If all the content people want (songs, movies, games) come prelocked and only the right kind of Intel processor can unlock it, it will spur a new generation of replacing PC's. Good for Intel, good for MS who will get to re-license Windows yet again. Time marches on.
He used 'way too many words. When you run the entire document through a BS processor, the end message is the same that all bureaucrats give when testifying before Congress:
1. It's not my [our] fault. 2. I could tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you. 3. If only we had more money we could do a better job.
Yes, but every vendor is allowed to define what services it offers to its customers. Just because I pay you $x for product Y, does not mean I have the right to demand you also give me product Z.
By the same token, universities are able to compete with one another for students by advertising less restrictive policies on net usage, if they want to. Thing is, the legal risk from the MPAA and RIAA make them not want to.
Okay, so this is off topic but I've got some karma to burn.
I think that the capital markets should punish BOTH Israel and its Arab neighbors by withholding investment in areas that either sponsor terrorism or refuse to participate in peace initiatives. Capital hates instability. These countries have a vested interest in peace: peace = investment = prosperity.
I don't know if you're an elitist bastard, but you do have a hefty set of tech-centric blinders on.
People don't want to know how a technology works. They want to use it, in as painless a way as possible, to get a job done. The reason you as an IS person exist is to help them do that. Technology for its own sake is IMHO the biggest sin we IS types commit in our daily jobs.
Regardless of how well the Internet was thought out in advance (and, there is contrary evidence on this point, witness the ICANN board upheavals) the target audience has changed and if the old way (separate services, FTP, Telnet, etc.) doesn't meet the new audience's needs, it's the system (not the audience) that must change.
Computers were invented for people, not the other way around. Get over your bad self.
My home lab has two Dell Precision 210 workstations, with a KVM box to a common monitor. I bought them used on UBid for about $300 each. They still work great, even after a corporation banged on them a couple of years.
What I really like about them is the "no tools" cases. I can flip up/open just about everything just by releasing latches. I wish the cabling was longer, but they've been good for me.
Yes, I had NEON running on my Mac SE 'way back then. It was a cool implementation, but the drawback (as with everything Mac) was the learning curve of the Mac architecture.
Still, I have the Brodie book and even published an article in Forth Journal. The elegance of the language is amazing. I like the way that you don't so much program, as extend the compiler to include new words for what you want to do. Eventually, the compiler is so close to your problem domain that a few words in this new language will solve your problem.
I know people who have generators or windmills and are connected to the electrical grid. When power demands are high, the power company actually pays THEM for their surplus power.
If I have a nice Linux cluster that meets the "standards" for the grid (whatever they are), can I sell cycles back to the provider? Or is it just one way, in which case I'm trapped into doing whatever the grid wants me to do.
What I want is a Union that will stop my job being transfered to Bangalore (or Wisconsin) for no other reason than the bottom line of a company.
The problem with your whole argument -- and the Union mindset -- is in the phrase "my job". Unions view jobs as semi-permanent things belonging to the worker, and that should continue to exist indefinitely, whether it makes business sense or not.
It makes more sense to me to take an entrepreneurial approach even if you're a full-time employee, and assume your "job" is really just a project that WILL come to an end. Your strategy is to continue selling your capabilities and to look for opportunities so that when it does come to an end you're first in line for the next one.
I agree that it sucks sometimes. It's the worst system out there... except for all the others.
It's also designed for the long run. Those "unreasonable" proposals are reasonable to someone, or they wouldn't propose them. If they're unreasonable to enough people, they won't get passed. If they get passed today, they may get reversed later as people see just how unreasonable they were.
For controlled environments (i.e., haunted houses) the head-on-a-platter gimmick is hard to beat for great reactions from the kids (and some parents!)
Basically, you get a thin aluminum serving platter, the throwaway kind, and cut a neck-sized hole in the center (tape the edge with transparent tape to avoid cuts). Cut one slit from outer edge to the hole. You can easily bend the platter open to put it on someone, then fold it back flat and tape up the slit.
