I used to have a car and it did this averaging automatically, simply because it couldn't accelerate like most other cars.
I remember it being more relaxing to drive this way, but this works in the "fluid" state, not in the "jello" state, 'cause that's when people jumping in front of you causes a problem.
I can think of two examples of sublimation in this model: when there's a wreck across the road and there's only room for one car to get by. Behind the wreck it's a solid, but once the cars 'pop' through that hole, traffic density is very low. The other example isn't so extreme, but works similarly: toll booths.
I'm no expert, but what if you made a phone call that happened to be carried by satellite. I would imagine more than half a watt misses the satellite after being sent by the ground station.
I was curious about what Eric Overfield an undergraduate computer science major said - that the messages will include coding that an ET theoretically could decipher to send a reply. I wonder if that means they're sending an RFC first.
I guess they're not using AOL's Instant Message format. Hooray for standards!
How about making this a contest? Maybe those Linux users disillusioned by their crippled SETI@Home client could put their idle time to use. Now that would be a Slashdot effect...
I haven't read the "rules", but I wonder if everyone will follow them.
This sounds pretty evil, but I can only imagine an affected site would come at the evil-doer with every lawyer they had. Imagine if long-distance phone companies were doing this to each other.
I suspect the (US) courts would side with the offended party, as this surely meets most definitions of "anti-competitive".
Maybe such devices will end up being banned, but will be sold in a version where the feature is disabled, but easily restored, just like assault rifles...
I think TV ratings are already pretty inaccurate but none of the interested parties - networks, ratings companies, and advertisers - want to see changes in the ratings system.
Pretty much everyone I know surfs to other channels during commercials. Surely the networks know this, but they're certainly not going to raise the alarm, for fear their advertisers would balk at their rates which are based on a supposed viewership.
I believe ratings services have virtual monopolies. One of the ways they maintain them is to keep their ratings consistent. It's probably not in their interest either to change how they rate TV/radio shows.
Here's an example of the power of ratings agencies. The company I work for (rhymes with 'oomberg') has a local radio and cable TV station. I heard the radio rating service, Arbitron, wanted them to pay tens of thousands of dollars just to be rated. Without ratings, you couldn't get advertisers to sign up, so they had no choice.
Finally, I hate to say it, but the advertisers want monopolistic ratings companies, not because they're monopolistic, but because that implies a standard. If I were advertising on TV/radio show, I'd want to know the rating for that show, not several different ones, since that makes my job harder.
The lack of a standard ratings agency on the web means that companies only have their web server statistics to go on. I believe that is a source of instability in the pricing model for web ads, hence the eagerness of companies to pursue "deep linkers".
However, as others have pointed out, if you're trying to protect your (percieved) copyrights, you'd better pursue every (percieved) violator, or else you can't protect them later. I suspect that's the prime directive for these companies at this point. The unstable pricing model will rear it's head in time, though.
I sort of hope this case makes it to and through trial, so that there's some case law on the issue. So far everything's been settled out of court, it seems.
I believe this issue demonstrates corporate lack of confidence in banner ads in particular, and the use of the web as a promotional device in general.
Sometimes people try to fit web-based issues into paper-based issues, where there is already lots of case law. Permit me the following analogy/thought experiment, which, by its awkward fit into paper publishing, highlights my statement above:
Many magazines have so many ads that I sometimes spend a few minutes tearing out pages that have ads on both sides. Suppose I were to do it the other way around, ripping out only those pages that had content? Suppose I were to publish a list of the relevant pages? Now suppose everyone had a machine at home that could automatically tear out pages from magazines and could be programmed with a list of pages? Interested readers could have their machine "harvest" their magazines. This is sort of a paper-era version of "deep linking".
Publishers probably wouldn't care because readers have already bought the magazine. Thus their circulation (i.e. ad revenue) isn't hurt. Similarly, I think TV networks aren't too worried by VCRs that skip commercials because it doesn't affect their revenue stream. In this case, the Neilsen ratings don't take such behavior into consideration.
What's absurd is that the company in this case is blind to the fact that they're going to make tons more money by people going to their movies and buying their merchandise than they will by a few banner impressions.
Conventionally they have achieved this by buying expensive ad time and playing their trailers, sending the movie stars on promotional tours, providing fluff pieces to fluff magazines/shows (think E Network.)
I can't believe they aren't wetting themselves every time someone downloads one of these trailers. That should mean one more person who is likely to see the movie or tell a friend about it or buy a toy etc. And it costs them virtually nothing compared to the conventional ways.
Re:Another spurious Star Trek reference
on
Beaming Money
·
· Score: 1
Citibank (and some other big bank, I think) tried a pilot (sorry) program on the Upper West Side of Manhattan a year ago or so. They replaced our ATM cards with "smart cards" that could hold cash, and got a bunch of vendors in the neighborhood to install readers. The smart card came with a little reader that would show you your current balance as well as your last few transactions.
