...they take over the PDA market.......the iTunes-enabled Motorola cell phone comes out......the Mac mini gets a hard drive with decent speed built into it......they go out of business for the 2604th straight time, as predicted here on Slashdot...
If you've got an occasionally vindictive ex-spouse, he/she may call your purchase of a Mac mini a "luxury purchase", as mine did.
Apparently she failed to realize that it was a Mac mini. A Power Mac G5 tower with dual 2.7 GHz processors and a 30" Apple Cinema Display would have been a "luxury purchase". A 1.67 GHz 17" PowerBook G4 with all the goods would have been a "luxury purchase".
A Mac mini with 512 MB or RAM and nothing wireless is so not a "luxury purchase".
I've spent most of my adult life doing startups, most of the smaller sort, but increaingly large over time. Y'all remember LinuxPPC, of course. More recently, I started a newspaper called The Wisconsinite, which I was the sole commander of. I had this cranky editor who had weight of his own, and that played a role in the functioning of my little LLC.
One lesson for next time around: I'm running it myself, goddammit. Partnerships, be they real or de facto, are very very hard. My editor was a wonderful editor, but he doesn't have my business instincts. I shouldn't have given him so much weight in that department. But it's all good; I know myself better now.
If nothing else, it served as the most expensive personal ad in the world, and I met a wonderful woman through it.;-> But I'll be much more prepared to succeed with Wisco 2.0.
And that's my lesson: When you plan your startup, plan to succeed. That's deeper than you might think. If your business does not make money, it will fail. If you do not have the ability to pay your peeps to do the necessary work, it'll fail.
That said, I don't consider any of my four startups failures. I'm a much better person as a result of each of them. But the plans at the core of them were not set up to allow for success.
It may be politically possible, but with the Republicans aligned against Doyle, and his knack for bozo moves like this, I don't think it would be a good move for him to let this one go.
At the same time I see the need for financial relief after Tommy's reign, but this is foolish.
Tommy had issues, too. Look at the mess that W2 has wrought, or the ever-expanding highways. Jails galore. We're in a big financial hole because of him.
Madison's got issues. The county's got issues too. The conservative radicals on the county board have major issues. I don't even want to talk about the City Council. (The green-prog core of it, at least.)
I've had enough, and I'm going to Milwaukee in May.
We (LinuxPPC Inc.) announced that in response to the LinuxPPC Security Challenge, a competition to break in to a computer running LinuxPPC 1999. The target computer is running the standard installation of LinuxPPC 1999. The target box has the Apache web server and telnet services turned on. Sendmail and FTP are not activated yet.
The contest was announce in response to Microsoft's Window 2000 security challenge, which has a box running a Windows 2000 beta, we were going to put a PowerMac 9500 up running LinuxPPC 1999. While only HTTP is running on the Microsoft box, to make things more interesting, the LinuxPPC box had telnet service active, opening another possible door for endeavoring network security enthusiasts to break in.
To make things interesting, we even gave out the root password.
So what happened? A deserving LinuxPPC hacker, don't recall who, exploted a flaw in the FTP server (ProFTPd?) and got in, modifying the index.html file. He rightfully won the 9500, and Microsoft had a little more egg on its face.
SCO's suits and claims that IBM "stole" code or readily lifted it in some way has always rubbed me the same way that Bush administration claims about Iraq's supposed possession of enough weapons to lay waste to Toledo in a heartbeat. Neither side produced indesputable, conclusive evidence, and from the start, people in the know were saying "No they [don't/didn't]." Instinctively, both allegations struck me as wrong. Thank goodness SCO is not a world power, or else we could find ourselves mounting an insurgency against them, too.
how cool is it that we're seeing this, and some of us, years ago, were so fascinated by the images coming back from Voyager 2 that we were certain we'd become astronomers, space explorers, little future Buck Rogers and Dr. Whos... this is awesome.:D
From issue 10 of my late, great newspaper The Wisconsinite. That issue's feature story was on electronic voting systems.
How to build a better electronic voting system? by Jason Haas
Like other laws with names that sound nice but whose language contains dark implications, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) spells trouble for the future of voting in this country. As passed by Congress, HAVA distributes almost $4 billion to the states for the purchase of electronic voting machines (EVMs). But far from helping us vote, the implementation of throws the windows wide for new forms of election quandaries. Due to their design, the current crop of EVMs bring a staggering possibility for fraud and manipulation of voter lists,and even the reported poll results.