Then get a board and cut a square notch into one of the long sides, about the middle. Put the board across some sawhorses. The person with the platter sits comfortably in a chair below table level, with the platter appearing to rest on the table. Throw a tablecloth over the whole thing and arrange eyeballs, worms, or whatever on the table.
If you're the head, keep your eyes closed until someone is nearby and speculating about whether you're real or not. Then pop open your eyes wide and scream as if just noticing you have no body.
When we did this one year, we picked up a ton of candy off the floor from kids who didn't stop to check what they'd lost! evil laugh
The technique of introducing "straw man" legislation to see how it plays is not a bug, it's a feature. It's how the system is designed to operate, in a dialog of discovering what's important to each of the constituencies involved. At best, creative win-win solutions emerge. At worst, watered down compromises. In the middle, no action is taken and we try again next year.
Politics isn't evil, it's life.
Unfortunately, it's only taken me 40 years or so to figure this out...
I've seen those guys. They're the ones who lurk around the IS department in black T-shirts, usually with computer vendor logos on them. Every once in while, they attack a helpless user's desktop PC and install new releases on it, thereby breaking everything else on the system. Then they chortle and run down the hall to the Jolt Cola machine.
Yes, we must do something about these support terrorists!
It's a different world in more ways than one. Right now, employers have the upper hand again, but their downsizing and rightsizing and other cost-cutting measures have had a severe impact on employee loyalty. As soon as the economy turns around, the demanding employee will be back. And this time, it'll take more than Foosball tables in the breakroom to attract and keep good talent. It's gonna take REAL cash, not inflated phony stock options.
Employees have wised up, learned to play the game better. They're just waiting their turn. Or they're picking up their marbles and going out on their own.
Yes, that's right. But my point is that even Slashdot, which has a tradition of allowing just about anything due to its excellent moderation system, still felt the need to physically remove material in the face of dealing with the Scientologists.
Slashdot HAS been targeted. One of the very few times that content has been deleted from Slashdot instead of just being modded into oblivion was in response to a Scientology lawsuit.
The problem with tagging all commercial email with an identifier such as "ADV:" is that most recipients will simply create an email rule to auto-delete it and never even know it arrived.
That's great for the recipients, but it does nothing to reduce the load on ISP servers; in fact, it may increase it as the advertisers will have to send out MORE mail to make sure at least somebody opens it.
Also, such a solution does nothing to help legitimate advertisers, who need to know the demographics of who is actually reading their ad. If there is an easy way to filter, they may buy a list that is 90% middle class professional office workers, but they have no way of telling what mix actually read their ad. So they would never buy a service that operated under the "ADV" rules. Result: only the scam companies would ever send the mail.
I read the words "good neighborhood" and started to seriously worry. All the "good neighborhood" attempts I've seen in the past were implemented by ruthless Neighborhood Associations, complete with Codes, Covenants and Restrictions (CC&R's) attached to the land. Buy a lot in the "neighborhood," you're legally obligated to follow the CC&R's. Most of which seem to have something to do with what color paint you can paint your house, whether you're allowed to have a basketball hoop out front, or whether the garage door can be open at times other than when you're actually moving a car in or out.
Do we really want the whole Internet to be one big anal-retentive "good neigborhood" controlled by an equally anal-retentive Neighborhood Association?
The reason for this approach is not only obvious, but it's the same reason CC&R's are created. Property values. CC&R's protect the property value, not the human values of living there. They elevate the property above the people. This sounds like the same thing to me, elevating the property values of commercial entities over the human values of the average person who is using the 'net.
I'll reply here to this one and the next couple. I don't use PayPal as a storage area, only a conduit. I transferred the funds out each day, and I was as frustrated by the 3 day delay as anybody. But you're right, there's a risk there that they will freeze funds (they've done it in the past) so I was careful not to leave anything lying around.
I used PayPal earlier this year to accept credit card payments for a seminar I co-produced. It all went very smoothly: following the instructions in their online manual, I was able to add the Paypal button to my website and also pre-populate the signup form for new PayPal users.
