it's worth noting that the non-profit in question would be operating only the network - it would be up to local businesses to market & resell the service to end-users. so in this model, the non-profit entity handles most or all of the tech to transmit right up to the outside wall of building x; a local reseller signs up residents of building x, sells whatever equipment those people may need (antennae, repeaters, whatever), and handles billing, support, etc. that's briefly mentioned in TFA, but it's an important point here - it's not municipal wifi, it's not even non-profit wifi. it's a non-profit network operator, doing wholesale sales to businesses who want to provide internet access to their customers, but aren't real ISPs.
So, back in the day, I conned my old boss into springing for some cheap hardware to turn into a Slackware test machine - which he took to mean 'whatever that guy down the street has left over from all those machines he builds in his basement.' Fine. Whatever. I can make it work, sure.
Actually ended up with halfway decent innards, but the only case he had on hand wouldn't close properly. Or, in fact, cover all the components. Fine, whatever, etc. Make sure the thing boots...yup, there's 95...get called away to do something else.
Packing up to leave that night, I see there's an alert on the soon-to-be-linux box. 'It'll still be there in the morning,' I think as I head out the door.
Check on it the next day...yeah, it was a CPU heat warning.
You'd think that by now, more people would've figured out a basic trait of Steve Jobs: he's got his own will, and he'll hit eject before he compromises it. A lot of people think that means he has a huge ego, and maybe he does, but that's not the point - he's spent an awfully long time trying to make the world see things his way, and he's not going to stop just because someone offers him a pile of cash.
A lot of industry writers don't seem interested in understanding Apple's motivation (which of course means trying to understand Steve), so they ascribe standard corporate motives, and we end up with wild-ass rumors like this. But of course that doesn't work, and they're wrong a lot (they're right sometimes too, but how many crazy rumors have you heard?), and so the industry looks at Apple like they're the crazy unpredictable man-child of computing. Who happened to get lucky once or twice with the iMac and maybe the iPod. Won't happen again.
But the thing is, they don't want to be on par with other manufacturers, and they don't want to beat them at their own game. Apple wants to change the rules and beat the others at Apple's game. That's the approach they've taken for a long time - iPod being probably the best example. It's also why Apple won't release a sub-$1000 machine, even though it might mean huge market share.
So in short, the article's another load of poorly thought-out crap. The idea that IBM could/would buy Apple is like saying that when you hit the lottery, your boss will be cleaning your house - the transaction has to go both ways, and as willing as IBM may be (and I'm betting they're not), Apple won't bite.
> Bacteria were found outside the mir space station, eating the glass
Actually, they were found inside. They weren't eating the glass (although the by-products of their existence did damage the glass and some other components), they were eating human epithelial cells and sweat. Not to mention you're begging the question of how the mysterious bacteria would be found in the first place...
While we're at it, let's all think for a minute about the housecat/penguin thing. Just for a second. How cold do you think a housecat would need to get before s/he was no longer interested in delicious penguin meat? It's like...Hoth cold in Antarctica, and until I see a cat capable of weilding a Light Saber, cutting open a...penguin, I guess, and wearing it as a coat until a Snow Speeder comes to the rescue, I don't think I'll be buying the Mysterious Feline Penguin Murder theory.
sorry to ruin the fun, but we're using an approved combination. the card in the apple base station is a lucent, the antenna is made by lucent, and the combination is authorized.
see here for some more on the history of the project.
full disclosure: i'm a field tech at tech superpowers. i am one of the people who worked on the newburyopen.net project, and am listed as a co-author of the specs we released last week.
the network exists primarily because we had spare bandwidth and wanted to do something neat with it. mike figured out how to make the repeaters we use to make the nodes, and set about talking with merchants on the street. we wanted to do something for the newbury st. community, and this was something that was essentially free, and that nobody else could provide, so we let it rip.
there are a whopping three remote nodes presently (with hundreds more coming in no time!), plus the central access point at our offices. why not more? because we have to bill hours to fund the thing, which is what we've been doing since this spring. we DO have jobs, you know...i mean besides this stuff.
about three weeks ago, mike had some kind of fevered evening in which he built this insane rig that sits on top of his car. it's tall and black, and you don't want to drive with it in place. but we can get pretty good ranges with it, and it does work a quarter-mile away from the t-1.