One way they promoted it was the chance of winning a few bucks when you transferred money to your card.
They pushed it pretty hard with ads saying how great it would be not to have to worry about having change in your pocket. Big whoop.
They, and others interested in getting people to try using some "virtual" form of money, should take a lesson from the NYC bus/subway system: they've been phasing out tokens and cash (which you could only use in coin form on busses) in favor of the MetroCard, which is a little card with a mag stripe that holds a balance.
The reasons I use the MetroCard and I didn't use my bank's smart card are simple:
It's universally accepted on all busses and subways. (I didn't get one 'til then.)
There's advantages to using them over cash:
You can transfer from any train or bus to nearly any other, within a couple of hours.
Later, they started giving a slight discount: if you put at least $15 on your card, they add 10%.
They didn't ask for any personal info when I bought the card. Thus, even though they may know where card #12345 may have been, they have no way of knowing that it's mine.
Thanks to the increased ability to transfer, bus and subway ridership is way up in the city.
I think I once saw a brief review or ad for a cordless phone that was supposed to be able to transmit to it's base station over a range of something like 1 or 2 kilometers. I thought such a phone would be pretty cool, since I spend most of my time that close to home. However, I work just a little farther than that, so it might not have been that useful.
Does anyone know of such a device? I'm not looking for a cell phone.
They could call it the "Rosy Palm" and market it as a PPV - Personal Porn Viewer. You'd use your other hand to hit the scroll button.
But seriously, for the applications I use on my Pilot, color would be unnecessary. As many have said, battery life is far more important. I'm no electrical engineer, but I wonder if supporting shades of grey takes less juice than the same number of colors. Not as sexy for the marketers, perhaps, but a more practical "improvement".
Wow, that must be a pretty high-tech calculator/watch if you were surfing playboy.com on it. Or did it just display "36-24-36" or "58008 918" (read it upside down on a calculator if you're not juvenile enough to get it) instead of a picture of a naked woman?
Thanks for the clarification. Still, as you say, you have to hold the IPO for 30 days, which is a lot longer than the time frames everyone's talking about here. The big changes (like $14 to $30) are mostly taking place in the first day, if not the first couple of hours.
The percentage gains per unit time are seductive; I think regular folks don't have great chances to take advantage of them.
Exactly. It seems to me that the people/organizations really making money on these internet IPOs lately are the underwriters, not us poor slobs wishing we were day trading our way to retirement.
Most of the comments expressing amazement at the range in price seem to be based on the implicit belief that it's possible for Joe eTrader to take advantage of those price swings from his/her PC.
I've never traded a stock in my life (just have mutual funds) so you can take this with a grain of salt, but it sure seems unlikely that with the resources of an amateur one could keep up with this kind of market. My take on trying to make money at it is that you'd better (a) have solid brass balls/ovaries, (b) have deep pockets, (c) not be distracted by your real job while you monitor the wild price swings, and (d) have a very low latency betweeen when you decide you want to buy/sell and when the trade actually takes place. In other words, you'd be best off if it was your full-time job.
It might be nice for the back, but this would kill my neck - I like to have my resolution way high and I sit with my face about 2 feet from the screen. The guy in the picture looks like his face is about 3 or 4 feet away.
Also, how do you stop the mouse from sliding off its support? If you level the rest, it's harder to get at the keyboard and mouse - you'll probably tweak your wrists...
I like the foot rests though - I always keep my feet on the little shelf under my desk - and the thing sure looks cool! I use an Aeron at work and I'm strongly considering getting one for home.
Except that the SUV's owner will surely go out and buy a replacement immediately, so not only do you have the pollution of the burning and the lifetime, you have the (environmental) cost of producing one more car. I agree it is funny, though, in some way. I hate SUV's, but some of my best friends drive them...
In New York's East Village, there was similar attempt to drive out the yuppies. A popular graffitti of the time found in that area was "Die Yuppie Scum."
By the way, it didn't work. It's Guiliani Time (tm) here in NYC. Just a few weeks ago, the City drove out some squatters from some East Village buildings they'd been in for years.
By the way, here's some interesting reading for anyone with an interest in some of the issues discussed here: Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
if people change jobs, that's very expensive for employers
This is undoubtedly true; however has anyone considered the following: for a new, startup company, this is actually a good environment: it's easy to lure away disgruntled workers from other companies. Then you overwork them for a few months while you produce enough of a product to keep the investors happy. By the time those workers go somewhere else, you've gotten what you want out of them.
Re:what's the fscking deal?
