There are lots of sites (like Issues 2000) that have information about presidential candidates, but don't forget the power of Congress and state & local governments.
Freedom Channel is one of the few sites that has issue statements from candidates for president, senator, U.S. rep and governor. The issue statements are video (so you get to look 'em in the eye), and there's additional information and links for each candidate (plus extensive profiles of Congressional incumbents from National Journal's Almanac of American Politics).
Freedom Channel is non-partisan and non-profit (with foundation support). They don't exclude third party candidates like many of the big-media sites do. They're a terrific starting point to learn more about any national, statewide or congressional candidate.
Am I the only one experiencing these problems:
o Under Win98, it seems to render pages perfectly fast, but downloads many sites very slowly. On the same machine Communicator 4.7 or MSIE downloads these sites 3 or 4 times faster.
o Under Win98, after 4 or 5 minutes of use, M17 and PR2 both with grab buckets of RAM for an instant and then give it back -- often enough to generate a "90% of resources in use" warning. If I run resoure meter, I can see the system resources take a dive and bounce right back as I load pages.
These two problem make either version unusable for me.
As I type this, I also notice that the cursor disappears from the text box when there's no keyboard activity. Very annoying.
I'm shopping for colocation as well (in this case for a financial application), and I'm having trouble sifting through the marketingspeak to figure out who's really got their sh*t together.
Does anyone know if one of the trade rags does surveys on/ratings of colocation services? I haven't been able to find anything.
1) Who's going to buy MyWindows from Joe Schmoe down the street instead of getting it from Microsoft?
Good question. And history already provides the answer.
DR-DOS/Novell DOS was just as good as MS-DOS, but it never won more than a few points of market share. Future Windows clones would suffer the same fate, unless MICROS~1 were subject to the conduct restrictions that everyone is trying to avoid.
If you try to market this to consumers, you've got a zillion challenges trying to break into the sales channel.
But the auto manufacturers are another story. They want more high-margin, high-tech communications, navigation and entertainment devices in their cars, but are worried about the Feds blaming them for drivers taking their eyes off the road. Consequently, are very hungry for voice-activated technology.
For example, GM already has plans to put a voice-activated cell phone in every car the sell (a logical enhancement to their OnStar emergency communications system). I'll bet they'd love to offer a Delco-branded voice-activated MP3 player.
Get your fanny up to Detroit and talk to GM, Ford and DCX. That's where the real market for this is.
While in this account Billington doesn't mention it, there is a bigger issue for the LOC: How long can they expect digital media to last?
We know from experience that acid-free paper lasts for many hundreds of years. But magnetic tape reels and cassettes aren't reliable for more than a half-dozen years, hard disks have bearings and other moving parts that fail over time, and some studies indicate that the plastic in compact disks may deteriorate after fifty years.
And this ignores the formatting issues: Can you find hardware to read your archive of old Sysquest tapes and 5.75" (or 8") floppies today? Will you be able to find CD readers 200 years from now? And if the data's stored as rich text, will anyone be able to find the software? My senior thesis is safely stored on a diskette in Leading Edge Word Processor format. It might as well be in heiroglyphics.
If the LOC were to take the trouble to digitize the books, what media and format could they reliable store them on so that they'll still exist for future generations?
Given these constraints, I'd rather not have them spend my tax dollars on the labor-intensive process of scanning, OCRing and correcting text from millions of boosk.
Nielsen ratings, like most public opinion research, uses random samples of the total population. As long as these samples are sufficiently large, one can reliably extrapolate -- within a known margin of error -- to get a picture of the total population's behavior.
So, can someone explain to me why all of us need our viewing habit tracked? If Nielsen wants to pay for a special verision of the Tivo/Replay software that will be compatible with their people meters, that's okay with me, because anyone who accepts a people meter is agreeing to monitoring of his behavior -- and presumaby is being compensated for it.
But as for the rest of us, this sort of monitoring is not only intrusive but also unnecessary.
This is a lot more interesting as a Ralph Reed story than as a Microsoft story. It just means that by delivering South Carolina for Bush, he's finally completed the transition from Outsider Activist to Insider Deal-Maker.
It also means ol' Ralph is starting to cash in big-time.
The Microsofties need a foot in the door among the Bush crowd so that their calls to a Bush White House are answered. Hiring one of the candidate's consultants as their own consultant is a time-honored method to do so. Now they just need a similar friend from the Gore team.