but this is the thing: it's not a commercial venture - it's professionally installed in your home or business, yes; it's corporate-funded (technically, we're an inc.); there's tech support available - but it's not about making money, and therefore isn't meant to comptete with starbucks or anyone else, as the cnet article kind of implies. if it were, we wouldn't have released the specs, but we did, because we wanted to help along the idea of free, open networks. ours, for example, will stay free. whether or not we could be charging, we don't intend to, because it's more fun this way.
also, just to make the point, people who hook up to THIS unsecured network *aren't* stealing, plain or simple. and that's the whole idea - if there were more (deliberately) unsecured networks, people wouldn't have to steal access. so go do your part!
...You say, "impressive", I already know it,
I'm a hardcore player and I'm not afraid to show it.
I got a Phd in pain and a masters in disaster,
the mighty Stephen Hawking is a fucking QuakeMaster...
everything is in flux now - it's the perfect time to make changes and challenge assumptions. that's exactly what the gubmint is doing right now: we've assumed we'd always be free to speak and act and think essentially as we pleased, but it seems that's all up for grabs now, doesn't it?
so what better time to challenge the idea that we, as end-users, will just accept whatever's put in front of us? what better time to replace 'consumer' with 'person who keeps our company afloat?'
that aside, the idea of the free market is to allow the best ideas to survive. market darwinism. in the natural world, genetic diversity is the recipe for survival; so, in what way could shutting out competition - decreasing the diversity of ideas - be beneficial over time? there may be a short-term gain for one entity, but far more - and sometimes better - lose out. (think beta vs. vhs, for example.)
if the market rewards a company for, in effect, behaving badly, there's something wrong with the market - witness the ms antitrust, for one. there is a difference between 'attacking our best corporate performers with regulation' and allowing the rules that govern the marketplace to evolve with an eye to ensuring fairness and diversity of ideas; that's the idea behind antitrust, and it's why not allowing verizon et al. to force out their competition is a good thing.
the economy will always leave people wishing for things to somehow get better. so by your reasoning, it seems there would never be a 'good time' to mandate fair play. i don't buy it; i think it's a perfect time.
i'm pretty sure mgm holds the copyright for the phrase 'dirty dozen' - is not naming a list of (heh) dangerous toys after a group of comdemned men - saved from hanging by lee marvin himself, trained secretly, then sent off to blow up germans - a violation of the DMCA?
the shop i work in consists mainly of techie-types who are vaguely well-adjusted, which i originally thought was a little strange. now i'm not so sure - for every pocket protector geek i meet, there's another who at least knows when to stop laughing.
so that's encouraging.
but, despite the fact that we all get along remarkably well, we've all got this aversion to hanging out together...and then it occured to me: we're all painfully aware of that geek stereotype, and we're all trying to pretend we have lives that involve other, non-geek, people.
of course, it's all a big lie, but i think it says something.
well, either that, or IT types understand that the purpose of the network is that you don't have to walk around anymore.
Turning to other news tonight, new reports on the status of Unhack-a-Net, originally proposed by former President Bush, indicate the test servers were actually transmitting gps information to would-be hackers, indicating their course and heading.
And in an ironic turn of events, an undisclosed number of people were arrested in nationwide raids following the most recent round of Unhack-a-Net testing, on charges of using illegal circumvention devices. Officials close to the case described the devices as 'Garmin eTrexes.' The official hinted at prosecution under the SSCA (Super-Secret Copyright Act), the details of which are still classified.
One detainee was overheard saying, "But...we're beta testers! You know, Unhack-a-Net!"
