt-and-peck your way along. But the real beauty of this UI is for expert users, and everyone is an expert user of their cellphone. By arranging the buttons radially, you have a much easier time dialing blindly. Check out the keypad, there's a nice buttonless space for your thumb to go when you grab the phone in your pocket. From there, each button is easily naviagble. In fact, it's somewhat similar to mozilla's pie menus. They're going for ease of use while dialing blindly, and they know that whoever get's this as their phone will have more than enough time to become an expert at using it. That's because people use it every day. Handspring made the mistake of not enabling blind dialing in their Treo phone. Because the touch screen has no texture, it's impossible to find the buttons without looking.
So don't look at the nokia layout as an attmpt to be retro or to emulate a rotary phone, they're trying to make it easy for people to effortlessly use thier phone without looking. And there's no reason to stick to the 3x4 layout. Most cellphones' buttons are so different in size anyways that it's impossible to blind dial one after constantly using another. Therefore, they might as well rearrange them completely.
Not long ago I would have totally agreed with you, but then I got a Canon s110 and I totally changed the way I viewed cameras. Due to the fact that it was so small and that there is zero cost to take pictures, I started taking it everywhere with me. It is as common as keys, wallet, and cellphone. So why not consolidate the cellphone and camera? Actually, I'm seriously interested in buying a product that merges my wallet and my cellphone.
Wow, reading the header I though that the FBI is going after people who create the warchalk marks. But, if you RTA it's a lot less interesting. Basically, the FBI is saying that companies should be clued in if they get a warchalk marking an open WLAN next to their office. Duh. Dunno why I need the FBI to tell me that.
Even though I couldn't stand Wesley Crusher on STNG, I think Wil Wheaton is a great dude. I'm bummed for him but glad he's not in the movie all at the same time. Somebody needs to write him into a better role somewhere because I really do hope he finds more success.
It's not that the mp3's were "different" it was that they were "copies". Because mp3.com reproduced, or made copies of the cds in a commercial setting, it was copyright infringement.
The same would be true if I purchased ever vhs tape in existance, and then burnt dvd's of all of them and rented the dvd's. It doesn't matter if I only burn one dvd per vhs tape, because it's still a copy, which violates copyright.
This is just what cost mp3.com 400 million bucks. The problem here is that when you copy the ROM from the chip to disk, you are making a copy of a copyrighted product for commercial use. This is illegal. It doesn't matter what you do with the ROM images on disk, once you make the copy you're screwed. The only way for this to work would be to rent the physical rom chips.
This dangerous situation only get's harder to deride the longer we wait. I am doing everything I can to influence NASA to start working on getting a nuclear blast to deride the course of the oncoming danger. I agree that detonating a nuclear bomb in the course of the approaching llama is a bit drastic, but I refuse to sit idly by as the approaching threat of llama collision approaches.
How can you possibly test bugfixes/changes that need to get deployed to thousands of machines? Furthermore, how in the heck do you deploy the changes once they're tested. I understand you probably can't describe the exact process, but perhaps you can enlighten us on some principals learned on the subject of CM on such a massive scale.
You're totally right, and the perl community agrees with you. For example, on page 3 of the apocalypse, Larry Wall states that perl has too much historical baggage. But that's exactly why they're redesigning it for perl 6.
It's up for debate whether python, ruby, PHP do perl better than perl, but it's true that they all took the good things out from perl5 and left out the bad things. They're doing the same with perl 6. In addition, some extremely bright people are working on it that have had a lot of experience with designing and extending languages. If you read the apocalypse, it's amazing how Larry Wall has shed all of his preconceptions and leanings towards older versions of perl. They're taking the good stuff out of every language and fusing it together in a very colaborative way. And I'm convinced that the resulting perl6 will be a language to be reconed with.
The comedy of this is that Blizzard is owned by Vivendi Universal, one of the big 5 record labels, as well as a member of the MPAA.