At the heart of the voting systems from one major manufacturer, the increasingly notorious Diebold, you will find Microsoft Windows. Practically anyone who has spent time using computers knows that Windows is an unstable and unreliable system that computer security experts consider to be rife with holes. It is easy for a person or even a malicious computer program to cause Windows to malfunction.
Viruses and worms acclimated to this system are commonplace. In 2003, a computer worm called Nachi made headlines for infecting millions of PCs around the world, as well as Diebold ATM cash machines. As they are essentially dressed up desktop PCs, Diebold machines carry the same security vulnerabilities as a plain desktop PC. Given that Diebold's EVMs are also based on this system, it is not a stretch to see how they too could be infected and disabled. There are deeper problem with electronic voting systems beyond these potential security failures. Since the machines are owned and developed by private corporations that claim copyright on the code, the general public cannot view the programming at the machines' core. Thus it is not possible for knowledgeable people to verify that the machines are counting votes properly. If a security problem exists in the machines, no one would be the wiser until the unit's manufacturer admitted the problem and released an update.
There are two solutions to this. One would be to continue to have the voting machines based on personal computer hardware, but replace proprietary operating systems with an open source system. While open source operating systems are renowned for their stability, more important to their use in voting systems is the fact that all open source software is created with and maintained through a process of peer review. Security problems are quickly documented and solved. This happens on a totally public basis, meaning no one is kept in the dark. The peer review process ensures that it is impossible to sneak in programming that would rig an election.
One immediate advantage to using open source software in voting systems is a significant cost savings over proprietary code. Unlike the systems used in major EVMs, the open source operating systems are available free of cost. A person or company can sell a copy of a particular flavor, but it is not necessary to buy it. There are no hidden costs or upgrade prices, as all updates to the core of the system and freely and widely distributed. I did just this, in fact. My previous career was as an executive in LinuxPPC, Inc., which developed a version of the Linux operating system for Apple's Power Macintosh and other PowerPC-based platforms.
Another form of electronic voting was recently used in the nation of India. The Indian voting machines use electrical circuits with a tiny bit of custom programming rather than commercial computer software. According to an Indian government web site, the machines cost about 10500 R ($230), while Diebold's machine costs in the neighborhood of $3300. Multiply that cost by a factor of several hundred or even thousand to determine the number required to fulfill a municipality's voting needs. This does not take into account the hidden costs of maintenance and repairs, or the in
I gave a speech almost two years ago on how there were six giant companies controlling 90% of our media. Given the rate of conglomeration, it would be a short time before there were five or four, then three, or less, doing it. I'm not unhappy to see this not go through. Though I am curious how it would do, given how AOL-Time Warner has imploded. hmm! good thoughts,/.ers.
I think the theory that "dark" matter is holding the universe together (and apart) is a lot like SCO's claims: lots of puffed up hyperbole that sounds good until examined closely.
Perhaps then it is this alleged dark energy that Darl and co. are trying to use to thwart Linux?
Blogs detailing the startup (now in slightly more specific detail) and other fun stuff can be found at the paper's site, which is of course,. I just set up a 1U server for it (running Linux, of course), but that's as close as I'm going to get to the software biz for a long while. got my fix with LinuxPPC.;->
The DaVinci Code has been on the bestseller stand at the bookstore I work at for a while now, so it must be good, right? right, which would mean Ann Coulter has something worth reading...
(actually, I'm happy to say she's been kicked off by the likes of Al Franken, Molly Ivins, and Michael Moore. go my friends!)
Diebold voting machines are renowned for their stability and reliability . What does this imply could happen to them, especially, say, on November 7, 2004?
...is over here. Despite what some flamers say on here, the many, independent Indymedia chapters have been on the forefront of civil rights battles since IMC was founded in 1998. We're still there, carrying on.
The good Mr. Balmer had the wit and insight to say we're a communist anti-American cancer AND a virus.
He said all these things, and I documented them in an article for linuxppc.org some time ago. Unfortunately, it's not up, nor is my article, but I assure you, he said 'em.