This Wired News item indicates the DOJ might push to open-source MSIE as part of the remedy in the Microsoft anti-trust trial.
It seems to me this would take a lot of wind out of Mozilla's sails. Does the world really need two open-source browsers? And with a majority of the end-user installed base, an open MSIE could very well grab a larger chunk of developer effort.
Netscape's user-agent string has been "Mozilla" since at least version 1 -- long before there was Mozilla Project. For that matter, Explorer shows up in access logs as Mozilla/MSIE.
This does not mean MICROS~1 is using Mozilla Project code in Explorer.
> looks basically like a Mozilla nightly build > with AOL crap thrown in
At least it allows you to opt out of installing the Instant Messenger, which the 4.7 installer obliges you to install.
Seems fairly stable for a "preview release." It only took me a few minutes to crash it, but it seems a lot closer to feature complete and stable than the last Mozilla build I grabbed.
I have yet to see a viable solution to the ballot secrecy problem. Votation's site includes the following amusing assurance:
You are now free to vote anonymously for the candidate of your choice. We cannot track you back and view your vote!
Why should I believe this?
Until someone can answer this question for me, I'm left wondering what problem online voting is a solution to.
Is it a cure for voter apathy? Of course not. Apathetic voters stay home because they don't think voting is important, not because they think it's too hard.
Does the current system make it hard to get to the polls? Preposterous. Most Americans live within walking distance of their polling place. True, physical disabilities may keep some people from the polls, but absentee balloting and free rides to the polls offered by both major parties and many other organizations are already available.
So just why is it that we're trying to create a whole new balloting infrastructure?
The following passage was buried in the interview with the U.S. Atty:
We're not necessarily looking for kits or components. We're looking for items like clocks, smoke detectors and picture frames.
What exactly was seized? Were they phony smoke detectors with hidden microphones and transmitters or were they just kits? The article never says explicitly.
If Ramsey was selling pre-disguised transmitters, I am sympathetic with the FBI. If they were just kits, I'm more inclined to see Ramsey's point of view.
This guy hasn't been on TV since the Mike Douglas show went off the air. This is the best publicity he's gotten in decades. He should be paying Nintendo.
Personally, I would like to see the practice of "fusion" legalized and/or instituted in Presidential elections. "Fusion" is the practice whereby multiple political parties can nominate the same candidate.
There is nothing in the law to prevent this. In fact, this is common practice in New York state elections, where the Conservative Party, Liberal Party and others routinely nominate the candidates of the major parties.
In fact, the mechanisms are already in place in presidential elections, where you are not really selecting a candidate and running mate when you vote. You are actually voting for a slate of electors, selected by a political party, who have pledged their votes in the electoral college to a candidate and his running mate. So if two parties endorsed the same ticket and both were on your ballot, you could pick the party label you wanted.
The biggest obstacles to this actually happening in a presidential election are as follows:
The biggest challenge for minor parties is getting on the ballot in the first place.
The candidate would have to accept the second nomination, which could hurt him in the race for the first. A candidate who is perceived to have weak party loyalty may lose favor among activists within his "primary" party if he shows too much interest in the nomination of "secondary" parties. One of Gore's bludgeons against Bradley for the last several months has been Gore's assertion that Bradley is not sufficiently loyal to the Democratic party. He'd lose that issue if he were perceived as being too close to the Greens.
Freedom of expression is not reserved to The Press alone. Everyone's "speech" is protected under the U.S. Constitution. Here's the full text of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Do they really each have 55 million users or 55 million registrations?
I don't use instant messengers, but I have tried them out from time to time, creating a new account each time. So, although I'm not a user, I do account for a half dozen registrations.
By this measure, Pointcast has 10 or 20 million users. Ha!
... is to blame for a lot of these names. If you plan on doing business worldwide, your name needs to be pronounceable by people with many different native languages, and needs to lack bad connotations in those languages.
For example, Federal Express officially changed its name to FedEx in part because people in many countries had trouble pronouncing Federal.
So we get the worst of decision by committee -- only names that have no chance of offending or confusing any one among the world's 6 billion people will survive.
This isn't about privacy, it's about commerce. I'm sure NSI will be very agressive about selling the contact names to bulk email and snail mail advertisers.
If you're an internet access provider, more hits just cost you more money. Publicity is nice, but he only makes money when ppl buy services from him.
I agree.
Maybe some Slashdotters who need some hosting can throw this guy some business.