Best of all, the fees were only $0.30 plus 2.9% per transaction, with no monthly minimum, terminal fees, etc. like with a standard credit card processor. This page at PalPal shows the comparison.
To me, this means that accepting credit card payments is not just a privilege of those who can "qualify" at a bank, but available to anyone with just a painless web signup. And the fees are less too.
If PayPal can ever get its customer service act together, it will really give banks a challenge. The credit card processors don't care: they're getting huge traffic from PayPal.
It's clear you don't understand either Amway or the software world.
This is a single level plan, where the individuals are certified by the organization. They cannot go out and re-certify others, and they get no financial benefit from others' efforts.
Amway is a multi-level marketing plan where you can make profits from selling products yourself, or by sponsoring others to do so. What corrupts Amway is not its plan, which is financially sound, but the tendency of the top distributor organizations to neglect personal sales and focus on sponsorship. Sponsors are not permitted to load up their downline with products: they have to buy them back if the distributor goes out of business. BUT, they DO load them up with scads of "training materials", which are not refundable.
In contrast, the article is about a simple plan to create an alliance program. Buying into the program gives you the right to use the company's brand in your marketing. You don't like the results? Don't renew.
Actually, Bucky had more than one reconfigurable housing idea. In addition to the Dymaxion house, which used suspension instead of compression for structure, he also invented a variety of domes including one, the Fly Eye dome, designed to be assembled in sections that could be lifted with one hand (so the other could fasten the bolts.)
...be sure to check out Advanced Distributed Learning, the organization that promotes the SCORM standard for online content. SCORM stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model, and is widely gaining acceptance in government and commercial settings as a standard for e-Learning courses. Tools which are SCORM-compliant have a better chance of becoming widely adopted, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
If all the content people want (songs, movies, games) come prelocked and only the right kind of Intel processor can unlock it, it will spur a new generation of replacing PC's. Good for Intel, good for MS who will get to re-license Windows yet again. Time marches on.
He used 'way too many words. When you run the entire document through a BS processor, the end message is the same that all bureaucrats give when testifying before Congress:
1. It's not my [our] fault.
2. I could tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you.
3. If only we had more money we could do a better job.
Yes, but every vendor is allowed to define what services it offers to its customers. Just because I pay you $x for product Y, does not mean I have the right to demand you also give me product Z.
By the same token, universities are able to compete with one another for students by advertising less restrictive policies on net usage, if they want to. Thing is, the legal risk from the MPAA and RIAA make them not want to.
Okay, so this is off topic but I've got some karma to burn.
I think that the capital markets should punish BOTH Israel and its Arab neighbors by withholding investment in areas that either sponsor terrorism or refuse to participate in peace initiatives. Capital hates instability. These countries have a vested interest in peace: peace = investment = prosperity.
"I wouldn't know, I haven't had a working weapon since Korea." --quote from the movie
I don't know if you're an elitist bastard, but you do have a hefty set of tech-centric blinders on.
People don't want to know how a technology works. They want to use it, in as painless a way as possible, to get a job done. The reason you as an IS person exist is to help them do that. Technology for its own sake is IMHO the biggest sin we IS types commit in our daily jobs.
Regardless of how well the Internet was thought out in advance (and, there is contrary evidence on this point, witness the ICANN board upheavals) the target audience has changed and if the old way (separate services, FTP, Telnet, etc.) doesn't meet the new audience's needs, it's the system (not the audience) that must change.
Computers were invented for people, not the other way around. Get over your bad self.
My home lab has two Dell Precision 210 workstations, with a KVM box to a common monitor. I bought them used on UBid for about $300 each. They still work great, even after a corporation banged on them a couple of years.
What I really like about them is the "no tools" cases. I can flip up/open just about everything just by releasing latches. I wish the cabling was longer, but they've been good for me.
Yes, I had NEON running on my Mac SE 'way back then. It was a cool implementation, but the drawback (as with everything Mac) was the learning curve of the Mac architecture.