I have reading the book "What LIberal Media?" by Eric Alterman. This page I read talked about the rise of pundits, especially the TV pundits who have a large impact on American political dialogue. They are 99% conservative to radical right-wing. Alterman observed that the defining quality of these pundits, aside from good looks, was their ability to voice a view on literally any issue without knowing anything about it. They spout rhetoric, question facts, and hurl forth often sophomoric opinions about major things. Yet that's exactly why they're so big. Liberals, though, tend to see multiple angles to an issue and in an argument, as you said. Their thoughts are cluttered with facts and diversity of views. Because of this diversity of views, Alterman says, they don't sell. Not as compared to the black and white world of the right, which has sold like hot cakes. It's so easily digested and understood. No thought required! Just do as we say, think as we say, act as we say, and all will be well...
Similarly, Windows is being taught everywhere. This one really rather dim tech support person at my college library said "I don't know how to use a Mac; it's not like Windows." She says this when the ONLY difference was that the close box is on the OTHER side of the window! Because it differs from Redmond's design, she couldn't take a second and figure out how to use it. That's how thick she was, and a very good example of what I believe Jones means.
Is this solution then to make everything like Windows? Goodness, I hope not! Nor do I believe it.
Really, you will not get shushed at a library unless you are doing something flagrantly disrespectful. And even then, you wouldn't get shushed; you'd be asked to stop whatever it is you're doing. A bun-haired old woman would not look at you over her pearl-rimmed glasses as she raises a finger to her shushing mouth.
Given how much work the above-mentioned ALA has done to fight the DMCA and similar things, I'm surprised that librarians still get such stereotyping here. My wife, a librarian, has four large tattoos and several piercings. A woman colleague of hers rides her Honda motorcycle to work. Bun-haired old women they are not!
Slashdot Mirror
...don't chew your fingernails.
Some older programs that "died" under System 7, and the later renamed Mac OSes 8 and 9 worked again under Classic/OSX. How you like them doughnuts?
...they take over the PDA market.... ...the iTunes-enabled Motorola cell phone comes out... ...the Mac mini gets a hard drive with decent speed built into it... ...they go out of business for the 2604th straight time, as predicted here on Slashdot...
Just be careful...
If you've got an occasionally vindictive ex-spouse, he/she may call your purchase of a Mac mini a "luxury purchase", as mine did.
Apparently she failed to realize that it was a Mac mini. A Power Mac G5 tower with dual 2.7 GHz processors and a 30" Apple Cinema Display would have been a "luxury purchase". A 1.67 GHz 17" PowerBook G4 with all the goods would have been a "luxury purchase".
A Mac mini with 512 MB or RAM and nothing wireless is so not a "luxury purchase".
Be warned...
I've spent most of my adult life doing startups, most of the smaller sort, but increaingly large over time. Y'all remember LinuxPPC, of course. More recently, I started a newspaper called The Wisconsinite, which I was the sole commander of. I had this cranky editor who had weight of his own, and that played a role in the functioning of my little LLC.
;-> But I'll be much more prepared to succeed with Wisco 2.0.
One lesson for next time around: I'm running it myself, goddammit. Partnerships, be they real or de facto, are very very hard. My editor was a wonderful editor, but he doesn't have my business instincts. I shouldn't have given him so much weight in that department. But it's all good; I know myself better now.
If nothing else, it served as the most expensive personal ad in the world, and I met a wonderful woman through it.
And that's my lesson: When you plan your startup, plan to succeed. That's deeper than you might think. If your business does not make money, it will fail. If you do not have the ability to pay your peeps to do the necessary work, it'll fail.
That said, I don't consider any of my four startups failures. I'm a much better person as a result of each of them. But the plans at the core of them were not set up to allow for success.
It may be politically possible, but with the Republicans aligned against Doyle, and his knack for bozo moves like this, I don't think it would be a good move for him to let this one go.
At the same time I see the need for financial relief after Tommy's reign, but this is foolish.
Stacie Rosenzweig's take on The Vast Dairy State Conspiracy
Journal-Sentinal
This guy, too.
Tommy had issues, too. Look at the mess that W2 has wrought, or the ever-expanding highways. Jails galore. We're in a big financial hole because of him.
Madison's got issues. The county's got issues too. The conservative radicals on the county board have major issues. I don't even want to talk about the City Council. (The green-prog core of it, at least.)
I've had enough, and I'm going to Milwaukee in May.
Here's a flashback to 1999. (Wooo, all those years ago!)