SSCA was signed into law in 2003, following the terrorist threats to the music and film industry. Those attacks came in the form of the thirteen year-old son of a record company exectuve, who crashed his father's Windows 2000 computer one night. Under the terms of the MASTA (Microsoft Antihacking, Security, and Terror Act), the child was sentenced to a prison term, but President Ashcroft felt greater protection was needed for America's vital interests.
how many of them have ever been seen by more than a hundred people?
how many would be considered to be a part of the historical record?
culling is a natural phenomenon in any field - people may become famous for a while, but over time plenty are forgotten; it's just a function of time. strong images survive, and some become famously known, but how many artists of any kind are known for the work that didn't make the cut? (west's argument says, in part, that we're losing this link to the past because we lose incidental shots - images of a newsworthy event, say, that may not be published, but that show more sometimes than those that become famous.)
how many of those photographs that didn't make the grade are known to the general public? how many are known even in academic circles? more to the point, how many times has a popularly-known image been supplanted by a more historically-relevant image later? (because, says west, we're losing images that may turn out to be more interesting later on.)
to ask a better question, how often has something really important or interesting or useful been supplanted by something mundane or useless or vapid? (in photographic terms, think walker evans vs. anne geddes.) if it were up to me, i'd have less vapid stuff, so that the historical context for important photography would matter more, but the real historical record we're leaving is not the 90% of photographers' negatives that are never printed, it's the 1% of the successes that are remembered. well, that and boy bands.
from an email sent to all speakeasy.net users just the other day:
"The affects of this worm are detrimental to all and we'd like to give each
member a chance to secure their machines. However, after 9/23/01,
Speakeasy's Abuse Team will be freezing the DSL circuit hooked to any
machine infected with the worm. We apologize for the inconvenience of
this, but it is imperative that we ensure our network is not assisting in
the propogation of this, or any, worm. All of us are part of a larger
community, and it really isn't cool to infect your neighbors."
so, IANACT (i am not a conspiracy theorist), but i think the announcement today was suposed to be much bigger. the faithful among us will have noticed the absence of the "one more thing" tag that steve has traditionally saved till the end, for whatever really big announcement he has this time around. not so compelling, i admit.
but if you watched the keynote (or catch the rebroadcast), you'll notice that things started to slow pretty hard during the iDVD demo, in particular. my money says steve was waiting for someone to show up, and he got the signal to stall for time from someone offstage. so, there's the demo, then the return to the digital camera (come on...like anyone at macworld doesn't know how it works...), then re-running the old commercials, along with one new one...my guess is he used that time to run offstage and find out what the deal was.
he essentially came back onstage right after the commercials, did a tiny bit more, re-hashed, and asked for a round of applause. that was it after he came back onstage from the commercial break.
so i think something went seriously wrong (a box didn't arrive, or a person maybe); steve stalled for time, hoping to make the announcement, but then found out when he went offstage that it was going to be impossible today. you could see he was disappointed when he came back onstage there at the end.
next guess: watch the next media event. i'm betting whatever wanted to be shown off today finds its way to that. hopefully on time.
"Does having a computer between artist and object somehow detract from the results? "
yes! in fact, it does. little did our friend know when s/he started out in the world that the rules would be changing so soon...
recently-enacted federal regulations require all "art projects" and "other fancy stuff" to be created without the benefit of ANY intervening medium whatsoever. this means elephant dung can, in fact, be considered art, while such disciplines as painting, photography, illustration, statuary, scrimshaw, and anything by christo (look him up) no longer qualify.
a senior washington official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed his hope that the sweeping legislation would "cut right down on the number of whiny-ass letters to the NEA askin' for handouts." inexplicably, performance art, including pantomime, remains unpenalized by the bill.
the official also noted the bill's rather curious wording, syntax and spelling, saying that, although brought to the floor by jesse helms, there is little doubt as to the identity of the bill's true author.
well, just for laughs, let's assume it's all true. night is day, up is down, and covad's bad, not verizon.
sure.
while we're at it, let's say apple sues micros~1 out of existence.
seriously, though, how many REAL trouble tickets were filed? 22k sounds like a lot, but what's its percentage of total tickets from covad? (i'm not buying the 50% figure just yet.) over how long were those 22k filed? in that time period, how many tickets were filed by covad in total (i.e., not just with verizon, but all around)?
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet Russia, game breaks YOU!