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 1
And anyway, the shell script could at least add a telnet daemon which allows password-less logins to the *user* account, to the user's crontab
I thought you had to be root on Unix to open a server (listening) socket, or does that only apply to well-known services or something? Can anyone confirm/deny this?
I just got a used G200 for $70 and I also like its Linux performance. (I don't have Windows, so I can't comment on that.)
However, it's made my old DOS game, Comanche, too fast to play. It's kinda interesting, 'cause you can get an idea of what it's good at and how the game graphics work. The rate of apparent motion seems to increase when doing things like panning from side to side - it looks like the game accomplishes this by simply moving a bitmap around and that the card does that really fast!
I may have to underclock my Celeron 333 to be able to play this thing.
I'm a Prodigy/Linux user. I started in the old days with a free "Classic" account from my brother, who used to work there. They offered a free trial of their "Prodigy Internet", so I signed up. By this time I was using Win '95. The switch to PPP under Linux wasn't bad. I had to get recent versions of pppd/chat. The critical thing was to get the right data into the pap and chap config files.
A few months ago, they confirmed an outage. Like others have said, they didn't have any Linux-specific help. It seemed I was unable to connect for longer than it should have taken. (I think I was able to connect from a Win '95 box.) Ultimately I discovered that I had to prevent either pap or chap from being used (I removed one of either the pap or chap config files). They never told me about any change on their servers that would have implied this, but it just started working again.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember it being more relaxing to drive this way, but this works in the "fluid" state, not in the "jello" state, 'cause that's when people jumping in front of you causes a problem.
I can think of two examples of sublimation in this model: when there's a wreck across the road and there's only room for one car to get by. Behind the wreck it's a solid, but once the cars 'pop' through that hole, traffic density is very low. The other example isn't so extreme, but works similarly: toll booths.
In this case I bet it was Slashdotters saying "First Crack!"
I was curious about what Eric Overfield an undergraduate computer science major said - that the messages will include coding that an ET theoretically could decipher to send a reply. I wonder if that means they're sending an RFC first.
I guess they're not using AOL's Instant Message format. Hooray for standards!
Motorola Lineo Toaster version 1.0
2 slices loaded, 1 ready
I haven't read the "rules", but I wonder if everyone will follow them.
I suspect the (US) courts would side with the offended party, as this surely meets most definitions of "anti-competitive".
Maybe such devices will end up being banned, but will be sold in a version where the feature is disabled, but easily restored, just like assault rifles...
Pretty much everyone I know surfs to other channels during commercials. Surely the networks know this, but they're certainly not going to raise the alarm, for fear their advertisers would balk at their rates which are based on a supposed viewership.
I believe ratings services have virtual monopolies. One of the ways they maintain them is to keep their ratings consistent. It's probably not in their interest either to change how they rate TV/radio shows.
Here's an example of the power of ratings agencies. The company I work for (rhymes with 'oomberg') has a local radio and cable TV station. I heard the radio rating service, Arbitron, wanted them to pay tens of thousands of dollars just to be rated. Without ratings, you couldn't get advertisers to sign up, so they had no choice.
Finally, I hate to say it, but the advertisers want monopolistic ratings companies, not because they're monopolistic, but because that implies a standard. If I were advertising on TV/radio show, I'd want to know the rating for that show, not several different ones, since that makes my job harder.
The lack of a standard ratings agency on the web means that companies only have their web server statistics to go on. I believe that is a source of instability in the pricing model for web ads, hence the eagerness of companies to pursue "deep linkers".
However, as others have pointed out, if you're trying to protect your (percieved) copyrights, you'd better pursue every (percieved) violator, or else you can't protect them later. I suspect that's the prime directive for these companies at this point. The unstable pricing model will rear it's head in time, though.
I sort of hope this case makes it to and through trial, so that there's some case law on the issue. So far everything's been settled out of court, it seems.
Thanks for the comment.
The Stasi were the East German secret police, not Russian.
Sometimes people try to fit web-based issues into paper-based issues, where there is already lots of case law. Permit me the following analogy/thought experiment, which, by its awkward fit into paper publishing, highlights my statement above:
Many magazines have so many ads that I sometimes spend a few minutes tearing out pages that have ads on both sides. Suppose I were to do it the other way around, ripping out only those pages that had content? Suppose I were to publish a list of the relevant pages? Now suppose everyone had a machine at home that could automatically tear out pages from magazines and could be programmed with a list of pages? Interested readers could have their machine "harvest" their magazines. This is sort of a paper-era version of "deep linking".
Publishers probably wouldn't care because readers have already bought the magazine. Thus their circulation (i.e. ad revenue) isn't hurt. Similarly, I think TV networks aren't too worried by VCRs that skip commercials because it doesn't affect their revenue stream. In this case, the Neilsen ratings don't take such behavior into consideration.