LinuxPPC: "Crack our box."
We (LinuxPPC Inc.) announced that in response to the LinuxPPC Security Challenge, a competition to break in to a computer running LinuxPPC 1999. The target computer is running the standard installation of LinuxPPC 1999. The target box has the Apache web server and telnet services turned on. Sendmail and FTP are not activated yet.
The contest was announce in response to Microsoft's Window 2000 security challenge, which has a box running a Windows 2000 beta, we were going to put a PowerMac 9500 up running LinuxPPC 1999. While only HTTP is running on the Microsoft box, to make things more interesting, the LinuxPPC box had telnet service active, opening another possible door for endeavoring network security enthusiasts to break in.
To make things interesting, we even gave out the root password.
So what happened? A deserving LinuxPPC hacker, don't recall who, exploted a flaw in the FTP server (ProFTPd?) and got in, modifying the index.html file. He rightfully won the 9500, and Microsoft had a little more egg on its face.
...is, how hot does it burn? If it is indeed a star, how hot are its surface and its core?
SCO's suits and claims that IBM "stole" code or readily lifted it in some way has always rubbed me the same way that Bush administration claims about Iraq's supposed possession of enough weapons to lay waste to Toledo in a heartbeat. Neither side produced indesputable, conclusive evidence, and from the start, people in the know were saying "No they [don't/didn't]." Instinctively, both allegations struck me as wrong. Thank goodness SCO is not a world power, or else we could find ourselves mounting an insurgency against them, too.
how cool is it that we're seeing this, and some of us, years ago, were so fascinated by the images coming back from Voyager 2 that we were certain we'd become astronomers, space explorers, little future Buck Rogers and Dr. Whos... this is awesome. :D
From issue 10 of my late, great newspaper The Wisconsinite. That issue's feature story was on electronic voting systems.
How to build a better electronic voting system?
by Jason Haas
Like other laws with names that sound nice but whose language contains dark implications, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) spells trouble for the future of voting in this country. As passed by Congress, HAVA distributes almost $4 billion to the states for the purchase of electronic voting machines (EVMs). But far from helping us vote, the implementation of throws the windows wide for new forms of election quandaries. Due to their design, the current crop of EVMs bring a staggering possibility for fraud and manipulation of voter lists,and even the reported poll results.
At the heart of the voting systems from one major manufacturer, the increasingly notorious Diebold, you will find Microsoft Windows. Practically anyone who has spent time using computers knows that Windows is an unstable and unreliable system that computer security experts consider to be rife with holes. It is easy for a person or even a malicious computer program to cause Windows to malfunction.
Viruses and worms acclimated to this system are commonplace. In 2003, a computer worm called Nachi made headlines for infecting millions of PCs around the world, as well as Diebold ATM cash machines. As they are essentially dressed up desktop PCs, Diebold machines carry the same security vulnerabilities as a plain desktop PC. Given that Diebold's EVMs are also based on this system, it is not a stretch to see how they too could be infected and disabled. There are deeper problem with electronic voting systems beyond these potential security failures. Since the machines are owned and developed by private corporations that claim copyright on the code, the general public cannot view the programming at the machines' core. Thus it is not possible for knowledgeable people to verify that the machines are counting votes properly. If a security problem exists in the machines, no one would be the wiser until the unit's manufacturer admitted the problem and released an update.
There are two solutions to this. One would be to continue to have the voting machines based on personal computer hardware, but replace proprietary operating systems with an open source system. While open source operating systems are renowned for their stability, more important to their use in voting systems is the fact that all open source software is created with and maintained through a process of peer review. Security problems are quickly documented and solved. This happens on a totally public basis, meaning no one is kept in the dark. The peer review process ensures that it is impossible to sneak in programming that would rig an election.
One immediate advantage to using open source software in voting systems is a significant cost savings over proprietary code. Unlike the systems used in major EVMs, the open source operating systems are available free of cost. A person or company can sell a copy of a particular flavor, but it is not necessary to buy it. There are no hidden costs or upgrade prices, as all updates to the core of the system and freely and widely distributed. I did just this, in fact. My previous career was as an executive in LinuxPPC, Inc., which developed a version of the Linux operating system for Apple's Power Macintosh and other PowerPC-based platforms.