Now if the damn Russians would just invent an arm-breaking machine, the joke would work...
it's worth noting that the non-profit in question would be operating only the network - it would be up to local businesses to market & resell the service to end-users. so in this model, the non-profit entity handles most or all of the tech to transmit right up to the outside wall of building x; a local reseller signs up residents of building x, sells whatever equipment those people may need (antennae, repeaters, whatever), and handles billing, support, etc. that's briefly mentioned in TFA, but it's an important point here - it's not municipal wifi, it's not even non-profit wifi. it's a non-profit network operator, doing wholesale sales to businesses who want to provide internet access to their customers, but aren't real ISPs.
that's cool.
So, back in the day, I conned my old boss into springing for some cheap hardware to turn into a Slackware test machine - which he took to mean 'whatever that guy down the street has left over from all those machines he builds in his basement.' Fine. Whatever. I can make it work, sure.
Actually ended up with halfway decent innards, but the only case he had on hand wouldn't close properly. Or, in fact, cover all the components. Fine, whatever, etc. Make sure the thing boots...yup, there's 95...get called away to do something else.
Packing up to leave that night, I see there's an alert on the soon-to-be-linux box. 'It'll still be there in the morning,' I think as I head out the door.
Check on it the next day...yeah, it was a CPU heat warning.
So that was fun.
You'd think that by now, more people would've figured out a basic trait of Steve Jobs: he's got his own will, and he'll hit eject before he compromises it. A lot of people think that means he has a huge ego, and maybe he does, but that's not the point - he's spent an awfully long time trying to make the world see things his way, and he's not going to stop just because someone offers him a pile of cash.
A lot of industry writers don't seem interested in understanding Apple's motivation (which of course means trying to understand Steve), so they ascribe standard corporate motives, and we end up with wild-ass rumors like this. But of course that doesn't work, and they're wrong a lot (they're right sometimes too, but how many crazy rumors have you heard?), and so the industry looks at Apple like they're the crazy unpredictable man-child of computing. Who happened to get lucky once or twice with the iMac and maybe the iPod. Won't happen again.
But the thing is, they don't want to be on par with other manufacturers, and they don't want to beat them at their own game. Apple wants to change the rules and beat the others at Apple's game. That's the approach they've taken for a long time - iPod being probably the best example. It's also why Apple won't release a sub-$1000 machine, even though it might mean huge market share.
So in short, the article's another load of poorly thought-out crap. The idea that IBM could/would buy Apple is like saying that when you hit the lottery, your boss will be cleaning your house - the transaction has to go both ways, and as willing as IBM may be (and I'm betting they're not), Apple won't bite.
This discussion is giving me a haddock.
> Bacteria were found outside the mir space station, eating the glass
Actually, they were found inside. They weren't eating the glass (although the by-products of their existence did damage the glass and some other components), they were eating human epithelial cells and sweat. Not to mention you're begging the question of how the mysterious bacteria would be found in the first place...
While we're at it, let's all think for a minute about the housecat/penguin thing. Just for a second. How cold do you think a housecat would need to get before s/he was no longer interested in delicious penguin meat? It's like...Hoth cold in Antarctica, and until I see a cat capable of weilding a Light Saber, cutting open a...penguin, I guess, and wearing it as a coat until a Snow Speeder comes to the rescue, I don't think I'll be buying the Mysterious Feline Penguin Murder theory.
sorry to ruin the fun, but we're using an approved combination. the card in the apple base station is a lucent, the antenna is made by lucent, and the combination is authorized.
see here for some more on the history of the project.
-john deyoung
tech superpowers
full disclosure: i'm a field tech at tech superpowers. i am one of the people who worked on the newburyopen.net project, and am listed as a co-author of the specs we released last week.
the network exists primarily because we had spare bandwidth and wanted to do something neat with it. mike figured out how to make the repeaters we use to make the nodes, and set about talking with merchants on the street. we wanted to do something for the newbury st. community, and this was something that was essentially free, and that nobody else could provide, so we let it rip.
there are a whopping three remote nodes presently (with hundreds more coming in no time!), plus the central access point at our offices. why not more? because we have to bill hours to fund the thing, which is what we've been doing since this spring. we DO have jobs, you know...i mean besides this stuff.
about three weeks ago, mike had some kind of fevered evening in which he built this insane rig that sits on top of his car. it's tall and black, and you don't want to drive with it in place. but we can get pretty good ranges with it, and it does work a quarter-mile away from the t-1.
but this is the thing: it's not a commercial venture - it's professionally installed in your home or business, yes; it's corporate-funded (technically, we're an inc.); there's tech support available - but it's not about making money, and therefore isn't meant to comptete with starbucks or anyone else, as the cnet article kind of implies. if it were, we wouldn't have released the specs, but we did, because we wanted to help along the idea of free, open networks. ours, for example, will stay free. whether or not we could be charging, we don't intend to, because it's more fun this way.
also, just to make the point, people who hook up to THIS unsecured network *aren't* stealing, plain or simple. and that's the whole idea - if there were more (deliberately) unsecured networks, people wouldn't have to steal access. so go do your part!