Keyboard-specific apps
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 2
I've long held that AT-style keyboards killed WordPerfect.
Good ol' WP 4.2 for DOS was easy to use once you trained your brain to feel the necessary key combinations. When asked what the keystroke for Print, or Search & Replace or Reveal Codes were, I typically didn't know the names of the keys, but I knew their feel with my left hand.
I say my left hand, because my old XT-style keyboard arrayed its function keys on the far left of the keyboard.
Cursor keys were easy to navigate without looking, because the only cursor keys available were on the un-NumLocked numeric keypad, where they are much more usefully arranged than in today's dedicated cursor keypad area. My right index finder still does the HomeHomeLeft dance in its sleep.
Then new & improved keyboards arrived with function keys arrayed across the top, so that for most WP commands, two hands and a glance down were now required. Being able to keep NumLock on and have separate keypads for cursors and numbers was a nice enhancement, but why completely rearrange the relationship between the cursor keys and Home, End, etc? Good luck executing a HomeHomeLeft without looking down.
As the new keyboards arrived (with top fuction keys, new cursor keypad, and migrated Ctrl key), two things happened to WP for DOS users.
First, the learning curve retrain our brains to feel the new locations of WP functions was nearly as great as the learning curve for a while new app.
Second, once new locations were learned, the ability to type without glancing down was seriously compromised.
Given these constraints, is it surprising that many chose to learn a new app -- MSWord -- rather than relearn the old app? I think not.
Even now, if it weren't for e-mail and browsers, I'd be happy with my only computer being a Compaq 386LTE laptop w/ 1 MB of RAM, 20 MB disk space, DOS 3.3 and WP 4.2. I'd get a lot more work done more efficiently, which is supposed to be the whole point of computer enhancements, isn't it?
It's great to see Mozilla acquire a new "senior partner" in addition to AOL.
When you look at the "improvements" to Communicator 4.x since AOL's acquisition of Netscape, you get the notion that AOL's only interest in the browser has been to market their "branded" service. Have you noticed there's no way to opt out of AIM in the 4.7 install (for Windows, at least)?
Yeah, I know, AOL/Netscape has eleventy-one developers dedicated to Mozilla, and if it weren't for them there'd be no Mozilla. But given their business model, it's hard to see how AOL will be able to justify that level of effort long term -- other than for adding bogus "enhancements" designed to herd sheep into their $23/month service.
Red Hat's business model is based on building a strong base of Open-Source apps, so it's easier for me to see them keeping Mozilla alive and relevant for the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
There are lots of sites (like Issues 2000) that have information about presidential candidates, but don't forget the power of Congress and state & local governments.
Freedom Channel is one of the few sites that has issue statements from candidates for president, senator, U.S. rep and governor. The issue statements are video (so you get to look 'em in the eye), and there's additional information and links for each candidate (plus extensive profiles of Congressional incumbents from National Journal's Almanac of American Politics).
Freedom Channel is non-partisan and non-profit (with foundation support). They don't exclude third party candidates like many of the big-media sites do. They're a terrific starting point to learn more about any national, statewide or congressional candidate.
Am I the only one experiencing these problems: o Under Win98, it seems to render pages perfectly fast, but downloads many sites very slowly. On the same machine Communicator 4.7 or MSIE downloads these sites 3 or 4 times faster. o Under Win98, after 4 or 5 minutes of use, M17 and PR2 both with grab buckets of RAM for an instant and then give it back -- often enough to generate a "90% of resources in use" warning. If I run resoure meter, I can see the system resources take a dive and bounce right back as I load pages. These two problem make either version unusable for me. As I type this, I also notice that the cursor disappears from the text box when there's no keyboard activity. Very annoying.
I'm shopping for colocation as well (in this case for a financial application), and I'm having trouble sifting through the marketingspeak to figure out who's really got their sh*t together.
Does anyone know if one of the trade rags does surveys on/ratings of colocation services? I haven't been able to find anything.
1) Who's going to buy MyWindows from Joe Schmoe down the street instead of getting it from Microsoft?
Good question. And history already provides the answer.
DR-DOS/Novell DOS was just as good as MS-DOS, but it never won more than a few points of market share. Future Windows clones would suffer the same fate, unless MICROS~1 were subject to the conduct restrictions that everyone is trying to avoid.
> They both say pretty much the same thing.
That's because they're both rewrites of a press release. Welcome to the glamourous world of business journalism.