Wouldn't it be great if it turns out to be the newest format forIndivBox.key
Please note that bad latency does not only affect gaming. I used to have DirectPC and it made ssh sessions all but unusable. To experience this, try typing each shell command with your eyes closed until you hit enter, and only open them after you see the output.
Not only that, many modern webpages are riddled with many small images. Depending on how your browser parllelizes image requests, the latency can even affect your browsing experience too.
Klez passed through my work a ways back and ever since then we've all been getting all kinds of spam. From what we can figure, the virus replied to all kinds of spam with the From line set to everybody's email address, including mine. So even though I hardly ever give my email away except for work issues, i'm now inundated with spam. Makes me think that someday some spammer out there will write a virus solely to collect email addresses.
Ok, on the whole I like dark lighting, private offices, headphone music (classical). But I'd sell all of this for one thing. Leave me alone. It takes me up to 45 minutes after sitting down to really get into what I'm coding. If I have an interruption every 30 minutes I will get nothing done. Of course it's very diffucult to structure an environment where people can ask questions when they want without bothering all of the other coders who are in the zone. Here's some ways to make this easier:
* set up an irc server or get everyone on IM. If you have a question, IM it to somebody instead of interrupting them with a phone call or personal visit. If they are in the zone, they can wait until their train of thought winds down to answer.
* Catered, delivered meals are a diabolical way to squeeze more zone time out of your employees. Nothing is better for me (and the company) when somebody brings in a bag of burritos when I'm in the zone. Delivered dinner is the best way to explioit me for more unpaid work.
* Good CM and documentation limit the amount of interruptions because people can consult the docs instead of, "Ask Bob, he's the only guy who knows how that works."
* Let me work funky hours. We've got one guy who gets here at 7:30 AM, another who shows up at noon and stays till 10:00 PM. Why? Because there are large chunks of time where nobody is around to interrupt them. This can wreak havoc at your company if you don't do the above documentation, but it can work out very well if you do.
Yeah, private offices, screen real-estate and Aeron chairs are cool, but I'd throw them all away for a full day without interruptions.
I was looking at jabber for a different purpose. I've heard a lot of hype that you can use Jabber for more than just an IM gateway, and Programming Jabber talks all about this. The task I evaluated it for is more like a message passing system for many automated distributed programs. The problem is that you cannot cluster many jabber servers in a high availiablity way such that one jabberd outage doesn't segment your network. In your example, what happens when the main server running jabberd goes down? What happens to the clients connected to it?
I read this book looking to use jabber for automated XML messaging and I'll have to say, it has a lot of nifty features that I'd love to use. Unfortunately, it's never getting deployed in my network. Why?
You can't cluster jabber servers. If the main jabber server goes down, you're hosed. In any application that's worth the effort to deploy, having such a single point of failure is a big problem. Additionally, I was kinda annoyed at how jabber leans so much towards instant messaging. I know, I know, that's what it was built for, but this book is trying to pass it off as an "XML messaging" tool, but it's properties often sway back to IM.
In conclusion, if you wanna fool around with a nifty IM robot that doesn't need to be relied on, jabber is a nifty tool. If you wanna do real XML messaging, try something like xmlblaster.
They're marketing BitTorrent as a solution to web providers with bandwidth limitations. The client registers a mime-type so when you click on a BitTorrent download link it hands it to the p2p client which then downloads it from the network.
.exe of freenet that could parse a meta-file pointing to the freenet key of the object you wanted to download.
The technology is nothing spectacular, but it's nice to see a simple install method that integrates nicely into the browser.
One interesting side-effect of this implementation is that there is no searching. You only download stuff from BitTorrent if you find a link on a web page for it. However, without the requirement for searching, Freenet would be a great replacement for this role of browser-download accellerator. All you really need to do to implement this would be to provide a nice installation
I hate to rain on the parade but Morpheus et al. as well as the latest version of BearShare both do this, and have for some time.
When you say p2p with brains, to me it means somebody has come up with a elegant balance between centralization and search speeds.
For some background reading, check out this press release where the music publishers sued Universal for trying to put (Universal) music online without the permission of the publishers.