Still, I have the Brodie book and even published an article in Forth Journal. The elegance of the language is amazing. I like the way that you don't so much program, as extend the compiler to include new words for what you want to do. Eventually, the compiler is so close to your problem domain that a few words in this new language will solve your problem.
I miss it.
I know people who have generators or windmills and are connected to the electrical grid. When power demands are high, the power company actually pays THEM for their surplus power.
If I have a nice Linux cluster that meets the "standards" for the grid (whatever they are), can I sell cycles back to the provider? Or is it just one way, in which case I'm trapped into doing whatever the grid wants me to do.
What I want is a Union that will stop my job being transfered to Bangalore (or Wisconsin) for no other reason than the bottom line of a company.
The problem with your whole argument -- and the Union mindset -- is in the phrase "my job". Unions view jobs as semi-permanent things belonging to the worker, and that should continue to exist indefinitely, whether it makes business sense or not.
It makes more sense to me to take an entrepreneurial approach even if you're a full-time employee, and assume your "job" is really just a project that WILL come to an end. Your strategy is to continue selling your capabilities and to look for opportunities so that when it does come to an end you're first in line for the next one.
I agree that it sucks sometimes. It's the worst system out there... except for all the others.
It's also designed for the long run. Those "unreasonable" proposals are reasonable to someone, or they wouldn't propose them. If they're unreasonable to enough people, they won't get passed. If they get passed today, they may get reversed later as people see just how unreasonable they were.
For controlled environments (i.e., haunted houses) the head-on-a-platter gimmick is hard to beat for great reactions from the kids (and some parents!)
Basically, you get a thin aluminum serving platter, the throwaway kind, and cut a neck-sized hole in the center (tape the edge with transparent tape to avoid cuts). Cut one slit from outer edge to the hole. You can easily bend the platter open to put it on someone, then fold it back flat and tape up the slit.
Then get a board and cut a square notch into one of the long sides, about the middle. Put the board across some sawhorses. The person with the platter sits comfortably in a chair below table level, with the platter appearing to rest on the table. Throw a tablecloth over the whole thing and arrange eyeballs, worms, or whatever on the table.
If you're the head, keep your eyes closed until someone is nearby and speculating about whether you're real or not. Then pop open your eyes wide and scream as if just noticing you have no body.
When we did this one year, we picked up a ton of candy off the floor from kids who didn't stop to check what they'd lost! evil laugh
Elegantly put. Wish I had mod points today.
The technique of introducing "straw man" legislation to see how it plays is not a bug, it's a feature. It's how the system is designed to operate, in a dialog of discovering what's important to each of the constituencies involved. At best, creative win-win solutions emerge. At worst, watered down compromises. In the middle, no action is taken and we try again next year.
Politics isn't evil, it's life.
Unfortunately, it's only taken me 40 years or so to figure this out...
I've seen those guys. They're the ones who lurk around the IS department in black T-shirts, usually with computer vendor logos on them. Every once in while, they attack a helpless user's desktop PC and install new releases on it, thereby breaking everything else on the system. Then they chortle and run down the hall to the Jolt Cola machine.
Yes, we must do something about these support terrorists!
It's a different world in more ways than one. Right now, employers have the upper hand again, but their downsizing and rightsizing and other cost-cutting measures have had a severe impact on employee loyalty. As soon as the economy turns around, the demanding employee will be back. And this time, it'll take more than Foosball tables in the breakroom to attract and keep good talent. It's gonna take REAL cash, not inflated phony stock options.
Employees have wised up, learned to play the game better. They're just waiting their turn. Or they're picking up their marbles and going out on their own.
Yes, that's right. But my point is that even Slashdot, which has a tradition of allowing just about anything due to its excellent moderation system, still felt the need to physically remove material in the face of dealing with the Scientologists.
Slashdot HAS been targeted. One of the very few times that content has been deleted from Slashdot instead of just being modded into oblivion was in response to a Scientology lawsuit.