If you try to market this to consumers, you've got a zillion challenges trying to break into the sales channel.
But the auto manufacturers are another story. They want more high-margin, high-tech communications, navigation and entertainment devices in their cars, but are worried about the Feds blaming them for drivers taking their eyes off the road. Consequently, are very hungry for voice-activated technology.
For example, GM already has plans to put a voice-activated cell phone in every car the sell (a logical enhancement to their OnStar emergency communications system). I'll bet they'd love to offer a Delco-branded voice-activated MP3 player.
Get your fanny up to Detroit and talk to GM, Ford and DCX. That's where the real market for this is.
While in this account Billington doesn't mention it, there is a bigger issue for the LOC: How long can they expect digital media to last?
We know from experience that acid-free paper lasts for many hundreds of years. But magnetic tape reels and cassettes aren't reliable for more than a half-dozen years, hard disks have bearings and other moving parts that fail over time, and some studies indicate that the plastic in compact disks may deteriorate after fifty years.
And this ignores the formatting issues: Can you find hardware to read your archive of old Sysquest tapes and 5.75" (or 8") floppies today? Will you be able to find CD readers 200 years from now? And if the data's stored as rich text, will anyone be able to find the software? My senior thesis is safely stored on a diskette in Leading Edge Word Processor format. It might as well be in heiroglyphics.
If the LOC were to take the trouble to digitize the books, what media and format could they reliable store them on so that they'll still exist for future generations?
Given these constraints, I'd rather not have them spend my tax dollars on the labor-intensive process of scanning, OCRing and correcting text from millions of boosk.
Nielsen ratings, like most public opinion research, uses random samples of the total population. As long as these samples are sufficiently large, one can reliably extrapolate -- within a known margin of error -- to get a picture of the total population's behavior.
So, can someone explain to me why all of us need our viewing habit tracked? If Nielsen wants to pay for a special verision of the Tivo/Replay software that will be compatible with their people meters, that's okay with me, because anyone who accepts a people meter is agreeing to monitoring of his behavior -- and presumaby is being compensated for it.
But as for the rest of us, this sort of monitoring is not only intrusive but also unnecessary.
I agree.
This is a lot more interesting as a Ralph Reed story than as a Microsoft story. It just means that by delivering South Carolina for Bush, he's finally completed the transition from Outsider Activist to Insider Deal-Maker.
It also means ol' Ralph is starting to cash in big-time.
The Microsofties need a foot in the door among the Bush crowd so that their calls to a Bush White House are answered. Hiring one of the candidate's consultants as their own consultant is a time-honored method to do so. Now they just need a similar friend from the Gore team.
This Wired News item indicates the DOJ might push to open-source MSIE as part of the remedy in the Microsoft anti-trust trial.
It seems to me this would take a lot of wind out of Mozilla's sails. Does the world really need two open-source browsers? And with a majority of the end-user installed base, an open MSIE could very well grab a larger chunk of developer effort.
Netscape's user-agent string has been "Mozilla" since at least version 1 -- long before there was Mozilla Project. For that matter, Explorer shows up in access logs as Mozilla/MSIE.
This does not mean MICROS~1 is using Mozilla Project code in Explorer.
> looks basically like a Mozilla nightly build
> with AOL crap thrown in
At least it allows you to opt out of installing the Instant Messenger, which the 4.7 installer obliges you to install.
Seems fairly stable for a "preview release." It only took me a few minutes to crash it, but it seems a lot closer to feature complete and stable than the last Mozilla build I grabbed.
I have yet to see a viable solution to the ballot secrecy problem. Votation's site includes the following amusing assurance:
Why should I believe this?
Until someone can answer this question for me, I'm left wondering what problem online voting is a solution to.
Is it a cure for voter apathy? Of course not. Apathetic voters stay home because they don't think voting is important, not because they think it's too hard.
Does the current system make it hard to get to the polls? Preposterous. Most Americans live within walking distance of their polling place. True, physical disabilities may keep some people from the polls, but absentee balloting and free rides to the polls offered by both major parties and many other organizations are already available.
So just why is it that we're trying to create a whole new balloting infrastructure?
The following passage was buried in the interview with the U.S. Atty:
What exactly was seized? Were they phony smoke detectors with hidden microphones and transmitters or were they just kits? The article never says explicitly.
If Ramsey was selling pre-disguised transmitters, I am sympathetic with the FBI. If they were just kits, I'm more inclined to see Ramsey's point of view.