What's absurd is that the company in this case is blind to the fact that they're going to make tons more money by people going to their movies and buying their merchandise than they will by a few banner impressions.
Conventionally they have achieved this by buying expensive ad time and playing their trailers, sending the movie stars on promotional tours, providing fluff pieces to fluff magazines/shows (think E Network.)
I can't believe they aren't wetting themselves every time someone downloads one of these trailers. That should mean one more person who is likely to see the movie or tell a friend about it or buy a toy etc. And it costs them virtually nothing compared to the conventional ways.
One way they promoted it was the chance of winning a few bucks when you transferred money to your card.
They pushed it pretty hard with ads saying how great it would be not to have to worry about having change in your pocket. Big whoop.
They, and others interested in getting people to try using some "virtual" form of money, should take a lesson from the NYC bus/subway system: they've been phasing out tokens and cash (which you could only use in coin form on busses) in favor of the MetroCard, which is a little card with a mag stripe that holds a balance.
The reasons I use the MetroCard and I didn't use my bank's smart card are simple:
- It's universally accepted on all busses and subways. (I didn't get one 'til then.)
- There's advantages to using them over cash:
- You can transfer from any train or bus to nearly any other, within a couple of hours.
- Later, they started giving a slight discount: if you put at least $15 on your card, they add 10%.
- They didn't ask for any personal info when I bought the card. Thus, even though they may know where card #12345 may have been, they have no way of knowing that it's mine.
Thanks to the increased ability to transfer, bus and subway ridership is way up in the city.Does anyone know of such a device? I'm not looking for a cell phone.
But seriously, for the applications I use on my Pilot, color would be unnecessary. As many have said, battery life is far more important. I'm no electrical engineer, but I wonder if supporting shades of grey takes less juice than the same number of colors. Not as sexy for the marketers, perhaps, but a more practical "improvement".
Wow, that must be a pretty high-tech calculator/watch if you were surfing playboy.com on it. Or did it just display "36-24-36" or "58008 918" (read it upside down on a calculator if you're not juvenile enough to get it) instead of a picture of a naked woman?
The percentage gains per unit time are seductive; I think regular folks don't have great chances to take advantage of them.
Most of the comments expressing amazement at the range in price seem to be based on the implicit belief that it's possible for Joe eTrader to take advantage of those price swings from his/her PC.
I've never traded a stock in my life (just have mutual funds) so you can take this with a grain of salt, but it sure seems unlikely that with the resources of an amateur one could keep up with this kind of market. My take on trying to make money at it is that you'd better (a) have solid brass balls/ovaries, (b) have deep pockets, (c) not be distracted by your real job while you monitor the wild price swings, and (d) have a very low latency betweeen when you decide you want to buy/sell and when the trade actually takes place. In other words, you'd be best off if it was your full-time job.
I hope Apple has gotten their meltdown battery packs under control. Otherwise I'd say it's got Firewire built in...
Also, how do you stop the mouse from sliding off its support? If you level the rest, it's harder to get at the keyboard and mouse - you'll probably tweak your wrists...
I like the foot rests though - I always keep my feet on the little shelf under my desk - and the thing sure looks cool! I use an Aeron at work and I'm strongly considering getting one for home.
I suppose that means it won't be long before they train it to post to Slashdot.
In New York's East Village, there was similar attempt to drive out the yuppies. A popular graffitti of the time found in that area was "Die Yuppie Scum."
By the way, it didn't work. It's Guiliani Time (tm) here in NYC. Just a few weeks ago, the City drove out some squatters from some East Village buildings they'd been in for years.
By the way, here's some interesting reading for anyone with an interest in some of the issues discussed here: Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
This is undoubtedly true; however has anyone considered the following: for a new, startup company, this is actually a good environment: it's easy to lure away disgruntled workers from other companies. Then you overwork them for a few months while you produce enough of a product to keep the investors happy. By the time those workers go somewhere else, you've gotten what you want out of them.
I thought you had to be root on Unix to open a server (listening) socket, or does that only apply to well-known services or something? Can anyone confirm/deny this?
However, it's made my old DOS game, Comanche, too fast to play. It's kinda interesting, 'cause you can get an idea of what it's good at and how the game graphics work. The rate of apparent motion seems to increase when doing things like panning from side to side - it looks like the game accomplishes this by simply moving a bitmap around and that the card does that really fast!
I may have to underclock my Celeron 333 to be able to play this thing.
That's 'cause of centrifugal force, right?
A few months ago, they confirmed an outage. Like others have said, they didn't have any Linux-specific help. It seemed I was unable to connect for longer than it should have taken. (I think I was able to connect from a Win '95 box.) Ultimately I discovered that I had to prevent either pap or chap from being used (I removed one of either the pap or chap config files). They never told me about any change on their servers that would have implied this, but it just started working again.