The problem with tagging all commercial email with an identifier such as "ADV:" is that most recipients will simply create an email rule to auto-delete it and never even know it arrived.
That's great for the recipients, but it does nothing to reduce the load on ISP servers; in fact, it may increase it as the advertisers will have to send out MORE mail to make sure at least somebody opens it.
Also, such a solution does nothing to help legitimate advertisers, who need to know the demographics of who is actually reading their ad. If there is an easy way to filter, they may buy a list that is 90% middle class professional office workers, but they have no way of telling what mix actually read their ad. So they would never buy a service that operated under the "ADV" rules. Result: only the scam companies would ever send the mail.
I read the words "good neighborhood" and started to seriously worry. All the "good neighborhood" attempts I've seen in the past were implemented by ruthless Neighborhood Associations, complete with Codes, Covenants and Restrictions (CC&R's) attached to the land. Buy a lot in the "neighborhood," you're legally obligated to follow the CC&R's. Most of which seem to have something to do with what color paint you can paint your house, whether you're allowed to have a basketball hoop out front, or whether the garage door can be open at times other than when you're actually moving a car in or out.
Do we really want the whole Internet to be one big anal-retentive "good neigborhood" controlled by an equally anal-retentive Neighborhood Association?
The reason for this approach is not only obvious, but it's the same reason CC&R's are created. Property values. CC&R's protect the property value, not the human values of living there. They elevate the property above the people. This sounds like the same thing to me, elevating the property values of commercial entities over the human values of the average person who is using the 'net.
I'll reply here to this one and the next couple. I don't use PayPal as a storage area, only a conduit. I transferred the funds out each day, and I was as frustrated by the 3 day delay as anybody. But you're right, there's a risk there that they will freeze funds (they've done it in the past) so I was careful not to leave anything lying around.
I used PayPal earlier this year to accept credit card payments for a seminar I co-produced. It all went very smoothly: following the instructions in their online manual, I was able to add the Paypal button to my website and also pre-populate the signup form for new PayPal users.
Best of all, the fees were only $0.30 plus 2.9% per transaction, with no monthly minimum, terminal fees, etc. like with a standard credit card processor. This page at PalPal shows the comparison.
To me, this means that accepting credit card payments is not just a privilege of those who can "qualify" at a bank, but available to anyone with just a painless web signup. And the fees are less too.
If PayPal can ever get its customer service act together, it will really give banks a challenge. The credit card processors don't care: they're getting huge traffic from PayPal.
And I'm guilty of yielding to a momentary impulse to be irritable. I apologize. Must the the phase of the moon. :-)
It's clear you don't understand either Amway or the software world.
This is a single level plan, where the individuals are certified by the organization. They cannot go out and re-certify others, and they get no financial benefit from others' efforts.
Amway is a multi-level marketing plan where you can make profits from selling products yourself, or by sponsoring others to do so. What corrupts Amway is not its plan, which is financially sound, but the tendency of the top distributor organizations to neglect personal sales and focus on sponsorship. Sponsors are not permitted to load up their downline with products: they have to buy them back if the distributor goes out of business. BUT, they DO load them up with scads of "training materials", which are not refundable.
In contrast, the article is about a simple plan to create an alliance program. Buying into the program gives you the right to use the company's brand in your marketing. You don't like the results? Don't renew.
Rats! Beat me to it. :-)
Actually, Bucky had more than one reconfigurable housing idea. In addition to the Dymaxion house, which used suspension instead of compression for structure, he also invented a variety of
domes including one, the Fly Eye dome, designed to be assembled in sections that could be lifted with one hand (so the other could fasten the bolts.)
Check out the
Buckminster Fuller Institute for all things Bucky.
...be sure to check out
Advanced Distributed Learning, the organization that promotes the SCORM standard for online content. SCORM stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model, and is widely gaining acceptance in government and commercial settings as a standard for e-Learning courses. Tools which are SCORM-compliant have a better chance of becoming widely adopted, IMHO.