So what's the full story?
This guy hasn't been on TV since the Mike Douglas show went off the air. This is the best publicity he's gotten in decades. He should be paying Nintendo.
There is nothing in the law to prevent this. In fact, this is common practice in New York state elections, where the Conservative Party, Liberal Party and others routinely nominate the candidates of the major parties.
In fact, the mechanisms are already in place in presidential elections, where you are not really selecting a candidate and running mate when you vote. You are actually voting for a slate of electors, selected by a political party, who have pledged their votes in the electoral college to a candidate and his running mate. So if two parties endorsed the same ticket and both were on your ballot, you could pick the party label you wanted.
The biggest obstacles to this actually happening in a presidential election are as follows:
Freedom of expression is not reserved to The Press alone. Everyone's "speech" is protected under the U.S. Constitution. Here's the full text of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Consider the following:
This is bad news for consumers.
Do they really each have 55 million users or 55 million registrations?
I don't use instant messengers, but I have tried them out from time to time, creating a new account each time. So, although I'm not a user, I do account for a half dozen registrations.
By this measure, Pointcast has 10 or 20 million users. Ha!
I guess the battle over access to cable modem networks has spilled out onto other fronts.
There is a lot of animosity between AT&T/TCI/Exite@Home and AOL right now, and I wouldn't doubt AT&T folks did this simply to show AOL who's "boss."
... is to blame for a lot of these names. If you plan on doing business worldwide, your name needs to be pronounceable by people with many different native languages, and needs to lack bad connotations in those languages.
For example, Federal Express officially changed its name to FedEx in part because people in many countries had trouble pronouncing Federal.
So we get the worst of decision by committee -- only names that have no chance of offending or confusing any one among the world's 6 billion people will survive.
I doubt it.
This isn't about privacy, it's about commerce. I'm sure NSI will be very agressive about selling the contact names to bulk email and snail mail advertisers.
If you're an internet access provider, more hits just cost you more money. Publicity is nice, but he only makes money when ppl buy services from him.
I agree.
Maybe some Slashdotters who need some hosting can throw this guy some business.
I've long held that AT-style keyboards killed WordPerfect.
Good ol' WP 4.2 for DOS was easy to use once you trained your brain to feel the necessary key combinations. When asked what the keystroke for Print, or Search & Replace or Reveal Codes were, I typically didn't know the names of the keys, but I knew their feel with my left hand.
I say my left hand, because my old XT-style keyboard arrayed its function keys on the far left of the keyboard.
Cursor keys were easy to navigate without looking, because the only cursor keys available were on the un-NumLocked numeric keypad, where they are much more usefully arranged than in today's dedicated cursor keypad area. My right index finder still does the HomeHomeLeft dance in its sleep.
Then new & improved keyboards arrived with function keys arrayed across the top, so that for most WP commands, two hands and a glance down were now required. Being able to keep NumLock on and have separate keypads for cursors and numbers was a nice enhancement, but why completely rearrange the relationship between the cursor keys and Home, End, etc? Good luck executing a HomeHomeLeft without looking down.
As the new keyboards arrived (with top fuction keys, new cursor keypad, and migrated Ctrl key), two things happened to WP for DOS users.
Given these constraints, is it surprising that many chose to learn a new app -- MSWord -- rather than relearn the old app? I think not.
Even now, if it weren't for e-mail and browsers, I'd be happy with my only computer being a Compaq 386LTE laptop w/ 1 MB of RAM, 20 MB disk space, DOS 3.3 and WP 4.2. I'd get a lot more work done more efficiently, which is supposed to be the whole point of computer enhancements, isn't it?
It's great to see Mozilla acquire a new "senior partner" in addition to AOL.
When you look at the "improvements" to Communicator 4.x since AOL's acquisition of Netscape, you get the notion that AOL's only interest in the browser has been to market their "branded" service. Have you noticed there's no way to opt out of AIM in the 4.7 install (for Windows, at least)?
Yeah, I know, AOL/Netscape has eleventy-one developers dedicated to Mozilla, and if it weren't for them there'd be no Mozilla. But given their business model, it's hard to see how AOL will be able to justify that level of effort long term -- other than for adding bogus "enhancements" designed to herd sheep into their $23/month service.
Red Hat's business model is based on building a strong base of Open-Source apps, so it's easier for me to see them keeping Mozilla alive and relevant for the long term.
Let's hope it's not too late.