Another form of electronic voting was recently used in the nation of India. The Indian voting machines use electrical circuits with a tiny bit of custom programming rather than commercial computer software. According to an Indian government web site, the machines cost about 10500 R ($230), while Diebold's machine costs in the neighborhood of $3300. Multiply that cost by a factor of several hundred or even thousand to determine the number required to fulfill a municipality's voting needs. This does not take into account the hidden costs of maintenance and repairs, or the in
Thives and liars!
Hypocrits and bastards!
(get up!)
*mosh*
$.05 with inflation..
/.ers.
I gave a speech almost two years ago on how there were six giant companies controlling 90% of our media. Given the rate of conglomeration, it would be a short time before there were five or four, then three, or less, doing it. I'm not unhappy to see this not go through. Though I am curious how it would do, given how AOL-Time Warner has imploded. hmm! good thoughts,
BTW, my new newspaper is out!
-- haaz, who'd rather die than give Murdoch control.
I think the theory that "dark" matter is holding the universe together (and apart) is a lot like SCO's claims: lots of puffed up hyperbole that sounds good until examined closely.
Perhaps then it is this alleged dark energy that Darl and co. are trying to use to thwart Linux?
Blogs detailing the startup (now in slightly more specific detail) and other fun stuff can be found at the paper's site, which is of course,. I just set up a 1U server for it (running Linux, of course), but that's as close as I'm going to get to the software biz for a long while. got my fix with LinuxPPC. ;->
Penn State President loves Microsoft, Napster, the RIAA and Al Gore (true)
...Praise to El Reg for doing that thing many American journalists seem to have forgotten to do: investigative reporting.
There is magic behind Penn State's Napster deal
Penn State trustee and RIAA lawyer denies conflict of interests
My new 1U that's currently shipping to me will be running it, anyway.
The DaVinci Code has been on the bestseller stand at the bookstore I work at for a while now, so it must be good, right? right, which would mean Ann Coulter has something worth reading...
(actually, I'm happy to say she's been kicked off by the likes of Al Franken, Molly Ivins, and Michael Moore. go my friends!)
Diebold voting machines are renowned for their stability and reliability . What does this imply could happen to them, especially, say, on November 7, 2004?
...is over here. Despite what some flamers say on here, the many, independent Indymedia chapters have been on the forefront of civil rights battles since IMC was founded in 1998. We're still there, carrying on.
The good Mr. Balmer had the wit and insight to say we're a communist anti-American cancer AND a virus.
He said all these things, and I documented them in an article for linuxppc.org some time ago. Unfortunately, it's not up, nor is my article, but I assure you, he said 'em.
I have reading the book "What LIberal Media?" by Eric Alterman. This page I read talked about the rise of pundits, especially the TV pundits who have a large impact on American political dialogue. They are 99% conservative to radical right-wing. Alterman observed that the defining quality of these pundits, aside from good looks, was their ability to voice a view on literally any issue without knowing anything about it. They spout rhetoric, question facts, and hurl forth often sophomoric opinions about major things. Yet that's exactly why they're so big. Liberals, though, tend to see multiple angles to an issue and in an argument, as you said. Their thoughts are cluttered with facts and diversity of views. Because of this diversity of views, Alterman says, they don't sell. Not as compared to the black and white world of the right, which has sold like hot cakes. It's so easily digested and understood. No thought required! Just do as we say, think as we say, act as we say, and all will be well...
Similarly, Windows is being taught everywhere. This one really rather dim tech support person at my college library said "I don't know how to use a Mac; it's not like Windows." She says this when the ONLY difference was that the close box is on the OTHER side of the window! Because it differs from Redmond's design, she couldn't take a second and figure out how to use it. That's how thick she was, and a very good example of what I believe Jones means.
Is this solution then to make everything like Windows? Goodness, I hope not! Nor do I believe it.
Really, you will not get shushed at a library unless you are doing something flagrantly disrespectful. And even then, you wouldn't get shushed; you'd be asked to stop whatever it is you're doing. A bun-haired old woman would not look at you over her pearl-rimmed glasses as she raises a finger to her shushing mouth.
Given how much work the above-mentioned ALA has done to fight the DMCA and similar things, I'm surprised that librarians still get such stereotyping here. My wife, a librarian, has four large tattoos and several piercings. A woman colleague of hers rides her Honda motorcycle to work. Bun-haired old women they are not!