"...or those with Lou Gehrig's Disease to allow them to use their computers."
whoa....the mighty stephen hawking (already a "fucking quake master") with implants...step back.
...You say, "impressive", I already know it,
I'm a hardcore player and I'm not afraid to show it.
I got a Phd in pain and a masters in disaster,
the mighty Stephen Hawking is a fucking QuakeMaster...
Man, that guy'll sell anything...
everything is in flux now - it's the perfect time to make changes and challenge assumptions. that's exactly what the gubmint is doing right now: we've assumed we'd always be free to speak and act and think essentially as we pleased, but it seems that's all up for grabs now, doesn't it?
so what better time to challenge the idea that we, as end-users, will just accept whatever's put in front of us? what better time to replace 'consumer' with 'person who keeps our company afloat?'
that aside, the idea of the free market is to allow the best ideas to survive. market darwinism. in the natural world, genetic diversity is the recipe for survival; so, in what way could shutting out competition - decreasing the diversity of ideas - be beneficial over time? there may be a short-term gain for one entity, but far more - and sometimes better - lose out. (think beta vs. vhs, for example.)
if the market rewards a company for, in effect, behaving badly, there's something wrong with the market - witness the ms antitrust, for one. there is a difference between 'attacking our best corporate performers with regulation' and allowing the rules that govern the marketplace to evolve with an eye to ensuring fairness and diversity of ideas; that's the idea behind antitrust, and it's why not allowing verizon et al. to force out their competition is a good thing.
the economy will always leave people wishing for things to somehow get better. so by your reasoning, it seems there would never be a 'good time' to mandate fair play. i don't buy it; i think it's a perfect time.
i'm pretty sure mgm holds the copyright for the phrase 'dirty dozen' - is not naming a list of (heh) dangerous toys after a group of comdemned men - saved from hanging by lee marvin himself, trained secretly, then sent off to blow up germans - a violation of the DMCA?
ooh! ooh! mister ashcroft - bust 'em!
alright. i'm trying to tread lightly here.
the shop i work in consists mainly of techie-types who are vaguely well-adjusted, which i originally thought was a little strange. now i'm not so sure - for every pocket protector geek i meet, there's another who at least knows when to stop laughing.
so that's encouraging.
but, despite the fact that we all get along remarkably well, we've all got this aversion to hanging out together...and then it occured to me: we're all painfully aware of that geek stereotype, and we're all trying to pretend we have lives that involve other, non-geek, people.
of course, it's all a big lie, but i think it says something.
well, either that, or IT types understand that the purpose of the network is that you don't have to walk around anymore.
Turning to other news tonight, new reports on the status of Unhack-a-Net, originally proposed by former President Bush, indicate the test servers were actually transmitting gps information to would-be hackers, indicating their course and heading.
And in an ironic turn of events, an undisclosed number of people were arrested in nationwide raids following the most recent round of Unhack-a-Net testing, on charges of using illegal circumvention devices. Officials close to the case described the devices as 'Garmin eTrexes.' The official hinted at prosecution under the SSCA (Super-Secret Copyright Act), the details of which are still classified.
One detainee was overheard saying, "But...we're beta testers! You know, Unhack-a-Net!"
SSCA was signed into law in 2003, following the terrorist threats to the music and film industry. Those attacks came in the form of the thirteen year-old son of a record company exectuve, who crashed his father's Windows 2000 computer one night. Under the terms of the MASTA (Microsoft Antihacking, Security, and Terror Act), the child was sentenced to a prison term, but President Ashcroft felt greater protection was needed for America's vital interests.
how many photographs have ever been made?
how many of them have ever been seen by more than a hundred people?
how many would be considered to be a part of the historical record?
culling is a natural phenomenon in any field - people may become famous for a while, but over time plenty are forgotten; it's just a function of time. strong images survive, and some become famously known, but how many artists of any kind are known for the work that didn't make the cut? (west's argument says, in part, that we're losing this link to the past because we lose incidental shots - images of a newsworthy event, say, that may not be published, but that show more sometimes than those that become famous.)
how many of those photographs that didn't make the grade are known to the general public? how many are known even in academic circles? more to the point, how many times has a popularly-known image been supplanted by a more historically-relevant image later? (because, says west, we're losing images that may turn out to be more interesting later on.)
to ask a better question, how often has something really important or interesting or useful been supplanted by something mundane or useless or vapid? (in photographic terms, think walker evans vs. anne geddes.) if it were up to me, i'd have less vapid stuff, so that the historical context for important photography would matter more, but the real historical record we're leaving is not the 90% of photographers' negatives that are never printed, it's the 1% of the successes that are remembered. well, that and boy bands.
from an email sent to all speakeasy.net users just the other day:
"The affects of this worm are detrimental to all and we'd like to give each
member a chance to secure their machines. However, after 9/23/01,
Speakeasy's Abuse Team will be freezing the DSL circuit hooked to any
machine infected with the worm. We apologize for the inconvenience of
this, but it is imperative that we ensure our network is not assisting in
the propogation of this, or any, worm. All of us are part of a larger
community, and it really isn't cool to infect your neighbors."
i got it!
10 print "please have a cup of coffee"
20 compress data
30 goto 10
done!
so, IANACT (i am not a conspiracy theorist), but i think the announcement today was suposed to be much bigger. the faithful among us will have noticed the absence of the "one more thing" tag that steve has traditionally saved till the end, for whatever really big announcement he has this time around. not so compelling, i admit.
but if you watched the keynote (or catch the rebroadcast), you'll notice that things started to slow pretty hard during the iDVD demo, in particular. my money says steve was waiting for someone to show up, and he got the signal to stall for time from someone offstage. so, there's the demo, then the return to the digital camera (come on...like anyone at macworld doesn't know how it works...), then re-running the old commercials, along with one new one...my guess is he used that time to run offstage and find out what the deal was.
he essentially came back onstage right after the commercials, did a tiny bit more, re-hashed, and asked for a round of applause. that was it after he came back onstage from the commercial break.
so i think something went seriously wrong (a box didn't arrive, or a person maybe); steve stalled for time, hoping to make the announcement, but then found out when he went offstage that it was going to be impossible today. you could see he was disappointed when he came back onstage there at the end.
next guess: watch the next media event. i'm betting whatever wanted to be shown off today finds its way to that. hopefully on time.
this is, of course, pure conjecture.
"Does having a computer between artist and object somehow detract from the results? "
yes! in fact, it does. little did our friend know when s/he started out in the world that the rules would be changing so soon...
recently-enacted federal regulations require all "art projects" and "other fancy stuff" to be created without the benefit of ANY intervening medium whatsoever. this means elephant dung can, in fact, be considered art, while such disciplines as painting, photography, illustration, statuary, scrimshaw, and anything by christo (look him up) no longer qualify.
a senior washington official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed his hope that the sweeping legislation would "cut right down on the number of whiny-ass letters to the NEA askin' for handouts." inexplicably, performance art, including pantomime, remains unpenalized by the bill.
the official also noted the bill's rather curious wording, syntax and spelling, saying that, although brought to the floor by jesse helms, there is little doubt as to the identity of the bill's true author.
well, just for laughs, let's assume it's all true. night is day, up is down, and covad's bad, not verizon.
sure.
while we're at it, let's say apple sues micros~1 out of existence.
seriously, though, how many REAL trouble tickets were filed? 22k sounds like a lot, but what's its percentage of total tickets from covad? (i'm not buying the 50% figure just yet.) over how long were those 22k filed? in that time period, how many tickets were filed by covad in total (i.e., not just with verizon, but all around)?
in the interests of full disclosure, i will now admit to hating the phone company.